Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas

Battlegrounds and Crossroads Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas

Portada Hispánica 15 Consejo de dirección Patrick Collard (Universidad de Gante) Hub. Hermans (Universidad de Groninga) Francisco Lasarte (Universidad de Utrecht) Maarten Steenmeijer (Universidad de Nimega) Rina Walthaus (Universidad de Groninga)

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003

Battlegrounds and Crossroads Social and Imaginary Space in Writings by Chicanas

Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

Parts of chapter 2 appeared, in different form, in Culture and Power II: Institutions, edited by Rosa González (Barcelona: PPU, 1996). Parts of chapter 3, also in different form, appeared in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 35 (1997). Portions of chapter 4 appeared in Culture and Power, edited by Felicity Hand (Barcelona: Poblagràfic, 1995). A preliminary version of section 6.1. appeared in Culture and Power III: Business, edited by Matilde Paredes, Rosa González, Felicity Hand, and Chantal Cornut-Gentille (Zaragoza: Universidad de Zaragoza, 1999). Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint this material.

Cover illustration: Collage by Ignasi Mateo Ramis, © 2002 Ignasi Mateo Ramis Cover design: Peggy Vogel The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1196-3 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2003 Printed in The Netherlands

El discurso es un acero que sirve por ambos cabos: de dar muerte, por la punta; por el pomo, de resguardo. Si vos, sabiendo el peligro, queréis por la punta usarlo, ¿qué culpa tiene el acero del mal uso de la mano? Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Poesía Lírica A mu mare i a mon pare, Fanny i Rafel, i a n’Hugo

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Acknowledgements/ Agraïments/ Agradecimientos

The process leading towards the publication of this book has been long. My first research on Chicano/a literature materialized in a Master thesis on the works of writer Helena Viramontes, directed by Felicity Hand, associate professor at the English Department of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I will be forever grateful to Felicity for her support and encouragement both during the “tesina” and the doctoral thesis, which she also directed and later resulted in this book. Moltes gràcies, Felicity, per el teu suport acadèmic i moral. In the course of my research I was fortunate to have the cooperation of some the writers and critics whose work has been the focus of my interest. Helena Viramontes provided me with materials that were not accessible to me. Pat Mora y Sandra Cisneros accedieron a ser entrevistadas por correo electrónico. Cherríe Moraga me envió varios manuscritos inéditos y me concedió una entrevista. Norma Alarcón, profesora titular en Ethnic Studies y Women Studies de la universidad de California (Berkeley), hizo posible mi visita a dicha universidad en dos ocasiones y accedió a asesorarme en mi trabajo. María HerreraSobek y Francisco Lomelí, profesores del Departamento de Chicano Studies de la Universidad de California en Santa Barbara, merecen una mención muy especial por sus ánimos, sus comentarios y su interés en mi trabajo. For the illustrations I am grateful to Gary Keller from Bilingual Press, as well as to the artists who gave me permission to reproduce their work: Ana Laura de la Garza, Ester Hernández, and Yolanda López. Agraeixo la col·laboració de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra en el finançament parcial de dues estades de recerca en Illinois i Berkeley, el suport de Miquel Berga, cap de la secció de filologia

anglesa de la UPF, i els consells pràctics d’un altre seguidor de la “chicanada,” Pere Gifra. Gràcies al meu amic Ignasi Mateo, qui ha posat tant d’entusiasme i creativitat en la il·lustració de la portada, and many thanks to Professor Francisco Lasarte, from the University of Utrecht, for his unfailing editing help. No puede faltar en este apartado mi agradecimiento a Hugo Rodríguez por su cariño, apoyo e insuperable paciencia.

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Contents List of Illustrations

11

Preface

15

Introduction

21 21 38

Beyond the Critical Pale The Borderlands as Critical Paradigm

Part I: Radical Postmodern Practices 1. New Spaces, Identities, and Struggles 1.1. Identity and Ethnicity Revisited 1.2. The Postmodern Look at Space 1.3. Women, Place, and Space in Literature and Feminist Theory

2. Chicano/a Cultural and Critical Politics 2.1. The Racialization of “Hispanics” and Mexicans 2.2. Aztlán as Chicano Counter-National Space 2.3. Malinchismo: The Feminist Challenge to Chicano Nationalism 2.4. From Chicano to Border Matters

Part II: Battlegrounds 3. Borderlands Domesticities 3.1. An Imaginary Escape from Domesticity: Isabella Ríos’ Victuum 3.2. Domestic Prisons and Domesticated Bodies: Helena Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros 3.2.1. No “Real Houses” on Mango Street 3.2.2. Helena Viramontes’ Domestic Prisons 3.2.3. “Bien Pretty” and Romantic: The Female Body as Borderland

63 67 67 72 79 93 94 101 110 123 133 141 142 168 175 185 203

4. Dangerous Crossings 4.1. Helena Viramontes and the “Ragged Edges” of Urban Postmodernity 4.2. “Mericans” and “Mechicanas”: Sandra Cisneros with Ana Castillo 4.3. The Border as Dystopia: Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman

Part III: Crossroads 5. Homeplaces and Spaces of Their Own 5.1. “Summoning Home All Those Who Stray:” Sandra Cisneros and Helena Viramontes 5.2. Pat Mora’s House of Houses and the Dream of a Homeplace with No Boundaries

6. Modest Utopias: Cherríe Moraga’s “Queer” Revisiting of Aztlán 6.1. Heroes and Saints 6.2. Watsonville

Conclusion Works Cited and Consulted Index

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219 225 244 265 285 291 292 315 333 341 356 371 383 403

Illustrations 1. Ester Hernández, Libertad

109

2. Ana Laura de la Garza, Cuata A

204

3. Yolanda M. López, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe

301

4. Ester Hernández, Sun Mad Raisins

310

5. Cover illustration of the first edition of House of Houses

319

6. Yolanda López, Women’s Work is Never Done

360

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To live in the borderlands means you are neither hispana india negra española ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed caught in the crossfire between camps while carrying all the five races on your back not knowing which side to turn to, run from; (…) In the borderlands you are the battleground where enemies are kin to each other; you are at home, a stranger, the border disputes have been settled the volley of shots have shattered the truce you are wounded, lost in action dead, fighting back; (…) To survive in the Borderlands you must live sin fronteras be a crossroads.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

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Preface

The land in the middle. “I am the middle woman, / not my mother, not my daughter.” I had at times considered nepantla, which means “place in the middle” in Nahuatl […] as a possible title for a poetry collection. […] Tonight I write these words from the middle of the United States, but I am a child of the border, the land corridor bordered by the two countries that have most influenced my perception of reality. Pat Mora, Nepantla (1993)

“Being a crossroads” feels like being caught up in remolinos, vortexes. In intercultural encounters, people, communities, and cultures are swept up in a maelstrom of controversy and whirled around and hen pulled in different directions by radically different perspectives, ways of life. We occupy positions that oscillate in a to-and-from movement—mobile, migrating, liminal. We basically live in in-between spaces (nepantlas). Gloria Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas (2000)

“Padre, no te espantes, pues todavía estamos nepantla” says an indigenous chief in a letter addressed to Fray Diego Durán, in which he expressess his people’s neutral position before the new laws and creeds imposed on them during the conquest of New Spain. The Nahuatl word nepantla, the historian Miguel LeónPortilla says, describes a sense of placelessness and uprootedness, the impending tragedy of the loss of a culture and a belief-system, made increasingly evident in a reluctance to take sides. It is a state of perplexity and indefinition that the philosopher Francisco Fernández Buey relates to a sense of death and pessimism prevalent after a cultural clash: “La relación entre sentimiento de muerte y nepantlismo […] parece haber sido una constante en América” (96). And yet, as Fernández Buey points out, among the indigenous peoples of America there were different and even opposite reactions to these overpowering cultural encounters. Being nepantla does not necessarily entail death and destruction: In some cases, there was resistance to Hispanic acculturation on

behalf of the acknowledged superiority of indigenous deities to the Christian deity (Fernández Buey 94); in others, there was also assimilation, integration, mestizaje, or complementation (98). It is no coincidence that contemporary Chicana or Mexican American women writers who see themselves living in-between two or more tangled cultures should have appropriated the indigenous term nepantla to refer to their personal and collective realities. Their writings, some of which this study tackles, are reflections upon a complicated cultural, political and socioeconomic reality and of its psychological import upon the female subject.1 The term “borderlands”, the leitmotif of Gloria Anzaldúa’s “collective autobiography” Borderlands/La Frontera, is used in this book as a contemporary version of nepantla to provide us with a critical lens in an exploration of the representation of social and imaginary space in these writings. The expression will enable a journey through a variety of Mexican American sociocultural contexts and attitudes in the analyses of selected writings by Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, and Helena Viramontes written or published between 1976 and 1997. It is in this time period, the aftermath of what is commonly known as the Chicano Movement or el movimiento chicano (beginning in the mid sixties and continuing until the mid seventies) that Mexican American female writers begin to make themselves known in the literary arena. The post-movement era (1980s and 1990s) has been marked by the gradual emergence and eventual effervescence of writers who, as Ellen McCracken points out in a recent study, are usually grouped and commodified under the umbrella term of "Latina writers". As McCracken 1

Both the terms “Mexican American” and “Chicana/o” will be used throughout this study. The former hyphenated term may suggest to many people a mere reference to origin, and to a complete assimilation to AngloSaxon society. The latter has more political content and, as I will explain in 2.4 below, is now related to a provisional, fluctuating subjectivity. I want to make it clear that if I use the term Mexican American it is mainly to refer to origin, not to political orientation or to full assimilation to U.S. society.

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rightly observes, this heterogeneous body of narratives both participates within and contests mainstream forms of a marketable, postmodern, gendered ethnicity. Mexican American writings by women, by no means an unvaried group of works produced in different racial, gender, and ethnic contingencies, have participated in this new postmodern ethnic discourse and struggle. In doing so, they have redefined Chicano/a identity as it was forged and widespread in the 1960s and 1970s. My discussion of these writings in this book evolves around two main complementary argumentative axes. Firstly, contemporary Chicana literature may be read as illustrating the variety of gender, race, class, national, and sexual power relations that shape the social and intimate spaces inhabited by Mexican American women. The social spaces include the home, the barrio, the city, the body, the small town, the workplace, the village, and the fields, amongst many others. Chicana literature portrays the spaces of “real life” as traversed by a multiplicity of simultaneous social codes and discourses, which make them contradictory, conflictive, and always dependent on other spaces. Thus, the apparent concern of this literature with “local,” “private,” “intimate” spaces is in fact a speculative reflection upon the relationship between the local and the global, the private and the public, masculinity and femininity, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective. This literature presents spaces as borderlands or nepantla spaces that are dynamic and subject to change. Therefore, it does not necessarily identify them with a timeless truth, essence or authenticity. In the writings of the women I will discuss, social and familiar spaces are battlegrounds, a reflection of the changing, diverse, and entangled social relations that affect individuals. Social space is not a mere setting for the representation of women’s and men’s ways, but the result of power relations that in turn shape the Chicano/a subject. Secondly, the study sustains that these texts manifest a creative desire to go beyond established spatial barriers that reinforce social differences and power relations grounded upon race, class, sexual, gender, and national status. They address and reflect upon 17

a multiplicity of communal struggles and predicaments without privileging one over the other. This has resulted in the production of spatial images and literary constructions whereby Chicana writers embrace the variety of social problems that affect Mexican Americans and, in particular, Mexican American women. The interrelated, real social conflicts that Chicanas describe have given rise to images of space that challenge geographical, cultural, and social divisions. The simultaneity of discourses that constitute the spatial power relations of society is the basis for a new aesthetics forged by hybrid subjectivities committed to multiple issues. These imaginary spaces bespeak a politicized postmodern sensitivity to difference, a resistance to homogeneization, or what the cultural and feminist critic bell hooks has called a “radical postmodernist practice” (Yearning 25). According to this practice, difference cannot be erased, and alliances and affiliations are necessary, but not always comfortable or devoid of conflict. These writings put forth that confinement to one single struggle, one single community is not possible. This supple consciousness, which Gloria Anzaldúa has termed a mestiza consciousness, ensues from being at the crossroads, from being both inside and outside, and from straddling places where one is not fully at home. The spaces these writers evoke are very often the most intimate, local ones: the home, the family house, the lost indigenous land, the church, the small town, or the place of ritual and ceremony. The return to and recovery of these “local” places may be associated to the appeal to “identity” and “culture” that typifies cultural nationalism. However, it also springs from a political and spiritual practice that generates necessary, positive, regenerating images of self and community. “Internal,” mental representations of space, the space of dreams, the innermost corners and details of the house, however crowded, dusty, and not always unchanging or secure, may become the “protected intimacy” that phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard has described in La poétique de l’espace. Whereas writers like Pat Mora place 18

more emphasis on the comfort and privacy of their imaginary dreamhouse, for other writers like Sandra Cisneros or Gloria Anzaldúa, these places are very often neither cozy nor “private.” For all of them, however, spaces usually become metaphors and symbols of the production of a hybrid, liberating subjectivity. There is no way this book can do justice to the immense number of works written by men and women in the last thirty years that address the complex reality of living between the cultural and social ethos of Mexico and that of the U.S. I have narrowed my scope by focusing on Chicana writers because it is mostly thanks to their awareness of the unequal opportunities cutting through race, gender, age, and class strands, that a new feminist imagery, symbology, and aesthetics have emerged. This in turn has opened up a new disciplinary space within feminist theory, Chicano/a studies, and American literary and cultural history. My choice of works and writers has been partly conditioned by their stress upon space, and by the popularity most of them are beginning to have in Europe, or at least in the European academic environment. The first author I discuss, Isabella Ríos, is perhaps the least known of them. I have found it appropriate to analyze her first and only novel as an example of a Chicana proto-feminist mentality expressed through representation of physical and psychological space. It is this mentality that subsequent works by Castillo, Cisneros, Mora, Moraga, and Viramontes will pursue and develop in a more critical and radical manner. The textual and cultural analyses of these works evolve around the argument that the expression and critique of identity in these writings is done through the ideological critique of social space and through the feminist representation of literary space. Both the social critique and the literary exploration bring together the public and the private concerns of women. For discussion of a diacritical territory I bring into my own critical practice the theoretical contributions of cultural geography, feminism, cultural theory, and literary studies, which together facilitate the journey from the most intimate of spaces to the most public spaces of 19

modernity. As part of displaced and deterritorialized peoples, Chicanas often make both spaces the conflictive site of existence. It is my aim to allow the aesthetic text to yield its knowledge of the contingent historical circumstances for its production in material and existential terms. These writings can only be made comprehensible to “mainstream” academic and non-academic audiences when read as documents that testify to the multiple codes of race, gender, class, nationality, and citizenship that traverse local spaces and turn them into conflictive zones for the female subject. Hence, the apparent regionalism and localism of this literature is nothing but a reflection of the relationship between the local and the global, the private and the public, the personal and the political, the aesthetic and the ideological, the subversive and the mainstream. The analysis of the interdependence of these realms intends that each text should stand by itself while it should also reach out to the socio-political imaginary for interpretation. Therefore, the methodological emplacement of these analytical entities within critical interdisciplinary practices has been indispensable to do justice to these writers' politicized aesthetics.

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Introduction

Beyond the Critical Pale The task of coming to grips with the relationship between spatial representations and the social world they refer to can best be performed by embracing the concept of the borderlands as the metaphor for an interdisciplinary methodology. This approach will attempt to capture the variety of discourses to be found in this literature. We cannot understand the imaginary place of Anzaldúa’s persona, la mestiza, if we do not frame it in the “real” borderland conflicts and discourses she has to face. Likewise, we will not grasp the significance of the spatial images in Chicana literature if it is not in relation to the competing gender, race, and class codes, the historical tensions between countries, social classes, and communities they allude to and/or seek to transform. An interdisciplinary approach like the one followed by cultural studies will make this critical task possible, as it is concerned with the relationship between cultural representations of any kind and the socio-political reality that they appropriate, change, and/ or continue to reproduce. A short passage by the reputed Chicano critic Luis Leal indirectly alludes to the dilemmas and difficulties we may face when wanting to inscribe our work within a field that is still controversial in both sides of the Atlantic. The excerpt is taken from his work Aztlán y México (1985), where he traces the historical and social conditions that have made the images and symbols of Aztlán and México recurrent in what he calls the Chicano “literatura de frontera” (63): La mente humana, cuando tiene el presagio de la existencia de una cosa, antes de conocerla, la inventa; esto es, crea una imagen con la cual le dé cierta realidad. La imagen creada y la realidad casi nunca coinciden,

aunque sí a veces se dan aproximaciones entre esa imagen forjada con anticipación y ciertos fenómenos de la realidad. (11)

The borderlands, as I understand the term, and as I have used it in this study, have to do with “certain [spatial] phenomena of reality” (to rephrase Leal) that are experienced as perplexing battlegrounds and crossroads by many human beings in very different socio-cultural contexts.1 The literature that responds to borderlands experiences offers a particular awareness of social relations in space as well as particular spatial images and metaphors. Materially speaking, the borderlands have a variety of very definite geographical locations with their corresponding sitespecific dynamics; figuratively or conceptually speaking, the borderlands cannot be either divided or closed; they are many locations and positions at once, and therefore, they are constantly open to redefinition. My theoretical understanding of the term as metaphor is akin to the African-American critic bell hooks’ definition of the margin as a contradictory, paradoxical geography, “a space of radical openness” (145), a critical sensibility. The margin also corresponds to a sense of displacement and lack of ground shared by a variety of minoritized groups, “even if [such a displacement] is not informed by shared circumstance” (27). The social and imaginative topographies of the borderlands are many and vary from group to group. The borderlands may be borders, barriers, limits, and margins. They may be shaped by cultural, political, social, geographical demarcations and, as such, may become places of cultural loss, conflict, and alienation. They may also stage divisions and relations of domination and subjugation. They may also be passageways, liminal spaces, places of resistance and struggle, sites of intermixture and 1

I will occasionally be using the singular variant “borderland” as an adjective, meaning an intermediate condition between two extremes, or as a noun, meaning a specific, intermediate place between two regions. The plural, non-capitalized “borderlands”, both an adjective and a noun, will refer to multiple, mixed geographical areas, intercultural identities, and hybrid subjectivities.

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transference; sites of hybridization and transformation. The borderlands is by no means a single, universal cultural formation or geographical space, so that we should be wary of the many culture-specific meanings attached to the term. As Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez has argued in relation to the abusive application of the metaphor to Mexican American literature, the “favoring of a universal reading of the Borderlands in contemporary criticism tends towards the collapsing of the distinct geographic differences between border regions” (1). The recovery of literary and non-literary works describing a variety of intercultural experiences, and the influence of poststructuralist textual theories, have favored the emergence of a methodology that brings in full view the relationship of the cultures of the United States to the cultures of its others. A whole body of popular, non-canonical productions from African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos, is now considered in the light of transnational issues. In the field of Chicano Studies and since the pioneering studies of Américo Paredes of the 1950s, significant work has been done by Norma Alarcón, Debra Castillo, María Herrera-Sobek, Francisco Lomelí, José Saldívar, Ramón Saldívar, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Rosaura Sánchez (to mention only a few) to analyze various written manifestations that attest to multiple gender, race, and class conflicts. Their work has engaged the emergence of a borderlands Mexican American culture since the beginning of the U.S. occupation of former Mexican territory. This task of recovery is coupled with the awareness that, as writings produced within the United States, these works question the assumed equivalence between culture and national boundaries. As a variety of Chicano scholars have pointed out, to highlight the concept of frontera, the border, or the borderlands over the concept of frontier is to emphasize a constant migratory movement from north to south, and from south to north. This movement is radically opposed to the linear, East to West

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expansion that configures the national imagery of the United States.2 As “imaginative” or “fictional” texts, the works that I discuss in this study have been classified according to terms that confer them a “literary” status. The labels that may be used to qualify them—novel, short story, autobiography, and play—lead us to assume that these texts should be read as “literature.” Given the provisionality and unreliability of the term “literature” and the difficulty of arriving at a consensus about it, highlighted by Terry Eagleton in Literary Theory (1983) and by Gerald Graff in Professing Literature (1987), I have placed it under erasure in this study.3 For some readers, “literature” may not be the most appropriate label to describe some of the works by Chicanas, especially the most hybrid forms produced by Anzaldúa, Pat 2

See Américo Paredes’ With his Pistol in his Hand (1958) for an analysis of the popular form of the corrido that emerges in the Mexican-U.S. borderlands or frontera in the nineteenth century. The concept of la frontera and the border differs from the idea of the “frontier” as proposed by historians as Fredrick Jackson Turner in the late nineteenth century. According to Turner and those who followed his theories, the Westward expansion of the frontier shaped the character, ambitions, and political organization of Anglo-America. They sustain that Westward expansion lies behind the idea that Americans can shape their own destiny and is therefore fundamental to understand the American doctrine of individualism and democracy. See Nelson Klose’s A Concise Study Guide to the American Frontier. The myth of the American frontier as proposed by Turner has been contested in the past twenty years. An important historical contribution is The Spanish Borderlands Frontier 15131821 (1973) by John Francis Bannon. The contribution of women and minorities to this contestation are considered in studies as Anette Kolodny’s The Lay of the Land (1982), The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers (1984), and “Letting go Our Grand Obsessions” (1992) as well as Richard Drinnon’s Facing West :The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (1980). Other contributors to the analysis of the culture of the borderlands are Juan Flores and George Yúdice in their essay “Living Borders/Buscando América” (1992), and José David Saldívar in Border Matters (1998). 3 Jacques Derrida’s term “sous rature” as translated by Gayatri Spivak in the collection of essays Of Grammatology. To put something “under erasure” is to acknowledge that it is necessary and yet also inaccurate and provisional.

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Mora, and Cherríe Moraga. “Writings” is perhaps a more neutral and less charged term, although it does not immediately denote the “imaginative” dimension of these works. Independently of how we may choose to label these imaginative texts, our reading and interpretation of them will be shaped by a series of value judgements and assumptions. In particular, my own reading of these texts does not focus on a formal analysis of these texts for the sake of a merely “literary” interest. My aim is rather to see how these works may help us question various assumptions about commonly accepted divisions in society. Whatever labels may be applied to them—popular culture, popular literature, political writings, minority literature, or any other—I consider these writings as valuable and useful to understand the particular representation of the Borderlands in a variety of Mexican-American contexts. For me, their value is cultural and cognitive since their symbolic and rhetorical features mediate social relations of power, so that, if we read these texts as mediations of reality, we can construct a dialectics between social discourses and metadiscourses, between ideology and its various discursive manifestations. The main premise of a reading that explores the dialectics between texts and social discourses is that the text is a fiction that is related to other fictions, all of which have a relation to ideology or, as John Frow puts it, “a variable relation to social power” (100). Frow’s reformulation of ideology in “semiotic terms” for the analysis of literary texts, which I have followed in this study, does not subject our interpretation to the boundaries and conditions that have long prevailed in the institutionalized study of literature. As the title of this chapter suggests, reading between the world and the text is to transgress the barriers imposed by some conventional critical behaviors and attitudes regarding “literature.” I will thus be criss-crossing the territories that have been so well defined by the division of the study of literature into critical currents, genres, and fields. The borderlands is therefore the space that I am claiming for myself as a reader, a space which, in my view, it is not yet very safe to inhabit either as a writer or 25

an academic. While I have stressed the lack of universal consensual agreement regarding what is to be considered literature and the disciplinary “barriers” existing in traditional literary studies, I do not attempt to suddenly sweep away all the categories and typologies that scholars have long used to classify texts. I simply want to argue that these more traditional ways of talking about literature, or what John Frow calls, these “literary discursive formations,” are not in and of themselves useful for the kind of reading I want to produce. The systems and signifying practices that have long regulated the study, production, and circulation of literature do not offer the tools for a reading that connects the text’s relationship to the power relations in the world outside it. Frow’s theory of literary discourse proposed in Marxism and Literary History, redeems the formalist concept of system from the formalist separation of literary and extra-literary factors, a separation that prevents us from thinking of literary discourse as a social fact. In accord with this theory, I will consider the writings I deal with as partly conditioned by literary discourse, but also as partaking of extraliterary discourses. This approach contrasts with the formalist approach to literature, where the discourses outside the text are only discussed when they become specifically literary within the structure of the text. Bakhtin’s post-Sausserian theory of the novel, based on the competition of social discourses, has been partially useful to view texts as dynamic entities that interact with the world that has produced them and that they appropriate. Bakhtin’s theory is only applied to the novel, which, in his view, is radically opposed to all the other genres in its exclusive properties of “heteroglossia” and “dialogism”. However, the competition of discourses and the reference of these discourses to other “non-literary” texts finds itself in a variety of genres and is a very remarkable feature in the writings that have been produced in the interstices of two cultures. I therefore agree with Frow that to be “sufficiently formalist” means to be able to relate literary discourse to other discourses, instead of to a “literary reality” that supposedly lies 26

outside social discourse (99).4 A similar argument is posed by Gerald Graff in his Professing Literature : If works of literature “speak for themselves,” they do so only up to a point, for their authors were not aware, and could not have been aware, of the kinds of situations in which their works would later be read and taught and the different problems of comprehension and appreciation these situations might occasion. The initial questions we decide to ask in teaching a literary work, the questions that delimit what we will say about it, are always dictated in some part by the pressures of our time, our culture, and our sense of history. (255)

To focus merely on the text itself may lead us to fetishism and to a dehistorization of the author, the work, and its readership. As critical readers we may avoid this by looking at the context in which a work is produced and the conditions that create it, by viewing the text as a social phenomenon and an ideological act that participates of life through language. Although we cannot assume a direct correspondence between reality and the way it is represented by the text, we can certainly argue that there is a relation between the text and the socio-historical actuality in 4

The concepts of “heteroglossia” and “dialogism” have been applied to the competition of discourses in genres other than the novel. In Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, “heteroglossia” is “[t]he base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is what insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions—social, historical, meteorological, physiological—that will insure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they are functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as is possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such, it is that which a systematic linguistics must always suppress” (428). “Dialogism” “is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood as part of a greater whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative [...] insures that there can be no actual monologue.” (426).

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which it is being produced, reproduced, and read. It is in the ways texts interpret, problematize, and/or mediate reality that their political and ideological function may be discerned. Frow’s redefinition of ideology in textual terms as a state of discourse has significant consequences for the political analysis of literary works. First, the text does not emerge as a univocal structure and, hence, cannot be described objectively. The text will be read according to social and historical authorities within a particular system. Second, issues of production and reception, and linguistic, rhetorical, enunciative, and thematic features are equally important in the analysis of a text. The structure of a text does not have ideological import in and of itself; it should always be tackled in relation to the conditions in which the text is produced and read. Third, literary discourse is a “metadiscourse” that can be both in harmony with or at a distance from the discourses it incorporates. There is not a homology between literary discourse and social structure; the literary system may be discontinuous with social structure. Some discourses that are not necessarily socially accepted may prevail in the text (Frow 100). In works such as Walter Benjamin: Toward a Revolutionary Criticism (1981) and Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983) Terry Eagleton has taken to task the distinction between the literary and the non-literary. In these studies he has proposed a “revolutionary”, political criticism that “would dismantle the ruling concepts of ‘literature’, reinserting ‘literary’ texts into the whole field of cultural practices. It would strive to relate such ‘cultural’ practices to other forms of social activity” (Walter Benjamin 98). No doubt, the texts we consider literary are not the only ones where several codes may compete and interrelate. Although Marxist theory has almost exclusively been applied to literature, it may be usefully applied to other texts in order to examine the interplay of discourses as well as to understand the complexity of the relations between the text and its institutional conditions of existence, between “social” and “symbolic” practices. As the French critic Pierre Macherey puts it, the literary work is not a self-sufficient totality or a complete reality in itself 28

(53). The role of the critic, as he has it, is to unmask the silences of the work, the “otherness” through which the text maintains a relationship to its margins, to what it is not (79). The critic should illuminate what the text does not say, what it tacitly implies (84). In a similar fashion, Terry Eagleton has espoused a kind of reading that looks at the affirmative propositions of the text as “the shadowy lineaments of the toil, misery and wretchedness which made it possible in the first place” (The Significance 3233). In an essay on Theodor Adorno, Eagleton comments on the critical power of the absences in the work of art: It is this internal slippage or hiatus within the art work, this impossibility of ever coinciding exactly with itself, which provides the very source of its critical power, in a world where objects lie petrified in their monotonously self-same being, doomed to the hell of being no more than themselves. (The Significance 49)

The interdiscilinary methodology of cultural studies can be best described with Eagleton’s terms “political criticism” and “revolutionary criticism.” According to this critic’s definition, political criticism should be based upon the analysis of the text’s intertextual relations to the historical moment in which it has been produced, to the hierarchies and social codes of gender, race, class, religion it incorporates. Eagleton views the political analysis of texts as necessarily involving the connection between a variety of disciplines and practices that may allow us to discern the various workings of power in society. Although cultural studies cannot fully discard the categories that the study of literature has produced, it also has to acknowledge that these categories do not provide the tools for a political reading of texts. The inquiry into the relations between the world and the text as proposed by Frow, Eagleton, and Stuart Hall amongst others, is a “semiotic politics” which has, as I have said, subversive disciplinary repercussions. Cultural studies may be understood as a revision of formalist criticism that incorporates the new tools of post-structuralism, feminist theory, Marxist theory, identity

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politics5, popular culture, sociology, cultural geography, and anthropology, amongst others. The two pillars on which cultural studies rest are an informed eclecticism and a political reading of texts: the crossing of boundaries between disciplines, the search for connections between the institution of literature and other institutions, between literature and the various social discourses it incorporates, defends, and/or challenges. When asked about the problems this eclectic methodological stance may bring about for the researcher, Terry Eagleton has explained that, despite harsh critiques, such an approach is his reaction to what he calls “a certain fetishism of method” that prevails in his early work: I would now want to say that, at the level of method, pluralism should reign, because what truly defeats eclecticism is not a consistency of method but a consistency of political goal. [...] So I’m happy in one sense to be called a pluralist if that means that there’s always more than one emancipatory discourse with which one can work. But I say “emancipatory discourse” to imply also a criterion of discrimination, and thus, let’s be frank about it, of exclusion. [...] [T]here will always be certain critical and theoretical discourse which will not be emancipatory, and therefore won’t be available for one’s work. (The Significance, 76) 5

In the U.S. identity politics emerged during the international liberation struggles carried out in various countries of Africa, Asia,and Latin America against colonization, injustice, and poverty. In the 60s Mexican-American and Puerto-Rican communities followed the example of the Black Power movement and placed an emphasis on racial pride, identity, and cultural heritage in order to raise political issues and claim a multicultural society. The main premise of identity politics is that concepts such race, class, language, gender, sexuality, and national origins shape social dynamics. Hence, they may be given political value to oppose and to change these dynamics. Women created their own identity politics the moment they realized that to become a “woman” was not a fact of nature, but the result of social, historical, and cultural processes that long shaped their lives. The precondition for identity politics to cease to exist is the respect for and mindfulness to social, class, gender, sexual, and racial difference. For recent reflections on Latino/a and feminist identity politics see Valentine M. Moghadam’s Identity Politics and Women (1994), Susan Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives (1995), and Aída Hurtado’s The Color of Privilege (1996). For more general reflections on identity politics in the network age see Castells’ The Power of Identity (1997).

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The politics of reading, Eagleton implies, is the key element to decide which relations of intertextuality we are going to privilege in our critique of texts, and which are going to be the relevant criteria for constructing such intertextual relations. The politically committed critic does not look so much for the norms defined by the institution of literature, as for the social text that constitutes such norms and mediates the content of the literary or non-literary work. In The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson bases his interpretive program on the reconstruction of hermeneutic master codes that attempt to explain the text (47). These linguistic materials and semantic conditions of possibility exist in advance in order for the specific text to be produced at a given historical moment (57). Thus, Jameson views the act of interpretation as a decoding according to those previously existing categories that have to be historicized. Literary phenomena (narratives, in this case) are, in Jameson’s view, the imaginary resolution of contradictions in social life. The formal patterns of a work are a “symbolic enactment of the social within the formal and the aesthetic” (77), the manifestation of the political unconscious. Jameson is therefore more interested in the metadiscourses of creation and interpretation through which we receive and read texts, in the particular ideological power of a text in relation to these literary discursive formations, than in the conflict of heterogeneous social discourses within the literary text (9). My reading of these texts wants to emphasize their cognitive value once we look at them as sites of exchange and conflict with other social texts outside them. Hence, more useful for this study is Jameson’s notion of “cognitive mapping,” as it hints at the dialectics between immediate social reality and an imaginary sense of space (“Cognitive Mapping” 353). As has been said, the study of different intertextual relations within the text should not rule out formal analysis. As opposed to a purely descriptive formal analysis where meaning is seen as contained in form, one may stress the function that stylistic and 31

rhetorical elements perform in a complex system of intertextual relations that go beyond the text itself. The concept of intertext is thus not an end in itself, because the prehistory of a text, as Frow says, is not a given, but a system elaborated as the result of relations (157). We may focus on the themes, genres, and registers which will determine our interpretive interest, but our priority should be the strategic value of a construction of relations within the text referring to other outside texts. The different conventions and registers within the text as well as the positions and voices that are suitable for a variety of speakers, including the narrator of the novel, the main speaker in an autobiography, or the characters in a play, are determined by certain knowledge conditions. Frow calls these registers (legal, literary, colloquial, scientific, etc.) genres of discourse or discourse genres (158). The concept of “discourse genre” allows us to analyze a text as a “play of voices.” To privilege the concept of “voice” over the concept of “point of view” frees the critic from the association of the representation of the world through the “consciousness” or “vision” of a personified character or narrator (159). Since the text is made of languages and voices, both characters and narrators are the producers of discourse and their object. They produce a kind of language within the register of the work that is suited to one or many positions and functions in discourse, but this language also refers to outside social codes that the literary text incorporates and may challenge (162). To invoke Bakhtin again, all discourses in a text are dialogic because they refer to and are influenced by other discourses. In the writings of Mexican-American women writers, the interplay of Mexican and American popular, aesthetic, social discourses reveals certain relations of domination, the effect of “relations of discursive contradiction,” and the “clash of realities” that may or may not lead to the contestation of ideology (Frow 169). In the literature by Chicanas I explore in this study there is an explicit thematization of these clashes of discourses and realities through the representation of space. The texts are places of contradiction 32

and ideological resistance both in terms of their content and their form: the social relations in space they depict and critique and the alternative spatial images they propose. In order to illustrate the pervasive presence of the borderlands as a psychological and social paradigm in writings by Chicanas, I have dealt with a variety of genres: narrative fiction, collective autobiography, and drama. As Derrida has observed, the “law of genre” establishes limitations as to the things that can be said and as to how those things should be said. “[A]s soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly or monstrosity” (203-204). Derrida urges us to contemplate the fact that his law of genre exists because there is a possibility of challenging it: “What if there were, lodged within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity, or a principle of contamination?” (204). The power of the law diminishes as soon as the possibility of mixing genres is envisioned. In one way or another, the writings analyzed in this study testify to the fact that the laws of genre can be broken. They are impure, mixed genres because they are not necessarily linked to one single tradition, one single formal convention or one single content. As textual representations of a variety of Mexican-American realities, they interact with various social, cultural, national discourses as well as with literary, non-literary, and popular genres. The underlying aims of these writings are the reconstruction and recovery of individual and collective history, the relationship between local and individual identity, and the world or society at large. These are hybrid genres dealing with hybrid social realities and hybrid selves from a critical perspective. We may see them as genres pervaded by a sense of responsibility against cultural deprivation and oppressive structures of domination. Thus, the formal analysis of these works will not deal extensively with genre in the conventional sense of the term. Discussions of the history and form of literary genres are beyond the main aim of this study, although, I will reflect, when it is pertinent, on those formal

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aspects that intersect with the representation of material and psychological space. Isabella Ríos’ novel, the epistolary work of Ana Castillo, the short stories by Viramontes and Cisneros, the drama of Cherríe Moraga, as well as the family chronicle of Pat Mora display a marked emphasis on orality and colloquial speech. Moraga has herself said that she has chosen the dramatic form to mirror the quality of everyday language and speech of the people (Moraga,Watsonville 4; Borrego 274). The experimental quality of Ríos’ novel, gives it, as Francisco Lomelí has said, “a very auditive character” (“Isabella Ríos” 59), thus also reflecting, like a theatre or film script, the everyday, local speech of her characters. Ríos can be said to anticipate the style of Castillo, Viramontes, and Cisneros, who very often choose colloquial speech in their stories. The modern short story, as Mary Louise Pratt has said in her essay “The Short Story,” is very often used to tell about the lives of marginal characters and marginal communities. Pratt does not see in the communities or in the genre itself anything inherent that makes these locations and literary form appropriate for one another—for there are indeed novels that deal with marginal communities as well. Yet, she observes that the novel tends to manifest its “writtenness,” while the short story is usually more valued in Third World countries and in less developed communities where literacy is not the norm. Open over closed forms, conflict over resolution, fragmentation over unity, characterize these fictional writings which are partly autobiographical, testimonial and documentary. These forms oppose the linear narratives that, in the introduction to Life/Lines, Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck have seen reifying the concept of a transparent and coherent subject (1-15). In the context of drama, Susan Bassnett has described linearity as reproducing a “masculine” way of understanding personal development and social relations (“Towards” 462). These feminist critics view the openness of form and multiplicity of voices as a trace of a “feminine” or “feminist” aesthetics. I would not go as far as to claim that decentered, open forms are exclusively feminine or 34

feminist, for open forms characterize many contemporary literary productions, as well as Chicano/a narratives independently of the gender of the author. Yet, I would say that these particular formal choices have a lot to do with the influence of postmodernism upon the understanding of a multivocal subjective and collective experience. In the case of the literature by Mexican-American women, postmodernity has shed light upon the contradictions within the self, within a collectivity of women, within feminism, and within the Mexican-American community. These contradictions are present in the fictional narratives of Viramontes, Castillo, and Cisneros, in the autobiographical, political, and dramatic writings of Cherríe Moraga, as well as in the family chronicle of Pat Mora. All of these writers refuse homogeneous, unitary representations of the ethnic subject and propose a feminist political consciousness that fuses individual and communal interests. At the same time, they also envision and claim social spaces where there is room for a variety of sexually, ethnically, racially different subjects, where differences are respected and not obliterated. Terms such as “collective” or “cultural autobiography,” “out-law genres” (Caren Kaplan, “Resisting Autobiography”), “biomythographies” (Audre Lorde, Zami), “autobiographical manifestos” (Sidonie Smith, Subjectivity, Identity and the Body), and “polyphonic” or “dialogic” drama (Helene Keyssar, “Drama and the Dialogic”) have been applied to define the poetics and politics of writings that deal with regional and global racial, sexual, cultural, and economic issues. These works integrate popular knowledge, culture, and folklore, as well as personal and collective history, thus transforming and hybridizing the textual space of Western forms such as the autobiography, the dramatic piece, the novel, or the short story. The ideological approach I have applied to the study of literature has placed me, as I have said above, in a borderland position between the text and the world. By integrating the disciplines of history, sociology, literary analysis, cultural history, mythology, and anthropology for the reading of these works, I 35

have not only transgressed the limits between the world and the text, but also between disciplines and critical theories (Marxist, feminist, post-colonial). Furthermore, I have crossed the boundaries traditionally established by literary history according to national tradition and have focused on a variety of hybrid literary genres that display the interaction of various “discourse genres.” This interdisciplinary approach is certainly innovative, but it is by no means new. Renowned critics such as not only have followed the method of cultural studies, but have also gone a long way towards the refashioning of this still young discipline. An instance of applied feminist cultural studies to literature is Hazel Carby’s Reconstructing Womanhood, which detaches itself from the American currents of black feminist criticism that assume that there is a distinguishable “black female tradition.” Her study focuses on the ways nineteenth-century black women writers confronted and transformed ideologies of womanhood that excluded them from what was conventionally understood as a “woman” in the United States. She describes the reconstruction of these ideologies in their novels so as to highlight the existence of alternative discourses about womanhood that adjusted to black women’s particular material conditions. Political writings, political lecturing, and other writing sources such as magazine articles, journalism and essays are used as intertexts for understanding black women’s narratives as interventions in the social formation where they lived (6-7). Reconstructing Womanhood pays particular attention to the interrelation of race, class, and gender social power relations in a materialist, historical account of the cultural production of black female intellectuals (16-17). The writings of these women are shown to be part of a discursive context that reflects the conflicts of the time. Therefore, language is dealt with as a site of struggle between various communities and social groups. Paul Gilroy has also taken a firm stance against cultural insiderism, against African-American exceptionalism in the U.S., or against race and ethnicity as absolute entities around which cultural studies has long been configured (3-4). He cannot 36

subscribe to the identification of culture with nation state, and looks at cultural productions as the result of the contact between cultures. The chronotopes6 used by Gilroy to emphasize his transcultural methodology are the “Black Atlantic” and the ship, both of which are allusions to the slave trade across the Atlantic Ocean. Both images oppose the narrow nationalism of English historiography and the essentialist understanding of some panAfricanist thought. In the constant movement evoked by the ship sailing across the Black Atlantic, the polyphonic qualities of Black cultural expression in a series of genres like music, essays, and novels come to the fore. The image of the Black Atlantic refers to what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling”.7 In particular, it represents the distinctive philosophical discourse that Gilroy perceives in these various cultural or counter-cultural manifestations of modernity: the struggle against the Western modern view that the compartmentalization of knowledge (ethics, aesthetics, science, culture, and politics) is necessary to discern the distinct and separate origins of “the true, the good and the beautiful” (39). The counter-culture of the modern Black Atlantic challenges these divisions by highlighting the race, class and gender abuses upon which the view of modernity is established.

6

“Chronotope” means “[l]iterally, ‘time-space.’ A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. The distinctiveness of this concept as opposed to other uses of time and space in literary analysis lies in the fact that neither category is privileged; they are utterly interdependent. The chronotope is an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination 425-426). 7 This term evinces the Marxist critic’s conviction that culture and society are inseparable from experience. Experience is a type of knowledge: a whole life-style at a given time period. In a society that creates uniform models of relations based upon use and consumption, personal experience and memory are critical responses to processes he terms “social deformations” (298). Memory and experience have to be filtered through a critical and historical evaluation of one’s own consciousness. See Williams’ The Country and the City (1973). See also Williams’ The Long Revolution (1961).

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I intend the borderlands to be a similar unifying chronotope eliciting the structure of feeling we may perceive by the Chicana writings I have chosen to discuss. The image of the borderlands refers to the crossbreeding of traditions, cultures and codes that are present in these works and from which new spatial concepts, political projects, and literary forms emerge. I read these works by Mexican-American women as staging various confrontations of power that correspond to an awareness of the borderlands as a physical and psychological place of contradiction and resistance. As I have observed above, the physical and mental Borderlands are not exclusive to Mexican-Americans. Yet, the problems, confrontations, contradictions, and resistance strategies present in these writings are shaped by different Borderlands MexicanAmerican realities. Hence, in this particular study, the Borderlands designate the conflation of social and imaginary representations of space in the light of the various MexicanAmerican circumstances in which they have been produced. The Borderlands as Critical Paradigm The border is the border, and it would not make any sense to divide it into sides. It is the place that it is, the country that it is, because of the influence and the inbreeding of the Mexican and the North American cultures. Alicia Gaspar de Alba assimilated? qué assimilated, brother, yo soy asimilao Tato Laviera

Gloria Anzaldúa has stated that “the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space 38

between two individuals shrinks with intimacy” (unpaged Preface to Borderlands/La Frontera). To be sure, there are many other cultural and geo-political borderlands inside the U.S. and outside the U.S. that are beyond the limits and aim of this work. In our postmodern era the fact that we all have a borderland identity boils down to an awareness of being both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan at the same time, of being part of a world culture where we all vindicate our particularity. Yet, in being porous, hybrid places of interaction between different peoples, the physical places we call borders stage the clash of languages and customs, as well as of racial and economic hostilities. The cultural and economic clashes on the legal fringes of a nation point at the traumatic aspects of living in-between codes, languages, and environments. These interactions, conflicts, and new meanings originate in very specific areas, but extend to and permeate the arenas of the law, the media, public opinion, and justice. In the particular contemporary geo-political context of Spain, we may certainly speak of a border culture emerging from the increasing presence of migrant peoples of African descent, which brings to mind the coexistence of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim cultures in the past. Our national space, though delimited by geographical and political boundaries, is by no means homogeneous. It is precisely in its very boundaries where cultural, social, and economic conflicts emerge, which then affect the rest of the state. The affluence of African immigration to the Spanish regions of Ceuta and Melilla in the African continent has caused them to be called “border spaces” or “borderlands.”8 The gradual militarization of these regions, the controversy over the Spanish “Ley de Estrangería” (Immigration Law) and over the treatment received by clandestine immigrants, as well as the discomfort of those who fear their presence around them, are only the first obvious signs of the complicated interaction of very different cultures and economies. At the other 8

See Ana Isabel Panet Contreras’ Melilla y Ceuta: Espacios frontera hispano-marroquíes and E.E. Rosander, Women in a Borderland: Managing Muslim Identity Where Morocco Meets Spain.

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end of the country, Catalunya and Euskadi are cultural nations that have certainly developed a bilingual and even multi-lingual border culture, or border identity.9 There are those who still insist on essential Catalan and Basque identities, but I view these regions as borderlands. Catalunya and Euskadi have never been officially granted the status of nation states. In spite of this fact, or perhaps precisely because of it, the representation of their present political, economic, and cultural reality will always waver between their past self-image as nations and their actual political and economic ties to Spain, Europe, and the rest of the world. For Nuyoricans, Puerto-Ricans living in New York, the city is that geographical borderland between the United States and their colonized island, a line epitomizing their halfway, discontinuous existence between Puerto-Rico and the U.S. This existence is difficult to define, as it always involves the erasure of one part of themselves by one group or another. In his poem “asimilao” the Nuyorican poet Tato Laviera evokes the lost side of his identity, his boricua (indigenous, jíbaro) past while at the same time putting the notion of assimilation to the Spanish and American ethoi under erasure: assimilated? qué assimilated, brother, yo soy asimilao, así mi la o sí es verdad, tengo un lado asimilao. you see, they went deep.... Ass oh........ they went deeper... SEE oh, oh,... they went deeper... ME but the sound LAO was too black for LATED, LAO could not be translated, assimilated, no, asimilao, melao, it became a black spanish word but we do have asimilados perfumados and by the last count even they 9

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I use the term “cultural nation” to distinguish it from “nation-state.”

were becoming asimilao how can it be analyzed as american? así que se chavaron trataron pero no pudieron con el AO de la palabra principal, déles gracias a los prietos que cambiaron asimilado al popular asimilao. (Amerícan 54)

Laviera plays on the differential meaning of the English, Spanish, and colloquial arrabal Spanish suffixes -lated, -lado, lao. The modification of the English and Spanish words “assimilated” and “asimilado” questions the speaker’s complete assimilation to both American and Spanish cultures; in addition, the speaker’s alternate use of English and Spanish testifies to the imprint American and Spanish cultures have left upon him. As he says, he is “asimilao,” and part of that assimilation is his American “ME” emerging after the American penetration of Puerto Rico. The poem ironically describes it as a sexual encounter giving rise to his partly American self: “Ass...SEE... ME.” “Lao” (“lado” in standard Spanish), meaning side, is the signifier of resistance that admits the influence of both cultures, but denies that they exist in full being. “Lao” stands in for an untranslatable trace in his Nuyorican identity. The suffix, characteristic of colloquial arrabalero Spanish, does not stand for a black jíbaro/prieto side that resists colonial penetration. After all, the speaker says “yo soy asimilao.” The ending “milao” evokes the sweet syrup made in Puerto Rico called “melao,” obtained through the evaporation of the purified juice of sugar cane. In spite of resorting to this local image, “lao” is the jíbaro sound that allows the speaker to say that he is neither one thing nor the other, neither American nor Spanish. Even the “asimilados perfumados” (perfumed, upper-class, assimilated people of Puerto Rican descent) become “assimilaos,” that is, an impure mixture of cultures giving rise to a third untranslatable 41

identity that cannot “be [fully] analyzed as american,” because it is not. The notion of the borderlands or la frontera as an impure space, as a problematic and contradictory “lao” (side) of its own is the critical paradigm that runs all through this study. Of all the works dealing with the Mexican-American border experience from a female point of view, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera is a clear attempt to narrate the impact of the material reality of the borderlands upon the female subject. Anzaldúa seeks to forge a new paradigm with which we can understand the multiplicity of issues that are being dealt with in writings by Chicanas. Borderlands establishes a constant dialectics between the real spaces where the speaker sets material and emotional conflicts and the imagined space where the speaking subject places her critique of a variety of nationalist, patriarchal, sexist, classist, racist, and homophobic discourses that have affected her and her people directly. The revolutionary power of Borderlands lies in its capacity to break boundaries between self and collectivity, theory and praxis, politics and aesthetics. In doing so, it proposes a different form of thought, a mestiza consciousness that does not fully reject standard genealogies, categories and definitions, but proposes to look at them as provisional, imperfect, and not always useful. The term “borderlands” in the title of this work alludes directly to Gloria Anzaldúa’s cultural autobiography because I consider the interplay of the literary representation of “social” spaces and “imaginary” spaces to be linked to the expression of a contradictory and resisting subjectivity. The representation of space in Chicana literature is analyzed here as a speculation upon a variety of (psychological, cultural, political, and social) Mexican-American realities. A closer reading of Borderlands/ La Frontera is in order here so as to elaborate on the critical paradigm that I have chosen to analyse these works. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera is, as Caren Kaplan would put it, a “collective autobiography,” an “out-law genre” (“Resisting Autobiography” 115). Such genres defy conventional 42

distinctions between autobiography, poetic prose, mythical or magical narrative, political pamphlet and/or manifesto, critical essay, and historical document. Borderlands incorporates and mingles all of these genres in an original production where the more aesthetic space of the text is grounded in the historical and political circumstances that pervade the “real” material space the speaking subject has inhabited. The terms “borderlands/la frontera” do not refer to a psychological disposition that easily accommodates contradictory categories. Anzaldúa is concerned with the psychological and emotional struggle of those living in the geographical, cultural, political, and/or economic or imaginary borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. This is a struggle to wrestle with notions of self and community imposed by a variety of cultures and to forge a sense of place out of a sense of constant displacement. She addresses this struggle as a member of a collectivity and as an individual. On the one hand, she is out to make her readership conscious of the history of oppression of the Mexican-American community and of Mexican-American women; on the other, she describes the effects of such oppression on herself, a lesbian who has lived inbetween two cultures and two genders. Her position, as she says repeatedly, is that of mediator. She is someone who speaks for herself as both subject (a writer, an academic, an author) and as object (descendant of a Texan family of farmers whose territories were expropriated, a Chicana, a lesbian): “I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t” (87). Taking that double position and refusing to do away with it, she uses her knowledge, her privilege, and her personal experience as a woman of Mexican origin, a descendant of field workers, and a lesbian in order to establish a dialogue between these multiple locations and identities. Her autobiographical persona can both learn “to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view [...] to juggle cultures” (79).

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The first chapter of her work begins with a geographical figuration of intercultural bloodshed. The speaker places her own personal struggle within the history of her homeland, the side of the U.S.-Mexican border “between the Nueces and the Rio Grande,” which she describes as an “open wound,” “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (3). This land, Anzaldúa says, “has survived possession and ill-use by five countries: Spain, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, the U.S., the Confederacy, and the U.S. again. It has survived Anglo-Mexican blood feuds, lynchings, burnings, rapes, pillage” (90). The occupation of Texas and what is now the Southwest of the United States began around the 1820s and culminated with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848). By this treaty Mexico was stripped of the territories that today comprise the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and half of Colorado. The border region where Anzaldúa was born has been shaped by the Spanish conquest, the illegal but permitted migration of Anglos into Texas, the creation of the Texas Republic by the AngloTexans, and the final annexation of Texas by the U.S. The history of the Texas border between Mexico and the U.S. is one of violent clashes, poverty, and displacement. Anzaldúa's birthplace suffered the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century and the U.S. invasion and "deterritorialization" of Mexican indigenous peoples since the early 1800s.10 U.S. imperialism led to the creation of the Republic of Texas by Anglo-Texans in 1836, to the eventual annexation of the territory to the U.S. in 1848, and to Native Mexicans' virtual abandonment of the region in the 1850s. Anzaldúa tells us that the industrialization of the border following land expropriations and bringing about the establishment of agribusiness corporations and factories in the 1880s, accounts for the massive presence of a poor Mexican migrant working class in this area. In the first chapter of this 10

In Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972), Deleuze and Guattari use the term "deterritorialization" to refer to the constant movement and displacement of peoples and cultures in the contemporary world. "Deterritorialization" also alludes to affective, social, and economic losses.

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work, the female speaker describes the subjection of her own family to race hatred after the Anglo invasion, her own widowed mother's and grandmother's loss of lands, and their impotence before a foreign law and language they did not understand. The chapter ends with a description of the industrialization of the border that followed these expropriations and that brought about the establishment of agribusiness corporations and factories, as well as the presence of a Mexican migrant working class. In the second chapter of the work, entitled “Movimientos de rebeldía y las culturas que traicionan,” the autobiographical subject recalls why she rebelled and abandoned her “home.” Home was never a source of identity, belonging and security, but a place of conflict, where, as a woman she was told to keep silent and to submit to the values of others: Y como mi raza que cada en cuando deja caer esa esclavitud de obedecer, de callarse y aceptar, en mi está la rebeldía encimita de mi carne. [...] Repele. Hable pa’ ‘tras. Fui muy hocicona. Era indiferente a muchos valores de mi cultura. No me dejé de los hombres. No fui buena ni obediente. (15)

Despite the fact that she has changed, grown more tolerant, and now takes from her culture whatever values are useful to her, she keeps fighting: Ya no sólo paso toda mi vida botando las costumbres y los valores de mi cultura que me traicionan. También recojo las costumbres que por el tiempo se han probado y las costumbres de respeto a las mujeres. But despite my growing tolerance, for this Chicana la guerra de independencia is a constant. (15)

Anzaldúa establishes the usual equivalence between home, race, culture and community, but her hesitance and fear of going back and not being accepted reveals the inadequacy of such an identification. She has “[f]ear of going home. And of not being taken in. [...] Most [queers] unconsciously believe that if we reveal this unacceptable part of the self our mother/culture/race will totally reject us” (20). For the woman of color the world “is 45

not a safe place to live in. [...] Alienated from her mother culture, ‘alien’ in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self” (20). The mestiza feels “sold out” by her people, and defines herself as “hija de la chingada,” thus turning over the fundamental Mexican cultural construct of woman as traitor that will be explored later in 2.3. of this study. Even if “‘home’ permeates every sinew and cartilage” in her body, she abhors and escapes the way her culture treats women in making them meek and subservient to men: “I had to leave home so I could find myself, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” (16). All throughout her work Anzaldúa proposes the fusion of opposites, “the coming together of opposite qualities within” (19), “a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity” (79), “a massive uprooting of dualistic thinking” (80). This might seem to revert to a kind of harmonious and ideal synthesis of opposites, or to the assertion of an easy kind of pluralism of the “‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ type,’ so long as we maintain a congenial conversation’” (Yúdice, “Marginality” 216). But the mestiza denies this: This assembly is not one where severed or separated pieces merely come together. Nor is it a balancing of opposing powers. In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm. (79-80)

Thus, the disruption of dualistic thinking is “the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (79). The mestiza speaks for others and does so as a relatively privileged subject who, from a variety of shifting margins, which become her center, can undo the epistemic violence that has kept

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many voices unheard.11 Borderlands describes the need for a “safe” communal place where the inhabitants of those margins can live without being the victims of their difference. It envisions and constructs a place where one can fight against sexism, racism, and other exclusionist cultural practices. The politically committed speaker denounces the silence that Anglo culture and history has imposed on Mexican-Americans. The silence that male-dominated cultures have imposed on women, that heterosexual binaries impose on homosexuals, that white supremacy imposes on other groups who have been racialized12 and stereotyped, that unequal distribution of wealth imposes on all peoples. She breaks this silence and creates new words and new myths which have both a personal and a collective function, but which do not gloss over the internal divisions within the self and the community. The speaker claims a “third culture,” a “third space,” where no barriers will exist for illegal Mexican workers, sexual outlaws, and other socially marginalized individuals. The speaker identifies this imaginary homeland with the mythical, utopian, egalitarian land tat Chicanos invented in the late 1960s and called Aztlán. Aztlán is the name that Aztec Indians had supposedly given to the territories now consisting of the U.S. southwestern 11

“Epistemic violence” is the term the post-colonial critic Gayatri Spivak uses to refer to the unquestioned premises by which the absolute “Other” has always been a “pure” signifier and a refraction of the Western imperialist self. According to Spivak, the cultural self-representation of the colonizer is always at the expense of the figure of the “native” who cannot speak and is portrayed as an unchanging essence. See her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). 12 (from racialization). The term was introduced by Robert Miles in his book Racism and Labour Migration (1982), an analysis of immigration to Britain after the Second World War. His theory rejects the notion of “race” in its biological sense, and proposes an analysis of the contingencies that have given rise to specific conceptions or constructions of race, through a process that he terms “racialization.” Miles emphasizes the fact that as of 1945 “colour” in Britain became almost synonymous with race. The implications of this emphasis on the “constructedness” of race is that the way in which that concept is understood really depends on power distribution within social and economic relations.

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States that used to belong to Mexico.13 In her "re-appropriation" of Aztlán the new mestiza redefines American nationalism and Chicano ethnic nationalism. She stands up against the constitution of the American national imaginary at the expense of ethnic minorities and non-heterosexual people, but she also opposes the Chicano nationalist discourse of the late 1960s that excluded both women and homosexuals. As Norma Alarcón has argued, the utopian "neonationalism" or "ethnonationalism" of writers like Anzaldúa is guided by the notions of provisionality, migratoriness, multiplicity, and never by the separatist utopianism of former Chicano cultural nationalism:14 [I]n the Americas today, the processes of sociopolitical empire and nation-making displacements over a five-hundred-year history are such that the notion of "Home" is as mobile as the populations, a "home" without juridically nationalized geopolitical territory. (“Anzaldúa’s Frontera” 43)

As revisited by Anzaldúa, Aztlán ceases to be geographical territory that must be "re-conquered." Despite this writer's appropriation of the indigenist Chicano term, Aztlán changes its meaning to stand for a symbolic claim for the rights of the dispossessed. In Anzaldúa's work it is a utopia forged by a new hybrid, mestiza consciousness, a land where clandestine Mexican workers, “sexual outlaws”, and all the disenfranchised may coexist with their particular differences. As the AfricanAmerican cultural critic bell hooks has said, “[s]paces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated, and transformed through artistic and literary practice” (Yearning 152). Aztlán is a symbolic claim for the rights of the disenfranchised and the dispossessed. This mythical place is coupled with the borderlands to which the title of Anzaldúa’s work alludes, that subjective space of the critical The mythical construction of this space and its cultural and political repercussions will be further developed in Chapter 2. 14 For more detailed accounts of the cultural nationalism of the Chicano Movement and its political failures, see Chapter 2. 13

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imagination, a site of resistance that can bring about a regenerating and healing process. These borderlands are also, very much in spite of the mestiza, a real “frontline, a war zone,” for they are the habitat of the undocumented, the queers, the maquiladora workers, the farm workers, the cholo gangs, the mojada15, "the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half dead" (3). Much as she imagines a utopia that is open to the excluded and disenfranchised, she always returns to the unavoidable reality that her home, the borderlands, is, as she says in the preface, “not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape” (unpaged Preface to Borderlands). In its claim for a "safe" communal place where sexism, racism and any other discriminatory practices won't exist, in its distinction between the oppressors and the oppressed, as well as in the manifest internal fragmentation of the autobiographical self and the communities described, Borderlands follows Caren Kaplan's definition of "cultural autobiography." Kaplan observes that these sort of personal stories that link individuals with communities go beyond the limits of the individualism and exclusive focus on the self of Western autobiographies, becoming instead forms of healing and cultural survival (132). In the case of Anzaldúa, this healing must come from a dangerous mental and cultural region between the self and the other. Thus, her imaginary borderlands, understood as a critical consciousness, is the space that can change the “real” social borderlands. She strives to find a “path of knowledge—one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our raza” (19). In her particular case, her sexual difference has provided that path through which she “slips in and out of the white, the Catholic, the 15

The cholo is the contemporary version of the pachuco, the MexicanAmerican young man who is a member of urban gangs. The mojada is the female “wetback,” a person usually of Mexican origin who crosses the Río Grande towards the U.S. with hopes of a better life.

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Mexican, the indigenous” and fights against the despotic power of value laden dualisms and binary oppositions such as man/woman, white/Mexican, heterosexual/lesbian (19). As Anzaldúa says, the mestiza has both many names and no names, and therefore crosses over from one identity to another not without pain or struggle (43). Each crossing involves “making sense,” “making connections,” “formulating insights,” “incrementing consciousness” about all the different spaces she inhabits (48). Knowledge, as Anzaldúa says, is the only way in which “divided loyalties” can be overcome and boundaries can be constantly redrawn. As a “mediator” between cultures that constantly defies their oppressive hierarchical structures, Anzaldúa faces the challenge posited by Gayatri Spivak. In her now classic essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” the postcolonial critic reminds us of the importance of distinguishing between aesthetic representation (darstellung, to speak about) and political representation (vertretung, to speak for). Her emphasis on the double meaning of the notion of “representation,” as exemplified by the two German terms, should be a warning to all those who claim to speak for those who cannot do so for themselves. For Spivak, the distinction between speaking about and speaking for will always stand for the difficult predicament of the post-colonial intellectual and/or writer that wants to “unlearn” the discursive mechanisms that keep the other silent, and attempts to rewrite and represent the history of the silenced other. If, as Gayatri Spivak says, the dominant language represents the subaltern, it can never speak or be known. Anzaldúa’s definition of the mestiza meets the challenge posed by Spivak as a discontinuous speaking that is able to speak from a variety of positions that challenge the homogenizing discourses imposed on the Mexican subaltern. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands proposes a radical redefinition of the margin or the border as they have been used by feminist and by postmodern theory. Marginality, the transgression of boundaries, and the border itself are metaphorical terms that writers and critics have deployed to evoke the transgression of patriarchal 50

institutional limits, the textual inscription of the other or of femininity, and the avoidance of closure and transparency. Virginia Woolf’s oft cited words “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country” (“Professions” 237), express a desire to go beyond both geographical barriers of a patriarchal country and society. Julia Kristeva’s concept of the “semiotic” and the “abject” in Powers of Horror (1982) and in Desire and Poetic Language (1992) refer to the marginal, the otherness that lies beneath, and grounds the symbolic order16 of language and discourse. Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig respectively redefine the terms “woman” and “lesbian” as signifiers that step beyond the boundaries, or rather, become the margin, the boundary of patriarchal language. “Lesbian is the only concept I know which is beyond the category of sex,” Wittig says (“The Category of Sex” 2). In Cixous’ words women’s marginal writing may “rack [patriarchal language] with radical convulsions” (“The Laugh of the Medusa” 142). These textual metaphors of marginality only have something to do with the borderlands or the margin of Anzaldúa in as far as they seek to break down established aesthetic forms, images, and metaphors within the space of the text. One of Anzaldúa’s main concerns is the fight against the fear felt when a culture makes one push the “unacceptable parts into the shadows,” a fear that, in psychoanalytical terms, is known as 16

In Lacan’s triad (real, imaginary, symbolic) it is the realm of language and, therefore, of difference. For Lacan the symbolic order is that set of cultural formations that determine our behavior, and that determine our unconscious and our subjectivity. The insertion in this “symbolic order” occurs in what he terms “the mirror stage,” the child’s fascination with its image in the mirror, an image that gives him/her the illusion of coherence and which coincides with his/her acquisition of language and with his/her sense of selfhood. Feminist theorists who draw on psychoanalysis like Luce Irigaray and Juliet Mitchell have pointed out that the image women see in the mirror is the reflection of masculine desire. Thus, women are usually instrumental for the preservation of the masculine symbolic order dominated by the “Law of the Father“ and its symbol, the phallus. Since they lack a signifier they can only submit to it or feel alienated in it.

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abjection. The feminist critic Judith Butler suggests that there are certain abject zones within the social order that threaten with dissolution; these are zones that the subject imagines as a threat to its own integrity and to which it responds “I would rather die than do or be that” (243). In Powers of Horror Kristeva defines the abject as the filthy, the horrid, the marginal. In other words, that which the subject thrusts aside in order to live, and which in writing or representation becomes a metaphor of otherness or alterity: “what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (2). The recognition that there is some suppressed other upon which writing and representation are founded, is no guarantee that we are interested in the marginalization of actual people. We may be interested in the textualization of the other (also known as the feminine or the semiotic in Kristeva’s terms), but that will prevent us from looking at the processes that turn people into abject beings, into silent others. Anzaldúa’s fears of dissolution have to do with the fact that all the elements that are being “pushed away” become metaphors for this generalized, essentialized otherness. Jacques Derrida has argued that glossing over différance, the constant metaphoric and metonymic operations of language (operations of substitution of one signifier for another in a system or structure that is already made possible by prior structures), will lead to “the metaphysics of presence,” to the assumption that the linguistic sign represents an essential truth and has an independent existence of its own (Culler 95-96). All the concepts that involve a notion of presence (ego, consciousness, subjectivity, God, meaning, soul, intuition, nature) describe what has been seen as a grounding force or principle (93). In this context, logocentrism turns the notion of the other and otherness into primary transcendental signifiers. Thus, in keeping with postcolonial critics’ arguments against the generalization of

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otherness,17 we may contend that the authoritarian use of this notion, together with the notion of the margin, as a textual metaphor, may not only prevent the discussion of the predicament of socially marginalized groups. It may also gloss over the differences within the other and, for that matter, the provisionality of the category of otherness, its occasional imbrication with one or more centers. Thus, Kristeva’s, Cixous’ and Wittig’s definition of the feminine or the lesbian as the marginal may lead us to conceive of it as a generalized, neutralized other that may be found in the limits of representation of a decontextualized, disengaged writing (Yúdice, Testimonio 220). In Borderlands Anzaldúa is not merely content with exploring the “filthy” and “horrid” in the mestiza’s psyche. She wants to “[uncover] the lie” of an absolute lustful Chicana, lesbian, female Other (20). Textual disruption and opposition in the name of that other would indeed leave her powerless, with no capacity to build an alternative. This would force her to live in constant opposition, which, as she says, “is not a way of life” (100). Since her experience is one of historical, social, and institutional marginalization and estrangement in the interstices of two cultures, history, meaning and figuration cannot possibly be effaced or collapsed; rather, they have to be constantly reconstructed and renewed.18 Gloria Anzaldúa’s speaking subject is not an absolute other in any of the communities she speaks about, and yet she is also always somehow other in that she does not fully feel at home in 17

See Spivak’s The Postcolonial Critic (40), Yarbro-Bejarano’s “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands”(9), Yudice’s “Marginality and the Ethics of Survival” (214-221), and Mohanty’s “Cartographies of Struggle” (34-35). 18 In “Postmodernism and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” Fredric Jameson defines postmodern manifestations of culture in these lines. The death of the subject, mimicry, parody, desire as nostalgia, and the absence of history and of critical intent are some of the characteristics that Jameson mentions about postmodernist art. As I will argue in chapter 1, Anzaldúa’s work and other works by Chicanos and Chicanas are a product of postmodernity but they do not necesssarily fit into the aesthetic movement of “postmodernism” although they may certainly share some of its characteristics.

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any of them. The following passage illustrates her ambiguous position: As a mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious malederived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (80-81)

The way for Anzaldúa to avoid fetishizing or aestheticizing otherness while yet speaking about and for it, is to turn her marginal position in relation to a variety of communities to her advantage. This allows her to otherness and marginality as positions from which she can speak. Because the speaker is never fully comfortable anywhere, she always speaks from the margin of a community or a discourse, but that margin is constituted by drawing on elements that may be central in other discourses. To be “marginal” in Anzaldúa’s terms means to speak from some center that is in turn peripheral to something else. Her both marginal and central position will constantly be shifting and the speaker will not fall into the trap of constructing either an absolute center or an absolute margin. It is only thus that she can disrupt binary oppositions and learn “to be an Indian in Mexican culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view [...] to juggle cultures” (79). This double position of centrality within marginality allows her to speak both for and about others while always calling attention to the fact that her perspective is partial, insecure, and that it is always open to new meanings that may change.

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She calls this capacity to shift her position “la Facultad;” the ability “to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface, […] an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak” (38). “La Facultad” is not an easy transition from “false knowledge” to “true knowledge” coming from the depths of the psyche. It has to do with the subject’s constant exposure to and involvement with different codes. Those who are not safe in any territory, those who are constantly pushed away and displaced, develop it the most. It is a survival tactic developed unconsciously by those who are caught in-between two worlds, anything that breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception, that causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance, anything that takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception (…) [that] deepens the way we see concrete objects and people [...]. (Borderlands 39).

To be marginal, in the context of Anzaldúa’s text, is not, I insist, to speak from pure otherness, from pure opposition. As the speaker says, “to stand on the opposite river bank” is not effective. A counterstance places one in the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed who, “like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence”(100). Although the speaker acknowledges that opposition is necessary, she also says that it is “not a way of life” (100). Her home, the borderlands, is metaphorically described as a dangerous “thin edge of barbwire” (13), a place where one may speak from partial knowledge, from ambiguity, from a “struggle of borders” (78). In the borderlands one may use discourses that one is not fully in control of, but that one needs; one may have to accept and yoke together forms of thought that are contradictory, but that can produce a different language. One has to fight for something positive to emerge out of the contradictory blend of cultural discourses that hums in one’s head:

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Because, I a mestiza continually walk out of one culture and into another, because I am in all cultures at the same time, alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro, me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio. Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan simultáneamente. (77)

The mestiza takes everything in: “nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned” (79). In order to become a politically committed hybrid subject, she also has to “take inventory. Despojando, desgranando, quitando paja” and to differentiate between “lo heredado, lo adquirido, lo impuesto”, to filter the lies: “[l]uego bota lo que no vale”(82). This is her way of getting rid of oppressive traditions, while at the same time including men, white people, homosexuals, and all the groups that make up U.S. society. As she says: “The struggle is inner: Chicano, indio, American Indian, mojado, mexicano, immigrant Latino, Anglo in power, working class Anglo, Black, Asian—our psyches resemble the border towns and are populated by the same people. The struggle has always been inner, and is played out in the outer terrains” (87). The mythological figures created in Anzaldúa’s text need to be interpreted in the light of this new consciousness that seeks to reinvent the myths that, as Roland Barthes tells us, are “a type of speech chosen by history” (110). In becoming form, Barthes argues, the mythical signifier, the semiological chain upon which is built, loses historicity; meaning is not lost, only impoverished, divested of the contingency that produced it. Barthes stresses the open character of myth, the instability of its meaning, its dependability on function: “[T]he fundamental character of the mythical concept is to be appropriated” (119). The redefinition and reinterpretation of myths is crucial for Anzaldúa because, as 56

she has it, “[N]othing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images of our heads” (87). For culturally and politically committed Chicana writers as Gloria Anzaldúa, mythmaking has the function of (re)telling and (re)fashioning history from a female perspective, as well as of celebrating a lost indigenous female racial heritage and pride. The best antidote against myth, Barthes says, is to use artificial myths as a weapon: “since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?” (135). In this vein, Anzaldúa constructs a counter-mythical language. As she puts it, she wants the freedom “to fashion my gods out of my entrails,” to shape a new culture “with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (Borderlands 22). In Borderlands, figures like the Shadow-Beast and Coatlicue are the primary metaphors or signifiers for a new meaning and a new—ethnic and gendered—politically committed subject that shifts her position depending on the struggle she is facing. The female subject’s redefinition of the goddesses Coatlicue and Cihuacoatl—both of which are two of the various dark aspects of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin—and her evocation of the “Shadow-Beast,” are figurative representations of a formerly repressed female strength that allows this Chicana to go against imposed paradigms and behaviors (16). The appropriation of these goddesses and of the usually fetishized indigenous female body, as well as the reference to other popular figures like Malinche and La Llorona is also present in Cisneros’ and Viramontes’ fiction, as well as in Moraga’s drama and essays. These references have been viewed as a return to the indigenous essentialism that prevailed during the Chicano movement and as a romantization of an unknown history (Cooper Alarcón 6, 141). There is no doubt that, as we will see in chapter 2, indigenism, which went hand in hand with the Chicano activism of the 60s, bypassed differences within the Mexican-American community. Yet, I believe that to reduce indigenist images and myths to romanticized views of history is to ignore their potential as critical paradigms in the social context in which they appear and 57

in which Anzaldúa and other writers inscribe them. In Anzaldúa’s case, myths and images are mainly used by the speaking subject as affirmative and resisting tools with the aim of proposing a new mestiza marginal consciousness rather than as proposals of a single, authentic ethnic culture and community.19 Anzaldúa does not represent reality as it really is; she creates a whole new signification out of a variety of revised, appropriated Mexican signifiers. As Rachel Blau Duplessis has put it, “making a critical mythopoesis goes against the grain of a major function of myth: the affirmation of dominant culture.” The critical mythic act may be used to say that a group is the privileged site of noncolonial consciousness, which reiterates and capitalizes on the affirmative function of myth and applies it to what Duplessis calls “the muted group” (107). On the other hand, as Duplessis says, to tell tales that are not central to mainstream culture involves the transformation of hegemonic society and its history (122). The autobiographical subject of Borderlands exerts a mediating role in so far as it tells about a history of female resistance not only by means of the revision of traditional Chicano mythology, but also by means of the appropriation of Mexican figures as a personal mythology. Our awareness of the existence of the border originates at the point in which two cultures clash as a result of geopolitical, socio-economic divisions in concrete geographical locations where individuals are exposed, perhaps for the first time, to different codes, different logics, and different people. Jacques Derrida defines the experience of the constant crossing material and conceptual borders as one of aporia. Each time we confront border we have to deal with the fact that it is both a dividing line between things (territories, communities, objects, people, languages) and an oppositional logic that separates domains of discourse and concepts (Aporias 17-18). As Derrida puts it, 19

The first part of this study (2.2, 2.3, 2.4) deals with Chicano/a appropriation of indigenous myths and legends.

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aporia “is not necessarily a failure or a simple paralysis, the sterile negativity of the impasse. It is neither stopping at it nor overcoming it” (32). Rather, it has to do with the arrival of the unexpected: “One does not expect the event of whatever, or whoever comes, arrives, and crosses the threshold—the immigrant, the emigrant, the guest or the stranger” (33). Yet, he continues, it is not only that this unexpected person crosses a border, it is also that “[s]uch an arrivant affects the experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, a call, a nomination or a promise” (34). The arrivant, who defines the experience of the aporia, is someone who is not a guest, someone who has not been invited, and who surprises the host—who is not yet a host or an inviting power—enough to call into question, to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage, names and language, nations, families and genealogies [...]. (34)

The new arrival or arrivant, Derrida says, does not have any identity yet, but the place she arrives at is changed as soon as she gets there: “one does not yet know or one no longer knows which is the country, the place the nation, the family, the language, and the home in general that welcomes the absolute arrivant” (34). For Derrida, the arrivant stands for the experience of being right on the border. This border cannot be reduced to anything and, simultaneously, can make possible a new understanding of the things that are erased if one stands perpetually on it: cultural, social, or national belonging, as well as subjective, conscious determination (35). If we read Derrida in the light of Anzaldúa, the borderlands becomes a perplexing battleground where one’s potential enemy may change overnight. The border, as Alicia Gaspar de Alba says, cannot be divided into sides. Yet, the borderlands also contains possibilities for regeneration; it can be a tool for imagining what binary logic makes impossible if one stands on either side of the border. A political reading of 59

Derrida’s text turns the borderlands into the disruption of the categories one is used to and conforms to. However, this account of the border falls short of being culturally and politically emancipatory. If we agree with Terry Eagleton that the goal of the critic and theorist must be “the strategic goal of human emancipation, the production of ‘better people’ through the socialist transformation of society” (Literary 211), we should look for such emancipating potential in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands and other texts by Chicanas. In her most visionary passages, Anzaldúa’s speaking subject imagines that “all the lost pieces of [herself] come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward [a] center. Completa”. (51) This desired wholeness bespeaks the wish to “take matters into our own hands” (51) and create a new political social space, “a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet” (81). Just as Anzaldúa makes public and political her personal concerns through her writing, so does she make the political situation of Chicanos/as personal. The imaginary region of the borderlands is free of oppositions, dualities and hierarchies, and patriarchy because it has been envisioned by a critical subject that rejects those categories and wants to raise consciousness about the present so as to effect liberation in a distant future. As in the resisting autobiographies that Caren Kaplan calls “out-law genres,” Anzaldúa’s Borderlands makes a constant reference to the sources of her discourse (her ambiguous position as a woman born and raised in the Texas border, a lesbian, a Chicana with divided loyalties towards Mexican culture, an American citizen). Consequently, she resists condensing the fragmented self and community she describes in a coherent “I” or a coherent narrative. Her purpose is, above all, to let us know how her predicament and that of other Mexican-Americans has been affected by the manipulation of history, to reinvent that history, and to hint at the possibility of a new critical consciousness, which should eventually materialize in a new social space.

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As has been said already, the condition of occupying a marginal space—be it geographical, linguistic, sexual, cultural or social—is not something exclusive to anyone. It is rather a condition that we all share to a greater or lesser degree, a condition that changes across cultures and individuals. To be on the border, as Anzaldúa and Derrida tell us, means to be other. It also means that one possesses what Anzaldúa terms “la facultad,” that one is, in Terry Eagleton’s words, a “natural hermeneuticist, […] a spontaneous semiotician, forced for sheer survival to decipher the signs systems of the enemy and adept at deploying their own opaque idioms against them” (“Uses” 45). Hence, from the margin one can launch a variety of oppositional discourses. My analysis of Chicana writings intends to explore these two complementary sides of the Mexican-American nepantla space or borderlands: the borderlands as battleground, and the borderlands as crossroads; the borderlands as a state of otherness and struggle and as a site of critical distance from dominant ideologies fostering clear-cut categories of nationality, status, gender, and sexuality. The first part of this study (chapters 1 and 2) introduces the reader to the postmodern critical and theoretical debates about space and to the social and cultural environment where these writings have originated. It introduces the reader to new approaches to social, cultural, literary, and national space provided by geography, feminism and Chicano/a studies. As the rest of this study shows, this new spatial mentality of the borderlands is also foregrounded by the oppositional writings of Mexican-American women. The titles of the second and third parts of the book correspond to the above-mentioned dual view of the borderlands. Part II, the central and longest part of the book, “Battlegrounds,” tackles Chicanas’ exploration of liminal spaces as spaces of exclusion and silence. Chapter three focuses on the description of the domestic sphere as alienating space. Chapter four engages in the study of Chicana writers’ thematization of the difficulty of crossing spatial and conceptual borders. 61

Part III, “Crossroads,” explores Chicanas’ emphasis on the creative possibilities of being on the border by imagining new social spaces beyond material and conceptual frontiers of race, sexuality, gender, class, nationality, and generation. As has been said, my reading of these works concurs with Anzaldúa’s dual representation of the borderlands as a social and imaginary place of contradiction and otherness, and as a place of political resistance and creativity. Postmodern spatial concepts such as “homeplace,” “heterotopia,” and “modest utopia” have been used to describe these images in tune with the particular social and literary sensibility of each writer. I believe that progression from the idea of “battlegrounds” to “crossroads” is the most convenient way to structure my arguments so as to establish a dialogue between the writers in terms of their particular depiction of these two aspects of borderland experiences. This division has allowed me to address first of all some of the socio-material issues that underlie these writers’ depiction of “living” or social space. In “Battlegrounds,” there prevails an ideological, cultural, and ethnographic focus. In “Crossroads” I stress the ways in which these writers have created textual, narrative, and/or metaphoric spaces that disclose a consciousness committed to solidarity and cultural survival.

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Part I Radical Postmodern Practices

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A paradox of the so-called postmodern era is the coexistence of the demythification of subjectivity, identity, and authority, and the identity politics of women and other disadvantaged groups that claim those categories for themselves. Also paradoxical is the concomitance of economic and cultural globalization and of the rise of localisms, nationalisms, and fundamentalisms. It is beyond my aim to address the complexity of the condition we know as postmodernity and the wide range of attitudes that have derived from this cultural, and economic ethos.1 In this first part of the study I want to discuss some postmodern critical manifestations that have emerged as clear reactions to modernity and place stress upon space. These theories, cultural and social practices disclose an awareness that the distribution of objects, bodies, and people is the result of power relations. Hence, postmodern spatial configurations and new ways of looking at space challenge economic and social practices that result in the unequal distribution of wealth, natural resources, and land. They also draw attention to the fabrication of hermetic, impenetrable boundaries between social spheres, countries, communities, and disciplines. The brief chapters that follow provide a succinct description of some of the interrelated radical theories that defend a more global, though not globalizing, approach to the claims of local territories, identities, and struggles as reactions to patriarchal values and to the economic and cultural globalization of the 1

For extensive discussions on this issue see Jean Baudrillard’s Cultura y simulacro (1987), David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity (1989), Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1993), and Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984).

planet. In the first chapter I will deal with several studies whose common denominator is the concern with identity politics and social activism from a post-Marxist approach. The common denominators of all these works and critical tendencies are their insights into postmodernity, which is viewed not only as a reaction towards modernity, but also as a responsible critique of modernity. The works by Chicanas analyzed in Part II and Part III of this study partake of this critique within the particular postmodern power structures that affect Mexican Americans in the U.S. A more specific analysis of the cultural and political activism of Mexican Americans, Chapter 2 examines the racial, sexual, gender, and class conjunctures that caused the emergence of the critical discourse of Chicanismo and the imaginary national space of Aztlán in the late 1960s, and their impact of this discourse and imaginary space upon the cultural, literary, and academic arenas. Finally, it discusses the reformulation of Chicano cultural and political activism since the development of a feminist counter-discourse of malinchismo and its proposal of alternative images, myths and spaces that incorporate indigenismo, tradition, and social justice to the struggle for women’s independence.

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1 New Spaces, Identities, and Struggles

1.1. Identity and Ethnicity Revisited The past twentieth century gradually brought about the awareness of the instability of identity not only in the philosophical sense that the “Self” is only a signifier searching for a transcendental signified, but also in a geographical, ideological, and political sense. Post-structuralist thinking has emphasized that meaning cannot be fixed and is constituted both by absence and presence. Yet, there is also a coterminous fragmentation in the social and cultural world in relation to relatively stable categories of race, class, gender, and national identity. The cultures and discourses of the so-called “minorities” have come to the forefront through various social and artistic practices that ensue from the demystification of Western culture and thought. The emergence of strong nationalisms and the upsurge of oppositional identities are direct consequences of the breakdown of Western colonial empires and formerly identifiable communities. New forms of imperialism in turn have caused increasing migration and the creation of a global economy and the spread of mass culture. In this cultural and geopolitical context context, intellectuals such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have questioned the validity of the representation of places, nations, and identities as natural and absolute. They expose the construction and invention of nations and communities based on the negation and suppression of others to be found within the same “national” boundaries. In his two well-known studies about the intercultural relationship between the West and its others (Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism), Said argues that in order for Western nations to create a concept of authentic identity and tradition, they have had to create an ideal past purged of unwanted “foreign” elements. In a more theoretical vein, Homi Bhabha alludes to the

Jacques Derrida’s notion of the constant deferral or dissemination of the signified to propose a look at the nation as a process (as “dissemiNation”), as a space that is always different from itself. The “difference within” and the interdependence of apparently different struggles and identities are the common traces of political approaches to postmodernity. Literary and cultural theorists such as Patricia Waugh (1989), Linda Hutcheon (1989), Jane Flax (1990), Judith Butler (1992), and Stuart Hall (1995, 1996) (to mention only a few) have, in Waugh’s words, “revisited the postmodern.” Their work establishes a convergence between women’s and ethnic movements, and postmodernity in so far as all of them may produce an aesthetics that draws attention to language, knowledge, and culture as representational, internally different, and contingent. In the current theorization of postmodern identity the Foucaultian concept of “subject position” is crucial to understand the contingency of personal and collective attitudes. The subject may fill a variety of subject positions and a subject position may be filled by a variety of subjects. The subject is, in other words, an effect of discourse. Useful as the concept of “subject position” may be, Foucault’s account of the discursive construction of the subject has been criticized for its failure to explain why certain subjects assume certain positions rather than others (Hall, “Introduction” 10). What remains to be elucidated is, in Stuart Hall’s words, “what the mechanisms are by which individuals as subjects identify (or do not identify) with the ‘positions’ to which they are summoned; as well as how they fashion, stylize, produce and ‘perform’ these positions, and why they never do so completely” (“Introduction” 14). Judith Butler’s innovative notion of “performativity,” as we will see subsequently, suggests precisely that the discursive norm and its production or performance are never identical with each other, that something gets lost in the complex transition from language to the subject, the body, and identity. According to this feminist theorist, there is a difference between the poststructuralist argument that assumes the subject never existed and the postmodern argument that the subject no longer has the 68

integrity it was formerly assumed to have (“Contingent Foundations” 14-15). It is in this latter respect that feminism and postmodernism come together. They both view the idea of the subject as problematic, which, as Butler says, is not the same as doing away with the subject for “deconstruction implies only that we suspend all commitments to that to which the term ‘the subject’ refers, and that we consider the linguistic function it serves in the consolidation and concealment of authority” (“Contingent Foundations” 15). This very suspension of judgment is proposed by Jacques Derrida in his essay on Western ethnocentrism “Structure, Sign, and Play” (1972) and grounds Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism.” The history of the West is, according to Derrida, a history of “substitutions of center for center,” a history of metaphors and metonymies by which the center receives different forms and names, and by which an “invariable presence” is designated: essence, existence, substance, subject, consciousness, God, and man are different forms of this very same presence ("Structure" 279-80). Derrida comments on the rupture that took place when this structure began to be thought, that is, when we started exploring the laws and processes underlying the desire for a center. The works of Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger questioned the concepts of Being, essence, and self, thus initiating the critique of transcendental signifieds and proclaiming the possibility of the infinite play of signification ("Structure" 280). Derrida is well aware that this may involve the absolute rejection of the much-needed sign: “[W]e cannot do without the concept of the sign, for we cannot give up this metaphysical complicity without also giving up the critique we are directing against this complicity, or without the risk of erasing difference in the self-identity of a signified reducing its signifier into itself” ("Structure" 281). The condition for ethnology— ethnocentrism—should purposefully be criticized just as the history of metaphysics is being destroyed (282). Yet, it is not a coincidence, Derrida observes, that ethnology consolidates its scientific discourse precisely at the moment when European 69

culture has been “dislocated.” Indeed, the premises of ethnocentrism have to be thoroughly studied in order to denounce them, for the critical discourse of ethnocentrism “borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself” ("Structure" 282). Derrida’s reflections on the simultaneous need to use and criticize what is only apparent— i.e., the stability of our structures of thought and knowledge— allow us to contest “buzz-words" like “identity” and “ethnicity” that continue to be significant despite the postmodern emphasis on the indeterminacy of the self and meaning. These concepts are now referred to as having a “lack,” as being subject to constant modification, critique, and redefinition as they are always part of a play of signification at a particular historical moment. Thus, Spivak’s “strategic essentialism” designates the commitment of critical readers to “noting how we ourselves and others are what you call essentialist, without claiming a counter-essence disguised under the alibi of strategy” (Rooney 155). Spivak calls for a careful vigilance that deconstruction has taught her. Deconstruction does not involve doing away with essences— which she considers necessary—but critiquing them: “[T]he most serious critique in deconstruction, is the critique of something that is extremely useful, something without which we cannot do anything […]” (Rooney 157). One should always, as she says, deconstruct “identity by identities” (157). Consequently, the postmodern understanding of ethnicity and identity entails considering them always in relation to difference (Hall 1995, 1996). They become unstable categories after the realization that they are cultural constructs, the result of representation. And, still, it is only through constructs and representations that one may attempt to understand a given sociocultural reality. It is impossible for us to talk about ourselves and our past if we do not try to define the culture and traditions that are specific to our place of origin, but it is also impossible for us to know ourselves or others, however incompletely, if we do not think of that culture and tradition as an ever-changing narrative where many factors come into play (Hall, “Ethnicity” 18-19). In 70

order for ethnicity to be seen as a dynamic process, we have to conclude, following Michael Fischer, that “ethnicity cannot be reduced to identical sociological functions, that ethnicity is a process of inter-reference between two or more cultural traditions” (201). The notions of liminality, transculturation, hybridization, intercultural relations, pervasive in contemporary critical and theoretical academic discourses, refer to this more or less violent inter-reference between cultures.1 It should be made clear that these terms do not refer to postmodern phenomena per se, for contact amongst cultures has taken place at every historical moment. A postmodern critical perspective, however, has made these contacts more conspicuous and worthier of enquiry. The West has recognized the presence of its peripheries in the very center of its culture. It also has had to acknowledge that its former boundaries, sense of autonomy, and superiority were being maintained at the expense of other colonized and occupied regions where hybridization and cross-cultural encounters had been a reality for a long time. Contemporary Chicano/a and feminist literature and culture may not always fall within the aesthetic movement known as postmodernism. Yet, they are certainly part of postmodernity in as far as they purposely bring to the fore the clash of and connection between cultures and the recovery of subjects so far absent from history. They echo the crisis of the Western logos and the crisis of the hegemonic, unitary, autonomous subject of 1

In the introduction to Literature and Liminality (1986) Gustavo Pérez Firmat defines the concept of “liminality,” first introduced by the anthropologist Victor Turner, as a process of transformation that does not lead to tolerance and resolution, but rather to permanent contradiction, to an indefinite expansion of the transitional and marginal state. The term “transculturation” was coined in the 1940s by the Cuban critic Fernando Ortiz to talk about the relationship between different cultures in Cuba. For Ortiz “transculturación” was the best term to define a culture in a permanent state of transition. The term is used and explained by Gustavo Pérez Firmat in his study The Cuban Condition: Translation and Identity in Modern Cuba (1989: 2125).

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knowledge that characterize postmodernity. Nonetheless, subjectivity and identity have not ceased to be important for the Chicana feminist writers I deal with in this study. These writers appeal to the subject of knowledge, to identity and ethnicity, but they have refashioned and reinvented them in ways that allow for political affirmation but that do not necessarily involve seeing them as univocal, transcendental, and unitary. 1.2. The Postmodern Look at Space Geographers have not been oblivious to the postmodern contestation and reinvention of identities and spatial configurations. At present, cultural geography views culture as a process or dynamics of symbols, beliefs, practices, and languages that give rise to “geographies” (spaces, places, landscapes, territories, and environments). These geographies structure and reconfigure social life according to forms of thought and action that are “cultural” or “social.” But geographies are not viewed as inert reflections of a culture and a society; they are constantly transformed under the influx of habits that are also conditioned by space. Identities shape space, but space also shapes identities. While “time” and “space” seem compressed and irrelevant for those who live immersed in the technological advances a globalized world, in other cases it is necessary to consider how a “sense of place” is tied to local and global processes and power relations that condition identities and their enactment. Indeed, when one is concerned with analyzing the relationship of subjectivity to space, one has to refer to the specifics of geography. This means considering that the links between space and identity formation are varied, complex, and occurring at multiple levels and scales. In Space, Place and Gender (1994) the British geographer Doreen Massey has warned us against romanticizing boundaries and viewing places, as indigenous sources of an “authentic” cultural identity that severs all ties with the “global” culture. 72

While claims to conservation of heritage are legitimate, we should not disregard the fact that the identity and the history of a place are always connected to other histories, other places and other identities. The paradox is, according to Massey, that “[t]he nature of the impact of the current phase of globalization has so far perhaps—and ironically—been analyzed from a very unglobal perspective” (166). The era of globalization and multiculturalism has witnessed the emergence of arguments, movements, and tendencies that establish a one-to-one relationship between place and identity and therefore rely on the notions of “time” as dynamic, as Becoming, and of “space” as static, as Being. The “recourse to a past, to a seamless coherence of character, of an apparently comforting bounded enclosure” is evident in certain kinds of cultural nationalisms, in the advertising of places as “authentic” and even in arguments against those who arrive from outside the confines of a nation (168). As the cultural geographer James Duncan has shown, the ethnographic discourses of the other follow similar associations. Duncan describes these narratives as drawing on the tropes of mimesis (faithful representation of the nature of a place) and of identification with the site of the other with the past. The appropriation of a “dying” culture, the collection of “cultural artifacts” and the discourses of the “noble savage” and the “Third World Other” as “ignorant, traditional, or less rational” are part of an exoticist discourse of the other: “Other cultures are often portrayed as occupying remote places that are rare or unique and therefore desirable, places where one can escape the social and psychological pressures of modernity and retreat into a ‘simpler,’ more ‘natural’ place and time” (Duncan, "Sites" 46). This ethnographic representation of otherness goes hand in hand with a dehistoricization of people and places from which multicultural discourses are not exempt. A further inflection on the discourse of the other in relation to time and space, is provided by Massey’s feminist observations upon the metaphorical connection between “Woman” and the 73

local. This association is often the result of power relations that have led to a disregard of women’s material reality. Taking to task the metaphorical equivalence of women with local, perennial, domestic, national identities, Massey sustains that this association is perhaps more prevalent in diasporic or threatened communities, both postcolonial and postmodern, where cultural nationalism promotes the nostalgic representation of distant places and homes. She insists on the fact that these representations prevent women’s personal and domestic concerns from being related to wider societal issues. Her emphasis on the relationship between local and global, private and public spaces hints at many of the issues Chicanas address in their literature as a reaction to the use of Woman as metaphor in Chicano nationalist discourse. Massey invites us to look at localities as places of interaction, for she believes that to study local issues does not necessarily lead to fetishism or divisiveness. Dismantling the opposition between notions of place as “bounded” and “static,” flat and immobile, and notions of time and history as a dynamic and changing process, she considers space and time to be mutually dependent. She refers to space as a “dynamic simultaneity,” as localities that relate, intersect, and align with one another. This understanding of space has consequences for the perception of the organization of society. Space is not merely the result or the setting of social relations, but also an integral part of their constitution. This in turn can change our received notion of local spaces, that is, of places. Despite the fact that localities such as the home have been imagined as secure and closed for fears of losing identity, they have always been open, “meeting places,” for even their “original” inhabitants always came from somewhere else (Massey, "Space" 171). Massey does not dismiss the importance of memory and history for the reconstruction of a place; she however stresses the need to demystify the existence of an essential past all its inhabitants share. Alluding to the African American critic bell hooks, Massey defends the use of historical memory as a positive struggle “against forgetting” that is to be 74

clearly distinguished from mere nostalgia. Memory is to be politicized if we are to understand the varied perspectives and circumstances that have shaped the places we inhabit; it illuminates and transforms the present through the retrieval of elements of the past that make us aware of the complexities of today’s social relations. The same critique of the space/time dichotomy is explicit in Edward Soja’s Postmodern Geographies (1993), where he argues for a critique of historicism as “a necessary step forward in [the] spatialization of critical thought and action” (6). The apparently innocent distribution of objects and people in space obeys relations of power and discipline that make human lives and geographies “filled with politics and ideology” (Postmodern 6). Soja argues for a contextualization of social being in the multiple layers that affect the space of the human body and the spaces of communal settlements in the postmodern era (Postmodern 8). Geographic, literary, and cultural studies have accentuated the critique of mimetic theories of representation, realism, objectivity, and positivism. The critiques of the figurative as enactment of material relations in the humanities, and the inquiry into material relations as byproducts of ideological, symbolic representations in geography, have enticed productive disciplinary cross-fertilizations. In the field of humanities, philosophers and literary critics such as Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson have shown an increasing concern with space and place. In “Cognitive Mapping” Jameson calls for a methodology for reading literary discourse that studies the power relations that condition different perceptions of space. In Discipline and Punish (1976) and in his essay “Of Other Spaces” (1984) Michel Foucault has also shown his curiosity about technologies of power and their effect upon the distribution and organization of objects and people in space. The concept of “heterotopia”, which he introduces rather ambiguously in his essay “Of Other Spaces”, which I will subsequently apply to the works of Cherríe Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, and Pat Mora, refers to the understanding of space as open, heterogeneous, and 75

diverse. Foucault’s postmodern definition of space contains the possibility of continuous conflict as well as the possibility of the meeting of the present and the past for the creation of collective memory. As we will see in the section that follows, spatial metaphors are also pervasive in contemporary feminist thought. Just as literary and cultural theorists have become more aware of the social and geographical factors at work in the production of cultural artifacts, so have geographic studies recast spatial terminology in terms of images that emphasize the constructedness of space through systems of meaning that are social and political. Denis Cosgrove and Mona Domosh observe that the presence of more cultural and artistic metaphors in geography reveals a shift away from empirical observation towards a more representational awareness ("Author and Authority" 30-31). Their use of the theatrical metaphor to think about landscape, for example, allows for an analysis of various spatial structures and agents and their mutual interaction. An example of the interdisciplinary focus of cultural geography is Edward Soja’s geographical study, Thirdspace (1996), which owes much to contemporary critics like Foucault, Said, Bhabha and to feminist writers and thinkers like Gloria Anzaldúa and bell hooks. The main idea of his study is however inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s search for a middle course between mental space (the space envisioned by philosophy or ensuing from artistic thought and creation) and material space (the actual space we inhabit including the home, the city, the workplace, etc.). The first part of Soja’s Thirdspace is extensively based on the biographical and theoretical writings of Henri Lefebvre. Soja's analysis of Lefebvre’s works reveals that lives are not only temporal and social, but that they are spatial as well. According to Soja, the French “metaphilosopher,” as he calls him, had a selfconscious peripheral consciousness that was shaped through the identification with those living outside the center of Paris. He built such an identification thanks to his knowledge of the power dynamics of such a center (Soja, Postmodern 29-30).

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Lefebvre’s point of departure in his Marxist analysis of space, The Production of Space (1974) is the critique of the traditional gap between mental and physical space modern philosophy has created (Lefebre, Production 5). According to Lefebvre, mental space is only apparently “extra-ideological” and discretely separated from physical space (6). He proposes a “unitary theory”: “to discover or construct a theoretical unity between ‘fields’ which are apprehended separately” (Production 11): the mental, logical, and formal abstractions of space, and the lived, social spatial creations. There is, according to Lefebvre, a schism between “ideal” space and “real” space, the space of science and abstraction and the space of social practice and human life (Production 14). The study of the production of space, he argues, should bring together the genesis of its different modalities, the role of different spatial codes in the same context, their dialectical character as part of a relationship between subjects and their surroundings (Production 16-18). In a Foucaultian manner, Lefebvre establishes connections between the pervasiveness of power in spaces and within each individual. One of Lefebvre’s crucial points for the subject matter of this study is, to be sure, that space is the result of social power relations that pervade all aspects of human existence and organize behaviors and practices. Social space results from the constant interpenetration or superimposition of geographical sites. Even if natural sites seem independent from urban sites, they in fact collide with each other and are only relatively independent of each other without disappearing or being absorbed by each other. Thus, places are not fixed points, but dynamic entities that relate to other entities and are sometimes in conflict with them (Production 88). Lefebvre proposes to do away with those ideologies that promote the division of space into discrete, unconnected realms: the science of space produced by philosophy, ecology, geopolitics, and cognitive theory focusing on the description of pieces of space and things in space (Production 90). To see space as fixed, neutral, transparent, and innocent is, according to Lefebvre, to maintain the illusion that 77

there are no power relations determining the place objects and people occupy (Production 94). Ideologies are part of space and become fulfilled in it. Also very important for the interplay between social and mental space this study explores, is Lefebvre’s distinction of “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” spaces, three modalities of space that stand in a constant dialectical relationship to each other. The space we perceive and we inhabit, its representations through signs and codes that establish relations between people and things, and the way we “live,” understand, imagine, and appropriate space, are all interrelated. Social relations become real only when they are represented in space, not merely in time, for space is part of lived experience: everything that occurs in our lives has to do with mental and social space. Emotions shape space and space shapes emotions. The body, when considered in spatial terms, is both subject and object, and cannot be separated in its mental and social aspects. The separation of the mental or the subjective and the social or the objective is, for Lefebvre, a denial of the body (Production 204). As we have seen in Anzaldúa and shall see in the works of other Chicana writers as Sandra Cisneros and Cherríe Moraga the body traverses institutional, domestic, and imaginary space. Lefebvre’s dialectical theory of social space and the space of subjectivity takes us directly to one of the main concerns of contemporary theories of subjectivity: how individual experience in society is both ideologically conditioned and can also resist such conditioning through the expression of individual desires. If, as Lefebvre suggests, we participate in the creation of space both individually and collectively, then space also changes as we change. Lefebvre leaves room for individual desire and resists the Foucaultian tendency to assume that institutional power conditions all our actions. Thus, he opens up the possibility for human beings to be the creators of mental counter-spaces that resist present spatial divisions and respond to social realities. Lefebvre’s concern with the way individuals live in social space and are affected by it ties in directly with feminist theories 78

of subjectivity. Considering important factors as ethnicity, cultural origin, and social status, these theories are, in Teresa de Lauretis’ words, “a political instance, not merely a sexual politics, but a politics of experience, of everyday life, which later then in turn enter the public sphere of expression and creative practice” (“Feminist Studies” 10). “Identity ” and “experience” are not goals in themselves, but processes allowing us to know how the personal is political, and how the female or male subject “is specifically and materially en-gendered in its social conditions and possibilities of existence” [my emphasis] (“Feminist Studies” 9). 1.3. Women, Place, and Space in Literature and Feminist Theory Given the subject matter of this book, it is pertinent to expound upon the contribution of feminist studies and literature by women to the construction of new disciplinary approaches, new theoretical spaces from which one can address issues related to the “en-gendering” of social and artistic space. I am referring to issues such as the gender division of labor, women’s absence from the public sphere, the devaluation of the literature and art produced by women, and the absence of discussions on women’s physical and material reality from the public, institutional, and political domains. The most fundamental of feminist axioms “the personal is political” sustains that the personal, private, and/or bodily sphere has to do with legal, institutional decisions, structures that configure what we know as the “political” or “public” sphere. Issues that affect women, and that have for a long time been considered to be naturally “private” matters unworthy of public discussion, are now seen as the result of socially promoted sexual divisions of labor. As the political theorist and historian Carole Pateman observes in The Disorder of Women (1989), these divisions are at the heart of civil society and the concept of citizenship, and they have been justified at 79

different times with biological or economic arguments that are still often used. Elaine Showalter has also documented and argued that women have often been represented as a threat to the order of society and the boundaries that ensure its stability. Their social and cultural marginality places them on the fringes of the symbolic order and turns them into the dwellers of a wild, chaotic zone outside culture (Sexual Anarchy 8). Paradoxically, however, women have also been represented as the custodians of a set of moral and cultural values whose foundation was the home or the socially “untainted” “private sphere.” In the United States the division of human activity into private and public domains was paramount for the development of modern market society. The division, which made itself felt around the 1850s, becomes prevalent in the second half of the nineteenth-century and well into the twentieth. From the private spaces assigned to them, women would represent the index of culture, morality, and the values of the community evolving around the concepts of order, civility, discipline, and unity. As Nina Baym says in her analysis of novels by and about women in America, these values were “in competition” with those of the savage American market they sought to redeem, but they also served to maintain the division between the public and the private (25). The dominant middle-class ideology of the time identified women with a domestic ideal whereby the home was a sanctuary of Christian morality, solace, and security against the social evils of exploitation and money often leading men to brutality, alcoholism, and family abandonment. These writers envisioned that the values that ruled the domestic realm (women's management of money around love) could reform American society, so that, as Baym puts it, home and the world were "different but not separate" (Woman's Fiction 49). This was so much so that, as women began to move outside the home towards the public arena at the end of the nineteenth-century, architecture, fiction, domestic treatises and magazines, emphasized the

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importance of traditional patterns that would be reduplicated in spatial divisions.2 While nineteenth-century American and British publications, often written by and for women, represented the domestic arena as one of interiority, feeling, inwardness, and moral superiority to the savage values of the market place (Coward 38-39, Baym 25), twentieth-century women’s literary and non-literary works have illustrated the misfortunes that women have suffered under the compartmentalization of society into these arenas. American women writing early, as Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, or later writers such as Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Tillie Olsen, claimed, either anticipating or following Virginia Woolf, a space of [their] own.3 This space was both physical and mental, but, as was the case in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall Paper” or Chopin’s “The Awakening,” it was often unattainable. As Judith Fryer observes, at the end of the century, there were few books that were “explicitly female in their vision,” that is, books where writers allowed themselves to step out of patriarchal culture into the space of the self. In the twentieth century, middleclass women progressively claimed and attained a space of their own. Yet, the feminine space of imagination and creativity continued to be a space of negativity and absence in novels such as Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1964), in which the abstract space of the imagination is impaired by material constraints. With regard to recent theories on gender relations, the work of feminist literary theorists and critics intersects with that of cultural geographers in that they are both concerned with the representations of women and with the power of these representations on subjectivity and gender divisions. In particular, cultural geographers have linked the perception of space to one’s 2

For discussions on the importance of the separation of the private and public realms in the nineteenth century U.S., Nina Baym’s Women’s Fiction (1978), Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her (1978), Gillian Brown’s Domestic Individualism (1990), and Mary Ryan’s Women in Public (1990). 3 See Judith Fryer’s study on the representation of feminine space in the works of Willa Cather and Edith Wharton entitled Felicitous Space (1986).

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gender identity, while also acknowledging that this identity is shaped by spatial configurations (Pratt and Hanson, “Geography” 8). Feminist geographers tackle the pervasive presence of patriarchal gender ideologies in the configuration of landscapes and places, as well in the shaping and reproduction of gender roles. They also deal with women’s resistance to patriarchal domination of space as expressed in the creation of new relations in urban spaces that counter the effect of technology and the destruction of the environment. As the work of Janice Monk and Vera Norwood shows, artistic imaginative geographies created by women are often crucial for this resistance and are deeply inflected with gendered meanings of empowerment. The work of feminist geographers has recently had a hold on literary and cultural studies. In her essay "Gender and Colonial Space" (1996), literary scholar Sara Mills has read the theoretical work on gender and space developed by geographers through and against post-colonial, literary, and cultural theory. Mills contests polarized views of gender and space that have prevailed in some literary studies, so as to offer an analysis that reveals the complexity of women’s relations to space in colonial settings. While dominant discourses on the relationship of women to space emphasize confinement, passivity, and protection (inscribed in the dualities man/woman, private/public), these representations and dualities themselves may be both reproduced and challenged in the texts of women and men. Later feminist contributions have also stressed the need to conflate materialist and figurative analyses of gender and spatiality. The volumes Making Worlds: Metaphor and Materiality in the Production of Feminist Texts (1997) and Cities of Difference (1998) go a long way from the perspective of gender towards probing into material and imaginary arrangements and representations of space, and into their cultural and social determinants and consequences. In dealing with metaphor and materiality, the essays that comprise Making Worlds (1997) engage in a dialectical, interdisciplinary, collaborative approach

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to figurative and materialist understandings and configurations of “space” and “place.” Geraldine Pratt’s essay on the spatial vocabulary used across a variety of disciplines encompassed by Gender Studies and Caren Kaplan’s article on the underlying content of spatial metaphors lay stress on the need to historicize and contextualize the metaphors used to talk about the relationship between gender and space. Following this historical, materialist inflection, the gendered spatial metaphor of the borderlands, as well as many other spatial metaphors used in this study such as the border, the homeplace, the heterotopia, and the dystopia will be tinged with very different Mexican American economic, social, sexual, and racial meanings. The contextualized use of these metaphors will attempt to reflect complex realities that are often at variance with dominant representations of spatial relations. Indeed, places have very different connotations depending on many culturally and socially specific environments, values and social differences. The writers whose works I deal with in this book not only portray space as a metaphor for the intellectual independence and development of the isolated female individual. They are concerned with women’s space of creativity and sexuality, but also with material issues that affect immigrant and working-class women. Hence, rooms, houses, countries, or spaces of one’s own are not only evoked to recover a long denied individual subjectivity, but also to affirm a communal culture and history, and to oppose and/or denounce dominating groups. These women will write about the constraints of both the domestic sphere and the public spheres, about the dream of impossible independent selves, about a variety of paralyzing myths of “Woman” caused by the colonial origins of their society. They will also imagine spaces from which to discover positive myths and values that may challenge patriarchal, racial, and class oppression. They all deal with issues that concern men and women; they certainly write as women, but as women who would sometimes like to “[have] forgotten this fact” (Waugh 10).

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There is in their writings what Jean Franco has called a “reinhabiting of the private” ("Going Public" 65). Private, domestic spaces are shown to be and to have been the domain of women, but they are now revisited to make politics, to transmit a different knowledge about them, a knowledge that may be either critical or celebratory. Like previous writers such as Woolf, Olsen, and Plath, Chicana writers have dwelt on the fact that women do not necessarily succeed in breaking out of the “escapeproof cage” (Plath, The Bell Jar 120). They draw attention to the fact that both the “public” and the “private” sphere may be cages. In making us aware of this, they change the meaning of the confining spaces to deny racial, sexual, gender, and class differences. Josefina Ludmer writes about the critical reappropriation of domestic space in women's writings as follows: Aceptar, pues, la esfera privada como campo “propio” de la palabra de la mujer, acatar la división dominante pero a la vez, al constituir esa esfera en zona de la ciencia y la literatura, negar desde allí la división sexual. […] desde el lugar asignado y aceptado, se cambia no sólo el sentido de ese lugar sino el sentido mismo de lo que se instaura en él. Como si una madre o una ama de casa dijera: acepto mi lugar pero hago política o ciencia en tanto madre o ama de casa. Siempre es posible tomar un espacio desde donde se puede practicar lo vedado en otros; siempre es posible anexar otros campos e instaurar otras territorialidades. (53)

Ludmer contemplates the possibility of reconceptualizing knowledge from and about female spaces, which involves bringing into being new territories of knowledge, or at least, refashioning those which already exist. Ruth Salvaggio has inquired into the possible impact of the changes of epistemological premises brought about by feminism as well as about the historical absence of women from the space of knowledge, and more specifically, from the space of literary and discursive theory. As she sees it, women’s silence in theoretical matters not only has to do with their historical exclusion from the domain of knowledge and public life, but also 84

with men’s definition of space in terms with which women could not identify: “When women write about space [...] they envision themselves outside metaphysical traditions that feed the production of theory,” for they conceptualize space differently (261). Today, women are transforming the contours of theory by writing “from, through and about” the spaces they have inhabited (262). It is certainly dangerous to speak about “female spaces” or a “female understanding of space” as if we were speaking of natural entities. However, we should admit that women’s introduction of new spatial metaphors and concepts has exposed the evaluative criteria behind the formerly male-dominated critical paradigms. Most literary theories define theoretical boundaries in spatial terms. Spatial divisions, Margaret Higonnet argues, have served to legitimate the boundaries between critical practices. This is the case with the distinction proposed by René Wellek and Austin Warren between “intrinsic” (style, metrics, narrative process) and “extrinsic” criticism (social conditions, thematic elements) that comparative and political feminist criticism has tried to efface (Higonnet 197-198). According to Ruth Salvaggio, the attempt to describe literature in spatial terms corresponds to the desire to establish the limits of literary discourse. The critical movements of formalism, modernism, and phenomenology share the desire to see literature as a definite space, corresponding either to a physical and mental architecture or to a system of patterns and myths (264-266). Hence, Gaston Bachelard’s view of the text as an architecture of love and pleasure, Joseph Frank’s theory of the spatial form of the text against the force of time, and Northrop Frye’s search for a mythical anatomy are examples of this critical tendency. In other applied critical studies, spatial metaphors include the division between high and low art, which usually corresponds to high and low genres. Under the category of “low” we find the art of women, the lower classes, children’s literature, ethnic literature, art about the popular and domestic worlds (Higonnet 199). This division usually concurs with that between “central” 85

and “marginal” works or genres: the “universal” versus the “regional” or “domestic.” Women’s works are usually confined to the latter (200). 4 Postmodern theory has very often followed this division and identified “Woman” with the marginal, the peripheral in metaphorical terms. Post-structuralist theorists like Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and even Julia Kristeva have “feminized” theory by reacting against its totalizing spatial divisions and have focused instead on the gaps, cracks, and fissures in the text. Understanding woman as the absolute other of language and of discourse may involve a break with former theories and the acknowledgment of another rhetorical space, but it does not necessarily mean that the contributions of women are being used to challenge theoretical and critical divisions. The marginal position of women within the literary canon and within critical language has been the source of the opposed critical currents of French feminism and gynocriticism. The French feminist school, initiating the feminist critique of male culture in the 1970s under the influence of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, is well known for its efforts to find a literary style that inscribes femininity and writes the female body. The textualization of the female body is a metaphoric inscription of a subversive space in language: the transformative power of female sexuality, repressed when woman enters the symbolic order and comes to abide by the “Law of the Father” of 4

Nina Baym’s above-mentioned study Woman’s Fiction (1978) takes issue with the distinction made by the reputed American literary critic Leslie Fiedler between a “domestic,” maternal, popular tradition, and a “paternal,” individualistic, “great” cosmopolitan tradition. In Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Fiedler categorizes novels written by women in the 19th century as inferior because they focus on the domestic realm. In his view, they are in deep contrast with cosmopolitan productions, dealing with supposedly “universal” issues and the individual imagination. Baym argues that Fiedler misinterprets these novels as mere manifestations of “sentiment” and defenses of “female honor.” Baym demonstrates the success and ideological importance of the “domestic” novels at the time were due to the various social conflicts they addressed and sought to resolve in a pragmatic manner.

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patriarchal language. The leading exponents of “écriture féminine,” Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, try to escape from the system of binary oppositions that fixes meaning according to patriarchal power structures. “Woman” is the negative signifier that through fluidity, disorder, transformation and dissolution of boundaries, melts down the limits and hierarchies established by patriarchal language. In This Sex which is not One (1985) Irigaray gives a positive interpretation of the female body through a fable in which she explains the multiplicity and dispersion of female desire through women’s various sexual organs. Like feminine desire, feminine language “sets off in all directions leaving [man] unable to discern the coherence of any meaning. Hers are contradictory words, somewhat made from the standpoint of reason, inaudible for whoever listens to them with ready-made grids, with a fully elaborated code in hand” (This Sex 29). In the eighties, Elaine Showalter’s gynocriticism looked at women’s literary productions with the aim of discovering “the history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women: the psychodynamics of female creativity; the trajectory of the individual or collective female career; and the evolution and laws of a female literary tradition” (“Feminist” 185). This current took for granted that women’s “muted” literary tradition corresponded to a distinct space. Showalter cannot accept the Kristevan notion of “Woman” as something that cannot be represented, something “above and beyond nomenclatures and ideologies” (Kristeva, “Woman Can Never” 137). This definition, Showalter sustains, does not allow women to change their status through the power of speech, as feminist critics cannot depend on gaps and ruptures in discourse for social change (“Criticism” 369). Faced with the unrepresentability of women in Kristevan theory Showalter asks: “But if women are the silenced and repressed “Others” of Western discourse, how can a Feminist theorist speak as a woman about women or anything else?” (“Criticism” 365). Her concern about the futility of the metaphorical representation of “Woman” as the eternal exile 87

leads her to find a separate “female tradition” or “female space” where woman can speak as what she is. Yet, the production of this alternative canon does not change the domains of knowledge and the institutions that foster the fragmentation of society into male and female ghettoes. Showalter has not been alone in her reaction against the use of the signifier “Woman” as a signifier for otherness, exile, marginalization, and eccentricity. Geraldine Pratt expresses the same concern in her essay “Geographic Metaphors in Feminist Theory” (1997). Those feminists concerned with “a theory in the flesh,” the actual material situation of women and their “flesh and blood experiences,” have also found that the “metaphorization” of woman has precluded the understanding of women’s experience within social relations (Moraga, This Bridge 23). This is the main concern of the so-called “women of color”5 feminism, within which Chicanas have to be included. The first inkling of this feminist perspective was made manifest with the publication of the collection of essays This Bridge Called My Back (1981), 5

Feminists of color argue that to focus exclusively on gender will beg the question of how sexuality, race, class, religion, and other factors interrelate in the formation of female subjectivity. In the United States the first effort to reformulate feminism from the perspective of women of color was exemplified in the volume edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and its expanded 1983 edition. These women have come together out of “political necessity” and share the need to expand the borders of ethnicity, sexuality, and nation. As Chela Sandoval says, they posit “a new subjectivity, a political revision that denies any one perspective as the only answer, but instead posits a shifting tactical and strategic subjectivity that has the capacity to re-center depending on the forms of oppression to be confronted” (“Feminism” 67). Gayatri Spivak and Debra Castillo have warned us against the use of homogenizing labels such as “Third World” and “Women of Color,” especially in literature anthologies using a translation-as-violation method that encourages decontextualized readings (Castillo, Talking Back 311). Today, the term transnational feminism is also used to refer to political coalitions between women (Kaplan and Grewal, “Transnational Feminist”). These coalitions are necessary, productive and enriching, but the critical analysis of texts, Norma Alarcón suggests, has to consider not only who speaks, but also what is spoken and where it is spoken (“Interlocutions” 274275).

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edited by the Chicanas Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa. Given Chicanas’ focus on material issues, the Butlerian idea that gender is a cultural construction that seeks to discipline the body becomes pertinent for the analysis of their writings. The body is a place where social meanings and subjective desires are negotiated; in Adrienne Rich’s words, it is “the geography closest in” (Love 212). This is the argument, for example, of studies like Sidonie Smith’s Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993), where she contends that the feminist writing subject has to incorporate and resist the normative character of masculine individuality in order to narrate herself. Dominant representations of the female body have to be confronted by the autobiographical female “I” in order to resist biological essentialism, and to speak the unspeakable. The peripheral status of the body, and those identified with it, among whom are women, allows the connection between self and soul, free of the constraints of biology. Woman’s embodiment as nurturer and as procreator reduces her destiny to anatomy. She is “encumbered,” her individuality being sacrificed to the roles that are assigned to her according to her biological function. Since woman deals with the material, she has no essence, or in Diana Fuss’ words “it is the essence of woman to have no essence” (Subjectivity 12). Woman depends on man for a destiny. The gradual sexualization of woman, and her identification with nature, define her as less rational, more practical and intuitive, less capable of reason, abstraction, speech. She cannot be defined except in the social roles she is assigned. Behind those masks there is only monstrosity. The moment she transgresses her role she is grotesque: [E]ven as her body is revealed to be aesthetically beautiful, it is corrupt and grotesque. Here there is no line between the beautiful and the grotesque; they are mutually arrested. Because the “tremulous private body” always threatens to “overflow its walls” and return from the margins, it threatens to disrupt the central powers of consciousness and power. (Subjectivity 16)

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The separation mind-body, nature-culture, as linked to the binary man-woman, also pointed out by the anthropologist Sherry Ortner, conditions both positive and negative mythical representations of woman. Women’s bodies and minds are colonized by the very discourse that produces such binaries. Elizabeth Spelman says that such an opposition (where the mind is valued over the body) is present throughout all Western thought, and has very often been internalized by feminists themselves (“Woman as Body”). They have either exalted woman’s closest ties to natural rhythms or have claimed independence by detaching themselves fully from bodily experiences such as maternity and childbirth. The question is however not so much to do away with the opposition, as to show the political implications of giving more value to one element over the other, or of denying the relationship between them. Within these contemporary debates on the body as a social space, the work of Judith Butler has been groundbreaking. Woman’s body is not what defines her as such, but how her biological difference is culturally interpreted in the society she lives, and how such interpretations determine certain cultural conventions, rituals, roles, and discourses. In her own words: “‘Sex’ is always produced as a reiteration of hegemonic norms. These productive reiterations can be read as a kind of performativity. Discursive performativity appears to produce that which it names, to enact its own referent, to name and to do, to name and to make” (Bodies 107). Yet, Butler sustains that the ideal of a prescribed gender is never fully enacted according to social expectations. In Bodies that Matter and many of her previous writings, she explores the relationship between the two elements of the opposition mind/body. Through a revision of psychoanalysis infused with a Foucaultian awareness of the social power of discourse and representations, Butler reflects upon the social inscription of meaning upon the body and the psyche as a means of maintaining gender conventions. She defies the anti-postmodernist stance that argues that to focus on language and discourse disallows the 90

materiality of women’s bodies, the materiality of sex. In all of her recent works she proposes to “subject notions of the body and materiality to a deconstructive critique” without denying the concepts of matter and body, and, instead mobilizing the body as signifier to produce alternative meanings that do not rely on oppressive, regulatory, metaphysical meanings” (“Contingent” 17). Sartre’s view that the body has a tendency to exceed its limits grounds Butler’s contention that new conceptions of bodily behavior foster new social meanings (“Variations” 130). The body is therefore not only the figurative borderlands or margin that textual feminist theory has evoked to designate the rhetorical gaps or fissures in a text; the body may also be a borderland material space between socially established gender and sexual codes and new practices and desires. Judith Butler’s view of the body as a liminal space where socially established conventions may be subverted has echoes of Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza subjectivity. The Chicana feminist discourse of most contemporary writers like Anzaldúa has been a strong reaction against the “metaphorization” of the female body in Chicano nationalist discourse. This discourse, which largely depended on spatial dichotomies, did not consider women as active participants in the creation of new values, and in consequence, did not meet Chicanas’ demands for gender and sexual equality. We will subsequently turn to their counternationalist spaces, feminist reactions to women’s exclusion from the imaginary Chicano nation.

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2 Chicano/a Cultural and Critical Politics

The critique of spatial divisions and the alternative spatial images in Chicana writings need to be contextualized within racial constructions of Mexicanness in the U.S., within the indigenist political and cultural discourse of resistance, and within the critiques of Chicano nationalist politics on the part of Chicana feminists. The consolidation of a Chicano/a identity was a reaction to a history of political exclusion that had been legitimated with racial arguments. Since the discrimination of Chicanos/as had been justified on the basis of race, the idea of race (la raza) became crucial for the invention of an oppositional Chicano identity and of an imaginary anti-American national space. The Chicano/a struggle for civil rights and the cultural movement that ensued opened up the space of American society for Mexican Americans in several ways. In its various manifestations throughout the Southwest, Chicano activism entailed the accomplishment of several objectives in terms of social benefits, education, and community organizing. However, subsequent reactions from Chicana feminists and other groups to Chicano nationalist discourse were to prove the Mexican emblems that had been chosen to unify all people of Mexican origin did nothing but emphasize the differences within Mexican Americans. Furthermore, the very masculinist emphasis of the discourse perpetuated traditional gender roles many Chicanas were no longer willing to accept. Chicanas stepped forward from the backdrop of chicanismo to claim a space of their own in their own Mexican communities and American civil society. Chicana politics, expressed both in political organizations and cultural manifestations, redefined the label of Chicano/a and made it less uniform, more flexible, and more open to difference, diversity, as well as controversy. Since the outburst of Chicana literature and Chicana studies in the 1980s, Chicano/a studies have changed

their direction from a parochial, nationalist, and essentialist approach to Chicano culture, to a more integrated discourse. Without ceasing to be political and indigenist, this discourse considers the various and often very different economic, gender, sexual, and racial contingencies within the Mexican collective and the various ways in which people of Mexican origin have responded to the fact of living on the threshold of two cultures. 2.1. The Racialization of “Hispanics” and Mexicans In his study Imagined Communities (1991), Benedict Anderson inquires into the “style in which [communities] are imagined” (6), and proposes that “[n]ationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which—as well as against which—it came into being” (19). If we follow Benedict Anderson’s definition of “imagined community,” we have to assume that all the members of a nation, independently of unequal distributions of power, see themselves as united by a “horizontal comradeship.” In the paragraphs that follow I will briefly outline the style in which an official view of the United States as “imagined community” has often been presented. I will also argue that this official view of America was partially possible thanks to the racialization of Mexican Americans and other immigrants and their exclusion from active participation in the national ethos. The discourse of chicanismo, which I also explore subsequently, is largely the by-product of the activism that followed the Second World War and which flourished in the late 1960s. Several social and political movements of Mexican Americans challenged the ways in which the United States had become an “imagined community” at the partial expense of racialized and sexualized concepts of Mexicanness. The term “melting pot,” taken from the title of Israel Zangwill’s 1909 play, is perhaps the most commonly used metaphor to define American identity. As it was used by Zangwill 94

and understood subsequently, the image suggested the dissolution or melting of different pasts and origins into a new sense of Americanness. In 1915 the Jewish philosopher Horace Kallen articulated a similar view of American identity and described the United States as a commonwealth of cultures living in harmony and unity. Kallen’s idea of “pluralism” was grounded on the belief that such harmonious cohabitation of cultures was an essential characteristic of Americanness, but he never considered the power relations amongst different cultural or social groups. In 1990 Lawrence E. Fuchs proposed the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to illustrate the ethnic complexity of the United States, but his description of America as “the blood of all nations” also precluded a discussion of the patterns of oppression and cultural suppression. In one way or another these different but related representations of the United States reflect Benedict Anderson’s view of “imagined community,” as they all evoke horizontal relations between citizens, the linear historical development of the nation, and the presence of cultural emblems that repeat themselves consistently in the uniform American imagination. The Civil Rights movement challenged the view of America as one people and broke up the apparent consensus of American society, a consensus that the historian Arthur Schlesinger, author of The Disuniting of America (1992), would like to see renewed. Seeking to find a uniform pattern in the American construction of ethnicity, in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986) Werner Sollors sustains that ethnicity is nothing but a cultural phenomenon, something that has no content and is a matter of the importance we ascribe to it (35). He quite adequately argues that studies that simply evaluate the ethnic particularity of a work “assume that there is not shared history and no human empathy, [...] that you have your history and I have mine” (13). Yet, Sollors eludes the fact that there are groups that have gotten the worst share of history and for whom ethnicity has precisely been a way of reacting to a lack of human empathy. The experience of these peoples, often not recognized as legitimate 95

American citizens, challenges Israel Zangwill’s concept of the “melting pot,” Horace Kallen’s notion of “cultural pluralism,” Lawrence E. Fuchs’ metaphor of the “ethnic kaleidoscope,” and Werner Sollors’ own view of ethnicity as a symbolic structure with no real significant content. In his groundbreaking essay “DissemiNation,” Homi Bhabha says that there is a tension between the pedagogical narrative of the nation and the narrative(s) people produce in their daily performances as national citizens (296). Bhabha sees this gap or fissure between the rule and the representation of the rule as the fundamental challenge from within the nation to univocal nationalist narratives: “Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries (both actual and conceptual) disturb those ideological manouvers through which ‘imagined communities’ are given essentialist identities” (299). The counter-narratives produced by minorities contest some of the established genealogies of national origin. Minority discourses within the nation can thrust ambivalence into a monumental historical memory. Chicano nationalism certainly challenges official views of the American national ethos. However, we should acknowledge, to partially accredit Sollors’ theorization of ethnicity, that Chicano/a nationalist counter-narratives are formally indebted to official narratives about the American “imagined community,” if only because they are a reaction to it. There is no doubt that one of the legacies of the political struggle of Chicanos in the 60s is, as we will see, the concern for the revision of American history in relation to the history of its others. However, before such a revision, a positive sense of community had to be forged. By inventing an alternative past devoid of racial and social oppression and based on an idealized, egalitarian, pre-colonial world, Chicanos did not so much strive to rewrite history as to achieve the group cohesion, unity, and collective pride that were necessary to attain political recognition in North American society.

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In the 1960s the Chicano alternative narrative or counternarrative to American nationalist discourse was articulated under the influence of the oppositional movements to North American imperialism, led by extreme leftist Latin American intellectuals (Monsiváis 149-51), and of the model of the Black Power movement. Both cultural and political revolutions were grounded on anti-colonial nationalist discourses. At that point, to claim an identity and cultural tradition on the basis of one’s race and one’s pre-colonial and pre-slavery past was the “American” way in which minorities confronted a racialized state and sought to gain some cultural and political authority. Through the “invention” of a counter-tradition they challenged received notions of American citizenship, foregrounded their oppression, and proposed the creation of a nation within a nation, of a tradition within a tradition. By using the term “invented tradition,” I am directly alluding to Eric Hobsbawn's The Invention of Tradition (1983) where he discusses “constructed, formally instituted” traditions that establish themselves with great rapidity, “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition” (1). One of the characteristics of these “invented traditions” is that continuity with the past is established through almost compulsory repetition (2). Ritual and formalization are essential in the process of invention and old traditional materials are used with the purpose of establishing social cohesion and membership within a more or less real community (9). This seems to be the case with the “invention” of a Chicano nation and cultural community in the 1960s. It is not my aim to provide the reader with a substantial history of the political organization process of Mexican Americans in the United States in the 1960s. Nonetheless, a brief overview of the institutionalization of the notion of “Hispanic” within the American “racial state” is necessary to understand Chicano activism as a reaction to and a product of the racial formation of America. As Omi and Winant define it, the “racial state” involves 97

the institutionalization of groups according to a racial system. The “racial state” does not simply impose racial norms through direct, uniform intervention, but is instead a site of conflict (81-83). Chicano activism, very much like Puerto Rican activism, was a reaction to the homogenizing label “Hispanic” and its discriminatory social implications. The ideological value of this label, cultural historian Susan Oboler says, has to be traced back to the political self-image of the United States as a “melting pot” and its more recent image as an “ethnic mosaic” (18). Since the 1970s the label “Hispanic” has been used to refer to people of Latin American Spanish-speaking countries. “Hispanic” has been widely circulated by U.S. official agencies as recognition of the “diversity” of the United States population. “Hispanic” was also an official label to designate a group of people who, despite having the same legal status as whites in many states, had been discriminated against and treated as a separate group (Suro 85). Nonetheless, as Oboler observes, the label glossed over the very diverse experiences, social backgrounds, and immigrant status of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, as well as the racial, linguistic, and social diversity within each and every one of these groups (1-2). The homogenization of all these people under the label of “Hispanic” was based upon a fusion of race and nationality inherent in the U.S. imperialist ideology of the nineteenth century. Given the pejorative connotations of this label, those people of Latin American descent with higher economic status who suddenly saw themselves incorporated into U.S. territory, sought to assimilate to the American ethos at all costs by claiming European (Spanish) origins. In the nineteenth century, American national identity was shaped in opposition to a variety of “foreign others” amongst which were the so-called “Hispanics.” Oboler contends that the boundaries of exclusion and inclusion that were to determine the community of Americans were established in the post-Civil War era. Americans came to see themselves as essentially white, protestant, and Anglo-Saxon despite the presence of other groups of Catholic Europeans, native Americans, African Americans, 98

and Asian Americans of various origins. Whatever their country of origin, Latin American immigrants were perceived as others in the United States (18-19). The expansionist policies of the United States of the early nineteenth century were initially firmly established by economic arguments, but expansion would eventually be justified ideologically with appeals to Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. In 1823 the Monroe doctrine established that the U.S. would come to seize economic control of the entire hemisphere to prevent Europe from doing so. By mid 1840s the ideology of Manifest Destiny, on the strength of the alleged superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, justified expansion into Latin American countries (Oboler 34). Oboler relates the clash of U.S. and Latin American racial and social dynamics taking place with the sudden incorporation of Mexican people and territory into the United States. The racial stratification of society in Latin America according to race conditioned the behavior of Mexican people as they were incorporated into American society. The occupation of Mexico by the United States (beginning in the first decades of the nineteenth century and culminating in 1848) was also characterized by the racist discourse inherent in the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. This caused wealthy Mexicans to claim “pure Spanish blood” so as to distinguish themselves from the “other” racially impure Mexicans (24-25). In a specific study of the interrelations of race and class, the economic historian Mario Barrera establishes a connection between the racial discrimination of the Mexican population during the occupation, and the present economic disadvantage of people of Mexican descent in the U.S. His study shows that an expanding American capitalism had an important role to play in the conquest and occupation of the Southwest. The ideology of Manifest Destiny was instrumental for speculators, landdevelopers, and large companies that rapidly moved into the Southwest. Barrera shows how a seemingly impartial legal and institutional system in fact favored the interest of such classes at that time. 99

Still today, the current ambiguous attitude of the state toward illegal immigration (at times allowing it, at other times hindering it) reflects its willingness to serve the business interests. In the early and mid 1990s California’s former Governor Pete Wilson justified the anti-immigrant backlash with economic arguments that turned immigrants into easy scapegoats for the economic crisis of the state (Duster 53). While the United States was brutally shutting its doors to illegal immigrants following the model of California, the Federal Government was making no effort to punish employers who kept on hiring them (Suro 95). Challenging biological, social structure, and cultural deficiency theories of racial inequality, Barrera points at the racist bias of those who justify the inferior socio-political status of some groups on the basis of a shortcoming within them. He establishes a parallel between the racial ideologies that developed in European colonies in the New World, and those racial ideologies that emerged in the South and Southwest of the United States during the occupation of Mexican territory. Viewing racism as built into the structures of the society, he speaks of “institutional racism,” a term that has been used to explain the particular discrimination experiences of Third World groups since the 1960s. “Neocolonization,”1 and “internal colonialism,”2 are used in his study to describe the subordinate position of many people of Mexican descent. Barrera notes that although Mexicans were racially inferior in the eyes of the American settlers, not all of them were treated equally, especially right after the Mexican war (1846-1848). Some of the wealthy sectors of Mexican society struggled to remain in control of their properties and established alliances with “Anglos” by means of marriage or business ties (26). A distinction was therefore established between the landed 1

The political and economic dependence of a country on international domination regardless of its apparent geographical and political autonomy. 2 The subordination of a given group within a larger society where populations mix, and where there is no geographical distinction between the metropolis and the colony.

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“Castilian” elite, who traced their origins back to Spain and therefore “whitened” their historical past, and the landless “Mexicano” population (Oboler 24). It was then that the term “Hispano” began to be used in contraposition to the term “Mexican” (25). Mexicans themselves deleted their connections to an indigenous past, as can be seen in the literary works of this period and after. In North of Mexico (1990), Carey McWilliams argues that the white legend or “Spanish Fantasy Heritage” stripped the Southwest of mestizaje and constructed an enchanted pastoral paradise in order to react to the stereotypes of the irrational, depraved Mexican in the literature of the dominant American culture.3 The nostalgic literature and ideology about Mexicans’ Spanish origins published in the U.S. between 1898 and 1945, and the ethnic literature and ideology of the 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s were shaped by colonialism, neo-colonialism, and racial consciousness, albeit in different ways. Both created reading communities who shared assumptions about the meaning of the nation. As Ramón Gutiérrez has argued, the former was in consonance with an integrationist movement that intended to find a historic association to Spanish culture in order to be assimilated to the white American mainstream. The latter, inscribed in a more popular ethnic nationalist movement, was a reaction to the American mainstream and to the label “Hispanic.” Consequently, it made of its appeals to communal unity and indigenous racial heritage a separatist project from Anglo America. 2.2. Aztlán as Chicano Counter-National Space “Chicano,” which, according to Edward Simmen, was a short form for “Mexicano,” or a variation of chico, was initially used 3

McWilliams mentions, amongst others, Aurelio M. Espinoza’s “Romancero Nuevo Mexicano,” (1915), Nina Otero Warren’s Old Spain in Our Southwest (1936), Arturo L. Campa’s The Spanish Folk Poetry in Mexico (1946), and Juan B. Real’s Cuentos españoles de Colorado y Nuevo México (1957). They all depicted Mexican folklore as Spanish in its origins.

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pejoratively to design the poor immigrants from Mexico (xii). Mexican Americans of a “lower” class adopted the term in the late 1960s and gave it a positive political nationalist meaning to design a community opposed to U.S. culture and to its discriminatory practices. In the 1970s, the term had “less to do with social position or ethnic origin than it [did] with political attitude” (xiii). Even today, what characterizes those Mexican Americans who prefer to be called Chicanos is their staunch nonconformity with the social inequality of their people as U.S. citizens. This is also the case with the label “Latino,” which, as Susan Oboler and Félix have argued, refers more to a common political bond against social inequality than to cultural origins or language. Chicanismo was born at a time when people of Mexican descent sought to affirm their identity on a social basis. The 1960s in the United States witnessed the rise of nationalist movements against internal colonialism by which minority groups like Blacks, American Indians, Chicanos, and Puerto Ricans claimed the right to cultural and political selfdetermination. One of the main challenges of these groups to the Anglo-Saxon notion of the “melting pot” was that, while the fact of becoming American was a conscious decision, many of them had gone to the U.S. forced by circumstances. Even if they wanted to become “Americans,” they were constantly rejected by “legitimate” national institutions (Oboler 28). America’s civil society was a “private” space to which many minorities had no access. The main manifestations of Chicano activism were César Chávez’s struggle for the defense of Mexican migrant workers, Reies López Tijerina’s defense of Mexican’s land-owning rights, the Chicano Power movement led by Rodolfo “Corky” González, La Raza Unida Party founded by José Angel Gutiérrez, and the Chicano student movement, particularly strong in Californian universities and in the cities of Los Angeles and Berkeley. All of them have been studied in depth by historical and sociological

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studies.4 One of the most relevant aspects of this activism is the spatial metaphor of Aztlán, the most long-lasting symbol of Chicano national unity as well as a constant reference in the literature and culture produced in the late sixties and after. Luis Leal has already pursued and documented the possible literary origins of the myth of Aztlán in his study Aztlán y México. Instead of focussing on its literary antecedents, and before going into the political function of the myth, I briefly want to explore some of its possible ideological subtexts. I am referring to the emancipating discourses emerging at the turn of the 19th century and continuing well into the 20th right after Latin American countries had attained independence from European powers and were facing the imminent threat of U.S. expansionism. Ideologues such as the Uruguayan José Enrique Rodó, the Cuban José Martí, and the Mexican José Vasconcelos anticipated the threat of the new degenerate invader. In his essay Ariel (1900), Rodó alluded to “una América deslatinizada por propia voluntad” (90) under the influence of the savage monster of North America.5 As an antidote to that “delatinization,” he proposed the cultivation of classical values, embodied by Ariel. In Rodó’s Shakespearean analogy, North America, the U.S., was the primitive, materialistic, and depraved Caliban. Later on, José Vasconcelos’ La raza cósmica (1925) would call for a mestizo race as the agglutinating factor of the Mexican nation as a whole through a synthesis of the best of the conqueror and the conquered. In contrast with Rodó’s and Vasconcelos’ partially 4

See Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (1988), Carlos Muñoz’s Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (1989), Aída Hurtado’s The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism (1996), and the more recent Mexicanos: A History of Mexicans in the United States (1999) by Manuel G. González. 5 Rodó's notion of "latinidad" differs from today's use of the term in the U.S. While "latino/a" is nowadays often used in antagonism with "Hispanic" and its connotations of European descent, Rodó's "latinidad" referred to a European cultural heritage and influence —particularly French—, which he opposed to the materialism and utilitarianism of the United States.

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Eurocentric views of Latin American culture, in Nuestra américa José Martí expressed a deep awareness of the mixed cultural heritage of the continent. He appealed to a “native halfbreed,” a “natural” but also cultivated man, who should free himself from the tyranny of the false erudition of the European powers. At the turn of a new century the threat of U.S. imperialism forewarned by Rodó and Martí has become a fact. From their respective Caribbean and Latin American contexts, George Lamming and Roberto Fernández Retamar have argued that Caliban is a more appropriate figure to describe their peoples’ colonial heritage. Speaking from the Caribbean context, Lamming argues that Prospero imposes a destiny and a language upon Caliban. Thus, Caliban never exists for himself and is condemned to the restrictions the conqueror’s gift forces on him. Ariel is always a privileged slave who is complicit with Prospero. Lamming compares Ariel to a spy or a secret police agent (107117), while Fernández Retamar argues that both Ariel and Caliban are slaves in Prospero's hands. Caliban, the depraved, monstrous slave, is the symbol of a hybrid Latin America that uses the language inherited from Prospero to curse him (14). Fernández Retamar identifies Ariel with the figure of the intellectual who may choose between allying himself with Prospero or with Caliban (16-39). In the latter case he will look at history from the other side with knowledge of Latin American reality (41-45). From a broader, more realistic perspective, Carlos Monsiváis argues that this long-accepted categorical schematization of the Latin American cultural debate proposes an “impossible cultural revolution” that erases whatever does not fall into the anticolonialist canon: “Si se quiere caer en la muy desvencijada trampa de los símbolos, la historia cultural [latinoamericana] es también la de Ariel” (151). As a consequence of the present neo-colonial, globalized order, Latin American countries have inevitably been “Americanized.” They are the recipients of information, goods, and life-styles from the northern hemisphere. But for all the economic, political, and cultural influences from the U.S., the 104

American continent has not been “delatinized.” The constant flow of immigrants of Latin American origin to the U.S., due to a great extent to the neo-colonial situation of South American and Central American countries, may even allow us to speak of a “latinization” of the U.S. The immense attention given to Latinos/as in the cultural and commercial spheres of this country, as well as their increasing social and political pressure upon the government (with its concomitant backlashes on the part of neoconservative political groups), have brought white, Anglo, protestant American identity to a crisis. Although the African community continues to be much larger, and the Asian community is also numerically important, recent demographic figures about Latinos have originated a “collective panic” about a possible “Hispanic threat” to an old sense of “Americanness.” This panic is especially acute in the state of California, where the massive affluence of documented and undocumented immigrants from Latin America has caused the Latino community to constitute the second largest ethnic/racial group in the state. The abolition of affirmative action and bilingual education is symptomatic of the neo-conservative political trends that have thrived in California and in the whole of the U.S. As an American claiming a different approach to literary history, the Chicano critic José David Saldívar has adopted Martí’s notion of a hybrid América to display a critical awareness of the crossfertilization between the north and the south. As he says in Border Matters (1997), the symbology of these two Américas does not intend to demonstrate “a Manichean clash of identities and affiliations” (160). Rather, it alludes to a complex process of intercultural relations. It is with this idea of hybrid America or nuestra América in mind that many Chicano and Chicana writers and artists depict their culture today. However, the initial rhetoric of chicanismo embraced the anti-colonialist thought proclaimed by Fernández Retamar. The chicanista myth of Aztlán is heavily tied to the separatist discourse of the 1960s in Latin America, also prevalent in the Black Power Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. One of the representatives of anti105

colonialist thought and a source of inspiration in the 50s and 60s was Frantz Fanon,6 whose work left a strong imprint on Chicano intellectuals. Fanon argued that since the white man failed to recognize that the Black man had good reason to hate and not to be hated, Black people had to assert their identity and make themselves known. In his essay “On National Culture” he referred to the plight of working-class Mexicans and argued that “the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant today” (168). Yet, he also acknowledged that to claim a past national culture was “a justification for the hope of a future national culture” (168-169). Hence, for Fanon the construction of a national culture did not serve the purpose of defining the people‘s “true” nature, but of creating a unity to justify the people’s actions targeted towards the future. The influence of Fanon’s thought is clearly seen in the theoretical postulates of both Luis Valdez and Alurista, two important ideologues of the Chicano cultural and political movement in its earlier and later phases. The former, together with César Chávez, the founder of the UFWUC (United Farm Workers Unionizing Committee), was a relevant figure in awakening the Chicano workers to the neo-colonialism of capitalist U.S. Valdez contributed to the committee's drafting of “El Plan Delano,” a declaration in which Chicanos asserted their willingness to see the present social order replaced by a more egalitarian one. Valdez was to turn his dramatic production, the Teatro Campesino, into a conveyor of the purposes stated in the declaration. In the notes that introduce a collection of actos he states that “Chicano theatre must be revolutionary in technique as well as in content. It must be subject to no other critics but the pueblo itself; but it must also educate the pueblo toward an appreciation of social change [sic], on and off the stage” (Early 6

Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique in 1925, but spent most of his life in Algeria, where he became a spokesman and theoretician for the armed insurgence towards independence. His liberationist thought called for the unity of all Third World countries against colonial powers.

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Works 8). One of the revolutionary aims of this theatre was to provide a source of unity for the Chicano population in order to do away with regional differences: Beyond the mass struggle of La Raza in the fields and barrios of America, there is an internal struggle in the very corazón of our people. That struggle, too, calls for revolutionary change. . . . And that again means teatro. . . . a teatro of ritual, of music, of beauty and spiritual sensitivity. . . . But if Aztlán is to become a reality, then we as Chicanos must not be reluctant to act nationally. To think in national terms: politically, economically, and spiritually. We must destroy the deadly regionalism that keeps us apart. The concept of a national theatre for La Raza is intimately related to our evolving nationalism in Aztlán. (Early Works 8-9)

Alurista, a poet and critic in the service of the Chicano Movement, also established the connection between a common culture, a common race, a common territory, and the common oppressive economic conditions under the government of the United States as the agglutinating factors of the Chicano population. In his essay “Cultural Nationalism” he acknowledges the heterogeneity of the Chicano people, but does not dwell on it since his purpose is to stress a sense of group cohesion. He quotes Fanon to describe the emancipatory spirit of Chicano artists: “Because they are in danger of losing their lives and thus becoming lost to their people, these men, hotheaded and with anger in their hearts, relentlessly determine to renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life of their people” (in Alurista 41; Fanon 168-169). Aztlán, the name the Aztec Indians had given to the territories now comprised by the Southwestern States, was one of the main emblems of the Chicano national project. Identified by el movimiento chicano as a future egalitarian pacifist space, where there would be no class, race, or ethnic differences, Aztlán corresponded to the decolonized nation envisioned by Fanon. Chicano students, farm workers, and all those who saw the danger of becoming insignificant as a people could find a home in a Chicano nation that had no frontiers and encompassed all “those who worked it” 107

(Alurista 43). Through this spatial metaphor the goals of the Chicano political struggle were articulated: the materialization of an egalitarian society with no racial or class differences, which contradictorily enough, was to belong only to Chicanos. The Chicano movement, like the Black Power movement, depended on coherent notions of racial and national identity for the viability of its political project. In the case of Chicano activism, it was only on the basis of belonging to la raza that the Chicanos could actually feel at home in Aztlán, whose name was already a racialized evocation of a supposedly harmonious, peaceful past before the arrival of the conqueror, the white race. From the moment Aztlán became officially established as the symbolic “Chicano nation” in the Chicano National Liberation Youth Conference (Denver, 1969), it became recurrent in the literature that ensued from Chicano activism (Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán [1974], Rudolfo Anaya’s Heart of Aztlán [1976], Alurista’s volume of poetry Floricanto en Aztlán [1971]). Still today, in the face of increasing anti-immigrant sentiments and of Latinos/as’ struggle for civil rights in the country where they work and live, the image of Aztlán continues to hold political value and significance for some writers and intellectuals. However, the mythical and social value of Aztlán has changed considerably since the late 1960s. It continues to be present in the literature and writings by Chicanas in surprisingly innovative ways. As we have seen, it is reappropriated by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera, and, as will be seen below in 4.3 and chapter 6, it has inspired Cherríe Moraga’s plays and essays. Aztlán or el otro México is also now evoked in the pop music of “El Vez”, “Aztlán Underground” and “Los Tigres del Norte”. Scholars such as Jorge Klor de Alva and Alex Saragoza have criticized the appropriation of indigenous Mexico on the part of Chicano activism and culture, particularly within the academic and literary context.7 The most recent exhaustive critical analysis of the myth has come from Daniel Cooper Alarcón in his The 7

See their respective essays “Recent Chicano Historiography” (1988) and “California Chicano Literature and Pre-Columbian Motifs” (1986).

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Aztec Palimpsest: Mexico in the Modern Imagination (1997). He reflects on the paradoxical nature of the message and the effects of the symbol. While Aztlán stressed the unity of the Chicano people and justified such a unity on the basis of European and Anglo colonization, it glossed over the fact that during the Spanish and American colonization other peoples such as Native Americans and African Americans also suffered losses and oppression. In addition, the mythical land, supposedly situated in the Southwest, downgraded the situation of other Mexicans citizens living in other parts of the States.

Figure 1. Ester Hernández, Libertad 1977, etching, 35 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

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Aztlán, Alarcón observes, was a symbol that glossed over internal differences of race, economic status, political views, gender, and assimilation within the Mexican community. Eventually, however, these differences caused the demise of the Chicano movement, the withdrawal of Luis Valdez from the UFWA, and the dissolution of parties such as La Raza Unida. Ironically, as Cooper Alarcón cogently demonstrates, the origins of the myth of Aztlán can be traced to the merging of indigenous and Spanish myths. The competing layers of signification of the myth make it disruptive of any monolithic version. In his own words, [t]he palimpsestic qualities of Aztlán make it fluid and unanchored and thus an easy myth to appropriate and invest with new meaning; however, the paradoxes embedded within the myth and its multilayered structure also make political claims based on the myth vulnerable. [...] In restricting Aztlán to just one version, the leaders of the Chicano movement created a nationalist myth so narrow that the nation it offered suffocated many within, and excluded many without, causing them to reject it. (32)

2.3. Malinchismo: The Feminist Challenge to Chicano Nationalism One of the agglutinating elements of Chicanismo was its stress on traditional Mexican family values. The sanctioned roles of women as mothers, submissive wives, custodians of the unity of the family and the community were taken for granted and considered to be natural. Ignoring the fact that many Chicanas were workers, the Movement used the figure of the Indian woman as an emblem of traditional cultural values, as the passive, masochistic bearer of tradition. Hernán Cortés’ lover, Malinche, characterized as a vendida or a sold-out to the Spaniards in Mexico, became a symbol to designate all those people of Mexican descent who had assimilated and sold themselves out to American culture. As we will see subsequently, the two main models of femininity of Chicano culture, the Virgin of Guadalupe and Malinche, did not allow women to have a position of 110

authority and failed to provide Chicanas with the tools for true liberation. Furthermore, there was no concern at all for this liberation. Chicanas’ efforts to voice sexual and gender inequalities were interpreted by male-dominated organizations as women’s own opposition to the cause of the whole Chicano community (González, Mexicanos 216). Mexican women were thus divided between the cultural loyalists, who saw any kind of organizing around gender as divisive and threatening to the whole causa chicana, and Chicana feminists, who criticized the patriarchal nationalist rhetoric that made it impossible for the women to speak (Hurtado 56). Cultural betrayal became identified with sexual betrayal through a direct connection between feminism and lesbianism. This association prevented many Chicanos from realizing that Chicana feminists were fighting for much more than sexual liberation, and that the main issue in their protests was the deep gender inequalities within the Mexican community (Hurtado 56). The creation of new feminist publications,8 presses, and organizations was fundamental for addressing these inequalities and articulating a Chicana literary and cultural counter-discourse. Chicana feminists addressed women’s oppression within the Mexican community as a conflation of interrelated race, class, and gender issues. They proclaimed themselves malinchistas with no qualms at all: By appropriating and exalting the figure of the treacherous” indigenous Mexican mother, they were questioning the traditional precepts of their culture and redefining their role as mediators between two cultures without abandoning the strategic indigenism of el movimiento.

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The magazines include Regeneración and Encuentro Femenil. Publishing houses such as The Women’s Press, Third Woman, Kitchen Table Press, Bilingual Press, West End Press, and Arte Público Press, amongst many others, have contributed to the dissemination of works by Chicanas. Among the feminist organizations worth mentioning are MAWNA (Mexican American Women’s National Association), Comisión Femenil Mexicana Nacional and MALCS (Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social).

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Octavio Paz’s interpretation of the myth of “la sufrida madre mexicana” in El Laberinto de la Soledad (1950) is a preeminent referent to appreciate the symbolic role of women in Chicano nationalist discourse and the subsequent oppositional malinchista discourse of Chicana feminists.9 Paz argues that under the cover of the mandatory respect demonstrated towards Mexican women, Mexican society restrains them and prevents them from expressing themselves freely: “Quizás muchas preferirían ser tratadas con menos ‘respeto,’ (que, por lo demás, se les concede solamente en público) y con más libertad y autenticidad” (34). Letting women speak, Paz suggests, would in fact endanger the social order: “Pero, ¿cómo vamos a consentir que ellas se expresen, si toda nuestra vida tiende a paralizarse en una máscara que oculte nuestra intimidad?” (34). For Paz this conception of women as silent, passive objects, has had in fact tragic consequences for Mexican people. Women’s—and more specifically Malinche’s— compulsory silence and passivity were in fact instrumental for the conquest of Mexico, but this has never been acknowledged by Mexicans. In the chapter “Máscaras mexicanas” Paz sustains that Malinche’s treachery, her subservience to the colonizer, her opening up to him—she is called “la chingada,” the raped one, the open one—becomes a justification for male powerlessness and humiliation in Mexico, and ultimately for the condition of the Mexican people. Her betrayal is the main cause of the mask of stoicism and conformity of the Mexican people, a mask that belies the suffering and humiliation that keeps them down. In order to overcome its shame Mexico has to accept Malinche as its legitimate mother. Feminist critics have problematized Paz’s account of Mexican national character on the grounds that his sexualized parable perpetuates the image of the passive, resigned Mexican woman, 9

In the essay “The Chicano Renaissance” (1982) Philip Ortego says that “no contemporary Mexican writers have influenced the Chicano Movement so much as Octavio Paz and his Labyrinth of Solitude, a work that goes far in exploring the Mexican mind and thought, not in its Hispanic origins so much but in relation to the Indian origins of Mexico” (580).

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and thus excludes women’s voices from the historical narrative of Mexico. Debra Castillo points out that in spite of his sympathetic reading of the long-suffering Mexican woman’s predicament, it is ultimately the Mexican writer who ends up speaking about her: “No woman’s voice attests to the validity or inaccuracy of his suppositions” (38). In her essay “Traduttora, Traditora” Norma Alarcón contends that Paz’s psychosocial analysis draws on the Mexican tendency to organize knowledge, values, and beliefs around symbolic figures, a tendency that has persisted in Mexican culture since the time of the conquest. According to this interpretation of Mexican history, Guadalupe is the national patroness of Mexico; Malinche is the Mexican Eve, “the procreator of a ‘fallen’ people” (58). These figures make up the socio-symbolic structure whereby women become socialized. In the binary, Manichean belief system of Mexican/Chicano culture the symbolic figure of Guadalupe, the Mexican native version of the Virgin Mary, is identified with transcendentalizing power, silence, and maternal self-sacrifice. She is endowed with attibutes that are meant to contrast positively with “those of a woman who speaks as a sexual being and independently of her maternal role” (62-63). The figure of the mother is associated with the reproduction of both her people and her culture. In contrast, the woman speaking for her own sake, and not for the sake of the community, betrays her culturally normal function of motherhood. For Alarcón, Paz’s rewriting of Malinche and his mythical explanation of the Mexican character are exclusively based on sexual power relations. Despite its considerate criticism of women’s subordinate position, his account strengthens the misogynist ideological remnants of the conventional representation of women (65). The ideological ground preceding Paz’s and other similar interpretations of the figure of Malinche is to be found in the work of the chroniclers and inventors of legends after the conquest, and in the discourse of Malinche as traitor which appears in the nineteenth century during the Mexican independence movement. In her study La Malinche in Mexican 113

Literature (1992) Sandra Messinger Cypress sustains that Doña Marina, as the Spaniards called her, was initially presented in a positive way by the conquerors, who compared her behavior to that of chivalric heroes or biblical figures. A number of chroniclers, such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo, presented her as the Great Mother, the protector of the conquerors. They celebrated the birth of her first son as the origin of the mestizo race, of Mexico, and of the blending of the European and Amerindian races. The myth was rewritten in the independence and postindependence eras. The anonymous first Mexican historical indigenista novel, Xicoténcatl (1826), portrays Marina as the Europeanized Amerindian, symbolizing the evils that come upon the native Americans when they accept European ways. This representation would prevail during and after Mexico's struggle for independence and would be adopted by the Chicano discourse derived from the reading of Octavio Paz. For these Chicanos, the positive female counterpart of a vendida or sell-out to AngloSaxon culture is the mother figure, inspired in Guadalupe, the silent mediator and virgin of the poor. In Chicana feminist counter-discourse Malinche (also called by her indigenous name Malintzin) is seen as actually having spoken for her own sake as a free woman, and not merely as passively acting in the service of the conqueror Hernán Cortés (Alarcón, “Traduttora” 62-63). Her role as translator is emblematic of her mediating position between two cultures, of her “contamination” of tradition through her adoption of Anglo views about femininity. As a mediator, a “juggler” of cultures within an ambiguous and always shifting borderland consciousness, this figure is caught in a double predicament. On the one hand, as Anzaldúa has it, she has a “plural” personality that allows her to constantly shift her ground. On the other, as Alarcón remarks, we should not forget that, crossing over from one side to the other does not prevent the mestiza from suffering. As we know from the story of Malinche, once she has been used, she disappears from historical records, which this critic 114

attributes to the fact that she is Indian and a woman. Once she has gone beyond the limits of her culture “there is no ‘legitimated’ place for her in the conqueror’s new order. Crossings over by ‘choice’ or by force become sporadic individual arrangements that do not necessarily change the status of Indian women or women of color, for example” (86). Alarcon’s Malintzin, like Spivak’s alienated speechless subaltern, is a representation of a female other, unassimilated to the dominant culture precisely because of both her race and gender. Anzaldúa’s mestiza, Kingston’s “woman warrior,” and hooks’s marginal critic, are subjects that can speak, as opposed to Spivak’s subaltern, Alarcón’s Indian woman, and Hong Kingston’s protagonist’s missing aunt, who cannot speak, or rather, are not heard. Women’s silence, their respect for taboo, their inability to speak about their lives and their bodies, has to be related to their function as preservers of the national culture. When these women try to take control of their abject bodies, these become “the community’s body, one which threatens to contaminate the body politic, to destroy the very fabric of cultural identity and nationalism” (Smith, Subjectivity 143). The expression of national or communal feelings of “unity” in terms of cultural and sexual norms leads to a symbolic association between the woman’s body and the land, the nation, and/or the community (Parker, “Introduction” 2-3). The trope that identifies the female body with the nation immediately establishes an analogy between the invasion of the land and the violation of the female, both of which must be prevented by the nation’s “male” citizens. If the nation is understood as a “deep, horizontal comradeship” (Anderson 7), it is in fact a male “homosocial”10 comradeship we are speaking about. 10

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick introduces the concept of homosociality, a term halfway between homosexuality and homophobia, in Between Men (1985).to describe the power of masculine homoeroticism as deeply engrained in social dynamics. In conflating homosociality and homosexuality Sedgwick deeply disturbs the opposition "homosexual/heterosexual" and begins a critical analysis of the definition of these terms in Western culture.

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The attributes required of a woman for the trope “woman as nation” to have representational efficacy are chastity, dutifulness, daughterliness, and maternity (Parker 6). Through this stereotypical representation of woman, male domination over women is legitimized while it excludes any discourses that wish to portray woman differently. The “‘essential woman,’ raced or not,” is, as Alarcón, Kaplan, and Moallen put it, “the national, iconic signifier for the material, the passive, and the corporeal, to be worshipped, protected, and controlled by those with the power to remember and to forget, to guard, to define and redefine” (“Introduction” 10). Thus, there is a clear breach between the nationalist private self, embodying traditional values, and the historical self, internalizing the outward changes of colonialism that may contradict such values. The traditional role of woman as preserver of certain communal values, as well as the connection between the female and the essence of the community, become unreal cultural constructs that silence and alienate women. As feminist literary critic Jean Franco argues, the detachment from the female body advanced by this ideology of womanhood also procures a detachment from other positive aspects of reproduction, such as love, connectedness, and community. Given the alleged ahistoricity of woman, her body becomes the only secure, unchangeable, utopian territory in unstable circumstances, so that she is unrealistically considered by many Latin American writers and intellectuals to be cut off from and untouched by sociopolitical oppression (Franco, “Beyond” 509). The figure of Guadalupe, a transcendental symbol of perfect femininity and a national emblem, is an example of essentialized womanhood. Eric Wolf tells us that in the colonial period the worship of Guadalupe, of European and Indian origin, guaranteed a place in heaven and in society for the increasing number of mestizos. The political and religious significance of the symbol found its utmost expression during the Mexican War of Independence: “Mother; food, hope, health, life; supernatural salvation from oppression; chosen people and national 116

independence—all find expression in a single symbol” (Wolf in Limón 63). José Limón has stressed the pacifying effects of the symbol in Mexico where, especially amongst lower social classes, it has produced a false impression of national unity and favored the popularity of the masculinist official church and the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) (66).11 Within the Chicano community, where nationalism has been fashioned following Mexican forms, the symbol has been maintained in the search for communal authenticity. A clear instance of this is that the banner of Guadalupe was carried during the Chicano farm workers’ strike of 1965 (Alarcón, Traduttora 69). The instrumental function of woman as representative of social, moral, and political values of Mexican/Chicano culture is summarized quite uncritically by Octavio Paz as follows: “La mujer mexicana, como todas las otras, es un símbolo que representa la estabilidad y la continuidad de la raza. A su significación cósmica se alía la social: en la vida diaria su función consiste en hacer imperar la ley y el orden, la piedad y la dulzura” (34). Many of the contemporary works by Chicana writers and artists have reacted against the virgin/whore dichotomy and, as will be seen later in this study, proposed alternative representations of Guadalupe in which aspects of womanhood such as strength, will, dynamism, generosity, understanding, nurturing and sustaining power resist and challenge the image of Guadalupe as the role model for the docility and passivity of the ideal Mexican/Chicana woman. Nonetheless, both female writers and artists have generally followed the racialization of gender inherent in the nationalist discourse of la causa Chicana. Angela 11

Probably inspired in Wolf, Jacques Lafaye’s book Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe (1976) analyzes the roles played by the Aztec god and the Catholic virgin in the formation of the Mexican national consciousness. According to Lafaye, the missionaries believed the Aztec god to be the native version of the messiah. Guadalupe gradually replaced the Aztec goddess Tonantzin, and when Mexico became independent from Spain in 1821, Guadalupe had already been consolidated as the national emblem of Mexico.

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de Hoyos’ poem “Tonantzin Morena,” refers to her mother as “mi madre morena / con su hechura de diosa,” “Mamá Tonantzin, always harnessing problems” (71). In Borderlands/ La Frontera Anzaldúa finds a source of pride and feminist resistance in Mexican mythological figures. In her drama as well as in the poems and autobiographical essays included in Loving in the War Years Cherríe Moraga claims “the color of [her] mother” and the “brown sex” of her mother (60, 94). We have to trace this racialization of gender to the particular context of the U.S. where skin differences are identified with social and cultural differences. The racialization of ethnicity imposes the rule that “white” is the norm and “non-white” is race (Kaminsky 11). During the Chicano movement, the words Raza and mestizo ceased to have the assimilationist overtones they had had for Mexican writers like José Vasconcelos or Octavio Paz12 and became loaded with associations to Chicano family, history, and indigenist oppositional politics. This kind of collective racial and cultural consciousness perpetuated the notion of monolithic racially-based identity categories that was already in circulation and that was to be one of the reasons for the demise of Chicano activism. Chicana activists, however, appropriated the indigenous female symbols of chicanismo and revised them according to their particular needs as racialized gendered subjects. The treacherous Indian woman allying with the Spanish or Anglo conqueror embodied by Malinche/Malintzin, is, in the Chicana feminist counterdiscursive revision of the figure, a powerful, transgressive female figure that speaks on her own behalf. 12

Their respective La raza cósmica (1925) and El laberinto de la soledad (1950) reflected the nationalist pedagogy that appealed to mestizaje to the detriment of indigenous peoples. In Mexico mestizaje is opposed to indigenismo, whereas in the U.S. it isn’t. In Vasconcelos’ view mestizaje meant that “la civilización conquistada por los blancos, organizada por nuestra época, ha puesto las bases morales y materiales para la unión de todos los hombres en una quinta raza universal, fruto de las anteriores y superación de todo lo pasado” (16).

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Amy Kaminsky observes that, as daughters of Malinche, Chicanas displace the male child of the conquest, replace it with a female subject, and recuperate the story as one of race and gender vindication (19). This is the case, for example, of two revisionist essays by Chicana scholars on the symbolic figure. Adelaida del Castillo argues that Malintzin’s actions “syncretized two conflicting worlds causing the emergence of a new one—our own;” she was “an actual force in the making of history” (1-5). Malintzin cannot be seen as “a traitor to la patria” as some claim, because, in fact, that patria did not exist at all in the sixteenth century (5). Cornelia Candelaria acknowledges that La Malinche played a major role in the conquest, but that, given her position as a woman “bred to serve and obey […] she defied traditional expectations of a woman’s role” and acted, with “intelligence, adaptability, and leadership” (4-6). In “Traduttora, Traditora,” after giving an overview of the multiple revisions of Malinche’s biography by Chicana writers and essayists, Alarcón remarks that they all foreground her role as mediator, transform her into a neo-myth of the goddess, or endow her with the qualities of a modern speaking-subject such as selfawareness, assertion, rage, and revenge. Most of them evade the image of the slave, the raped mother, an image which, in Alarcón’s view, “emphasizes that our beginnings, which took place barely half a millennium ago, are drenched in violence, not simply symbolic but historically coinciding with European expansionist adventures” (83). These simplifications and appropriations of the figure, this critic suggests, preclude a revision of history on the basis of race, class, and gender issues, issues that are part of her condition and prevent her from speaking. Agreeing with Alarcón, Kaminsky observes that “this polarization, whereby race is marked by and as gender, cannot be sustained. The figure of Malinche has been injected with multiple and contradictory meanings precisely because the racially marked other she represents has been overly simplified” (18-19). Regardless of this simplification, the identification with the Indian mother through the revised figures of Malinche provided 119

Chicanas with socio-symbolic possibilities for (re)signification. This figure became an alter ego through which Chicanas like Lucha Corpi, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Carmen Tafolla, and Adelaida del Castillo claimed the right to speak as Indian women and Chicanas in a society where the racial formation identifies race with cultural singularity. Given their similar position inbetween Mexican traditional and Anglo secular values, they demanded historical recognition of the role they had played in the re-creation of a Chicano/a culture beyond traditional social expectations. Partaking of the liberationist discourse of a radical feminism that erupted in the 60s, they exposed a history of racialized heterosexuality with rage, and provided alternative views of womanhood and motherhood. Their alternative (re)presentations were part of a discourse of emancipation through which, in the 1960s and early 70s, women claimed “natural” and “true” selves and pursued the example of socially transgressive female figures (Waugh 13). Chicana writers, mainly writing poetry at that time, saw in Malinche the reversal of the stereotypes or roles assigned to women in Mexican/Chicano society. Furthermore, as we have seen with Anzaldúa and will see with Cisneros, Moraga, and Viramontes in the chapters to follow, a legendary figure related to la Malinche, La Llorona, would also be evoked and redefined. This figure has come to symbolize the betrayal, silencing, and socio-cultural displacement many Mexican American women continue to suffer. One of the most accepted versions of the story of La Llorona13 tells us she was an Indian woman who had several illegitimate children by a married man, who is sometimes identified with a Spanish conqueror. When he abandoned her she went out of her mind and killed herself and her children. After her death she was compelled to search for them eternally at night. Nowadays she appears as a supernatural, beautiful woman with long hair and dressed in white. Men are attracted to her, follow her, and they are often found dead. In this legend, as well as in the myth of 13

This version is based on the legend as it appears in José Limón’s essay and in Michael Kearney’s “La Llorona as a Social Symbol" (1969).

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Malinche, native women are blamed and chastised by the community for an illicit sexual affair.14 Traditional anthropological interpretations like John O. West’s and Michael Kearney’s strip the legend of its socio-historical and ideological implications and reduce it to a moralistic tale that reinforces women’s role as mothers. In these versions, the legend reproduces a microcosmic vision of the world: Man is exposed to evil forces, represented by the powerful maternal figure of La Llorona. She teaches people not to transgress the limits of their social class, and keeps wayward husbands and children in their place. But she herself is a transgressive female representation of evil, often identified with and related to other European and Amerindian myths. La Llorona is a relative of Medea (Limón 5960), a connection that Cherríe Moraga explores in her play The Hungry Woman (2001). She is a popular version of European female incarnations of evil and seduction like Medusa, Eve, Lilith, Die Weisse Frau (West 31-33), and John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido 54).15 She is also to be related to Aztec goddesses of death and evil like Coatlicue, Chicomecoatl, Izapapalotl, and Tlazolteotl, or Mayan

14

Mexican and Chicano writers and critics have established a connection between the figures of Malinche and Llorona. In El laberinto de la soledad, Octavio Paz says she is one of the versions of the Mexican mother. In The Legend of La Llorona (1984) Anaya presents Malinche as the first Llorona of the New World. In her essay “Tres modelos culturales” (1986) Shirlene Soto looks at both figures as related representations of victimized womahood in the hands of the conqueror. 15 Lilith is Adam’s first wife, the woman God created before Eve. She was cast out of Paradise for being strong-willed and spirited and destined to become a creature of darkness. Die Weisse Frau is a legendary figure of European folklore associated with death. Her ghost returns to mourn a husband that never returned or a lost child. John Keats’ poem “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (1819) relates the story of a knight that met a beautiful woman, who spoke and sang to him of love in a strange language. He fell asleep by her side and dreamt of pale kings and warriors who warned him about her: They had become mesmerized by her and, just like them, he had fallen under her spell.

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deities like Ixtabai, of seductive feminine appearance but hostile and violent to men (Limón 61-62; Anzaldúa 31-35). In The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis, Herrera-Sobek observes that the cultural construct of the beautiful woman who kills and destroys, a variation of the Terrible Mother archetype, represents “[t]he terror of death in a patriarchal culture” which is “projected onto the figure of a woman” (55). The feminist psychoanalytical theorist Melanie Klein has argued the “Terrible Mother” “is feared because of the dependency that [her capacity to satisfy every desire] creates” (Waugh 65). She is “the source of the persecutory anxiety which gives rise to hatred and aggression” (Waugh 65). One of the most representative novels of the beginning stages of contemporary Chicano literature, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima (1972), portrays La Llorona as a metaphorical representation of evil. She appears in significant transitional moments in the life of the protagonist, Antonio, where his bravery, his rationality—as opposed to his lust—and his masculine independence are tested. José Limón contrasts this legendary figure with the mythical figures of Malinche and Guadalupe and says La Llorona is a “real” woman— a lover, wife, mother, and a social contradiction. In his view, she is explicitly the counter-hegemonic denial of the first pole in the “Madonna/whore” symbolic, ideological configuration of women. Her infanticide, though immoral, is humanly understandable if we consider she is a victim of the contradictory patriarchal norms imposed on Mexican women. She is by no means a “moral example” like Guadalupe, but she is a threat to patriarchal structures (75-77). I would say that what is most remarkable about this legend is that it is usually women who tell this story to children and that, as Limón points out, they are the ones who have control of its development. La Llorona is a fluid tale with constant shifts and changes depending on who tells it. Women cooperate to change this narrative, which prevents it from becoming a bounded text and makes it liable to constant redefinition (Limón 78). Thus, as Rosan A. Jordan suggests, the legend may also be a manifestation 122

of women’s defiance of patriarchal values, their own wish to retaliate against male sexual aggression (39). As will be seen in the analysis of Viramontes,’ Moraga’s, and Cisneros’ work, these writers have taken advantage of the fluidity of this oral tale to produce contemporary versions that are resisting accounts of Chicanas’ postmodern predicament. As Norma Alarcón suggests in “Traduttora,” the legend does not necessarily make an effective emancipating feminist cultural symbol, as it does not allow women to make vindications of their rights outside their condition as wives and mothers (77-78, footnote 51). Yet, Chicana writers have appropriated it precisely in order to illustrate that women who are wives and mothers are still trapped in contradictory patriarchal discourses that do not allow them to speak for themselves as subjects despite their wish to do so. La Llorona is a “real” woman (a product of oral history), not a mythical figure (a product of “official” history like la Malinche). Hence, this story has allowed Chicana writers to explore the discrepancy between mythical representations of women and the hostile social reality they have to confront. 2.4. From Chicano to Border Matters The political and regionalist focus of the Chicano Movement that has been addressed above had an impact on the literary production and scholarship that followed it. The most current critical approach to literature placed an important focus on region and race in order to define what was Chicano and what was not. In literary circles the task of Chicano cultural self-affirmation was done through the recuperation and legitimization of a literary canon that belonged to the supposedly monolithic community of Chicanos. Ramón Gutiérrez sustains that that the conflation of aesthetics and politics in Chicano activism led literary critics to choose 1848 as the milestone of the beginning Chicano/a literary tradition. This was the year in which the treaty of Guadalupe 123

Hidalgo was signed and Mexico was stripped of the territory comprising California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and half of Colorado. The date would signal the beginning of the colonization of Mexican territory by the United States and the beginning of a literary tradition of resistance.16 Other dates like 1836 (the date of the formation of the Republic of Texas by Anglo and Mexican Texans) or 1540 (the beginning of the conflict between the Spanish and the Indians of the Southwest) were not politically suitable for a cultural movement that aimed to stress the conflict between the Anglo and the Spanish-speaking mestizo (“Nationalism” 247). In the words of Miguel Méndez, “la literatura aztlanense” should be “como un aliento que anime los anhelos del chicano, exponiendo el reflejo de su vivir, dando a nuestro pueblo conciencia histórica y algo muy importante, su verdadera identidad”. Literature was to be a vehicle to celebrate “nuestros triunfos o para gritar la indignación que provocan las injusticias” (qted. in Anon. 8). Once the legitimacy of Chicano literature was established, one could talk about the “Chicano literary Renaissance.” The Chicano Renaissance was the product of a movement that sought to refashion the image of the Mexican and the Mexican American as inferior, untrustworthy, savage, and depraved, frequent since the very first border contacts between Mexicans and Anglos.17 Like the Chicano movement, the most acclaimed writers of the 16

Chicano activists vindicated it as the document that was to guarantee the protection of civil and property rights of their people. These guarantees had failed to come true and people like López Tijerina made an important task of consciousness raising about the violation of its provisions since 1848. The legal implications of the treaty were applied to the context of the Civil Rights Movement. The movement contributed to a historical awareness that the American Southwest was occupied territory. See Richard Griswold del Castillo “The Chicano Movement and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo” (1988). 17 As derogatory images of Mexican Americans, Philip Ortego cites Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1959), W.W.H. Davis’s ElGringo: Or New Mexico and Her People (1857), Walter Prescott Webb’s The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1965), and Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat (1965), as helping in the perpetuation of these disparaging images. See his “The Chicano Renaissance.”

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Renaissance followed an indigenist course and claimed an Indian past and the myths of the Aztec and Mayan peoples, thus avoiding any kind of identification with a “Hispanic” (European) past (Ortego 580). In his essay “Canonical and Noncanonical Works” (1990) Juan Bruce-Novoa alleges that the Chicano Movement's urgent need to delineate a Chicano identity was a political determinant in the configuration of the Chicano canon. Works like Raymond Barrio’s The Plum Plum Pickers (1969), José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959) and Richard Vásquez’s Chicano (1970) were always present in courses on Chicano literature in the Universities of the Southwest, whereas others like Floyd Salas’ Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), John Rechy’s City of Night (1967) and Numbers (1967), or Josephina Niggly’s Mexican City (1947) were excluded because of their sidestepping of ethnicity. BruceNovoa mentions a similar canonization process in the 1970s when the three Quinto Sol prize winners, Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and Rolando Hinojosa, became the “Chicano Big Three” (“Canonical” 122). Their respective works had in common a nostalgic view of the past as well as a narrow focus on ethnicity and on a positive communal image. Bruce-Novoa says that the novels of Oscar Zeta Acosta, published also during the 70s but not awarded much recognition, offered a controversial counterpart. The traumas of Acosta’s characters, ensuing from their excessive concern with ethnicity in a heterogeneous U.S. society, interrogate the premises of a movement based on the affirmation of Chicano identity (122-126). In fact, the critic Raymund A. Paredes sustains that Acosta’s work “is problematical” when it comes to categorization “because [he] wants so desperately to retrieve his ethnic heritage” (74). The socalled “Chicanesque Writings,” works by non-Chicano writers like John Nichols who immersed themselves into Chicano culture and wrote about it, also posed a problem for the canon. However, Bruce-Novoa says the only rationale for distinguishing these works from Chicano works was that the writers were not of Mexican descent (“Canonical” 134). 125

Today, the criticism of Chicano culture and literature has changed its initially narrow focus on the description of an “essential” Chicano identity. As Francisco Lomelí has pointed out, various shifts in identity have taken place amongst those who are generically known as Chicanos or Mexican Americans. In consequence, one needs to acknowledge that many of the works Chicanos are claiming for themselves might be “common to two national and/or ethnic literary histories” (“Po(l)etics” 230). Lomelí observes that we should look for the links between contemporary works and a literary past, but he also deems it necessary to consider that the formal identification of those works has not always been under the very political, liberationist rubric of “Chicano.” Indeed, depending on whether a work had been published in 1815, 1831, or 1848, it could have been labeled as Hispanic, Mexican, or American (245). The intersection of theory and practice, aesthetics and critique, individual authorship and collective consciousness, history and mythology that characterizes Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera have caused it to become a constant referent for those who have theorized the implications on their respective fields of a cross-cultural Mexican experience. Borderlands has become an inspirational source for new ways of looking at literary history, and for linking cultural productions to a transnational political consciousness. Ramón Saldívar’s and José David Saldívar’s dialectical analyses of literature go beyond Bruce-Novoa’s search for a Chicano phenomenological literary space in Retrospace.18 They call for a new dialogical model of American literary and cultural history where the subject’s constant crossing from one space to another results in a variety of ideological positions depending on how class origins, racial, and gender differences have affected this subject’s relation to hegemonic culture. 18

Bruce-Novoa’s theory of “the space of Chicano literature” sustained that the dominant paradigm of these works was the creation of order out of the chaos of social life. Thus, the real, “discontinous” conflictive socio-cultural spaces dissolve in the “continuity” of universalizing literary images and textual constructions.

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In his groundbreaking Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), Ramón Saldívar extends “Anzaldúa’s guiding figure of the border as the primary metaphor of the particularly dialectical subject position articulated by each of the texts” he chooses to discuss (218). His theory revealed Chicano/a narrative to be in a constant dialectical relationship with the codes of American and Mexican society, a dialectic that never resulted in assimilation, synthesis and resolution, but in conflict. The work of José David Saldívar and the other theorists included in Criticism in the Borderlands (1991) intends to “remap the borderlands of theory and theorists” and travel “between first and third worlds, between cores and peripheries, center and margins” (Criticism 7). Saldívar’s The Dialectics of Our America (1991) challenges American literary history by exploring the inter-connections between Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez, Chicano writers Rolando Hinojosa and Arturo Islas, and African writer Ntozake Shange. His more recent Border Matters (1997) explores musical, pictorial, and literary cultural manifestations, as well as the history of theorists and intellectuals of a borderlands that is not equated with the geographical border between Mexico and the U.S. Echoing Anzaldúa’s text, Saldívar refers to a “third culture” and a “third country,” thus challenging the idea that the U.S. southern border is Anglocentric on one side and Mexican on the other (8). Saldívar looks at American culture in terms of “‘migration’ and not only immigration” (8). He adopts a different approach to this other culture which is “placed in local frames of awareness, on the one hand, and situated globally, on the other,” but which “cannot be reduced to any nationally-based ‘tradition’” (12). Alfred Arteaga’s Bakhtinian analyses of Chicano poetry have taken a similar approach. This critic takes to task the Bakhtinian assumption that poetry tends to efface all the traits of social diversity in language and that the competition between languages is only to be found in the novel (Bakhtin 298). Arteaga’s “hybrid poetics,” and the notion of the “heterotext” refer to the constant competition of texts and cultural tendencies that inform all 127

Chicano literature (including poetry) in a way that goes beyond heteroglossia as Bakhtin initially conceived it. The logic of hybridization by which the Chicano/a subject constitutes itself in any textual production—be it drama, poetry, or narrative—does not allow for containment on the narrow conceptual axis of monologic nationalism (“Beasts” 280-1). Finally, and more significantly for the subject matter of this study, Anzaldúa’s “mestiza consciousness” has become paradigmatic of the new manifoldly constituted transnational “female subject of feminism.” For Teresa de Lauretis, this subject is “an inherent and at least for now irreconcilable contradiction” (“Eccentric” 120). In Bodies that Matter (1993) Judith Butler situates it in the “non-space” of cultural collision, where the terms of one’s identification are constantly shifting without necessarily involving the repudiation of others (117-124). In theorizing the feminism of women of color in relation with and opposition to Western feminism, Chela Sandoval evokes Anzaldúa to exemplify a subjectivity “with the capacity to recenter depending upon the kinds of oppression to be confronted” (822). For Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Anzaldúa’s text is one of the key documents of what she calls “Border Feminism,” a feminism that “deconstructs geopolitical boundaries” and “resides in a space not acknowledged by hegemonic culture” [my emphasis] (211). “Border feminism” is the term Sonia Saldívar uses to designate a theory and a practice that turns to the unwritten history of the border cities and fields where Chicanas and other post-colonial women work for multinational corporations. Border feminism is concerned with what it means to be a woman according to traditional standards in urban and rural environments. As Norma Alarcón says in her essay “Chicana Feminism” (1990), Chicana feminist discourse has not only broadened the concept of the Chicano political class, but also established alliances with another “woman-of-color” political class which has a national and international scope. This new feminist discourse acknowledges the complexity of women’s circumstances at the individual and collective level, and the fact that the erasure of 128

difference and conflict is perhaps the most difficult to fulfill of all human desires. It sustains that affiliation can only be built on the grounds of a conscious political kinship and sympathy, but never assuming a “natural” bond amongst women. Hence, woman-ofcolor feminisms undermine the assumption there is an equalizing gender system that grants similar gender roles to all women. The new transnational or woman-of-color feminisms urge us to ask ourselves a similar question to the one Debra Castillo reproduces from a dialogue between Latin American feminist critics: “[We] still have to ask what an illiterate Indian servant has in common with, for example, a writer like Victoria Ocampo. Don’t you believe that Indian woman would “equalize” better with her male counterpart than with her fellow woman?” (qted. in Castillo 308). Castillo concludes that in Latin America it would be absurd to speak of gender issues without dealing with race and class issues beforehand. The political alliance of feminists of color is based on what Chandra Mohanty has called “a common context of struggle” created by “underdevelopment, oppressive traditions, high illiteracy, rural and urban poverty, religious fanaticism, and ‘overpopulation’” (“Cartographies” 7). With the internationalization of economies and labor forces and the massive migration of formerly colonized populations to Europe and the U.S., this context has extended beyond the boundaries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to other parts of the first world. In the United States Latinas identify politically as “women of color” in spite of their very different cultural realities: “[T]heir voices share an awareness of their insertion into a history of colonization and neo-colonialism” (Ortega 8). As Mohanty says, to become a woman has much more to do with the convergence of race, class, and sexual ideologies than with the fact of being female (“Cartographies” 12-13). Transnational feminist theory cannot accept gender as the only category of oppression. What matters in this kind of criticism is not so much what women do, but, as Judith Butler would have it, how what women do is interpreted within their particular cultural and sociopolitical context. 129

To conclude this section, I would like to remark on the fact that throughout this book the name Chicano/a is being used in keeping with Norma Alarcón’s contention that it is “not a name that women or men are born to or with, as is often the case with ‘Mexican’”(“Chicana Feminism” 249). Alarcón argues that this name is now “consciously and critically assumed” and serves “as point of redeparture for dismantling historical conjunctures of crisis, confusion, political and ideological conflict and contradictions of the simultaneous effects of having ‘no names,’ having ‘many names,’ not ‘know(ing) her names’ and being someone else’s ‘dreamwork’” (“Chicana Feminism” 250). The diverse culture of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands of the present and the past testifies to the fact that “Chicano/a” is a signifier that cuts across a variety of identities and oppositional fronts (Mexican, Spanish, Hispanic, Third World, working class, feminist, man/woman of color, etc.). “Chicano/a” is also an epistemological category that has been shaped and is shaping much of the theory and practice produced in the U.S. today. All in all, the geopolitical awareness that is gradually permeating Chicano/a feminist and cultural studies stresses the fictional character of myths of national, ethnic, and familial unity. Domestic and local spaces are by no means safe, detached, and protected. “Local spaces” like the barrio are neither havens from the outside world nor culturally homogeneous ethnic communities as they have often been represented. They are instead what Cornel West has called, the “ragged edges of the Real,” places of conflict and urban warfare that result from global processes of economic expansion and urbanization (“Postmodern Culture” 515-520). The margins of the postmodern condition also include industrial factories and fields in the U.S.-Mexico border, where we see rigid immigration policies enforced by increasing militarization and the economic subordination of documented and undocumented workers. Unstable and heterogeneous as these “local” spaces and places may be, they are by no means politically neutral, inactive sites. Since American society is not an open public ethos where one may participate independently of race and 130

class, but a “private” space where citizenship is restricted, it is in these very “ragged edges” of society that resistance struggles to the present configuration of a “privatized” public sphere emerge. Scholars such as Sarah Ruddick (1989), Mary Ryan (1990) and Nancy Fraser (1997) have focused on the ways in which marginal groups that are not part of the public arena have been “rethinking the public sphere” (Fraser 70). This sphere, encompassing the apparatuses of the state, the official economy, and other forums of public opinion and discourse is generally viewed as opposed to the home, the ethnic group, sexuality, and religion, which constitute the “private” sphere of life. Social scientists like Ryan and Fraser speak of groups of people, usually excluded from a supposedly democratic society, which take issues considered to be “private” and “local” to the public arena, thus becoming, in Fraser’s words, “competing counterpublics” (75). Latino/a social movements in the U.S., such as MALCS (Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social) or MEChA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) constitute some of these counterpublics. Literature and art, in the interstices of the public and the private, also partake in the creation of a counterdiscourse.

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Part II Battlegrounds

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The marked emphasis on communal and family union of the cultural politics of Chicano activism in the 1960s is one of the main influences upon the literary production and criticism of the 1970s and 80s. An example of the regional emphasis of Chicano criticism is Thomas Vallejos’ essay “Ritual Process and the Family in the Chicano novel” (1983). Vallejos argues that the male protagonists of the classic novels Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Y no se lo tragó la tierra (1987) attain maturity, selfdiscovery, and communal integration through a ritual process entailing the rediscovery of “the traditions preserved by their families and their communities” (14). Vallejos observes that, in contrast, Pocho (1959), the also classic novel by José Antonio Villarreal, casts a negative look upon Chicano culture. In his view Pocho disintegrates the ritual process that leads the characters in Tierra and Última to the discovery of the richness of their culture and of importance of communal ties for survival. In Pocho the individual’s conflict between the values of the old and the new culture is never resolved. Vallejos concludes that the novel places more weight on the marginality of Chicanos versus the American mainstream than on the presence of Mexican communal solidarity and traditions (15). His analysis establishes an immediate connection between the richness of a coherent Chicano heritage and the unity of the family, an association that is based on the opposition of Chicano familial tradition and American modern life. Contemporary Chicana writers like Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Cherríe Moraga, Isabella Ríos, and Helena Viramontes have reflected an ambivalent position towards both Mexican and Anglo American values. They have thus avoided the fetishization of Chicano/a spaces, the detachment from American society, and the narrow focus on ethnicity and positive communal images that characterized the early Chicano literature of the 1970s. Their

works are realistic portrayals of the cultural and gender conflicts across generations, families, and social groups. Chicana writers launch more or less explicit critical assessments of Mexican American women’s double dedication to the domestic and public sphere of labor, as well as of Mexican and American patriarchal structures that thwart their independence, imagination, and creativity. They speak of Mexican American women’s double discrimination within the Chicano/Mexican community and within the American public ethos. This critique has also been developed by Chicana historians and ideologues in their rewritings of contemporary history from a feminist point of view. They emphasize the liminality or “borderland” dialectics that we are to find in Southwestern conceptualizations of social, gender, class, and race relations. Historian and social anthropologist Patricia Zavella objects to the functionalist “machismo” model, according to which Mexican folk tradition is expressed in “familistic” values. This model assumes the premise that Mexican American families constitute a separate world from that of American institutions, and that the American family model is more egalitarian: “Structurally, the traditional American family is similar to the traditional Mexican family; the assumption that the former is somehow more modern is unfounded” (13). Studies on the Chicano family such as Adolfo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez’s in La Chicana: The Mexican-American Woman (1979) and Leo Grebler et al. in Introduction to Chicano Studies (1973), have described the family as an important source of support for the individual. However, their work on the effect of immigration, rural exploitation, and urban life upon the family, fails to consider the full implications of these factors on traditional women’s roles. While they show that the rigidity of machismo has diminished with the exposure of males to American urban life, these studies highlight the persistence of traditional family roles, and disregard the major changes in women’s roles within Mexican American families. An instance of this is that, in their reevaluation of the Chicana woman in the family, Adolfo Mirandé and Evangelina 136

Enríquez reiterate the separation between the private and the public domains and the division of labor between men and women. In the authors’ own words men and women are given power “within their respective spheres” (117). Since the U.S. invasion of Mexican territory in the 19th Century, Southwestern society suffered a gradual transformation from a feudal system into a capitalist system of exploitation. Rodolfo Acuña tells us the lure of capital accumulation led some ranchers and patrones to favor annexation by the U.S. out of selfinterest, which led to the division of Mexican patrones and Mexican laboring masses (129). Acuña sidesteps the effect of this economic shift on the sexual division of labor. In contrast, the works of Vicki Ruiz, Rosaura Sánchez, and Patricia Zavella have inquired into the impact of this annexation onto gender roles both inside and outside the family. As soon as Mexican territory became American, an immense mass of Mexican workers were “proletarianized,” segregated from the Anglo population, and displaced from their previous vaquero or sheep-herding jobs. Although, in principle, Mexican American women were not allowed to work outside their homes, they started to work in the fields during the harvest and later on, in fruit canneries, fruit processing plants, or as domestics. As women acquired greater autonomy, their role ceased to be restricted to the private sphere of the home. In her analysis of Southwestern “capitalist patriarchy” incipient at the end of the nineteenth century, Patricia Zavella argues that the control of women’s work and sexuality went hand in hand with the control of labor by capitalist relations. The contradictions between patriarchy (the interest in women's familiar and personal service) and capitalism (strong in certain periods such as during W.W.II when women's entrance into the labor market was favored), began to be solved in the nineteenth century with the ideology of woman's “proper place” and the “family wage.” The former ensured woman's position in the home as moral guardian, which reinforced her inferior status in the labor market. The latter supposedly ensured that men were paid 137

enough to support a family so women would not have to work. According to Zavella, the American ideology of the nuclear family and romantic love relations was an illusion that, through the opposition family/work, private/public, both enhanced and masked women's subordination and their status as secondary workers with a double day (4-5). In the particular case of Chicana labor history the family has also been instrumental for the maintenance of labor power, and women have always been seen as secondary workers within both a racial and class hierarchy. Zavella tells us that in colonial times, Mexico was already socially divided according to race stratification: Indians, Blacks and “mixed races” worked for the white settlers. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Mexicans in the Southwest started to lose their land to Anglo businessmen and Mexicans were “proletarianized” according to a class structure based on racial domination. Racial discrimination resulted in a system of “dual wages”—by which Chicanos were paid much less than white workers—, in the racial segregation of towns, as well as in political and cultural repression. “Greaser towns” and barrios appeared after 1910 as Mexican immigrants brought their families to live with them near the mines or the railroad tracks. In the case of the braceros or Chicano farm workers, entire families worked together in the fields. Mexican women working as domestics or in canneries received lower wages than white women at the end of the previous century and well into the twentieth. Chicanas have mostly been doing what is considered to be “women's work,” that is, less valuable work. This discrimination on the part of employers is due to the low educational level of Chicanas and their lack of skills. Also furthering discrimination are the particular constructions of morality that inform Third World women's self-abasement and lack of resistance. Chandra Mohanty mentions sexist stereotypes like “sewing is a woman's job” or the notion that “third world women are more docile and obedient” (30). Betty Garcia-Bahne has also emphasized that women’s acceptance of the stereotype of the “good mother” as the self-sacrificing, unassertive woman, has 138

made them more vulnerable and more available to abuse, for their only sources of fulfilment become their children, their husband, and consumerism (40). To conclude, we may say that in the case of the ChicanoMexican working class, economic conditions and discriminatory practices have combined and developed into a specific conception of family and community, in which traditional ideology still has an important influence, but merges with the American ideology of capitalist patriarchy. In this Mexican American ideology there is no rightful and secure place for the doubly discriminated Mexicanas and Chicanas. These women’s lives and sense of self in the borderland of two ideologies has been the focus of much of Chicana writing. Many of the characters in these works are caught in-between fanciful expectations and oppressive rules. They move between Mexican and/or American feminine role models and gender discriminatory practices; between the hopes of a better future and a reality of economic and social deprivation; between the desire to belong somewhere and the rejection from a variety of potential homes and communities. As Castillo, Cisneros, Moraga, Ríos, and Viramontes show in their writings, there is no ideal home or ideal community for the other, especially if she is female.

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3 Borderlands Domesticities Chicana writers have largely focused on the home as a space of conflict and confinement where women are caught between the restrictions of Mexican patriarchy and those of the American socio-cultural system. They have thus reinhabited the domestic sphere through a poetics based on the experience of triple gender, race, and class discrimination; an experience of silence, yearning, rage, and isolation. Isabella Ríos’ novel Victuum (1976), set in a Southern Californian barrio, portrays Mexican American women’s daily experiences and discloses the gender, class, and race ideologies that condition the young protagonist’s desire to break loose through the imagination. More critical and moving, Sandra Cisneros’ and Helena Viramontes’ works deal with Mexican American women’s experience of fear, selflessness, estrangement, and commotion within the family and the home. Cisneros has stated that her first home in the Mexican barrio of Chicago did not have anything to do with the intimate, comfortable, unchangeable space of the early home described by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1957). Cisneros found her own voice as a writer when she realized that Bachelard’s theory of inner space could not offer a satisfactory model for writing about the experience she had had: “[T]he street, third-floor flats, fear of rats, and drunken husbands” (“Ghosts and Voices” 72-73). A daughter of a large migrant family of Los Angeles, Helena Viramontes has also described the home as a place of contradictions for women. As she says in her essay “Nopalitos” (1989), it is in the home where working-class women may find support, but it is also there where their caretaking and domestic activities destroy their sense of self and silence them. These three writers address the interrelated middleclass Mexican, Hispanic, and American ideologies of marriage, domesticity, love, and beauty that pervade these spaces, and set out to question and demystify them in the working-class context

of their characters. From their passionate, committed writings springs a poetics, albeit a poetics of harsh, violent spaces that are as dynamic, changing, and internally conflictive as the lives of the characters that inhabit them. 3.1. An Imaginary Escape from Domesticity: Isabella Ríos’ Victuum “they left spaces in my mind” that’s what it’s like living in the barrio spaces are left in the mind knowing something else exists but you are addicted to the city family and friends it’s safe there in the barrio you can handle it no one expects anything all you have to do is stay alive and keep out of trouble spaces are the things you know exist the talents that go unrecognized because the fear of failing while grasping opportunity that exists elsewhere is much too overwhelming Irene Blea, “Spaces like the Barrio” (1980)

Irene Blea’s poem makes a clear differentiation between the “known” social space of the barrio and the “imaginary” spaces that lie “elsewhere” and are inaccessible to a speaker who would like to see her talents recognized, but still prefers to stay where it 142

is “safe.” My reading of Isabella Ríos’ novel evolves around the main female character’s transition from the familiar and yet also constraining spaces of the home and the barrio, to a space “elsewhere” that is the product of her powerful imagination. The novel, relating the story of a Mexican American woman born in a working-class barrio of Oxnard (California), is divided into two parts that respectively correspond to these two stages of the characters’ life. Victuum (1976) begins with Valentina’s first-person account of her own birth in free direct speech. The voices of both Valentina and her mother at the time of Valentina’s birth merge through a juxtaposition of monologues. In the immediacy of a fictionalized present, Ríos brings together the unmediated voices of mother and daughter, thus hinting at the mutual identification that is to prevail in the novel: Wet...Wet...Wetness...the water bag is broken...Oh, it is time! ... What is the time? ... [...] How sad I was to learn that again I was pregnant, but I grew accustomed to my womb’s constant stretching, and knowing that a human being was miraculously developing with my help...How the little thing depended on me so...detachment will soon part our nearness and the babe will be its own... [...] How I dislike bringing this woman pain, for this woman is my mother, and that small churning body is my own...the body my sound will enter...for with the slap of earthly awaking, my vocal chords will force my mouth to stretch and screech out that melody of human life.... (2)

At the beginning of Ríos’ story, a first-person narrator relates her detachment from a primary, cosmic consciousness as she is born into a Chicano working-class environment. After her birth, there begins a journey to recover her previous symbiosis with this universal consciousness, referred to as the “knowledge of yesteryears” (2). As the character’s first-person consciousness says at the beginning of the chapter, “[a]ll will be forgotten. I will cling close to instinct and intuition, yet my tongue will lack the maneuverability to express all that I feel. My eyes will exist in darkness until enlightment chooses to blaze from their enclosed profundity” (2). 143

As a proof of this difficulty at articulating feeling, Valentina’s subsequent interventions as a storyteller, a narrator, or a judge of character are very scarce, and the story line or plot disappears as the novel proceeds through dialogue. The novel is written in an almost “unliterary” style: There is hardly any figuration or description, and the language is simple, prosaic, and conversational. Ríos’ experimental style breaks with conventional narrative and story-telling techniques. Like a film or drama script, the plot develops through dialogues with almost no temporal or spatial reference. The perspective of the main character will prevail over that of other characters, but, since there is no narrative mediation, the voices of these other characters are granted a considerable degree of autonomy. The first part, comprising almost the whole novel and set in a time period ranging from the mid-twenties to the mid-sixties, relates Valentina’s childhood and adolescence in the midst of a patriarchal family with middle-class aspirations. Towards the end of this first part, the novel focuses on the hardships Valentina’s family has to face after the father’s death. The absence of description, as well as the simplicity and everyday character of the dialogues result in a realistic picture of Valentina’s and her family’s everyday lives; in the writer’s own words, “a feeling that the occurrence is happening there and then” (“Isabella Ríos” 59). As Francisco A. Lomelí has remarked, this dramatic technique gives the novel a very “auditive” character (“Isabella Ríos” 59). In the second part, Valentina is happily married, has nine children, and has abandoned her job after a brief incursion into the professional world. This last and much briefer section relates her coming to terms with a supernatural capacity and telepathic power which have been virtually absent in the first part of the novel. These special powers will allow her to travel beyond historical time and space and establish supernatural contact with prominent figures of Western history, philosophy, science, and mythology. Lomelí has argued that in Ríos’ novel there is an incipient focus on the individual in the sense that the writer is not simply 144

concerned with conveying “a collective self” like other Chicano writers such as Tomás Rivera, and Miguel Méndez do in their respective ...y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971) and Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974)” (“Isabella Ríos” 49). Given the attention given to personal development and to a single character’s relationship to her familial and cultural environment, Ríos’ work is closer to Rudolfo Anaya’s Bildungsroman Bless Me Ultima. Victuum can also be said to anticipate other novels by Chicanas constructed around short episodes or vignettes where self-introspective narration is more developed. Indeed, the writings of Sandra Cisneros and Helena Viramontes go a step further in their emphasis on the autonomy of the female voice and on processes of self-discovery. Although Valentina is the main character of the novel and we tend to hear her voice more often than those of others, the virtual lack of self-reflexivity in the narrative process, as well as the increasing protagonism of a multiplicity of voices, turn this work into a multivocal collective genre. As native of Oxnard, Isabella Ríos (Diana López) has said that the novel is a “total selfexpression of the culture from which I come” (“Isabella Ríos” 5455). Lomelí sees this work both as a psychic novel and as a “Bildungsroman about a Chicana” (“Isabella Ríos” 49). He also comments on the various generic forms that intersect in this work: “[I]t borders on the science fiction [...], the metaphysical initiation novel [...], the biographical (which becomes confused with the autobiographical point of view […]), the historical-epic [...], the psychological and the magical real ” (“Isabella Ríos” 4950). If we may talk about this novel as “biographical” or “autobiographical” we can only do so by acknowledging that the “real” source of the female “I” whose perspective we are given wants to be deliberately hidden from its readers. This “I” results from the fictionalization of the lives of two women, both of whom blend in the character of Valentina. Ríos has said that she writes about “what [she] know[s]:” “I write about womanhood, being a woman, because I am a woman” (“Isabella Ríos” 58). The 145

blurring of fact and fiction is already purposely enacted in the pseudonym with which the writer, Diana López, chooses to conceal her real identity in order to keep the privacy of her intimate thoughts (“Isabella Ríos” 60). The writer has stated that she has purposely disguised and protected the identity of another woman from her barrio, whom she has interviewed and whose biography she is partially transcribing in the novel (“Isabella Ríos” 58). Thus, complicity between women underlies the writing process of the novel, a process in which the writer is at once compiler, translator, mediator, biographer, and autobiographer. Her own individual story merges with that of the woman whose life experience she is relating. Lomelí sees in that translating process a desdoblamiento or a “a sort of dealing with yourself through someone else” (“Isabella Ríos” 60). Ríos’ novel reveals a characteristic of women’s autobiographical writing, which, as Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenk have remarked, demonstrates a marginal position to conventional displays of the self that assume authorial power and voice. In line with other critics of women’s autobiography, they argue that “self-definition in relation to significant others, is the most pervasive characteristic of the female autobiography” (“Introduction” 9). Victuum retains the conventional focus on the subject, but its narrative technique as well as the author’s displacement by and identification with a real woman and a fictional character, show that the subject can only be known in relation to others. Ríos’ concept of subjectivity is made manifest in this blurring of the self with the other, the real and the fictional. Françoise Lionnet has clearly exposed the reasons why autobiography may merge with or present itself as fiction: [T]he narrator’s process of reflection, narration, and self-integration within language is bound to unveil patterns of self-definition (and selfdissimulation) with which we are not always consciously familiar. [...] [T]he female narrator [...] exists in the text under circumstances of alienated communication because the text is the locus of her dialogue with a tradition she tacitly aims to subvert. (92-93)

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Apart from conflating a “real” self with a fictional self, Victuum also merges (auto)biographical history with collective history. The sociohistorical grounding of the novel makes the character’s story inseparable from that of the Mexican American community in Oxnard. The inhabitants of the Mexican American barrio in Oxnard are shown to have little relation with other spaces in the town due to their ethnicity and their class. This is a geographically isolated neighborhood, whose residents are foreign-born Mexicans established around an agricultural economy (Keefe and Padilla 181-87). Although the neighborhood’s interaction with the outside world is beyond Ríos’ aim in the novel, American and Hispanic influences are felt in the lives of her characters. The writer’s recuperation of the history of the Californios’ dispossession through the oral tales of her characters immediately relates her to previous women writers such as Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, whose works lament the “Hispanic” loss of property, lands, traditions and customs.1 As Keefe and Padilla tell us, the elite class of Californios, the native-born people that claimed Hispanic descent, used to hold the government positions before the arrival of the Anglos. The latter came to displace the inhabitants of the area and to dominate legal, political, and social institutions (17778). The stories of Valentina’s relatives disclose the impact of a collective history of occupation suffered by the Ríos and Ballesteros families during the Anglo invasion. These stories are told from a clearly revisionary and oppositional stance. Through Valentina’s mother and aunt, we hear about the expropriations of large extensions of land “by these so-called settlers”: “Thieves that’s what they were...squatters...thieves... Why our great 1

Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1884) is an explicit lament for the loss of Californios’ property, lands, traditions, and customs. Cabeza de Baca’s We Fed Them Cactus (1954) is a nostalgic recollection of the writer’s family's life in a Nuevo-Mexican hacienda and an account of the loss and destruction of the land with the arrival of the Anglo settlers.

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grandfather...they hung him from his own tree...just to steal his land...These gringos they took the land from the Mexican just taxed them to death and stepped right in and took it...” (151). Valentina’s father dismantles the Hollywood myth of the American cowboy and traces its history back to the years when Mexicans had cattle ranches in the Southwest and taught Americans to “guide the steer”: [T]he Mexican was the first cowboy here in the West, they were called Vaqueros. The Mexican taught foreigners, the gringos, how to rope and guide the steer. The Southwest was full of cattle ranches; the Southwest was Northern Mexico, you might say. Why, everyone spoke Spanish... not English... it wasn’t until those pioneers, or shall I say pirateers, from back East started treading upon this land, that we began to speak English. (114)

Adolfo is adamant in his claim that Spanish is the official language of the Southwest and edits a newspaper in Spanish that provides a forum for the discussion of the issues that affect people of Mexican descent in the U.S. The figures of Adolfo and other politically active men in the barrio are a direct reference to the growing core of proletarianized workers of Mexican origin in the years before the U.S. economic depression.2 Valentina is present in political debates where these men’s openly communist views, their criticism of Hoover’s social politics, and their open support of Roosevelt’s New Deal, testify to the importance of communist resistance ideals against the discriminatory practices of unbridled capitalism (Victuum 112-113): [W]hy, don’t you think it was gruesome what the aristocrats did to their 2

The activism of these men should be distinguished from that of the 1960s, which emphasized Mexican nationalism and addressed racial discrimination as a way of building solidarity among people of Mexican origin. Rodolfo Acuña says that the recruitment of Mexicans and other minorities by leftist movements in the 1930s was encouraged in order to prevent racism from dividing workers. However, trade unions continued to be racist and did not consider that issues of race needed to be addressed by progressive movements. See chapter 7 of his Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (1972).

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people! Yes, Maestro, but you and Senor Jimenez must agree, that wiping out an entire Royal family, why, that’s barbaric! Yes, but it had to be done... how otherwise could they bring change? ... Don’t you see, all of Russia was becoming a Siberia! ... All the people starving, dying needlessly while the royal family wined and dined with elaborate banquets [...] that’s exactly what it was becoming... there was no work... people dying from diseases...from malnutrition... and Hoover and those corrupt mongrels would sup in sheer royalty... ah, they should all be shot... (112)

These stories and street scenes become part of Valentina’s own story, which shows she cannot represent herself if it is not in relation to the collective history of her people and their day-today lives. If we assume it is Valentina who is telling the story, then she is both the mouthpiece, the addressee, and the referent of that collective history: She is telling it after having heard it, but she is also constituted by it. Within this dynamics of storytelling, the protagonist of Ríos’ novel is not an autonomous subject, but a collective one. Since Victuum was published in 1976, the novel might be expected to show a concern with a working-class struggle—commonly identified with the cultural and social Chicano Movement—as well as with women’s marginal position within the Mexican American community. The novel does indeed show a preoccupation with both issues, but does not do so in the terms of the identity politics established by the Civil Rights Movements of the mid 1960s. Ríos’ novel participates in the task of recovering communal and family history through narrative, but it does not even once allude to the indigenous myths and symbols that characterized most of the Mexican American cultural production during the Chicano movements of the 60s and 70s. These myths would be appropriated and redefined by Chicana feminists in the 80s. In fact, the occupation and conquest of the territory inhabited by the indigenous peoples of America is only mentioned in passing when Adolfo acknowledges the Indians are the original inhabitants of the area. The theme of dispossession, common to many of the border writings of the Southwest, is dealt 149

with by Ríos in a way that connects her more to a “Hispanic” than to a “Chicano” identity politics. From Valentina’s father’s “rags to riches” autobiographical story at the beginning of the novel, we learn that he descends from Spanish immigrants. From various stories told by Valentina’s mother and aunts, we know that the Ríos, Valentina’s mother’s family, used to be owners of large extensions of rancho land that were taken away from them. The lightness of Valentina’s complexion, just like that of her mother, is extolled from the very beginning of the novel, and it becomes a mark of excellence and status. In the second chapter of the novel, a distinction is made between the “Mexicans coming across the border every so often,” and “the old Californians” whom Valentina’s mother prefers as servants (5). Women have internalized the Anglo middle-class ideals of femininity, which combine with their belief in their superior “Spanish” pedigree. However, the novel shows the impossibility of those ideals to come true in the Californian barrio, and hence, draws attention to the discrepancy between the Ballesteros women’s social aspirations—the middle-class ideology they have internalized— and their actual socio-economic status. In this novel, the domestic and public realms, which according to the middle-class ideology of womanhood should remain separate, become blurred and confused in women’s lives. The first part of Victuum relates the struggles of the protagonist in a patriarchal family before and after her father’s death, and Valentina’s final fulfillment of the social expectations of a middle-class woman. Through the patriarchal mother, an agent of male-dominated institutions both in the father’s presence and absence, a domestic order and the traditional role of middleclass women are maintained. As a daughter, Valentina is a direct recipient of the codes of womanhood that require that she also become a mother. The first part of Victuum is indeed a clear exemplification of what Nancy Chodorow has called “the reproduction of mothering.”

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Chodorow’s account analyzes the particular form mothering adopts in Western society, and, more specifically, in American society. Chodorow’s assumption is that the patterns she delineates are universal and she, therefore, neglects the interaction of gender, race, and class issues in her theory on the constitution of the family. However, her analysis of the structural split between the private and the public reveals an awareness of simultaneous psychological and social processes that give rise to social expectations and patterns of behavior about gender. This theorist considers the function of mothering, women’s most important social location within Western society, as “a fundamental constituting feature of the sexual division of labor” and relates it to the institutions and ideology that underlie such a division (32). She concedes that role training and enforcement play a part in gender acquisition by creating and perpetuating social consensus about what is normal and adequate. Her main argument, nonetheless, is that psychological processes intervene in the maintenance of patterns of social behavior in spite of ideological changes and consciousness raising (35). For Chodorow, the sense of self of boys and girls is deeply related to the pattern of relations and identifications created in the Western family. Girls, she sustains, do not naturally identify with their mothers, as some psychological accounts presume. Primary preoedipal or relationship-seeking identification, associated with a sense of oneness and mutual mother-child attachment, is proven to be longer in daughters than in sons, but this is so because there is a socialization process that causes girls to base their sense of identity on the model provided by their mothers. In contrast, boys, who have been socially conditioned to abandon their pre-Oedipal relationship with their mothers, will eventually abandon their sense of empathy and mutual identification (166). This is what accounts for boys’ and girls’ internalization of their social roles within the private and public domains, as well as for the assumption that women’s sense of self is inferior. In fact, feminist psychoanalytical theory has shown that in a male-dominated society and larger culture where the reality principle (autonomy, 151

reason, individualism, profit) is symbolized by the father, the mother will still be thought of as having no identity. She will thus incite fears of dissolution and loss of identity once the male or female child has developed a sense of selfhood (Waugh 72-73). The prevalence of the pre-Oedipal, relational identification between mother and daughter, already alluded to at the very beginning of Ríos’ narrative, will be a recurrent leitmotif throughout the story. The transmission of the socially accepted “motherly” and “womanly” attributes such as availability, selfsacrifice, and submission are instilled in Valentina during her childhood through a harsh disciplinary parenting system, where the father is the utmost authority and the mother his immediate deputy. According to the codes of Hispanic patriarchy, Valentina is raised to be a “proper” woman and a mother in very similar conditions to those described by Chodorow. The bond between mother and daughter and the relational subjectivity of Valentina that such a bond has fostered are further enhanced through Valentina’s supernatural abilities. Already at the time of her birth Valentina is said to have been born with a gift for “the spiritual world” (4). Such a gift makes Valentina special and strengthens the bond with her mother, while it also serves to dignify her task of serving the community and the family. In this first part of the novel, her telepathic abilities are used preventively to predict possible aggressions the family will suffer at the hands of the federales or strangers, and to foreshadow the deaths or ill fate of relatives and friends. Valentina’s preventive abilities may be related to those of an outstanding archetypal heroine in Chicana literature, that of the curandera/bruja. The curandera has positive, curing, healing, and intuitive aspects, but as Tey Diana Rebolledo argues, this figure may also transform into or be associated with witchcraft, evil, and madness (Women Singing 80). Aware of the negative connotations of the pagan witch in traditional, Catholic, Hispanic culture, Valentina and her mother will keep this supernatural gift to themselves.

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Although Valentina’s subservient and docile disposition is an instance of her conformity towards the role she has socially been instructed to perform, she is also haunted by fears of dissolution, of loss of identity, as well as by a sense of inferiority. Valentina does not express hatred towards her mother, but she cannot hide her wish to escape the realm of domesticity where she perceives herself negatively in relation to others: Oh, if I could just live in a magic cottage, where the broom pops out of the closet and begins to sweep up everything into a dust pan! Then four dust cloths would march across into the living room, dust the two end tables, the coffee table, the big piano...the piano bench...the window sills...if only my sisters wouldn’t dance on the rug... (50)

The private domain, compared to the outside world of the father, is a constant ratification of women’s dependence, self-sacrifice, and inferiority. Patricia Waugh remarks that since the predominating model of subjectivity is one based on independence and self-improvement, a woman exclusively devoted to others is likely to perceive herself as “a shadow, a negative, an object” (48). Nancy Chodorow has stressed that women’s sense of negativity is grounded in the way femininity (women’s unique capacities for sacrifice, caring, and mothering) has been socially constructed and psychologically internalized by women and in the way women in their fantasies associate men with virtue and growth (83). Valentina’s familial environment instills in her the notion that her father is, in her mother’s words, “the smart one” (153), or as the people in the neighborhood call him, the maestro. Her belief in her father’s superior subjectivity will govern her subsequent identification with him in the second part of the work. In this first part, however, her father’s death and the subsequent economic hardships of her family, force her to serve others both in the domestic realm and in the outside world. Her internal conflict between the “ideal self” the father represents and the socially constructed “womanly” self is aggravated as she reaches 153

adolescence and cannot cope with her triple day as domestic woman, family provider, and student: “Oh God...why do I have to go through all of this? I have no one to turn to...no one understands! Why dear God, do we have to be poor? [...] I get so tired of all this...so tired...everyday, everyday” [sic] (225). Ríos’ novel offers a realistic description of how efforts to keep the private and the public spheres of life separate from each other are futile in the working-class environment of Meta Street. In spite of reiterating the dignity and high social standing of the Ballesteros-Ríos family, Victuum gradually unfolds the racial and class prejudices inherent in the constitution and transmission of identity. The novel depicts the tension between the need to identify oneself with and assert certain role models and ideals of masculinity and femininity and the impossibility of fulfilling them completely in the circumstances in which Valentina’s family lives. Ríos makes a point of showing that however educated, hardworking, and admired Valentina’s father (the maestro) may be, he is ultimately an abusive father and husband, a bootlegger, and a drunkard. Much as these women claim and are said to be beautiful lightskinned ladies, they are subject to abuse and aggression both within their families and their communities. Certain patterns repeat themselves with crushing and tragic inevitability: Women elope or marry early, husbands drink and beat them up, sons are favored over daughters, men abandon and/or are unfaithful to women, women are sexually harassed by strangers. Domestic violence is an important theme in the story and constant in almost all marriages. Valentina’s sister Veve runs away with Lucero and marries him “because she felt people would talk” (80), only to be exposed to his drunken attacks of jealousy. Isabel also elopes and marries very young in spite of her mother’s warning about “the life that awaits her” (200). The title of the novel, Victuum, punning on the word “victim” may be viewed as referring to both Valentina’s victimization and that of the network of women to whom she relates. Indeed, they are trapped between the strictures

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of a middle-class model of female conduct, and life in the poor, destitute barrio of Meta Street. Isabella Ríos has said that in Victuum she writes about “being a woman.” Yet, as Elisabeth Spelman has observed, “being a woman” may seem to the most important fact conditioning the experience of females, but it is not the only one. Spelman contends that to focus on the patriarchal family and the social discourse that promotes it, does not provide enough of a social context to explain how motherhood is socially mediated. As she puts it, “[investigation] of ethnicity and class and race within that social structure might make us consider the possibility that what one learns when one learns one’s gender identity is the gender identity appropriate to one’s ethnic, class, national, and racial identity” (Inessential 88). Despite Ríos’ intention to write only about “being a woman,” the socio-historical and geographical conjuncture of the experience she narrates informs her story in a way that shows the class and race discourses at work in the specific Mexican American ideology of womanhood she is reproducing. In Meta Street, a barrio of Mexican immigrants, the Ballesteros sisters are constantly exposed to racial discrimination both on the streets and at school. In these public environments they are prevented from speaking Spanish and, as the following comments from a white woman and a schoolmate illustrate, are treated as “dirty Mexicans.” “Listen, you dirty little brat, don’t be coming around here yelling for that filthy Indian! [...] “You just go back to that house of whores [...]. “You females think you’re so high and mighty... you dirty Mexicans. All of you... all of you up and down this street—nothing but dirty Mexicans.” (51) “Ah teacher... when are those dirty Mexicans going to get out of our room and go back to their own school... or to their own room where they belong!” (67)

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In a predominantly Mexican immigrant neighborhood their reputation as respectable women is also at stake as they are judged according to the stereotype of the loose Mexican woman even by the local authorities. Isabella responds to these accusations by defending the dignity of Valentina: “You had absolutely no business asking my daughter such questions; after all, she is very innocent... a young virgin... I must say… you terrified her with your vulgarity!” (Victuum 242-243). The respectability of the Ballesteros-Ríos family is constantly asserted with an emphasis on certain social codes that are emblematic of an educated middle class. The lady-like qualities, the dressing style, and the beauty of the Ballesteros girls are the object of the barrio neighbors’ admiration. The girls are given an especially strict education to become, in their father’s words, “young ladies...goddesses for a man to worship...virgin princesses” (146). These women live in a culture that disciplines their bodies in order to mould them in the image of the middle-class woman. From the perspective of the middle class, attachment to a woman is only possible if she is under control, that is, if she is the “right” kind of woman. Patricia Waugh comments on the immense ambivalence of women’s bodies in the “masculine” imagination: They represent both the affiliative human ties secured within the realm of domesticity, and a fearful essence that ultimately cannot be controlled (75). Since the Ballesteros women’s bodies are the sites of two competing cultural discourses, the discipline on their bodies is especially daunting. While they strive to be the “right” kind of women, there is always the risk that they might be looked upon otherwise as dirty, promiscuous, Mexican women. The stigmatized figure of the dark, indigenous woman produced by colonial discourse hovers over the lives of Valentina and her sisters as a reminder of what they may become in the eyes of others if they do not assert the “proper” womanhood that is accepted within Western patriarchal society. The effects of this discourse on the subordination of women and their strict confinement to the home have been dealt with by 156

prominent feminist critics of Latin American culture and Latina culture in the U.S. Jean Franco says this rigidity established that there were three spaces women would traditionally occupy: the home, the convent, or the brothel. The strict confinement of women to the home, the space that concerns us here, has very clear racial implications in the Latin American context: [T]he virtual confinement of married women to the home had not only been required by the Church but was also intended to ensure the purity of blood that Spanish society had imposed after the wars against the Moors. Thus, the mother’s immobility is related to racism and to the protection of inheritable property. (507)

This racialized sexist discourse, subsequently transmitted to Latin American society during and after the conquest, established a connection between racial purity and spiritual purity. As Debra Castillo points out, “women of good family who escape are madwomen by definition” (11). Hence the disturbance caused in the Ríos family by the elopement of their eldest daughter Isabel. The immobility of women, and particularly, of the mother, has its roots in the nationalist, colonial, and post-colonial discourses mentioned in 2.3. Any form of streetwalking and transgression of the limits of the private domestic realm is seen as an infringement of the official morality. It is befitting those women of lower social and racial status, who are more prone to promiscuity, and who lack the womanly pudor and recato of the middle-class woman (Castillo 16). In the Americas, Norma Alarcón observes, “the” native woman is identified with the reproduction of barbarie; in order to be able to speak at all, she has to validate her status as a woman by conforming to the “European,” “civilizing” norms about what is right for a woman to do. This is almost impracticable if she is not ‘married’ or if she has no chances of coming into contact with the “right” kind of man (Alarcón, “Chicana” 252). Victuum recurrently voices the social convention that a proper husband is a woman’s vehicle towards a respectable position in society as a mother. In fact, the loss of status that follows 157

Valentina’s father’s death propels most of the dramatism of this first part of the novel. While Adolfo is still alive, the Ballesteros enjoy a reasonably comfortable status that allows for domestic service and the latest appliances: “[A] new washing machine...the latest...Norge...the best, no less, and an excellent Eureka vacuum...the latest model; [...] new fangled cleaning contraptions [and] [...] a house-cleaner comin’ at her beck’n call!” (62). And yet, Isabella’s middle-class aspirations are not at all satisfied in Oxnard. She yearns for a “Spanish style home” away from the “barbary area” in which Adolfo has chosen to live in order to be close to the people of Mexican origin (102). After Adolfo’s death, domesticity becomes even more oppressive for Valentina. The rebellious tomboy who had so far resented doing household duties and had cut her eyelashes so as not to be subject to men’s stares, has been “domesticated” and follows her mother’s severe dictates by the book. Valentina’s mother, Isabella, is now in charge of providing for the family while she is also compelled to demonstrate that she, in spite of her husband’s death, retains all her respectability. A good schooling and musical education are signs of social status and dignity which, even after her husband’s decease, Isabella insists on giving to her children. Although after Adolfo’s death both Valentina and her mother will have to work outside their home, we are reminded of the prestige the maestro enjoyed in the neighborhood and that the family comes from “good stock” (206). As if to make amends for the destitution the family has fallen into, Isabella also prides herself that they have been able to preserve their dignity by not resorting to anyone’s nor the government’s financial help even after Adolfo’s death: Oh, if only he were alive to carry the burdens of this family... and all its troubles and struggles for survival [...]. Thank God, we have what we have... and I’ve never needed to beg from anyone... At least that’s one thing; we have maintained our dignity... Why, Papa wouldn’t have stood for it... if we were to receive help from the government. (Victuum 227)

However, the rigid demarcation between the domestic and public spheres in Isabella’s family has broken down, thus 158

exposing their permeability when economic conditions that should enable their separation are absent. As Kari Boyd-McBride has stated, in rural and urban contexts women don’t actually live in a world of clear boundaries, even though the ideal of domesticity for both the upper and lower classes establishes a clear distinction between the private and the public. Women cannot be placed only in the limited context of the factory-worker family or in clear-cut categories of class or of private-public spheres as most feminist Marxist analyses do. Many women have contributed to their families’ economies, but always within the limitations of the role that suited a certain class identity and structure. Boyd-McBride points out that the cult of domesticity was “a pseudoreligious ideal for women of both middle and lower classes” that preserved the myth of women’s domestic nature, while, in fact, the public and private merged in their lives (93). Class consciousness is maintained through a system of codes that is not associated to production. Home decoration, dressing, speech, and other conventions distinguish one class from another. There is a particular effort in maintaining such a system in times of economic hardship and crisis, for at those times income alone is not enough to maintain class distinctions.3 Boyd-McBride concludes that in the realm of domesticity, where sex and not class is the basic category conditioning the type of work women do, it is not work that separates one class from another, but the cultural codes through which women understand their work and construct it socially (93).

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Following Marx, Dolores Hayden says that women’s labor in the household does not necessarily alienate them as much as their own labor does men in a capitalistic society (92). According to Hayden, housework is more meaningful than factory work because it involves childcare. Hayden claims that women are only alienated when they are excluded from the institutions that “shape the cultural world in accord with their own dynamic” or when women have to combine factory work with domestic labor (92). Boyd-McBride opposes this romantic view of housework for, as she argues, it does not help us understand why women are subordinate participants in public dialogues, or why their housework is downgraded in many cultures.

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Given the lack of economic solvency of the family and Isabella’s temporary loss of her home, the emphasis on cleanliness, domesticity, discipline, and hard work represents Isabella’s attempt to prove the fantasy of her superior standing as a middle-class woman. The barrio of Meta Street becomes even more menacing to her and her family’s identity now that they may be seen as one of the many poor Mexican families living on the street. Her refusal to marry below her former husband’s social standing is one more assertion of the identity she wants to preserve: “I could never marry anyone...why not after having a man like your father... [...]; I could never have another...besides your father was cultured, educated, handsome...” (165). Isabella tries to compensate both for the absence of masculine authority and the status the presence of the male figure had so far ensured. Her hardening of domestic discipline is a way of proving that, in spite of Adolfo’s death and the economic difficulties that have followed it, the domestic order and arrangements of a middleclass family are still being maintained. She becomes the mouthpiece, the custodian, and the preserver of a “symbolic order,” that is, of the middle-class values she fulfilled with her marriage to Adolfo. Even though Valentina and her sisters have had to go to the fields and work with the migrant workers, she disassociates herself from the darker Mexicans as a way of asserting her higher position. The Ballesteros’ forced abandonment of their home and their temporary migrant status is particularly traumatic, since home is in fact the most important signifier of economic status and social dignity. Even after the recovery of their house, they cannot enjoy the privacy of a middle-class family as their difficult financial situation forces them to have boarders that expose them to constant danger. The coming together of the private and the public, of domesticity and business under their own roof bespeak the fact that, in BoydMacBride’s words, “a boarding house is not a home” (91). However, Isabella fights to preserve the dignity that corresponds to the status she claims for herself by stressing cleanliness and

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discipline in the domestic sphere, and the importance of education for her children. In the case of Valentina, education is not so much a way of securing a woman’s independence and resourcefulness as a way for her to attain a certain social position and then be able to marry somebody that is not “some ol’ bum from around here!,” someone who does not belong to the “barbary area” of Meta street, but who can provide for her family (Victuum 246). A “good catch” is a woman’s social vehicle towards a respectable condition and the novel enacts such a “happy” ending for its protagonist. As is expected from what Rachel Blau Duplessis terms the “euphoric” version of the female Bildungsroman plot, a man provides the heroine Valentina with her ultimate destiny by marrying her. Ríos’ character apparently succumbs to the only social alternative that privileged women have imagined for overcoming social oppression. As Caroline Heilbrun has observed, the complete internalization of patriarchal standards by many privileged women has caused them to shrink from claiming the responsibilities they have borne or from acknowledging they have ever been ambitious. Instead, they have looked for male approval of their actions, thus following a symbolic order where a woman is supposed to be the reflection of male desire (69). Given the traditional middle-class aspirations of Valentina, her entrepreneurial abilities, strength, and intellect are only a way of proving her worth to a man, an avenue towards marriage and, consequently, are ultimately dissipated by it. In this first part Ríos hardly allows for her female characters’ resistance to patriarchal norms. Except for Valentina’s occasional complaints, her attitude, like that of her mother, is one of stoicism and complicity with the system. Only in the character of tía Petra do we see a consciously defensive, challenging attitude in the face of domestic violence or any kind of abuse against her female relatives. This character offers a potential role model for the main character: She adapts male roles to a related but different female experience. As she puts it, “to be feminine doesn’t necessarily 161

mean to be weak and to be constantly sniveling or something... no sir, a woman has to hold her own, whenever the occasion arises!” (59). Ríos has acknowledged the strength of such a character as opposed to her other female characters in this novel (“Isabella Ríos” 57). It seems beyond the writer’s intention to explore this alternative, resisting form of feminine identity, or to launch an ironic critique of women’s complicity with patriarchal structures and values. Instead, she seems to be more intent on giving a “realistic” portrayal of how a family run by a woman complicit with patriarchal ideology manages to survive and maintain the middle-class “Hispanic” identity on which her family’s and her own innermost sense of dignity depends. As the writer herself has said, the culmination of Valentina’s life in marriage and motherhood should not come as a surprise once we consider the times in which it is set, the social aspirations of the character, and the Catholic background of her family (“Isabella Ríos” 58) In the second part of her novel Ríos shows her dissatisfaction with the necessary plight to which her main character is destined by writing, to use Rachel Blau-Duplessis’ term, “beyond the ending,” and, as I will argue henceforth, beyond social space. As Blau-Duplessis argues, the romantic plot that prevailed in nineteenth-century novels and that is still followed today, has the function of reproducing the sex-gender system and the institutional practices underlying the organization of society. The novels of heterosexual romance express collective codes of culturally specific social behavior, and hence work as ideological instruments that explain and interpret reality according to what are thought to be “natural” and “moral” norms. The ideological resolution in marriage or in death of nineteenth- century novels revealed the impossibility of reconciling Bildung and love. Bildung (education, knowledge, adventure) is always repressed by marriage or by death. Duplessis’ study focuses on the ways twentieth-century women writers have attempted to solve this contradiction by offering alternative endings for their heroines. They have gone beyond the possibilities of the legacy of nineteenth-century romance plot: “Writing beyond the ending 162

means the transgressive invention of narrative strategies, strategies that express critical dissent from dominant narrative” (5). Ríos expresses her non-conformity with her character’s conventional end as a woman who gains social status through marriage, by proposing an alternative quest or Bildung that does not fall into the behavior patterns of conventional womanhood proposed by the romance plot. By the end of the first part of the novel, Valentina has fulfilled middle-class social norms and has married, in her mother’s words, “the right man, ... a kind man...with principles...with beliefs that are similar to yours... that he be ambitious...that he wants to accomplish something” (233). According to Valentina’s mother a good marriage can only occur outside the social realm that has been imposed on them: “[Y]our Papa always believed in living among his people! But then, it doesn’t help as far as raising children... [...] children must be raised in the best possible area...away from rif-raf (sic)...so that when they grow up they may meet the right mate to marry...” (234). In the second part of Victuum, however, Valentina’s supernatural power, repressed all throughout the first part, is finally given full vent. Once she has consolidated her position in society by finding the “right” husband, and has fulfilled her role as wife and mother, Valentina escapes the rules of the middle-class family and pursues her own individual quest for knowledge. Ríos’ writes “beyond the ending” of the conventional female Bildungsroman that resolves individual and communal aspirations in marriage by transporting Valentina to a fantastic, mental, a-historical realm. This fantastic flight is a rejection, an escape from and therefore an implicit critique of a particular Mexican/Chicano form of patriarchy that has denied women access to education and knowledge. Although we never hear Valentina’s explicit rejection of her feminine role, her oppression and sense of inferiority are shown throughout the novel. The ambivalence felt towards her role of wife and mother, and towards the figure of her own mother, is finally resolved in the second part of the work, where Valentina’s fantasies allow her to withdraw from the institutions of patriarchy 163

that stifled her desire to be a self-determining subject. After her mother’s death, Valentina still has a strong supernatural connection with her that will gradually fade as the protagonist discovers other potentialities of her telepathic gift. As Valentina tries to experience herself as an autonomous being, she will develop aspects of subjectivity that men have used as a defense against the supposedly emotional instability and absence of women, and that have been considered as inherently masculine. Aspects like distance, separateness, objectivity, and rationality, which, in Patricia Waugh’s words “are the haven and ‘escape’ of masculinity.” Impersonality is seen by men “not only as superior, but as a necessary defense against the inferior feminine qualities of emotionality and subjective impressionism” (71). Valentina achieves impersonality by separating her consciousness from that of her mother, her family, her husband, her barrio, and her community, and thus transcends the materiality of being a woman and being other. “I have so little knowledge!,” she says, “If only my brain would open to the mysteries of the universe so that I may better understand” (324). Victuum traces the development of the main character from a “relational” sense of selfhood (the self of the first part portrayed in relation to a collectivity and with a historico-material reality) to an autonomous sense of selfhood (a self which, in a fantastic, mental, transhistorical realm, is detached from the community). Doris Sommer’s distinction between the metonymic identification of the “I” in testimonial narratives and the metaphoric identification of the “I” in autobiographical works is particularly useful here to describe the shift from a collective to an individual voice in the novel. Sommer speaks of a “lateral” or metonymic identification “through relationship” that is characteristic of the collective self of testimonios. This “I” sees itself as an extension of a community where there might be multiple differences, introduces other communal voices into the public sphere, and supplements official history through oral rhetoric (108-111). Sommer opposes this collective self or collective protagonist to the self who has a metaphoric 164

relationship to the community, and sees itself as an exceptional, exemplary part of the whole, has a heroic relationship to it, and stands out from the rest (108). During her childhood and adolescence, Valentina depends on other communal and family figures for her self-definition; it is only in the second part of the novel that Valentina is portrayed as mature, autonomous, and outstanding. She is now detached from her historical and social community and from her condition of victim. The surprising change of register in the second part of the novel attests to the shift from the collective, historically-rooted subject to the ahistorical impersonal subject. In contrast with the simple, practical, oral, and unsophisticated register of the first part, the language of the second section corresponds to a variety of disciplinary phallogocentric jargons (the literary, the political, the scientific, the religious, the philosophical).4 Valentina comes in contact with famous figures from human history who provide protracted, sometimes inchoate disquisitions about their respective theories of knowledge in an indoctrinating, instructive manner. Mr. Morgan instructs her on how to construct a device for automobiles so as to use gasoline to its fullest potential and avoid air pollution; Wordsworth speaks about a literary style “which enables the occurrence of the momentary event” (312); and Victuum, the prophet of the future, interprets scientific data that explain “the theory of sound” (325). Ramón Saldívar has rightly called Valentina’s telepathic journey a “hegemonic dream,” for, indeed, Ríos seems to claim the hegemonic Cartesian 4

The term, used by French feminists, results from the conjunction of the notions of phallocentrism and logocentrism. In Lacanian theory phallocentrism is the order dominated by masculine sexuality and by the phallus as primary signifier, where “Woman” stands for lack, man’s negative, the object and representation of masculine desire. Logocentrism, in Jacques Derrida’s view, is, as the term indicates, the centrality of the word or the concept independently of différance; the faith in an essential truth outside language as the source of all meaning; the belief in higher presences such as truth, the Word, thought, reason, and logic (Culler 92-93). For a reflection on “logocentrism” and “phallocentrism” from a psychoanalytical perspective see Cixous’ essay “Sorties: Out and Out: Attacks/Ways Out/Forays” (1989).

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subject of knowledge for her character in order to satisfy her repressed wishes to know, learn, and be independent as a “public” individual in a traditional patriarchal sense. As Valentina’s “hegemonic dreams” come true, we lose sight of the more “personal,” “private,” “material” truths of her barrio and of her condition as a woman within her family.5 In spite of its association with writings by men, impersonality does not always involve an identification with a “masculine,” patriarchal type of subjectivity. Thanks to impersonality, Patricia Waugh says, women writers have been able to understand and describe the relations of women towards others in “impersonal” terms, that is, in intellectual and political terms, instead of in exclusively emotional terms. Waugh says that however impersonal their perception of women’s place in the world, women writers have expressed an alternative conception of subjectivity that is neither fully subjugated to others not fully independent from them (18-9). In the case of Victuum, however, impersonality is not used to describe a woman’s different relationship or perspective towards the world, but rather to accomplish a withdrawal from patriarchy. It is impossible for Ríos’ heroine to achieve autonomy and selffulfillment through the identification with her mother. She has certainly repressed the values that the general culture perceives as “feminine” (such as nurturance, dependency, self-sacrifice) and adopted those it perceives to be “masculine,” which ensure triumph in the public world (independence, ambition, rationality). Contemporary American writers like Marge Piercy, Maxine Hong-Kingston, and Audre Lorde, have used fantasy and evoked unverifiable, telepathic, uncanny realms to portray changes in 5

In The Disorder of Women (1989) Carole Pateman explains the patriarchal sense of the notion of public citizenship. The construct of the political subject or citizen is tacitly dependent on the division of "civil" society between the private and the public spheres of life. In the field of political theory, for instance, the public sphere is taken as an autonomous sui generis realm that may be analysed and talked about independently of the domestic realm (3).

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consciousness and to challenge the world as we know it—“both laws of physics and laws of society, everything from causality to propriety” (Duplessis 179). These writers situate alternatives to the actual social order in other times and spaces where muted groups, values, and institutions become dominant. In Victuum the shift from realism to fantasy is certainly targeted towards the destabilization of the societal gender patterns that the main female character had accepted with submission and compliance. The last section transgresses the feminine Bildungsroman plot in that Valentina abandons the traditional role of mother and wife and devotes her time to learning. Her mother and her husband, representative of the middle-class familial order under which Valentina has been instructed to live, become conspicuously absent during Valentina’s journey. Her children, together with her wifely and motherly obligations also cease to be mentioned. The creation of Valentina’s subjective space depends on the virtual disappearance of the spatial, temporal, biological, and social contingencies that had determined her role as a woman. A feminist reader might be somewhat displeased with the novel’s ending, for Victuum does not openly critique and problematize the dichotomy between the personal, the emotional, the private, the material (and hence the allegedly “feminine”), and the impersonal, the rational, the public, the intellectual (the supposedly “masculine”). The main female character seeks autonomy and freedom, as well as the wholeness and security of the infantile union with the mother. As the unity with the mother is fraught with the memory of dependency, sacrifice, and selfeffacement, autonomy can only be experienced through the identification with the father. The fantastic allows Valentina to compensate for her lack and otherness as a woman and thus satisfy her desire for wholeness and unity. By means of her telepathic powers she establishes a connection with other beings through which she may imagine her relationship to the world in different terms. Yet, Victuum does not propose a different worldview where those contingencies are different and less 167

oppressive. The novel does not show a critical attitude towards the relationship between the dominating and the dominated; nor does it imagine an alternative to that relationship. Valentina’s journey reaches a final stage under the direction of a prophetic figure of the future, Victuum. In the final passages of the novel, he foretells the coming of a better world and of a “projecting sound of feminitude (sic)” that will have the “primary position of influence upon the planet earth” (345). This final prophecy has remarkable feminist resonances, probably suggesting that thanks to Victuum the “victim” has finally become a knowledgeable “victor.” Nevertheless, Victuum’s ambiguous predictions do not describe how in this new order to come, issues of sexual, social, and racial discrimination such as the ones described in the first part will be dealt with. In Ríos’ novel desire is displaced onto a different world outside history, the body, time, and society. Victuum does not contemplate the possibility of transforming social space through communal solidarity, a possibility that will be explored by other writers under the influence of the political discourse of Chicano and Chicana activism. 3.2. Domestic Prisons and Domesticated Bodies: Helena Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros Where the gifted among women (and men) have remained mute, or have never attained full capacity, it is because circumstances, inner or outer, which oppose the needs of creation. [...] But women are traditionally trained to place others’ needs first, to feel these needs as their own (the “infinite capacity”); their sphere, their satisfaction to be in making it possible to use their abilities. Tillie Olsen, “Silences” (1978) I pondered [...] what effect poverty has on the mind; and what effect wealth has on the mind; [...] and I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse perhaps to be locked in. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1929)

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Tillie Olsen’s essay “Silences,” from which the quote above is taken, is a defense of women’s right to create and imagine beyond their domestic prisons, beyond the activities of home-making and mothering. Isabella Ríos’ Victuum may be read as a thematization of the silence Tillie Olsen speaks about in “Silences.” Valentina is hardly a self-introspective character and her silence, together with the absence of a narrative mediating voice, is certainly an instance of a woman’s (Diana Lopez’s) timid and ambivalent effort to write about women. Her female characters do speak but we hardly hear their interior voices of resistance. We need to read between the lines of their words in order to disclose the anxieties, fears, and silences that pervade their lives on the border of two cultures. In Victuum the implication is that women depend upon silence and fantasy in order to survive in a male-dominated culture, their refuge from social constraints being the realm of the imagination. Although silence may occasionally be a strategy of resistance whereby one follows the dictates of the powerful while still keeping his/her thoughts free of intrusion, its political effects are very limited. This is perhaps the main underlying message in the fiction by writers more socially and politically committed than Ríos such as Helena Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros. Their characters speak thoughts that challenge their alleged compliance with their various roles as women. Viramontes was born and grew up in the old neighborhood of East First (L.A.). Originally from a large family of migrant workers, she has worked as a volunteer in community causes, which she has combined with her academic work as an editor, essayist, fiction writer, and teacher. Sandra Cisneros was born in a Mexican American working-class neighborhood in Chicago, the only daughter in a family of six children. She has worked as a teacher of disadvantaged high-school children, and as a college recruiter and counselor for minority students. Her work has been included in anthologies of Chicano/a writing and of Third World women’s writing. It partakes of the explicitly political preoccupations of women writers traditionally associated with the American left, such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Katherine Ann 169

Porter, Dorothy Parker, Adrienne Rich, and with those contemporary writers tied to civil rights and antiwar movements like Alice Walker, Grace Paley, and Zora Neale Hurston. As Deborah Rosenfelt has put it, these are women who unite a class consciousness and a feminist consciousness in their lives and creative work, who are concerned with the material circumstances of people’s lives, who articulate the experiences and grievances of women and of other oppressed groups—workers, national minorities, the colonized and the exploited—and who speak out of a defining commitment to social change. (218) 6

Cisneros’ and Viramontes’ main concern is with what Olsen calls the “unnatural silences,” the “words that will never find a story” (“Silences” 6-7). In her first testimonial essay, “Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction” (1988), Viramontes mentions the influence in her work of writers like Tillie Olsen and Virginia Woolf. Both of these writers acknowledged that it is only a few people who really have the privilege to write and tell about their lives without gender, race and/or class constraints (“Nopalitos” 34). Similarly, Cisneros’ essay “Notes to a Younger Writer” (1987) expresses her own social commitment and responsibility as a privileged member of her family and community: I can write of worlds they [people who don’t know of need] never dreamed of, of things they never could learn from a college textbook. I am the first woman in my family to pick up a pen and record what I see around me, a woman who has the power to speak and is privileged enough to be heard. That is a responsibility [...]. There are so few of us writing about the powerless, and that world, the world of thousands of silent women [...], must be recorded so that their stories can finally be heard. (36)

Chicana writers discover what Alice Walker calls a “music not yet written,” “the springs of creativity in [their mothers and 6

For more background on this socialist-feminist tradition, see Deborah Rosenfelt's essay “From the Thirties” (1985) and Paul Lauter’s “WorkingClass Women's Literature” (1991).

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grandmothers] for which there was no release” (232-33); the “contrary instincts” of the lack of ownership of their minds and bodies (235). In the essays of Woolf, Walker, Viramontes, Cisneros, and Olsen, women’s literary and creative silence is traced back to a lack of time and of what Olsen terms a “totality of self” (“Silences” 17). As they tell and revise their own stories or the stories of their working-class families, mothers, and grandmothers, Chicana writers reflect on the absence of a “room of [their] own,” the private space and economic solvency that Woolf deemed indispensable for a woman to be intellectually and socially independent. The experience of the women these writers record is fraught with a mental and physical agony that cannot always be released. Olsen contends that women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Katherine Anne Porter, or Dorothy Parker either did not marry or did not have children, or had servants; theirs were “special circumstances.” In the specific context of the Chicano/Mexican American experience, Viramontes provides a similar argument about literary creation, and about women’s creative and intellectual expression in general: We must come to understand that stifling a woman’s imagination is too costly a price to pay for servitude. [...] Family ties are fierce. Especially for mujeres. We are raised to care for. We are raised to stick together, for the family unit is our only source of safety. Outside our home there lies a dominant culture that is foreign to us, isolates us, and labels us illegal alien. But what may be seen as a nurturing, close unit, may also become suffocating, manipulative, and sadly victimizing. (35)

Although both Cisneros and Viramontes have made respective incursions into the novel—Viramontes with her 1995 novel Under the Feet of Jesus and Cisneros with the novel she is working on at present—their most frequent mode of literary expression has been the short-story. Mary Louise Pratt has found an occasional correspondence between this genre and the representation of those considered as peripheral, marginal, or 171

minor subjects such as women, children, rural characters, and people living in peripheral areas of a city. Pratt associates marginal subjects to marginal genres, and she also links the lesser authority of speech (orality) to the “lesser” genre:7 The tradition of orality in the short story has special significance in cultures where literacy is not the norm, or where the standard literary language is that of an oppressor. [...] Orality can also be counted as one of the important flourishing aspects of the short story in the modern literatures of many Third World nations and peoples, where, not incidentally, it is taken much more seriously as an art form than it is elsewhere. (190)

Pratt contends that the ties between many stories and colloquial speech, children’s literature, folklore, entertainment, and journalism, all of which imply a mass public, go against the impersonal art-for-art’s sake principle of modernism. Many of the stories discussed here were first published in commercial magazines or political journals as entertainment or demonstrations of a “different” mode of Chicana expression. The journals and small presses that published these works, such as Arte Público Press or Bilingual Press, target a very specific Latino/a audience. These factors certainly tie these short stories to a more popular art or aesthetics that, as Pratt argues, dissociates them from the “high art” of modernist aesthetics. Indeed, the art forms chosen by Chicana writers follow the tendencies initiated by the first reputed Chicano writers, Rolando Hinojosa, Tomás Rivera, and Miguel Méndez, all of whom have found the short7

A wide discussion of Pratt’s main argument is beyond the objectives of this study. Her essay “The Short Story” (1981), explores the status of the short story in its modern form as a minor, marked genre with respect to the more unmarked dominant genre of the novel. It is in this interdependence of genres, which begins to be established with the rise of the novel, that Pratt sees the “minor” status of the short story as always relative to the status of the novel. Her application of Claudio Guillén's term “counter-genre” to the short story is therefore justified with the premise that the emergence of the short story as a modern form is not so much the appearance of an altogether new genre, as the consolidation of a new relationship between genres (182).

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story cycle an effective vehicle to render orality and communal identity. As has been stated in the first part of this study, publishing and marketing factors condition our reading and categorization of works. Ultimately, however, we will remember a piece of writing for what it does to us, no matter how we choose to categorize it. It is my belief that Cisneros and Viramontes use literary strategies that may be qualified as modernist and/or postmodernist. Yet, as I see it, to focus only on the formal aspects of their works would not do justice to the social commitment with which they were written, and thus, to their work’s reflection upon the effects of a complex myriad of social relations upon female subjectivity. These writers’ concern, just as the concern of other Chicana writers like Ana Castillo, goes beyond the impersonal modernist or postmodernist concern with aesthetics. Social commitment has been their main motivation to write. In keeping with Pratt’s delineation of the marginality of the short story, Viramontes and Cisneros deal with peripheral themes and peripheral people (children, women, old people, the poor, the outcast, and the displaced) and make use of popular oral sources. These writers’ awareness of the power of ideology on the constitution of subjectivity, their sensitivity to how symbolic systems and power relations affect the social relationships between individuals, has given rise to a postmodern realist8 literature that combines the social and the poetic. Like their male counterparts, they may be said to occupy a different place vis-à-vis traditional ways of understanding literature.

8

“Postmodern realism,” as José Saldívar has defined it, shows a distrust of hegemonic narratives and returns to the historical by “[r]ecovering alternative American histories in the unwritten texts of history (songs, cuentos, and talk story).” It merges actual and fantastic events in alternative versions of the “real” (“Postmodern Realism” 529). It is is informed by a “creative politics” that tries to figure a larger politics of the possible and of resistance (535). This definition ties in with the argument sustained throughout this book that writings by Chicanas are suffused with a “practical aesthetics” or an aesthetics of “materialist ethics.”

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The unifying theme of Viramontes’ only short-story sequence, The Moths and Other Stories (1985), is the lives of women of all ages that struggle against the restrictions of a patriarchal society in a variety of urban and rural settings of the Californian borderlands. Like the classic short-story constellation by James Joyce, Dubliners (1916), The Moths is chronologically organized according to childhood, adolescence, and maturity. Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1991) is similarly structured around various stages in women’s lives, exemplified by the titles of the three parts into which the volume is divided: “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn,” “One Holy Night,” and “There Was a Man, There Was a Woman.” The first and most acclaimed of Sandra Cisneros’ works, The House on Mango Street (1985) can be read either as a female novel of initiation structured around vignettes, or as a short-story constellation unified by the narrative perspective of a female protagonist. Mango Street is structured following the character’s gradual coming to terms with her social Mexican American environment and her condition as a woman through a series of reflections on the people of her neighborhood and her family. Other works by Viramontes also analyzed here include stories published in journals and anthologies, and her novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). The works by Viramontes and Cisneros I tackle here deal with Mexican American women’s exclusion from public spaces and with their seclusion in private spaces. The characters in these stories are either banished or locked out from the dominant social order as women and as Chicanas, locked in or trapped within their own patriarchal communities. Viramontes and Cisneros address the interrelated borderlands ideologies of marriage, domesticity, love, and beauty that pervade the spaces these women occupy. As Cisneros remarks, Chicana writers write more from obsession than by inspiration (“Ghosts” 69-73). Their poetics is not a poetics of luxurious, comfortable spaces, but of spaces of poverty, exclusion, and deprivation. Nonetheless, women’s desire for a space of their own, is always present in these writers’ stories. A harshness and dramatism she has qualified as her own “screaming 174

and shouting” about women’s pain (Christoph 10) characterize the style of Helena Viramontes’ first works. Part of the dramatism of these works is caused by women’s incapacity to speak and act for themselves, by the fact that they are both “locked out” and “locked in.” Cisneros has offered a less dark but a no less vivid depiction of women’s imprisonment in borderlands spaces. Cisneros tends to end her works on a hopeful and often invigorating note that Viramontes has only clearly expressed in her latest works. 3.2.1. No “Real Houses” on Mango Street Without [a house] a man would be a dispersed being. It sustains him against the storms of the sky and against the storms of life. It is body and soul. It is the first world of the human being [...]. And always, in our dreams, the house is a large cradle. Gaston Bachelard, La poétique de l’espace (1957) [my translation] [A] house, a house, it hit me. What did I know except third-floor flats [...]. That’s precisely what I chose to write: about third-floor flats, and fear of rats, and drunk husbands sending rocks through windows, anything as far from the poetic as possible. Sandra Cisneros, “Ghosts and Voices” (1987)

Sandra Cisneros’ first acclaimed book, The House on Mango Street (1985), was written as the expression of a dream (“a house where one family lived and grew old and didn’t move away”) and as the expression of the social reality she had to live during her childhood and adolescence: “A second or third-floor flat [...]. To make matters worse, we were constantly moving back and forth between Chicago and Mexico City due to my father’s compulsive ‘homesickness’” (Cisneros, “Ghosts” 69-71). Like many other descendants of Mexican immigrants, Cisneros has been one of those “dispersed beings” Bachelard speaks of in La poétique de l’espace (1957). Despite her negative reaction to Bachelard’s 175

image of the house as a metaphor for her poetics, her characters continue to dream of that stable place of intimacy. As we will see subsequently in this study, Cisneros and other Chicana writers have recreated spatial images of resistance according to women’s individual needs and political consciousness. In this section, however, I want to focus on Cisneros’ exploration of the spatial divisions grounding the desires and longings of her characters and, in particular, her main character Esperanza Cordero. In Mango Street the archetypal image of the house hints at the protagonist’s desire for a space that, contrary to Bachelard’s depiction of the home, is both “inner” and “outer.” In this semiautobiographical novel, and through the innocent and occasionally critical voice of a young woman, Cisneros shows how the absence of freedom and space is the result of being both trapped and excluded. In fact, both Cisneros’ and Viramontes’ works draw attention to the particular predicament of workingclass women that Woolf ignored almost entirely: To be both locked in and locked out are part and parcel of the condition of being a woman and poor in a patriarchal culture. Cisneros’ Mango Street puts a particular stress on this simultaneous feeling of exclusion and seclusion, while always being critical of the social codes by which women construct a hypothetical and illusory sense of freedom. All the female characters of the collection want houses of their own, family houses, spaces of intimacy and freedom. Yet, they all seem to have internalized the ideology of womanhood and love whereby marriage is the immediate vehicle to inner freedom and the culmination of love. Echoing Olsen’s “Silences,” the Mexican writer Julieta Campos reminds us that [i]t is insufficient to construct a sense of identity around a husband and children; a woman needs to “produce something that transcends her and makes her really exist,” or she will be left in the illusory doorway of someone else’s story, a fictional construct without power to give testimony or even to vocalize her unease. (in Castillo, Talking Back 175)

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From the very first chapter of Mango Street Esperanza, the main character and narrative voice of this semi-autobiographical novel, declares that she wants to have “a real house. One I could point to” and does not have to feel ashamed of, a “real house that would be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year” (8-9). As the novel progresses and the narrative voice of the child transforms into the voice of a young woman, the desire for a family house is replaced by a desire for a house of her own: “Not a flat. Not an apartment in the back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own” (100). A Bildungsroman narrated in short vignettes, the novel records Esperanza’s gradual coming to terms with the fact that in order to have a house she can call her own, she has to do something beyond the strictures imposed by her poor working-class Mexican American patriarchal background. In Mango Street the desire for a house of one’s own corresponds to a wish for an individuality that is constructed through a dialectics between inner freedom and a freedom granted from outside by others. Esperanza’s house is her space as constructed on her own terms. Observing the lives of the women and men around her, Esperanza realizes that such a house is difficult to attain, especially for women; it has to be fought and sought for outside the confinement of the rules of Mexican American patriarchy and social discrimination. For Bachelard, who takes for granted the association between inner space and freedom, a house stands for individuality and “protected intimacy.” Nonetheless, for someone like Cisneros’ character, for whom individuality and autonomy are not givens and do not depend on herself alone, a house cannot be exclusively represented in terms of “inner space,” intimacy, and solitude. As is suggested in many of the vignettes of Mango Street, isolation and solitude may result from an involuntary, oppressive confinement and exclusion. Cisneros’ work draws attention to the fact that, as Terry Eagleton has remarked, to speak of freedom as something that is inherent only to ourselves and that is to be found in seclusion and intimacy, is to consider only one of the 177

factors that may make it possible: “To claim that the ‘inner space’ is an inappropriate metaphor for picturing human freedom is not, of course, to deny that freedom’s existence. It is just to deny that human freedom can ever be usefully thought of as ‘inner.’” (The Significance 37). As Juan Olivares suggests, Cisneros has inverted Bachelard’s utopian vision that a house contains happiness and stability by turning it into a space of anguish and alienation. Olivares suggests that this inversion of the inside/outside dialectics described by Bachelard is evoked through poetic images such as “linoleum roses” and “tortilla star,” which derive from women’s particular experience of the domestic realm. The juxtaposition inside/outside of these images refers to the inside as confining and the outside as liberating (“Sandra Cisneros” 160-164). They correspond to the narrative voice’s understanding of women’s frustrated desire for freedom. However, there is another outside from which women’s freedom depends and that Cisneros represents through the voice of the young protagonist: the codes that divide and regulate social space, the social rules that determine women’s bondage to the home, and that cause them to be afraid of transgressing its barriers. As I see it, Cisneros’ dealings with the binary inside/outside have more nuances than the ones described by Olivares. To describe women’s experience of space as merely structured around the opposition between confinement (inside) and freedom (outside) glosses over Cisneros’ subtle depiction of the complicated social and psychological dynamics at work in Mexican American women’s relation to places. As Geraldine Pratt argues, “borders in space and place are tied up with social boundaries […] but […] there are multiple grids of difference and complex varied links between space and identity formation” (“Geographic Metaphors” 27). The women in Cisneros’ work relate to more than one place and cross more than one boundary. Therefore, mapping their identity as women involves paying careful attention to the power relations that produce these places

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and the implications of these relations for them and their sense of identity. Most of Cisneros’ female characters in The House on Mango Street feel isolated in their homes and local areas, while they are also barred from social spaces and environments where they may not venture on their own without feeling threatened or at a loss. These women’s lives are affected by spatial divisions they have no control of, and, in consequence, they are others both inside and outside their homes. The novel evolves around two spatial configurations. There is, on the one hand, an emphasis on geographic divisions in society and the—gender, racial, or ethnic—economic spatial practices that reinforce them and condition men and women’s behavior. On the other hand, as Olivares has remarked, there is also a constant dialectics between the space of the imagination, consciousness, creativity, and individuality, and those social and geographical constraints. Esperanza’s particular expression of the desire for a house of her own, a metaphor indeed of her creative “inner” freedom, will be triggered by her awareness of the constraining divisions inside her neighborhood and in all social spaces in general. While Viramontes’ stories cast a dramatic look at women’s rebellious, irrational, and psychotic attitudes, Cisneros’ vignettes in Mango Street are subtle, often ingenuous looks at the lives of others, particularly women, through the eyes of a child who has not yet come to terms with herself or her environment. As the narrative progresses through various sketches of Esperanza’s life and the lives of others in the barrio, the naive voice of the child is gradually replaced by the more mature and critical voice of a woman. The voice of the child, present in the first episodes, has a keen eye for detecting the differences between people, which have a counterpart in physical and geographical divisions. Notions of race, class, and gender, which may often be interwoven, are at the heart of these barriers. Esperanza reflects on the limits imposed on her as a Mexican American girl; limits of race, citizenship, class, and gender that separate the city from the neighborhood, 179

the boys from the girls, the rich from the poor, the legal from the illegal, the women from the men. “Boys and Girls” draws on the contradictions of the different social roles men and women perform depending on their location. Esperanza’s brothers “have plenty to say to me and Nenny inside the house. But outside the house they can’t be seen talking to girls. Carlos and Kiki are each other’s best friend... not ours” (11). In “Cathy Queen of Cats” Cisneros draws on the spatial divisions between neighborhoods, marked by race and class differences. Esperanza makes her first acquaintance after her family has moved to Mango Street. Cathy, who claims to be “the great great grand cousin of the queen of France,” says she can be her friend, but “only till next Tuesday”; she and her family are moving out of the neighborhood because it “is getting bad.” The narrator assumes that it is because “people like us keep moving in” that people like Cathy’s family are moving north from Mango Street (14-15). Through Esperanza Cisneros captures the signs of contemporary American cities and their geographies of social inequality: “Segregation, separation, zoning, the spatial severing of certain people from certain places, increasing differentiation between forms of labor market participation and social resources among groups that are divided spatially” (51). The story titled “Those Who Don’t” is once again a reference to urban spatial divisions. People who should know better than to stray from their neighborhood, recklessly crossing the threshold between the safe and the dangerous: “They think we are dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives [...] But we aren’t afraid” (29). Esperanza and all those who are “all brown all around” know who is to be feared and who isn’t. However, “those who don’t” live in their neighborhood see them all as typically dangerous. Cisneros hints here at the fact that preconceptions of inner-city ghettoes of big cities “identify residents racially, and by income and employment status. Innercity peoples are, even if implicitly, presented as the bearers of certain collective attributes and behaviors […]. The youthful demography of inner cities is portrayed as a ‘problem’” (Fincher 180

53). The same fear is also experienced by Mexican Americans when they cross the boundaries of a neighborhood “of a different color” (29). Cisneros maps the geographical, ethnic, and racial barriers separating one Chicago neighborhood from another, reflecting the competence of legal and constitutional authorities to “restrict access to ‘unlike’ families or households,” an urban politics that maintains the differences between residents of different jurisdictions (Fincher 52) In the figure of Geraldo, the Mexican wetback with no last name, Cisneros represents a new socially dislocated underclass in the global American city: the illegal immigrant filling in lowerwage jobs resulting from the informalization of labor processes. The voice of Esperanza tells Geraldo’s story with poignancy and compassion. He is only seen at night; he is publicly invisible; there is no place for him in a city that does not acknowledge his existence: “No address. No name. Nothing in his pockets. Ain’t it a shame?” (62). After he has had an accident on a Saturday night, no one cares, not even Marin, the last girl he danced with: “He wasn’t anything to her. He wasn’t her boyfriend or anything like that. Just another brazer who didn’t speak English [...]. The ones who always look ashamed. [...] What does it matter” (63). Most important for the narrator of the story is the fact that Geraldo has no home: “[H]is home is in another country. The ones he left behind are far away” (63). The fact that Geraldo does not have a proper house or, as Esperanza puts it, “a real house,” is a sign of his clandestine life: “They never saw the kitchenettes. They never knew about the two-room flats and sleeping rooms he rented, the weekly money orders sent home, the currency exchange” (63). Not unlike many women in the novel, Geraldo feels threatened by a public social space that ignores him, locks him out, excludes him, and therefore prevents him from developing a public identity as an “American” citizen. Cisneros herself has stated that some of the stories in Mango Street read like memoirs that are “not consciously critical, analytical, or political” (“Do You Know Me?” 78). Others were written while she was working in the Chicano barrio as a teacher 181

to high school dropouts and later on as a university administrative assistant and counselor for minority and disadvantaged students: “From this experience of listening to young Latinas whose problems were so great, I felt helpless; I was moved to do something to change their lives, ours, mine. I did the only thing I knew how.” (78). Stories like “Alicia Who Sees Mice,” “Sally,” “What Sally Said,” “There Was an Old Woman,” and “The Family of Little Feet” stemmed from Cisneros’ commitment to and concern about these women’s daily problems (78). This writer’s female characters are neither totally safe inside or outside their homes. Based on a comment of a college student to Cisneros, “The Family of Little Feet” deals with the danger faced by young women crossing the threshold between the home and the street. Esperanza and her friends realize that to play certain games before the eyes of men immediately turns them into sexually desirable objects. Walking on high-heel shoes and playing at being beautiful on the street, entails the public exposure of their bodies to the fetishizing eyes of men. As the girls find themselves threatened by men’s crude advances, they grow “tired of being beautiful” and return to their ordinary games. The street is certainly not a place for Esperanza if she does not want to become like Sire’s girlfriend, Lois, one of “those kinds of girls, [...] the ones that go into alleys” (70). As we have seen in Victuum, the boundary between the street and the house, which defines a woman’s condition in a patriarchal environment, cannot possibly be maintained when that woman is poor and without a husband. In the case of a poor, abandoned woman like Rosa Vargas in “There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn’t Know What to Do,” the separation between the house and the street is not only the boundary between her decency and disrepute as a woman. It is also the limit between her children’s careless and disrespectful behavior, their exposure to danger on the street, and the comfort, dignity, and attention that they might be given in the domestic domain. Rosa Vargas is “only one against so many,” “is tired all the time from buttoning and bottling and babying” and “cries every day for the man who 182

left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come” (30). Meanwhile, “[t]he kids bend trees and bounce between cars and dangle upside down from knees and almost break like fancy museum vases you can’t replace” (30). Rosa’s kids have no respect for anyone or anything, including themselves. In consequence, they cease to be respected or even looked at or cared for by the neighbors: Mr. Benny says, hey ain’t you kids know better than to be swinging up there. Come down, you come down right now, and then they just spit [...]. No wonder everybody gave up. Just stopped looking out when little Efren chipped his buck tooth on a parking meter and didn’t even stop Refugia from getting her head stuck between two slats in the back gate. (31)

In the face of all these threats inside and outside their homes, the women of Esperanza’s neighborhood are prisoners of both motherhood and poverty, and of the fantasies of freedom and selfperfection they hoped to fulfill with marriage and marriage has frustrated. “Edna’s Ruthie,” who never took the many jobs she was offered when she was younger, got married and moved to a pretty house outside the city. For some mysterious reason, she lives now with her mother and is afraid to go out: “Sometimes we go shopping and take her with us, but she never comes inside the stores and if she does she keeps looking all around her like a wild animal in a house for the first time” (64). But what Esperanza cannot understand is why is she sleeping on a couch in her mother’s living room when she has a real house of her own, but she says she’s just visiting and next weekend her husband’s gonna come back to take her home. But the weekends come and go and Ruthie stays. (65)

Ruthie never goes to the dentist about her toothaches; she no longer writes nor reads because of her headaches. If Ruthie feels at a loss outside her mother’s house, the big Mamacita of “No Speak English,” who has come from a different country, feels threatened by a language she cannot understand but that her 183

children will speak better than she. She also longs for a house of her own in a country of her own: “Home, Home, Home is a house in a photograph, a pink house, pink as hollyhocks with lots of startled light. The man paints the wall of the apartment pink, but it is not the same, you know” (74). Cisneros’ main character suggests that the only possible antidote to women’s dependability is the inner power she evokes with the image of the “four skinny trees,” a metaphor for the desire to find the “secret strength” to “reach out,” “to grow despite concrete” (71). In Mango Street Esperanza and Alicia herself are examples of women who want to reach out. Alicia, whose mother died and lives with her father, catches two trains and a bus to go to college because “she does not want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (32). Yet, she also occupies “a woman’s place” and is sorry there is no one who rises early in the morning to make her lunchbox tortillas. She is afraid of nothing “except four-legged fur. And fathers” (32). Esperanza’s own mother, whose dependability and insecurity prevent her from taking the subway by herself, regrets her past, her shame, and her insecurity and advises Esperanza to “take care all your own” for “[s]hame is a bad thing [...]. It keeps you down” (83). In Mango Street many a woman’s place, except that of the narrator and Alicia’s, is in the house with or without husbands and fathers who abuse them and on whom they depend. The outside world is only accessible to them from balconies and through windows from which they may occasionally look out. The place by the window, where Mamacita sits and where Esperanza’s grandmother also used to sit, is the peripheral place that Esperanza does not want to inherit (12). It is the margin or the limit understood as exclusion, the otherness of the threshold, the transparent border where public exclusion, discrimination, and domestic confinement and oppression come together. Almost at the end of the work, Esperanza’s voice is that of a mature woman who decides “not to grow tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain” (82). Her role will be that of the “beautiful and cruel” protagonist of the movies, the one who “drives the men crazy and 184

laughs them all the way” (82). The rebellious, assertive spirit that Cisneros gives her character, and that is also present in the writings of other Chicanas like Helena Viramontes, Cherríe Moraga, and Pat Mora, is a precondition for her to be able to build her own house—the material space as well as the psychological space. Nonetheless, Cisneros acknowledges that some women get the chance to be freer than others, sometimes at the expense or thanks to the sacrifice of others, be they servants, mothers, or fathers. I wonder if Emily Dickinson’s Irish housekeeper wrote poetry or if she ever had the secret desire to study and be anything besides a housekeeper. [...] Maybe [she] had to sacrifice her life so that Emily could live hers locked upstairs in the corner bedroom writing her 1,775 poems. [...] I’m here because my mother let me stay in my room reading and studying, perhaps because she didn’t want me to inherit her sadness and her rolling pin. (“Notes” 74)

3.2.2. Helena Viramontes’ Domestic Prisons “The Broken Web” and “The Moths” are two of this writer’s most forceful and dramatic critiques of the Christian (in this case Catholic) ideology of women’s “proper place.” “The Moths” narrates the struggle of a girl to come to terms with patriarchal Catholic values as she goes through a constrictive socialization process she does not understand and resists. The women in the story are mostly silent. Whenever they speak, it is only to express compliance with the patriarchal system. The mother is conspicuously absent from the story and emerges as a longsuffering figure and transmitter of patriarchal discipline. With her “cute waterlike voices” the protagonist’s sisters laugh at her big hands, and reprimand her for her selfishness, disrespect, and lack of sacrifice (25). The sisters identify with the traditional model of femininity the mother represents and adopt her submissive attitude. They speak as what Susan Rubin-Suleiman calls future “patriarchal mothers” or what Kristeva, after Lacan, calls “phallic 185

mothers”; that is, as women who reproduce an established role that has been previously decided for them within the symbolic system; women who control the family and perpetuate the dynamics of socialization according to pre-established gender roles (Rubin-Suleiman 19; Kristeva, Desire 191). In order for the Law-of-the-Father to prevail, Kristeva explains, the desire for the mother and for physical affection has to be repressed. It is the body of the mother that mediates social relations (Desire 27). As a result of this repression of physical contact and affection, the protagonist’s relationship with her mother and grandmother, whose retrospective narrative perspective prevails throughout the whole story, is one of stifled and silenced emotions. Remembering her grandmother, she says: “We hardly spoke, hardly looked at each other” (25). Her abuelita’s mouth is described as “vacant” and “speechless.” The girl’s emotional estrangement from her mother is even more flagrant. Physical contact between them is sparse even when the pain of abuela’s imminent death seems to call for it: “I heard Amá crying in Abuelita’s kitchen. She looked at me with puffy eyes. I placed the bags of groceries on the table and began putting the cans of soup away. Amá sobbed quietly. I never kissed her. After a while, I patted her on the back for comfort” (26). As we will also see in “Snapshots,” Viramontes shows her awareness of the power of patriarchy to deprive women of their subjectivity, and consequently, to prevent mothers and daughters from speaking to each other. Therefore, women may not “re-invent” themselves outside the constraints of a system that makes them dependent on one another but at the same time strangers to one another. As Irigaray says in her essay about mother-daughter relationships, “And the One does not Stir without the Other,” there is [a] breach of silence where we constantly reenvelop ourselves in order to be reborn. Where we come to relearn ourselves and each other; in order to become women, and mothers, again and again. […]. But we have never, never spoken to each other. And such an abyss now separates us that I never leave you whole, for I am always held back in your womb. Shrouded in shadow. Captives of our confinement. (66-67)

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In “The Moths” the protagonist comes to terms with her own physical and emotional needs as well as with those of other women, which Chicano patriarchy restrains and controls. The fine embroideries, the uncomfortable black shining Easter shoes, and the veil women wear to mass are references to the rigidity of women’s roles, to the discipline imposed upon their bodies by patriarchal Catholicism, whose exponent is the figure of the father: He would pound his hands on the table [...] and scream that if I didn’t go to mass every Sunday to save my goddamn sinning soul, then I had no reason to go out of the house, period. Punto final. He would grab my arm and dig his nails into me to make sure I understood the importance of catechism. (25)

The girl’s resistance to such roles, codes, and constraints, concomitant to her guilt and psychological awkwardness, is figured through the magical-realist image9 of her monstrous hands, which fan out and grow “like a liar’s nose,” and hang by her side “like low weights” (23). The malformation of the girl’s hands is a hyperbolic representation of her inner state of feeling, as well as the sign of the presence of an alternative reality and silent language 9

“Marvelous realism” differs from fantasy. The latter destabilizes the rational system of the reader and causes fear, emotional disturbance, and unease through the “poetics of uncertainty” (Chiampi 66-70). It also differs from pure marvelous narratives in which everything is possible, since the reader assumes a world with laws of its own that need not be justified. Marvelous realism does not distinguish between the marvelous and the real. They are contiguous spheres in a causality that need not be explained but that is taken for granted in the works. The succession of chronological events in the story does not create an antagonism between what is inordinate and what is ordinary. The critique of reality is produced when mythology is naturalized and is not at odds with the physical in the narration, or when the very act of narrating is questioned as a mere performance of a series of conventions and clichés through which the reader and the story are controlled. See Alejo Carpentier’s essay “De lo real maravilloso americano” (1967) and Irlemar Chiampi’s El realismo maravilloso (1983).

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expressed through magical or marvelous realism. Abuelita makes her granddaughter feel at ease with her hands by returning them to their normal shape with a balm made of moth wings that strangely feels “like bones melting,” “like sun shining through the darkness of your eyelids” (24). This encounter with the strange and the sacred, expressed through the dissolution between the real and the magical in language, is an encounter with the spiritual as reached through the physical, the realm of human connectedness and affection that she has so far been denied. After that, a secret but silent bond is established with her grandmother: I’d gladly go help Abuelita plant her wild lilies or jasmine or heliotrope or cilantro or hierbabuena in red Hills Brothers coffee cans. Abuelita would wait for me at the top step of her porch [...]. Although we hardly spoke, hardly looked at each other as we worked over root transplants, I always felt her gray eye on me. It made me feel, in a strange sort of way, safe and guarded and not alone. Like God was supposed to make you feel. (24)

Detached from the strict atmosphere of the patriarchal house and the church, and surrounded by the chayotes “that twisted and wound over the porch pillars [...] up and over the roof, and down the other side,” her abuela’s small brick house, “cradled within the vines that grew pear-shaped squashes ready for the pick, ready to be steamed with onions and cheese and butter,” comes to represent an alternative home, a space where the protagonist feels nurtured, protected, and comforted (24). It is there she “crushes” her guilt as she crushes the vegetables for dinner in the mocaljete. Her abuela’s house is a specifically female, healing pre-symbolic space. The grandmother, one of the most common female initiation figures in Chicana literature (Rebolledo, “Abuelitas” 154), takes the protagonist to a different dimension of herself that is connected to female aspects of Mexican culture. Her house, a space of warmth and sustenance, serves to expose in the speaker’s narration the contradictions of a patriarchal, Catholic culture. There is a very marked contrast between the small house cradled in vines and plants that makes the girl feel safe, and the “coolness 188

of the marble pillar and the frozen statues with blank eyes” of the church that make her feel alone (25). The comfort the girl feels under the gaze of her grandmother is “what God was supposed to make you feel” (The Moths 24) (but doesn’t, we could add). The final ritual that follows Abuela’s death (the cleaning of the old woman’s old battered body) is the culmination of the girl’s process of coming to terms with her own desperation, loneliness, and need for human comfort. The references to Abuela’s vomits, to the defecation of the remains of her cancerous stomach, to the coils of her neck, the creases of her stretch-marked stomach, her sporadic vaginal hairs, her sagging thighs, the lint between her toes, etc. are signs of suffering, old age, and decay. In discovering these signs and cleaning her Abuela’s body, the girl experiences an emotional rebirth and identification with the suffering of others. Physical contact allows the protagonist to confront her own pain through the pain of another. As is also the case in other writings by women in the twentieth century, Viramontes’ explicit discourse about the female body transcends the Catholic pudor and ladylike recato. In Debra Castillo’s words, it “concerns itself with taking back from men the right to use all the words, including the precise and functional words for the woman’s body” (99). The final ritual, a meaning-making process in which touching, naming, and cleaning are interrelated, provides the links between the dead and the yet unborn, where the suffering and loneliness of Abuela are regenerated and transformed into empathy and understanding in the granddaughter. In the final scene of the story, the girl steps into the bathtub and lies there, cradling and smoothing her grandmother’s dead body as the water overflows from the bathtub. All of a sudden, the moths come, “[s]mall gray ones that came from her soul and out from her mouth fluttering to light” (28): Dying is lonely and I wanted to go where the moths were, stay with her [...]; I wanted to rest my head on her chest with her stroking my hair [...], I wanted to return to the waters of the womb with her so that we would never be alone again. I wanted. I wanted my Amá. (28)

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The moths stand as a symbol of the real but unspoken bond between the grandmother and granddaughter, of their shared loneliness, but also of a possible connection between mother and daughter on the basis of their shared oppression as women. Viramontes’ story creates, to use Bruce-Novoa’s expression, a “space of Chican[a] literature,” a rhetorical realm claimed through a rural, natural, and maternal symbology that may, if we like, be related to Kristeva’s semiotic. The silent kind of communication between grandmother and grandaughter, the wish for a language that “transcends” the existing socio-cognitive language is indeed figured through the magical-realist image of the moths. However, the story does not merely propose a rhetorical resolution through a figurative representation of the bond between women. “The Moths” reflects on the incipient experience of social marginalization of the young girl as a gendered Chicana subject and it signals the various cultural, psychological, and social processes that constitute her formation as unstable, ambivalent, and rootless in the patriarchal spaces of the home and the church. The moths are the expression of an unfulfilled desire for a place where connection and unity are possible, but they cannot ultimately heal the restlessness and sense of deprivation of the girl, whose sobs emerge “from the depths of anguish, the misery of feeling half born” (28). In “The Broken Web” women’s silence is implicit in the alternated interior monologues of the two main female characters: Olivia and Tomás’s wife. Both women keep their dreams and secrets to themselves. The pursuit of their romantic aspirations always has tragic consequences, and they have to pay a dear price for rebelling against tradition. The end of these women’s respective stories is however not death as a “cosmic sanction” for woman’s inability to negotiate with sexuality and kinship. Rather, it is women’s inconclusive awareness of their dependence on man-made social norms. Olivia risked living as an outcast for the man she loved in the past, while Tomás’ wife gave up her freedom or, as she puts it, “being a woman,” to marry Tomás and 190

follow tradition (The Moths 56). The former is abandoned by her partner and condemned to loneliness and to a “silent contract,” a mutually unresponsive relationship, with her children, and a frustrated, empty love affair with Tomás. Olivia loves Tomás secretly, aware of the danger that involves making her love public. She ends up speaking to him while he sleeps, indifferent to her talk and sobs, “unyielding to the fingers that petted and comforted him” (54). Equally tragic are the silent resignation and anger of Tomás’ nameless wife, which culminate in the murder of her husband. “Only in complete solitude,” she says, “did she feel like a woman,” away from the duties of mother and wife, and from the hard work of the Fresno grape harvest. Tomás claims his right to be unfaithful to a woman who is “más cabrona que la chingada” (55). Code switching from English to Spanish is here emphatically used to emphasize the analogy between Malinche, also known as “la chingada,” “the raped one,” and a woman who practiced unlawful sex. For all her radical resistance, Tomás’s wife cannot possibly understand herself outside the realm of family and domesticity. Her dreams are intimations of her unconscious wishes for freedom and independence, but the images of liberation—“an invisible bird with huge wings”—intermingle with images of conventional motherhood—“She dreamt of her mother; dozens of diapers blazing”—and of capitalist bourgeois life—“[…] houses. Big ones that would belong to all of them. A color TV and an island” (53). The conventional images of domestic space reflect the double bind in which women are involved. As Debra Castillo has put it, the illusions of self-perfection within the domestic realm, both hurt and seduce. One cannot simply reject that structure, but must realistically withstand full complicity with it by pointing at the contradictions of loving it and hating it at the same time. This more effective resistance, a “tactical resistance,” as Castillo calls it, is present in the following monologue by Tomás’ wife after she has killed him: How could she explain to him that she was so tired and wrinkled and torn by him, his God and his word. She had tried to defy the rules by

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sleeping with another man; but that only left her worse off. And she could not leave him because she no longer owned herself. He owned her, her children owned her, and she needed them all to live. And she was tired of needing. (56)

Even dead her husband remains “an invincible cloud of the past” on whom she still feels dependent. The passage points at woman’s silence and oppression within Catholic patriarchy and within a language that, as we know from Biblical sources, is “his.”10 It also points at her dependence on the social system for survival. Both Olivia’s and Tomás’ wife’s meditations are narrated in the first person to emphasize the unmediated voice of the characters and their full awareness of their interior death as women. Tomás’ wife says: “Surely now, at this moment, I feel so close to you; equally dead, but equally real” (56). These women’s interior deaths are caused by the impossibility of seeing their romantic expectations come true if they follow the conventional roles of wife and mother. The scandal of Olivia’s illegitimate affair, which causes her to become displaced and an outcast from her family, and the mystery of Tomás’ wife’s “puzzle-piece heart” that is never revealed to the readers, are indications of the cultural barriers put up against women’s self-fulfillment and selfownership. Together with the myth of the long-suffering Mexican mother and the also docile figure of Guadalupe, the Western patriarchal cultural conception of love, based on the idea of propriety and ownership, seems to be conditioning the silences of these women and their emotional distance from their husbands/lovers. In this respect, the comments by Puerto Rican writer Rosario Ferré on the work of Soviet writer Alexandra Kollontay are illuminating. Kollontay sought women’s liberation through sexual revolution during the Soviet Revolution and insisted on the need to replace the concept of love as understood in bourgeois, capitalist society. 10

Genesis 3 reads: “So the Lord formed from the soil every kind of animal and bird, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever he called them, that was their name.”

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In a way that anticipates Irigaray’s concept of specul(ariz)ation,11 Kollontay said the bourgeois family was not only founded on economic interests, but on psychic mechanisms that forced women to define themselves in relation to men, to be like “mirrors” reflecting men’s own personality. She argued that the notion of love in terms of possession and property—the link between love and marriage the bourgeoisie had consecrated— needed to be replaced by a concept of love based on feeling and spiritual and moral bonds (112-113). Following Kollontay, Ferré sustains that family relations conceived around the traditional boundaries of motherhood, domesticity, and beauty have disempowering consequences for women. Attributes required of a woman such as self-renunciation and self-sacrifice, encouraged in her education, endow her with a capacity to have faith, to dream and be moved: [L]a mujer se encuentra dividida irremediablemente entre su necesidad de transar con las fórmulas que la sociedad impone, para evitar el caos y la anarquía que perjudican el bien social y su necesidad de persistir en la búsqueda de un amor ideal, que tiene como la meta no la posesión del amado, sino la trascendencia y perfección de sí misma. (Ferré 196)

At the same time, her passions, and imaginings cause her to dream of a forever-awaited prince charming (38). Viramontes and Cisneros fulfill Ferré’s call to the female writer to tell her readers that prince charming is just a figment of their imagination, for their stories insist on the futility of their characters’ romantic fantasies. Viramontes’ and Cisneros’ views concerning ideologies of domesticity, love, and romance are in step with Ferré’s, especially in relation to the description of women’s predicament once they have assumed their roles in societal models of heterosexual relations. 11

Irigaray’s notion of “specul(ariz)ation,” as defined in Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), designates man’s “self-reflexiveness,” the incapacity of his language and his thought to represent woman. For Irigaray, the “logic of the same” of Freudian theory, by which woman is perceived as a castrated male, results in her negative representation.

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The last episode of this story is the writer’s commentary on women’s complicity with patriarchal repression. The old aunt’s account of Martha’s mother’s past, emphasizes the irreversible fate of women who dare challenge their social role. At the end of her ominous narration of Tomás’ wife’s premarital infidelity, she mentions the crickets, “the souls of the condemned people,” the victims of God’s eternal punishment conducting the mass of the dead at night (56). The old aunt’s resigned tale reproduces conventional cultural concepts of femininity by emphasizing the idea of divine justice. In this last section of her story Viramontes places women’s story-telling as central in the perpetuation of tradition, superstition, and taboo, which very often ensures women’s assigned role in a patriarchal cosmology. However, the story also disallows univocal views of femininity through the multiplicity of voices. Apart from Olivia’s and Tomás’s wife’s mediated or direct interior monologues, the use of negation by Tomás’s daughter, Martha, in the first section of the story, anticipates what is to come and also disturbs the rigidity of Catholic family values. After her mother’s murder of her father, the young protagonist of this section goes to confession troubled by a constant irreverent dream. In the girl’s dream the statue of Jesus shatters after the sound of a bullet. This association links the figure of her murdered father with the figure of Jesus, and, consequently, with the patriarchal values instilled by the church. The broken statue contrasts with the Catholic image “of the stone shapes of the holy family” (49) mentioned at the beginning of the story. In her confession to the priest, Martha consistently affirms her lack of control of what happens in the dream, and the ostensible “unreality” of the events she could have prevented but didn’t: Yreina, you know her, Father, my sister, begs me to pray to God to make the voices stop. But you see, Father, I can’t because I’m asleep, and when you are asleep, you don’t know what’s going on. Everything is not real, and so the voices aren’t real and I wanted it that way. By morning, I would open my eyes with no memory, nothing. So I wasn’t supposed to know what was happening. [...] Our Lord with His hands outstretched. I feel

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comforted even if He is only a statue in the living room. [...] There He stands. Solid. But what happened next I will never understand. I will never be able to forgive myself for letting it happen. I heard something, something loud. A bullet sound. [...] I saw it pierce the image, burst like a firecracker. Sparks. Pierce it into little pieces before my eyes, flashing light on the screen. I think I know what happened, but it’s a dream. I’m asleep, you see. (50, my emphasis)

Martha’s obstinate negation, her insistence on her not knowing, not being supposed to know, losing memory, and the events in her dream being not real, may be looked at in the light of Josefina Ludmer’s comments on Sor Juana’s letter to Sor Filotea in her essay “Tretas del débil” (1984). Ludmer describes the tactic of negation as a means of resistance and difference, of changing the meaning of the place where the speaker is situated, and the meaning of what is to be found in that place. Martha’s “no” cannot be an openly confrontational one. It is only indirectly disturbing and destabilizing. Her dream, her sleepiness, allow her to say “no,” to negate her understanding of the facts staged in it, and to elude the social reality that has triggered it. At the same time, the dream, as a manifestation of a rebellious unconscious and imagination, is the only place where the free play of knowledge is allowed, where unspoken truths may be revealed. Viramontes has thus confronted us with two types of speech: the univocal voice of tradition, superstition, and taboo, which keep women in their place, and a number of marginal resisting voices situated on the threshold of the spoken and the unspoken. “The Broken Web” thematizes the silence of women under patriarchy, but Martha’s dream also hints at a refusal to participate in society according to the rules. In “The Long Reconciliation” oppression by social formulas of marriage and femininity is complicated by the class oppression of the feudal system from before the Mexican Revolution. The story signals how in the particular context of 1900s rural Mexico, women were not only commodified as property of their husbands, but also property of their landlords, thus fulfilling the dual role of homemaker and worker. Don Joaquín, the landlord educated in the United States, is the model of masculinity the male 195

protagonist, Chato, follows and imitates. Chato has interiorized the values of the dominating landowning class in his country. He promises his father-in-law to be “as virile as the land he would buy” (The Moths 81), his property standing for his own place within the patriarchal public sphere. For Chato such a place can only be secured through money because, as he puts it, “he did not believe in talk, or the revolution, or for that matter, God” (88). Don Joaquín, for his part, is stereotypically described as a racist, abusive master. Also part of Chato’s conception of the patriarchal family is the idea of a son. His discourse identifies the fertility of the land and that of his woman; both woman and land become a representation of his power. Amanda and the land are Joaquín’s possessions, mirrors of his potential masculinity. The discovery of “love” after the consummation of the sexual act occurs through her realization that her husband had claimed as his own “her undiscovered island” (83). This transcendental representation of woman causes woman to be defined according to the ways she reinforces or disqualifies masculinity, but Amanda’s selfassertive voice in “Reconciliation” is also that of a vendida. Her denial of her maternal function involves a personal choice independent from convention, a choice that emasculates her husband. The use of unheard parallel monologues in this story confronts those two opposed, silenced discourses on love referred to by Ferré and Kollontay. Represented by the respective voices of Chato and Amanda, the discourses are juxtaposed in the structure of the narration, but they remain mutually unheard and estranged in real life: What do you want of me? You have already destroyed what I loved more than you. And you, Chato? I killed for honor. Then I killed for life. It’s the same thing isn’t it? Which is worse? You killed because something said “you must kill to remain a man”—and not for this honor. For me, things are different as our bodies. I killed, as you

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say, because it would have been unbearable to watch a child slowly rot. But you couldn’t understand that, because something said “you must have sons to remain a man.” (79)

Amanda vindicates her right to abort in the context of poverty and exploitation. Chato condemns her for killing the child who would have kept his name and his blood, while he finds justification for his murder of Don Joaquín in his honor. Silent, self-sacrificing Guadalupe is an unrealistic model of femininity for Amanda. As she sees it, self-sacrificing motherhood turns out to be fatal, whereas abortion is, paradoxically, an act of love. The mediating narrative voice accounts for Amanda’s affair with Don Joaquín as a consequence of Chato’s neglect after Amanda’s abortion. While male sexuality is tied to economic and social power in Chato’s monologues, female sexuality, as presented through the consciousness of the female character, is related to pleasure and wish for human contact. Viramontes’ radical treatment of female sexuality through the voice of Amanda no doubt bespeaks her outspokenness as a feminist writer, the most illustrative example of this assertiveness being the lines where Amanda addresses God, and challenges the Catholic prescription that sex is exclusively aimed at reproduction: Sex is the only free pleasure we have. It makes us feel like clouds for the minutes that not even you can prevent. You ask us not to lie together, but we are not made of you, we are not gods. You God, eating and drinking as you like, you, there, not feeling the sweat or the pests that feed on the skin. (85)

In “The Long Reconciliation” the voice of the omniscient narrator, reproducing the consciousness of Chato, Amanda’s husband, is a representation of the dominant Chicano/Mexican national discourse, where the female body is a metaphor for a fruitful land, the soil where man will plant his seed. In the desperate circumstances of poverty and exploitation of rural Mexico, Amanda represents, in Chato’s consciousness, fertility, beauty, and continuity. She is a utopian space that “does not reproduce agonal relationships” (Franco, “Beyond” 509): “In 197

front of him stood Amanda, frightened, pure, her skin brown and rich like the fertile soil, like the fruitful earth should be, his heartland, only hope, now his wife, amidst the warmth of the fire” (83). The futility and delusion of Chato’s dreams are anticipated by the scornful laughter of his father-in-law, reminding him of the laughter of their patron Don Joaquín, the real owner of their land and their bodies. Amanda’s realism contrasts with Chato’s illusion: “[T]o sprout a child that we can’t feed or care for” (84), “[c]hildren die like crops here” (86). Viramontes puts, as Norma Alarcón would say, “flesh back on the object,” providing us with a realistic picture of women’s lives and bodies as controlled by gender and class divisions, as well as by mystifying nationalist discourses of womanhood (“Chicana Feminist Literature” 182). In “Snapshots” Viramontes also gives a dramatic depiction of the frustrated hopes of an embittered old Mexican American. Olga, a psychotic protagonist, is reminiscent of the protagonist of Tillie Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle.” Alone in her home after a divorce, she finds herself following the inertia of a mechanical existence devoted to others. Like Olsen in “Tell Me a Riddle” and “As I Stand Here Ironing,” Viramontes looks at this old woman’s experience through a dark lens. The crudest experiences of motherhood, family life, and marriage are described with little comic relief. Yet, unlike Tillie Olsen’s characters, for whom memory often has a redemptive value, Olga looks pointlessly in her snapshot album for evidence of a possibly happier past when she lived for herself. But she can only find the hurt of “frozen moments,” of forgotten experiences she does not identify as her own. The story narrates Olga’s recapitulation of her life, her attempt to look back and find some meaning in what she has been. The cinematographic narrative technique highlights the ideological impositions of a culture dominated by a patriarchal disciplinary gaze over woman’s body. This disciplinary gaze is represented by her family’s constant intrusion in her effort to see beyond an existence devoted to others, and by the paralyzing effects of the camera operated by men. Olga’s domestic routine turns out to be 198

alienating as she discovers that, now that she is no longer needed, it does not make sense at all. It is hard to do anything different from what she has always done, but, tragically enough, she cannot find any other way to occupy her time: Now, it’s no wonder that I wake mornings and try my damnest not to mimic the movements of ironing, [...], going to Marge’s room to see if she’s sufficiently covered, [...], refilling the pot and only later realizing that the breakfast nook has been set for three, … and I don’t remember doing any of it because I’ve done it for thirty years and Marge is already married. (92)

In her insistence that Olga remain active and efficient—“do something,” “keep as busy as a bee,” “make the best of things”— her daughter Marge shows little understanding of what her mother is going through. Olga never moves, she just sits and stares, annoyed at the waste of time her life has been: “I wish to do nothing, but allow indulgence to rush through my veins with frightening speed. I do so because I have never been able to tolerate it in anyone, including myself” (93). Indulgence is what Olga has missed in a life devoted to doing and giving. “The sound of swans slicing the lake water or the fluttering wings of wild geese […] or the heartbeat I could have heard if I had just held Marge a little closer” provide evidence of wasted moments where she could have found herself (93). Olga is cynically aware that her life has been a parody of the picture of the ideal bourgeois family life she created in her mind in her younger days. The narrative third-person voice reproduces the widely accepted picture of the ideal family in the ideal domestic place of her dreams: His wife in the kitchen wearing a freshly ironed apron, stirring a pot of soup, whistling a whistle-while-you-work tune, and preparing frosting for some cupcakes so that when he drove home from work, tired and sweaty, he would enter his castle to find his cherub baby in a pink day suit with newly starched ribbons crawling to him and his wife looking at him with pleasing eyes and offering him a cupcake. (93)

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The “burnt cupcakes,” her “damn varicose veins, and Marge blubbering all over her day suit” (93) establish the tension between the “perfect snapshot” and Olga’s reality. This tension will make itself apparent every time she attempts to find in the photographs a clue of a better life to brighten her lonely existence and an acceptable image of herself. Her obsession with the snapshots is an addiction to nostalgia, a way to quench the thirst of her soul, to color her “blank mind” with some kind of dream. Going over the pictures of her family, she realizes how cut off she is and has been from feelings and people: “[E]very detail, as minute as it may seem, made me feel that so much had passed unnoticed” (94). The old picture of her family will make her reflect on her mother’s relationship to her father and on her own relationship to her husband. Of her parents she says: “I don’t remember” (95). Her own sexual relationship with her husband Dave is described as an “efficient” one. Dave looks into her eyes for some passion, while she, “could never figure out what he expected to find” (95). The distance between Olga and her mother is now reduplicated in the relationship between Olga and her daughter Marge. Marge’s “befuddled” look, her reproofs and indifference to Olga’s urgings, and the broken ceramic reproduction that Olga drops during an argument with Marge, are all signs of the fissures in the mother-daughter bond. Olga wishes her daughter “would break out of her frozen look, jump out of any snapshot and slap me in the face. Do something. Do something” (96). This mutual estrangement causes them to unleash their anger at each other instead of at the culture that has determined their roles as dutiful mothers and wives. Olga’s obsession with the “frozen moments” of the snapshots is like the obsession with the wallpaper of the mad protagonist of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Both the wallpaper and the photographs are figurations of a woman’s willingness to decode her life, to find her own space, to break out of ensnaring constructs of femininity. Mary Jacobus has argued that, besides reading madness as a consequence of 200

women’s social and sexual oppression, we need to consider it “as symbolic of women’s situation under patriarchy, and to see in [it] not only the result of patriarchal attitudes but a kind of sanity” (233). Both Gilman’s and Viramontes’ stories in fact present women’s madness as some kind of powerful resistance to patriarchal norms and to women’s domestic imprisonment. In her reading of the wallpaper pattern Gilman’s imprisoned protagonist finds an irrational mental space of resistance, secretly advancing in the shape of a woman. Olga’s contemplation of the photographs is a quest for a different self, for “the meaning of memories,” “for some old dream,” “for a past that never really existed” (94). Olga’s psychotic language reveals an awareness that there is something that has dissolved in and been neutralized by domesticity and a life devoted to others. If in Gilman’s story the female protagonist’s husband tries to prevent her from thinking in order to “protect” her mental health, in “Snapshots” Olga’s husband, Dave, interferes to thwart Olga’s realization that she remains trapped in the single function of mothering: “Dave eventually packed them up in a wooden crate to keep me from hurting myself. He was good in that way. Like when he clipped roses for me. He made sure the thorns were cut off so I didn’t have to prick myself while putting them in a vase” (94). The reductive, repressive, and freezing power of patriarchal representations of femininity is suggested in the description of the two very similar family snapshots in Olga’s album: that of herself and her parents, and that of Marge, Dave, and herself. In both pictures mother and daughter look very similar: “Both woman and child are clones: same bathing suit, same ponytails, same ribbons” (97). They also have a similar attitude towards the camera as willing objectives of its gaze. In the first one the woman “looks straight ahead at the camera” and the man holding the baby “points to the camera” with the aim of making her look at it (95). In the second picture the woman “is looking directly at the camera” (97). On her “bad nights” Olga does not know “who the couples in the pictures are. My mother and me? Me and 201

Marge? I don’t remember San Juan Capistrano and I don’t remember the woman. She faded into thirty years of trivia” (97). The lack of substance of Olga’s personal history, a replica of her mother’s, signals her inability to understand a present based on a meaningless past. The photograph of her mother cannot awaken any sense of origin or individual identity in Olga. In Irigaray’s words, she suffers from an “obliviousness of self,” the same that her mother suffered and transmitted to her (“One doesn’t” 65). In so far as Olga has no history apart from that of being a mother, she cannot have an identity. The mother’s absence from Olga’s memory, and Olga’s recognition of her impossibility to get close to her in the past, are in turn, another replication of Olga’s relationship to her own daughter, Marge. Both daughters’ rejection of their respective mothers could be seen as the expression of “matrophobia,” or, in Adrienne Rich’s words “the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother” (Of Woman Born 235). Rich argues that daughters see their mothers as transmitting to their daughters that self-hatred that comes from the degradations of female existence, and thus, it is easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her. But where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely. (235)

At the end of the story, Olga’s flashback to her childhood brings an ambiguous resolution. She remembers her grandmother’s protests and failed attempts to stop the men in her family from taking the picture, because, as she said, “snapshots steal the souls of people” (98), which is perhaps the answer to Olga’s riddle. The statement brings Olga to some fearful understanding of what her life has been: “It scares me to think that my grandmother might have been right” (99). The warning was however rejected by her grandfather, who, fascinated by the invention of the camera, ignored his wife’s bad omen, and finally 202

took the picture. From a rational Anglo American perspective, Olga interprets her grandmother’s superstitious comment as possibly containing some truth about her. Once within the specular ideology of family and domesticity of patriarchal thought, we may ask, as Mary Jacobus does, “is there a way out of the prison? ” (247). Ultimately, Olga’s story is both a nostalgic lament for a lost self, but also a lament for a lost cultural past, represented by the grandmother’s refusal to be photographed by the camera. 3.2.3. “Bien Pretty” and Romantic: The Female Body as Borderland Chicana writers and artists have offered bitter, ironic and comical views on the hold of mainstream Mexican and American codes of female beauty and romance upon the working-class and middle-class Chicana. Be it through mordacious irony—as in the case of Helena Viramontes—or through humor—as in the case of Sandra Cisneros—writers often portray women who are serious victims of their own burning passions and romantic obsessions. They also show the predicaments of these female characters to be directly dependent on the ideology of love and marriage permeating the fabric of popular culture catered to women— movies, songs, magazines, soap operas. Once again, in these stories the most intimate, private aspects of womanhood can only be understood in relation to images of woman in a wider socio-cultural scenario. The institution of marriage in both Mexican and American mainstream contexts establishes that the pursuit and attainment of ideal love in marriage is a necessary and sufficient condition for woman’s selffulfillment and for the realization of her social role. Social pressure combines with a middle-class “beauty system” whereby woman’s surface appearance determines her value and the power she may or may not have over a man.

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The female body, the space where these social meanings of beauty, love and marriage are inscribed and possibly contested, becomes a focal point in these narrative pieces. Given their emphasis on these social constructs, these stories have a direct counterpoint in the visual representation of the female body offered by tejana artist Ana Laura de la Garza. Cuata A (1994), one of the works included in her Border Bride Series, offers a sardonic depiction of the gap between the performative reiteration of social norms by the female body and women’s socio-cultural reality.

Figure 2. Ana Laura de la Garza, Cuata A, 1994, monoprint, 22 x 30 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

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De la Garza’s representation of the border bride is far from ideal or metaphysical. The woman’s face, with red make-up especially concentrated and smeared on her swollen lips, strikes the viewer as an affected, kitsch counterfeit, a cheap imitation of an ideal this woman can never possibly measure up to. The red lips, the red flowers framing the wedding picture and crowning the woman’s head, and the enormous white ribbon in her dress contrast with her coarse features, baggy eyes, and puzzled look. In spite of its paraphernalia, her attire does not succeed in hiding a female body that has probably suffered and that may be in for more suffering and sadness, clearly evoked by her tear-shaped earring. By inscribing and over-representing emblems of love (the rose), sensuality (the lips), and glamour (the ribbon) on the body of the border bride, De la Garza’s burlesque depiction highlights the performative character of the bridal picture within the social construct of marriage and the deceitfulness of the belief system that grounds such a construct. Chicana writers occasionally also draw on discrepancy and exaggerated performativity as a way of illustrating and criticizing patriarchal behavioral patterns that colonize women’s minds and bodies. The defamiliarization of social markers allows them to reduce the norm to the absurd and, thus, to establish a critical distance between themselves and their characters that does not rule out sympathy and emotional understanding. Just like the woman in De la Garza’s painting, in Viramontes’ “The Broken Web” the old barmaid and cleaning woman, Olivia, constructs a romantic fiction of herself by making up “her illusionary eyes” (53). Olivia makes herself beautiful in order to picture herself valuable in the eyes of a man. She has thus internalized a cultural construct of beauty and romance according to which, as Dean McCannell and Judith Flower McCannell have said, beauty lies in the male gaze that finds the woman beautiful superficially. Women’s bodies are beauty objects with a greater or lesser value in the eyes of a man. This “beauty system” turns woman’s body into a fetishized space, a surface appearance, 205

where a man can see his desire reflected. According to this contemporary Western ideology, the artificial is beautiful, and the body is “the only cultural place where a woman can exercise power as a woman” (23).12 Both Cisneros’ and Viramontes’ fiction explores Chicanas’ internalization and appropriation of these beauty codes, which are intrinsically related to the abovementioned ideologies of romance. On the one hand, they point at the ways in which women may be victimized by these codes and ideologies; on the other, some of their writings suggest the possibility of a different border aesthetics that grants women power. Taking the premise of the MacCannells and the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos’ affirmation that the cultivation of superficiality is in fact a strategy to contemplate oneself, in Talking Back Debra Castillo has analyzed women writers’ use of make-up as conscious self-constructions, performaces, or rituals. As we will see later on, Cisneros reflects on women’s selfconscious manipulation of their own bodies as a strategy towards self-empowerment. However, both Cisneros and Viramontes are concerned with the influence of middle-class beauty codes upon working-class women of Mexican origin, and on the false promises of romantic love that are associated with them. In “The Broken Web” Olivia’s youth is “peeling off her face like the paint of the saloon walls” (52). She is therefore very far from participating in a self-empowering appropriation of aesthetics. She nevertheless does her best to improve her appearance following the social codes that establish a woman will be loved if she is beautiful in the eyes of a man. For a while, Olivia dreams of love and conceals her old age and her loneliness under false 12

An excellent complement to the McCannells’ study is María Dolores Martínez Raventós’ “Women's Narcissistic Wound as a Condition of our Culture” (1995). From a psychoanalytical perspective, Martínez argues that women's narcissistic displays are demonstrations of a sense of inferiority and dependence on surface appearances, which are in fact the result of the mechanisms by which Western patriarchal culture has fashioned femininity as a reflection and complement of masculinity.

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eyelashes, make up, and a low cut blouse that makes the best of her “skinny legs that knotted at the knees, and her small but protruding belly” that “surpassed her legs” (53). Her frustrated encounter with her lover does not bring the expected satisfaction. Ironically, it is a reminder of the real inner death she has tried to conceal with false hopes and illusory make-up: “Mesh. It looks like mesh. Pieces of bones rattling like ice in an empty glass. Those are times I wish I was an artist so I could paint a picture of myself … lime-light green, dull yellow, mixed together like vomit” (55). Viramontes’ very short narrative “Miss Clairol” is the first of what we could call the “Arlene Series.” In this series, including also “Dance Me Forever” as well as “Tears on my Pillow,” Viramontes introduces the reader to everyday episodes in the life of a Mexican American working-class woman living in an urban setting. Arlene may be seen as the counterpart of Clemencia, the protagonist in Sandra Cisneros’ episode “Never Marry a Mexican,” included in her short-story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. While Clemencia represents a “raced” mestiza beauty that rejects assimilation, Arlene has assimilated to the Euro American beauty system and rejects her racial self. Viramontes denounces the system encouraging women’s mirror-dependence by ironizing, as she does in other stories, on the imaginative escapes of her character. As opposed to other more dramatic stories where Viramontes’ characters show some self-consciousness, this short narration ironically exposes the main female character’s ignorance of her objectification. Out of touch with her reality and therefore incapable of acting upon it, Arlene finds refuge in visionary selfrepresentation according to a pre-established model of femininity based on surface exhibitionism. The almost omniscient thirdperson narrator, usually reproducing the characters’ consciousness through free indirect speech, has the function of showing the disparity between her hopes and dreams and her sordid barrio life.

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As the title indicates, Arlene has internalized the “feminine beauty system” of Western patriarchal culture, a complex and contradictory ideology or set of cultural practices controlled by the collective power of society that have as primary objective making woman attractive to men so that she may “get” them (208). One of the false myths of this system is the image of the “bored woman” who devotes herself to preening her empty head (210). Within a culture that dictates, in Jane Fonda’s words, “thin is better, blond is beautiful, and buxom is best,” the woman that does not have these attributes and is forced into this beauty system, can only come to the conclusion that she is ugly (MacCannell and MacCannell 214). As long as women of color were excluded from competing in this system, they were also saved from its influence. However, Viramontes’ story illustrates that working-class Chicanas have inherited the beauty canons of the capitalist middle class. As Rosaura Sánchez has said, many women of Mexican origin do not fully share in American culture for they are cheap labor, but they are certainly affected, influenced, and often exploited by it (“Chicana Labor” 3-15). Thus, the wealth and power of the American glamour girls produced by the market economy remain inaccessible to women like Arlene. She is an example of a working-class woman “identifying up,” pointlessly imitating and aspiring to the life of American beauty queens as a kind of escape from her sordid existence. Arlene has taken up some of the values of the market economy by which her worth is measured according to her efficiency and her shopping for glamorous objects (García-Bahne 39). Her excessive make up, her toes dotted with nail polish, her blond strands with black roots, her dress two or three sizes too small, reveal her lowerclass status. But in front of the mirror “she puts her head back, relaxes, like the Calgon comercials” (“Miss Clairol” 103). Arlene practices a self-deluding apprenticeship in narcissism, in movements and attitudes that gradually become hers. She follows an “acting is becoming” method by which the preservation of

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surface beauty is associated to mood (MacCannell and MacCannell 221). Yet, Arlene’s rising excitement about her Saturday night date is undercut by the narrator’s repeated comment “Arlene is a romantic.” The narrative voice’s remark becomes ironic in light of the references to Arlene’s cheap looks, her menial job at the sewing factory, and her own unromantic expectations: “[T]o grind their bodies together until she can feel a bulge in his pants and she knows she’s in for the night” (104). Like Olivia in “The Broken Web,” the most Arlene may expect of such a date is a fleeting one-night stand. As MacCannell and MacCannell say, the “beauty system” that will supposedly lead to ideal heterosexual love, contradictorily results in practically the opposite: The man’s attraction to the woman is in fact an attraction to her superficiality. This means he is liable “to being duped by the oldest, most widespread, and open cons around” for “his balls are bigger than his brains” (MacCannell and MacCannell 222). The more a man is interested in a woman’s surface appearance, the less he is to be respected. Only Arlene and Olivia seem unaware of this. As single women and mothers, Olivia and Arlene have been alienated from their original culture, their families, and their community. In the American economic system, these women’s bodies fulfill the role that is expected of them: the reproduction of the labor force and the preservation of a hierarchic power system based on authorities and subordinates (García-Bahne 40). With ironic detachment, the partially omniscient narrator of “Miss Clairol” comments on the empty relationship motherdaughter and their estrangement from one another in their daily interaction. While Arlene worries in front of the mirror about her hair frizzing, Champ, impelled by her mother’s loud directions, runs around amidst the disorder of their apartment, looking for her mother’s hairpins and her dress. The alienation between mother and daughter comes through in the answers Champ gives her mother when she asks her opinion on her appearance. The recurrent “I dunno know” of the girl demonstrates her impossibility of relating to her mother’s concern about eye 209

shadows and hair spray. The ironic remark of the narrative voice—“Arlene is a Romantic”—may certainly be interpreted as mockery. Yet, I read it as a critical commentary on the lack of self-consciousness of this character. To use Bakhtin’s term, the story has a “double-voiced” narrator who uses and refracts the codes that contain the social intentions of others to serve his new intentions (Dialogic Imagination 299-300). This narrator speaks from the point of view of those who accept the dominant culture’s discourse of romance, but he uses this discourse ironically by making Arlene its target. The goal of addressing the ideology of romance and beauty is its ironic subversion and mockery. The narrator points at the working-class Chicana’s internalization of these codes, all the while showing how they are transformed by this character. From a position of tactical resistance, the story shows there is no place for the working-class Chicana within the American middle-class realm that imposes dominant views of femininity. From her own particular working-class environment she recreates those values, which, as Homi Bhabha suggests, immediately results in a parody, mockery, and hybridization of authoritative discourse (Location 120). Sandra Cisneros’ stories also contest middle-class views of womanhood that place beauty at the service of idealized heterosexual love. In Mango Street the voice of the main character Esperanza observes men’s objectification and appropriation of women’s bodies. Other women like Sally, Rafaela, or Marin are prisoners of their beauty. Marin’s hopes are “to get a job downtown [...] since you always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes and can meet someone in the subway who might marry and take you to live in a big house far away” (27). But the narrator shows how deceitful this dream is in the story of Rafaela, whose husband locks her indoors as he is afraid she “will run away since she is too beautiful to look at” (76). For a beautiful woman, marriage, the narrative voice concludes, is nothing but “a silver string” used by husbands to tie women to the home (76). Beauty as women’s prison outside marriage is also thematized in the stories about Sally. As the girl’s father says, “to 210

be this beautiful is trouble” (77). Sally is the object of both her best friend’s envy who calls her “that name” and of the boys’ boastful false stories (78). The narrator shows her empathy with Sally by envisioning a house that is different from her family home and away from Mango Street: [A] house, a nice one with flowers and big windows and steps for you to climb up two by two upstairs where there is a room waiting for you. [...] the windows would swing open, all the sky would come in. There’d be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcyles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry [...]. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against a car, leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad [...] without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake when all you wanted, all you wanted, Sally, was to love and to love and to love and to love and no one could call that crazy. (78-79)

Esperanza, however, is also deceived by Sally’s promises of romantic love: “What he did. Where he touched me. I didn’t want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it’s supposed to be, all the story books and movies, why did you lie to me?” (93). Yet Esperanza realizes the conscious cultivation of one’s image can actually be the site of power, a way for women to cease to be dependent on men: “In the movies there is always one with red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the men crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own. She will not give it away” (82). With this same idea in mind, Cisneros creates the character of Carmen Berriozábal in her collection Woman Hollering Creek. In the very short vignette titled “La Fabulosa: A Texas Operetta” we hear the gossipy voice of another woman speaking about Carmen. She says Carmen claims to be “Spanish” but is from “Laredo like the rest of us” (61). The narrator tells of Carmen’s “[b]ig chichis [...] Men couldn’t take their eyes off them. She couldn’t help it, really. Anytime they talked to her they never looked her in the eye. It was kind of sad” (61). But Carmen, who is a secretary at a law firm, is an independent, “take-it-or-leave-it type of woman:” “If you don’t like it, there’s the door” (61). The narrator says 211

Carmen is “not smart” but in fact smart enough to make the best of her looks. A corporal becomes “her guaranteed love slave,” whom she gives up for a famous Texas senator, married and with kids “who was paving his way to the big house. Set her up in a fancy condo in north Austin” (62). After a scandal caused by the corporal’s jealousy puts an end to her affair with the senator, rumor has it that Carmen wants to die. “Don’t you believe it,” the narrator says: “She ran off with King Kong Cárdenas, a professional wrestler from Crystal and a sweetie” (62). Cisneros’ humorous, sympathetic characterization of selfassertive Carmen is not at odds with her awareness that it is not at all easy for Mexican women with indigenous traits to be happy, beautiful, and cruel in a society where the white woman is still a symbol of status. Revenge, she claims elsewhere, is no form of liberation. Clemencia, the smart, romantic, and attractive protagonist of “Never Marry a Mexican,” can only find some kind of fulfillment in silent vengeance and cruelty, but her life is stamped with loneliness, acridity, and resentment. Clemencia mocks and scorns the artificial beauty of the middle-class woman—her lover’s wife in the story— yet she sees her own Mexican beauty become a signifier of her illicit condition. She is condemned to remaining second best, “[his] Malinally, Malinche, [his] courtesan” (74), a love that will never be publicly acknowledged. As in the myth of Cortés and Malinche, the white man goes back to the woman that suits his race and social status. In Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek popular culture— advertising, the soaps or telenovelas, and popular romantic novels and songs—is shown to play an important role in the perpetuation of working-class women’s silent acceptance of and compliance with ideologies of beauty, domesticity, and romance. Like Viramontes, Cisneros points at the gap between middle-class ideologies of beauty and romance and the working-class context of Chicanas where they cannot be fulfilled. In “Barbie-Q,” the voice of a very young female narrator tells about Mexican girls’ fascination with Barbie, one of the most representative American emblems of ideal female beauty. The Barbies that these poor 212

Mexican American girls play with are old: “We have to make do with your mean-eyed Barbie and my bubblehead Barbie and our one outfit apiece no including the sock dress” (15). The girls replace their old Barbies with the “Career Gal” Barbie and the “Sweet Dreams” Barbie, two bargains bought at a fire sale in the flea market of Maxwell Street after a big toy warehouse in the neighborhood has burned down. Defective, “water-soaked and sooty,” their Barbies, as the title of the story humorously suggests, are smoked versions of the brand-new glamorous kind. But, as the young narrator puts it, “if the prettiest doll [...] has a left foot that’s melted a little [...] so long as you don’t lift the dress, right?—who’s to know” (16). These children do not seem to care much about these differences, but Cisneros makes a point of having her character notice that those differences exist; there are Barbies that come “in nice, clean boxes” and Barbies that are “water soaked and sooty” (15). These observations anticipate the gender, race, and class differences among women that Cisneros will highlight in other stories. In “My Tocaya” Cisneros explores the gap between ideologies of womanhood and the lives of working-class Chicanas through the voice of a female teenager, Patricia Chávez. Patricia tells the story of her namesake, Patricia Bernadette Benavídez, who is, in her own words, “a freak.” Patricia Benavídez works at her father’s taco house after school and weekends, is “bored, a little sad” and “[w]ho knows what she had to put up with. Maybe her father beat her” (36-37). Patricia is one of those girls “destined for trouble,” “a girl who wore rhinestone earrings, and glitter high heels to school,” one of those kids “that always try too hard to fit in” (36-37). “Trish” is the name Patricia Benavídez has invented for herself, which she pronounces with a “phony English accent too, all breathless and sexy like a British Marilyn Monroe. Real goofy” (37). This invented new name bespeaks the tocaya’s desire to invent a new glamorous self that has nothing to do with the stink of crispy tacos and the fights at home. The narrative voice of Patricia Chávez admits her tocaya “had problems” and that she is not “for real,” but also that she is “all right” if you 213

catch her without an audience. A relationship between the two girls develops as Trish promises her to hook her up with a boy in their brothers’ Catholic school. To the narrator’s anger, Patricia escapes all of a sudden without having fulfilled her promise, leaving behind her Catholic school and her father’s strict education. She then becomes the focus of all local newspapers. After her parents’ identification of a dead body as their daughter’s, Patricia Benavídez’s tragic death is made public. The adolescent narrator critiques the hypocritical attitude of the school and the sensationalist television coverage of her friend’s death: her mother’s tears, her father’s kind words, the teacher’s compliments and the school kids’ “drama hot shits howling real tears, even the ones that didn’t know her. Sick” (40). Trish rises from the dead and turns up alive and kicking at the local police station. The media go wild on her again and the narrator complains: “All I’m saying is she couldn’t even die right. But whose famous face is on the front page of the San Antonio Light, the San Antonio Express News, and the Southside Reporter?” (40). Cisneros’ story illustrates that a girl like Trish, trapped in a poor, patriarchal Mexican American family and neighborhood, can only become famous by disappearing, dying tragically, and becoming one of those many victims appearing on the dailies and news, a cheap Mexican version of glamorous Marilyn. The story that entitles the volume, “Woman Hollering Creek,” deals with the idealization of love and marriage promoted by magazines, romance novels, and telenovelas. The protagonist, Cleófilas, from a small village on the Mexican side of the border and a non-English speaker, has married Juan Pedro and gone to “el otro lado” with hopes of a better life: He has a very important position in Seguin, with, with... a beer company, I think. Or was it tires? [...] and then they will drive off in his new pickup—did you see it?—to their new home in Seguin. Well, not exactly new, but they’re going to repaint the house. You know newlyweds. New paint and new furniture. Why not? He can afford it. (45)

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Cleófilas has been waiting for “passion in its purest crystalline essence. The kind books and songs and telenovelas describe when one finds, finally, the great love of one’s life,” the passion of women who love “no matter what, because that is the most important thing [...]. Because to suffer for love is good. The pain all sweet somehow. In the end” (44-45). Cisneros’ protagonist is shown adopting the social role promoted by soaps and romance novels. As Tania Modleski contends in Loving with a Vengeance (1990), the never-ending, convoluted, unresolved plot of soapoperas promotes women’s sympathy for the struggle of all the characters, but also encourages their acceptance of their passive role (their patience, resistance, understanding, and conformity). The “good woman” of the soaps becomes the mirror image and role model for the ordinary housewife, confirming and satisfying socially-produced desires. She is the all-enduring bearer and reliever of the sufferings of others who waits for the happy ending as a reward for all her suffering. But Cleófilas does not cross the border to a new life of prosperity and passion. She lives on the border: on the border of American society, of poverty; on a border town with lonely women like Soledad and Dolores, the former abandoned by her husband, the latter mourning two sons fallen in the last war and a husband. Cleófilas’ border life entails dreaming and hoping like a telenovela heroine and facing a husband who comes back home drunk late at night, who beats her because he hates his life, his work, and his house. Confused after the first beating, Cleófilas does not speak and will remain silent when more comes: But when the moment came, and he slapped her once, and then again, and again; until the lip split and bled an orchid of blood, she didn’t fight back, she didn’t break into tears, she didn’t run away as she imagined she might when she saw such things in the telenovelas. (47)

The story highlights the contrast between Cleófilas’ romantic dreams and her efforts to “remember why” she loves a husband that makes love to her and holds her, but is moody, loud, rude, 215

husky, demanding, abusive and does not care about love or romance. A husband she suspects of infidelity when she goes back home from hospital after the birth of their first child: “A doubt. Slender as hair. A washed cup set back on the shelf wrongside-up. Her lipstick, and body talc, and hairbrush all arranged in the bathroom a different way” (50). Cleófilas’ options are going back to her Mexican “town of gossips,” “town of dust and despair,” or staying in this American town where there is nothing to do for a Mexican woman like her “because the towns here are built so that you have to depend on husbands. Or you stay home. Or you drive. If you’re rich enough to own, allowed to drive, your own car” (51). She begins to feel threatened by the news of dead and abused women: “Her ex-husband, her husband, her lover, her father, her brother, her uncle, her friend, her co-worker. Always. The same grisly news in the pages of the dailies” (52). But she continues to read Corín Tellado and watch telenovelas with women with names like Topazio, Yesenia, Cristal, Adriana, Stefania, and Andrea; stories about women with happy endings. Modleski argues that the women of the soaps patiently wait for things to happen to them, and that the housewife who watches and follows these role models, adopts the passive, self-abasing attitude they propound. The housewife projects her romantic fantasies onto the fictional lives of the soap characters she has come to see as members of her own family (88). Cleófilas begins to realize that telenovelas reinforce her own powerlessness: “Everything happened to women with names like jewels. But what happened to a Cleófilas? Nothing. But a crack in the face” (53). Not having a place to go, Cleófilas goes to the arroyo called “Woman Hollering” whose name has intrigued her since the day she arrived in the town. Tradition has it that wandering about on her own is dangerous, may bring mala suerte, but she feels something calling her; perhaps La Llorona, the woman who drowned her own children (51). The meaning of the creek is finally revealed to Cleófilas when, scared, battered, and pregnant with her second child, she finally asks for help at the hospital. She is driven out of her domestic prison by Felice, a 216

middle-class Chicana who, to Cleófilas’ surprise, owns, and drives her own truck and has no husband. On their way to San Antonio, they drive past the creek and Cleófilas is taken aback by Felice’s Tarzan-like yelling as they are crossing the bridge. Felice says that the creek is the only thing in the area named after a woman who is not a virgin. Cisneros’ feminist revision of the legend of La Llorona in this story offers an alternative role model to displaced women like Cleófilas. In contrast with the tragic traditional Llorona, Cisneros’ legendary woman hollers a cry of freedom, self-ownership, and happiness. This is indeed a happy and optimistic ending for Cleófilas, an ending that is certainly far from most of the actual endings of the stories of many Mexican women that cross the border either way. But the story revises folklore to claim a space in the American landscape that is turned into both a monument to women’s strength and a reminder of their desire for freedom. Cleófilas’ freedom is in the hands of Felice, which confers responsibility to second-and-third generation Chicanas refusing the submissiveness and passitivity of their foremothers but inheriting their strength and bravery. Cisneros’ message, put in the mouth of Lupe, the protagonist of “Bien Pretty,” contains one of the prerequisites for the representation of the borderlands or nepantla space as a place of resistance, creativity, and sustenance that the third part of this study will engage. Also addicted to telenovelas, Lupe acknowledges the role she has been socialized to perform, but admits that in order to preserve her self-ownership and dignity, it is important to love herself first: “Not Lola Beltrán sobbing ‘Soy infeliz’ into her four cervezas. But Daniela Romo singing ‘Ya no. Es verdad que te adoro, pero más me adoro yo.’” (163). When she dreams of the characters of the telenovelas Lupe slaps the heroine to her sense, because I want them to be women who make things happen, not women who things happen to [...]. Not men powerful and passionate versus women either volatile and evil, or sweet and resigned. But women. Real women [...]. Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. And, above all, fierce. (161)

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4 Dangerous Crossings

Todo cada cual con su cada cuala doblando la espalda o volviendo la cara. Miras en mis ojos y te ves mirada, me tocas la mano y ya estás tocada. Si no miras, vata, nunca verás nada. María Lugonés (1990)

Border crossings involve confrontation with the unexpected, the other within communities, cultures, nations, and selves that have been imagined as homogeneous and unitary. Going beyond the limits of these spaces entails the intriguing and fearful meeting with what is different, foreign, unknown, and hence, potentially threatening. To live in the borderlands, or to be nepantla, as I remarked in the preface and the introduction of this study with reference to Miguel León-Portilla’s and Anzaldúa’s work, is to be on the verge of what is known and what is unknown. It is to be host and new arrival, observer and observed, subject and object, victim and culprit. For my definition of the borderlands I also drew on Derrida’s definition of crossing as a state of aporia (see “Introduction”). He distinguishes between the transgression of physical divisions (between countries, communities, geographical areas, and social spaces) and the crossing of conceptual barriers (between cultures, languages, social codes, and roles). In both cases boundaries bring together the accepted and the forbidden, the self and the other, what we know about ourselves and about others, and what we don’t. Placing a particular emphasis on the idea of exceeding or transgressing limits, the works by Helena Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga I tackle in this chapter contest received notions of Mexican/Chicano/a identity and ethnicity by thematizing a complex web of interrelated issues

and relations. The lives of their characters are plagued by danger, uncertainty, conflict, and isolation, as well as by a desire for safety, coherence, stability, and connection. The latter is usually expressed through ethnic icons and cultural markers. Viramontes’ short stories on the urban ghettoes of Los Angeles, describe the other side of a postmodern, postindustrial era. At a time when the mobility and speed of globalization seem to be universalizing cultures and values and doing away with local boundaries and geographical frontiers, this writer explores a more disturbing, frayed face of postmodernity. For the protagonists of her stories borders do matter and have a significant effect on their lives. They are those for whom to move and cross boundaries is a matter of life or death. As products and residues of complex local and global processes, her characters survive in the downtrodden areas of the city, away from the now disperse centers of power. These stories are the daily melodramas of forgotten, despondent beings whose past or future is unheeded by the hegemonic political economy. For her part, Sandra Cisneros critiques American concepts of Mexican ethnicity and authenticity through humorous, but also sad and acrid portrayals of psychological, generational, and intercultural conflicts stemming from migration and mixed origins. Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) is an epistolary novel that gives an ironic vision of the motif of the journey to Mexico as necessary quest for identity and spirituality. The novel reads as a collection of interrelated intimate letters from Teresa to Alicia which reveal these two Chicanas’ attempts to find an amiable space for the development of their confused and displaced selves. Through an extended spatial metaphor, Cherríe Moraga’s latest play, The Hungry Woman (2000), is one more expression of the double bind of the Mexican American. In this piece, the Chicana playwright refashions classical and Aztec myths and legends in an attempt to construct a metalanguage with which to interpret the sexual and gender oppression of women within Mexican/Chicano culture. 220

Viramontes, Moraga, Cisneros, and Castillo reflect on the fact that ethnic icons may become fetishes or objects of worship that do not often correspond to some people’s social and historical needs. The idea of a communal image and a collective identity is revealed as necessary, but it is also presented as a deluding mirage. With different emphases, the four of them present ethnicity as a source of spiritual and cultural regeneration, as well as source of alternative meanings and identity. In some of these works, ethnicity is also ironized upon as a deceitful and romanticized counterfeit. Given the subject matter of this chapter, it is fitting to say a few words about how the modern and postmodern sensitivity to the indeterminacy of the self, internal difference, the breakdown of communities, and diversity connects with the decentered strategies of representation in Chicano/a fiction and drama. Under the influence of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics, the modern forms of the short story and the dramatic piece have enabled the focus on individual and communal difference, the understanding of identity as a process of constant becoming and transformation. Linear narrative sequences are replaced by techniques that emphasize simultaneity of events in space, the interdependence and non-sequential relationship between the past and the present, and the multiplicity of coexisting, disparate, and often conflictive subject positions within the self and the collectivity. Narratives manifest sensitivity to difference and multiplicity with techniques such as fragmentation, juxtaposition, and simultaneity. The modern phenomenon of the short-story cycle, also known as short-story sequence or constellation, is frequently used by “minority writers” seeking to find a balance between individual voices and communal relations. Together with Viramontes, Cisneros, and Castillo some of the most acclaimed Chicano/a writers have written their first works of fiction in the form of

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short-story cycles or decentered narratives.1 J. Gerald Kennedy and Robert M. Luscher have noticed the ways in which shortstory sequences and novels of collective protagonists overlap. Works like Tomás Rivera’s ... y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), Rolando Hinojosa’s Dear Rafe (1985), Klail City (1987), and his other works belonging to the “Klail City Death Trip Series,” Sandra Cisneros’ House on Mango Street (1985), Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) may be read either as novels of collective protagonists or as short-narrative cycles about the Chicana/o experience. As Luscher observes, the unifying aesthetic principles in short-story sequences or cycles are the characters, the locale, the themes, symbols, and images, as well as narrative techniques such as counterpoint, juxtaposition, and loose temporal sequence (150). Yet, I would like to insist on Kennedy’s view that the poetics of the short-story sequence is both the outcome of “cosmopolitan, cultural pluralism” and the breakdown of community, and the ensuing nostalgia for collective life (xiv). Posing a similar argument to Kennedy’s, Mary Louise Pratt says short-narrative sequences may be deliberately used to transmit the duality of a desired communal unity and the actual division within the community: “[T]he disorder of frontier society, or of traditional societies disintegrating in the face of modernization” (188). Be it in the form of the episodic childhood novel or Bildungsroman (Sandra Cisneros’ Mango Street), in the form of the epistolary novel (Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters), in the shape of place-based collections, or through polyphonic narratives (Viramontes’ and Cisneros’ stories and collections), these works all portray the tension between the disintegration of a culture, a community, and/or an individual, and the desire for harmony and unity against dividing and fragmenting forces. 1

Tomás Rivera (1971), Américo Paredes (stories written from the 30s to the 50s, and published in 1994 in the collection The Hammon and the Beans), Denise Chávez (1986), Gary Soto (1985), and Miguel Méndez (1974).

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Plurality and diversity also characterize modern dramatic forms. C.W.E. Bigsby says that the pluralism of voices Mikhail Bakhtin saw in the novel as a reflection and representation of the modern age is a characteristic of modern theatre. Drama provides an environment where voices are given social form, where speakers adopt a multiplicity of positions, and where it is possible to stage a different future (341). Bigsby has not been the only one to apply the Bakhtinian concept of heteroglossia and dialogism to drama. Alluding to Bakhtin, Helene Keyssar speaks of a “novelization of drama” in order to account for the multiplicity of interanimating and conflicting voices that are to be found in modern theatre. This dialogism within drama makes it possible to apply Bakhtin’s theories to a literary genre the Russian theorist saw as monologic. Keyssar makes a distinction between texts that are revolutionary and dialogic in themselves, such as those highlighted by Bakhtin, and those that emerge during a transformational moment in history. Like the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the present century has given rise to changing views of human nature and the world. Drama offers the possibility of illustrating changes in individual characters, but more relevant for the times we live in, Keyssar argues, is the capacity of this genre to illustrate an essential transformation in the image men and women have of themselves (118-119). Feminist drama, like most modern drama, is under the influence of modern and postmodern thought, and thus, refuses linearity and the assumption of the unity of the world, the self, and the community. It deals with women’s need for selfexploration, the relationship between women, their occasional incapacity to assume their freedom, and their inability to transcend the circumstances that imprison them. As other literary genres have done when addressing feminist issues, drama expresses the struggle of those who fight for their independence but are still subject to male-dominated thought. Thus, this struggle needs to be seen in relation to the circumstances that make it possible and to those that thwart it. Susan Bassnett argues that a feminist awareness in theatre involves the presentation of 223

the action as a social situation where the dilemmas of the female individual may be grounded in a broader context of relations of power (456-461). Similarly, Jeanie Forte sustains that subversive feminist texts must deconstruct the dominant ideology: They have to undermine the illusion of a coherent, seamless reality and relate the importance of race, class, and gender issues in the challenge to patriarchal ideology and the articulation of an alternative female subjectivity (21). These plays must present the structure of society as determining characters’ actions; they have to make clear that individuals are not the only ones responsible for their actions by emphasizing the political in personal experience (22). In Forte’s view, “pseudo-realism” is useful because it puts forth the idea of real events in a real world. Yet, there have to be elements that “conjure up what classic realism usually renders invisible, which is the society that isn’t on stage” (23). Thus, for Forte, a play must include a multiplicity of discourses that refuse an authoritative position. It has to avoid the possibility of a fixed, stable identity; it must show, in the case of women, their estrangement from a culture and a heritage they want to make their own, but cannot control, claim, or shape. By fostering ambiguity, drama has to traverse various signifying systems (23-25). This interanimation of languages and the ambivalent position towards the future of women may be conveyed by means of the dialogic relationship among a variety of women’s voices from the present and the past. Dialogism has the double function of staging women’s subjective views and personalities, and of highlighting dialogically the variety of social milieus that affect those very particular views, including the most feminist and radical one. Akin to one of the most representative feminist plays, Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1984), Cherríe Moraga’s theatre pieces such as Giving Up the Ghost (1984), Shadow of a Man (1985) (both of them included in the volume Heroes and Saints and Other Plays), and her latest The Hungry Woman (2000) reject a single “feminine” or “feminist” vision and refuse to propose a clear solution to the dilemmas they present. 224

4.1. Helena Viramontes and the “Ragged Edges” of Urban Postmodernity East L.A., the barrio where Helena Viramontes was born and raised and the location of some of her stories about urban life, is the largest and oldest Spanish-speaking enclave in Los Angeles. Together with many other barrios that began to grow in in the 1970s U.S. cities, East L.A. was both the result of Latino immigration and, eventually, its cause. The deep economic and political involvement of the U.S. in Latin America (1950s and 60s) favored immigration flows from Latin America that gradually stabilized after the settlement of legal and illegal immigrants escaping the economic and political turmoil of Latin American countries (Suro 21). The geographer Edward W. Soja describes contemporary L.A. as the paradigm of a new modern, post-industrial, “global,” information-intensive metropolis that brings together First, Second, and Third World economies into a system “of production, exchange, and consumption” (Soja 303-304). The immediate result of this globalization has been the lack of local control over the planning process. Los Angeles’ welcoming of foreign investment has resulted in the creation of a Business District controlled by overseas firms and in the emergence of numerous outer cities. The boundaries within the city and within other non-metropolitan neighborhoods become the site of violent struggles for the rights they deny their most disadvantaged inhabitants. As Soja puts it, “the old and new poor either crowd into the expanding immigrant enclaves of the Third World City or remain trapped in murderous landscapes of despair” (306). The post-industrial city does not offer Latinos the possibility of a gradual transition from hard labor to economic betterment. Very much unlike their predecessors, with the disappearance of industries many Latinos currently find themselves stuck in unskilled jobs and in poor neighborhoods. One may sometimes 225

come across three generations of gang members with no possible way out of the barrio (Suro 16-18). These urban areas are indeed also becoming borderlands, “because of a constant traffic of goods and people, a give-and-take, a constant hybridization” (Suro 124-125). In barrios such as East L.A., Latinos may invent new identities, create alternative cultural expressions and communal solidarity organizations, but also new forms of crime, cultural confusion, and conflict (Suro 127). Viramontes depicts the most dismal, dramatic face of Latinos’ daily existence in postmodern L.A. In her stories, she describes the urban spatial relations of the Latin American poor attracted to the postmodern labor market or fleeing oppressive regimes in their home countries. Her settings are the urban neighborhoods of foreign workers, neighborhoods overrun by long stretches of highway and crammed with a working class of U.S. domestic poor, legal, and illegal immigrants. “Neighbors” addresses the theme of personal, racial, institutional, and cultural barriers within the barrio. Spatial divisions are significantly prevalent in this story: Walls separate the home and the street, stretches of highways fragment neighborhoods and tower above the poor urban neighborhoods of the vast barrio of East L.A., doors stand between distrustful neighbors. Invalidating some of the myths around which Chicano unity and identity have been expressed, the story is an ironic reversal of the sense of collective harmony connoted by its title. The mysterious female figure of the story deserves particular attention as it is through this incarnation of otherness that Viramontes focuses on the problems of race, gender, nationality, and generation inherent to the neocolonial context of U.S. marginal areas. In this story, as in others, contemporary issues of immigration, race, and discrimination intermingle with fantasies inspired by Mexican myths and stereotypes of femininity. Narrated in third person by an ominiscient narrator, the story is divided into eight sections that alternate Aura’s and Fierro’s respective mediated voices. Aura, the female protagonist, is an old, lonely woman whose 226

only companion is her also aged neighbor Fierro. She is deeply disturbed by the arrival of a strange woman who claims to be her neighbor’s friend. Frustrated and impotent in her isolation after the arrival of the woman, and unable to withstand the street gangs’ racket outside her door, she calls the police. After the harsh intervention of the police against the Mexican American youths, Aura realizes her mistake. The gang boys devastate her garden in revenge and swear to “get her,” but Aura decides to defend herself and fight against them on her own. Meanwhile, Fierro enjoys the company of the new arrival, a momentary relief against his loneliness and the sad memories of the death of his son in a street squabble. The last episode of the story narrates Aura’s fear of the running footsteps, and panting outside her door. Thinking it is the street gang coming to get her, she grabs the gun her grandfather taught her to use. Outside Aura’s house, the unknown woman, desperate after Fierro’s sudden death, runs towards the door of the only woman she has met in the neighborhood. The first irony of the story is that the arrival of another lonely and displaced woman impels Aura to act against the unkempt young men of the street. This younger woman breaks Aura’s private and relatively stable relationship with Fierro, which makes the old woman more conscious of her confinement, her loneliness, and her old age. Aura’s mistrust of the woman is partly due to her sense of territoriality, “her perimeters, both personal and otherwise” (102). Aura’s inspection of the woman reflects the general mistrust of illegal immigrants in the U.S.: “The woman became nervous under Aura’s scrutiny. She began rummaging her bags like one looking for proof of birth at a border crossing” (103). The woman’s appearance, as described through Aura’s eyes, suggests a long, tiresome journey from a different place, and a grievous past. Her pathetic untidiness and her striking massive appearance arouse Aura’s mixed feelings. The woman’s feet are cracked, dirty, “encrusted with dry blood,” “hard years had etched her chapped and sunburnt face” (102). Her badly mended dress, soiled bags, toothless mouth, and the whites 227

of her eyes, “vague as old memories,” arouse Aura’s compassion (102-103). The woman’s characteristic smell sharpens her difference and unfamiliarity. Upon her arrival she is described as having “a vacuous hole of a mouth,” which hints at her silent status as noncitizen after she has crossed the border. In contrast, she has a confidence, a security, and a flaunting indifference to the scornful stares of the neighbors Aura smilingly values. This woman has stepped over the traditional barriers of female decorum with exuberance and acts with no qualms about the possible obstacles her femininity, her class, and her race may pose her. Paradoxically, the intense assertiveness of the woman rekindles Aura’s repressed wish to resist, live, and be free. It is by detecting the woman’s compelling presence that Aura becomes aware of a dormant “deephearted yearning.” If, so far, life in the graveyard-like barrio had caused her to resign “herself to live with the caution and silence of an apparition […] assured of no want” (102), she now, after watching this woman was in the mood to dance, to loosen her inhibitions from the tight confines of shoes and explore a barefoot freedom she had never experienced in her wakeful hours. But she awoke to stare at her feet, to inspect the swelling, to let reality slowly sink in, and she was thankful and quite satisfied simply to be able to walk. (110)

As Aura contemplates the barefoot woman on the porch feeding the pigeons she understands the sickness in her stomach is not from her medication, but from the foreign woman’s ebullience that pleases and yet belittles her. Aura is more than once tempted to identify with the woman out of empathy, but refuses that identification to protect herself from someone she does not know. The nonchalant entrance of the imposing woman in Fierro’s house is accompanied by the cooing pigeon, which in the Mexican ballad tradition “is usually a messenger of love or of unfortunate news, such as the demise of a hero” (Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido 96). Following the presage of the pigeon, the omniscient narrative voice emphasizes the mystery around 228

this woman in an effort to make her symbolize both death and life according to Aura’s and Fierro’s respective visions. In doing so, Viramontes prevents the woman from speaking, and thus emphasizes her objectification and her otherness. In the eyes of Aura, the woman is a vigorous and vivacious “massive presence,” manipulating a scarf “as though it were a serpent,” causing Fierro to let out a laugh that sounds like a rattle (110). The description links the woman to the aforementioned archetypal presentation of woman as evil present in the Mexican ballad tradition as a result of the intertwining of Western and Mexican-Aztec conceptualizations of the female. This representation also links her to figures of coquettish, seductive, and treacherous women like Eve, Malinche, La Llorona, or “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” figures that patriarchal culture identifies with destruction given the mental correlation between female sexuality and death (Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido 54-77) (See section 2.3 above). As depicted through Aura’s consciousness, the woman suits the racist stereotype of the dangerous, foreign illegal: “Her memory swelled with stories which began with similar circumstances, and she began to worry about being duped” (103). If, as Fredric Jameson states, evil characterizes “whatever is radically different from me, whatever by virtue of precisely that difference seems to constitute a real and urgent threat to my own existence” (Political Unconscious 115), then, in Aura’s eyes, the woman is evil because she is different, unclean, and unfamiliar. Aura indirectly denies any possible connection or identification with the visitor when she says she finds it “strange” that the newcomer should know her name (104). Fierro is not afraid of the woman, but prefers to ignore her origin and her past and take comfort in her presence: “[T]o find the warm mass of a woman sleeping beside him was enough to silence his curiosity. He also knew never to ask a question if he wasn’t prepared for the answer, and so he was content to let her stay for as long as she wanted without even asking her name” (113). When described through his consciousness, the woman 229

appears as a caretaking, motherly figure. At the moment of his death he adopts a “fetal position,” which immediately links the woman to her natural function of giving birth, and connects her to the archetype of the good mother or mater dolorosa, a figure associated with the death of the hero in the corrido. María Herrera-Sobek says that in the border ballad the death of the hero is perceived as a return to the earth. The image of the mother holding her son and crying for him at his deathbead at that crucial moment is appropriate as an emblem of his origins (The Mexican Corrido 1-8). In “Neighbors” Viramontes has rewritten the epic-heroic male-centered corrido. Unlike the hero of the Mexican border ballad, whose pistol is, according to Américo Paredes, a symbol of his bravery against American authorities, Fierro is an old and deranged anti-hero living on welfare and scared of highways. Sitting at Fierro’s deathbed, the mysterious woman may be viewed as the archetypal maternal figure described by Herrera-Sobek. Gloria Anzaldúa’s double representation of the indigenous woman provides a cultural model for understanding the ambiguous representation of the female arrivant in Viramontes’ story. Her racial difference makes her visible, but her history and culture are almost unknown in the host culture, which makes her publicly invisible. Yet, from a Chicana feminist perspective, she stands for strength, survival, power, and resistance. Let’s recall Anzaldúa’s words: “I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist” (Borderlands 86). In line with Anzaldúa, the story reiterates this woman’s simultaneous absence and presence in history. We don’t know where she comes from or what she has come for. She is almost an abstract, symbolic presence. Both Aura and Fierro project their individual frustrations and fantasies onto this woman, and choose not to ask questions, to ignore her story. The narrative voice, speaking in free indirect speech, echoes Mexican and Anglo American racialized, gendered visions of the native woman through the gaze of these 230

two characters, thus emphasizing her objectification. The last images of the woman in the scene of Fierro’s death are perhaps the only ones clearly hinting at her real, material life-experience, probably fraught with violence and disgrace. Described as pacing “around and around his bed like a caged lioness,” wringing her hands in helplessness, moaning, wailing, and shrieking in grief and desperation, the woman is reminiscent of other desperate, grieving women, of those unheard, lonely Lloronas of contemporary urban and border life. As soon as Fierro remembers the woman’s name, it is already too late for us to know her story. Yet Viramontes’ story offers the possibility of an instance in which her name may be known, and in which subject and object, self and other, present and past may meet in this marginal neighborhood. As the woman runs to Aura’s door seeking help, she is about to transgress the perimeters erected by her neighbor. In the final scene, both women’s crushing loneliness and desperation are about to make them collide tragically. Nonetheless, the possibility of their encounter contains a potential solution to the estrangement from each other, as well as a potential for their public resistance. If, as Américo Paredes argues, the gun is emblematic of resistance linked to communal fate (202), Aura’s taking of the gun symbolizes woman’s entrance into history, perhaps through violence, the transgression of the traditional boundaries of the home, and the possibility of a reinvigorating encounter with another woman.2 The last epiphanic moment of Viramontes’ story may be seen as an intimation that these women may in the future be neighbors, although they might not yet be aware of this. The woman is what Jacques Derrida would call an “absolute arrivant” for she “surprises the host [Aura, in this case]—who is 2

In The Mexican Corrido (1990) María Herrera-Sobek argues that women, children, and the mother of the corrido hero usually occupy the domestic space. Only in “El corrido de Agripina” does a woman appear “con sus armas en la mano,” although she shows signs of weakness, doubt, and fear before the approaching enemy.

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not yet a host or an inviting power [...] to the point of annihilating or rendering indeterminate, all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home” (Aporias 34). For Derrida, to wait at the limit, “s’attendre,” refers to the fact of expecting something to happen, but also to other transitive and reflexive meanings such as “awaiting oneself,” “awaiting oneself in oneself,” “awaiting for each other” (Aporias 64-65). Neus Carbonell elucidates the relevant implications of these unexpected encounters and arrivals as follows: If the absolute Other is what limits myself, it is also what I do not know and I do not expect, but what I should be able to experience momentarily as a disruption in a moment of surprise and true encounter with my ignorance of the Other. I can experience otherness, then, only in a moment of contamination between what I think and what I cannot think, between myself and my own limits. (177)

The imposing woman’s unexpected arrival in Aura’s neighborhood and, finally, her sudden entrance into Aura’s home and life, will certainly demolish the perimeters Aura has erected around herself, and will force her confrontation with an other in herself she did not expect. By turning the woman into a mysterious, silent recipient of the imaginary projections of others, Viramontes has emphasized the discursive domination that turns her into an “absolute Other.” Yet, the final collision between the two women may be viewed as the confrontation between the symbolic representations of woman, and woman herself, between Aura’s known and unknown self. A violent encounter perhaps, but an encounter after all that will possibly pave the way for resistance to the gender, race, and class discrimination both of these women have had to confront in their respective social contexts. If in this story women are possible agents of collective resistance, young men become parodies of the corrido hero. In “Neighbors” the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) enforces an institutionalized repressive power and could be seen 232

as the post-contemporary version of the Texas Rangers in the corrido. However, the “Bixby boys,” supposedly defying institutional power, do not have Cortez’s knowledge of communal struggle nor Joaquín’s sense of historical continuity with his ancestors.3 Their “little knowledge of struggle,” their loss in “the abyss of defeat” contrasts with the magnitude of the police weapons. These urban gang members are an ironic reversal of the pachucos, the presumable mythic precursors of Chicano resistance. The defiant graffiti on Aura’s wall,“Bixby Boys rule,” is the writer’s sardonic comment on their impotence. The “rebellious attitude,” “obstinate, almost fanatical will-to-be” that characterized the pachuco according to Octavio Paz and some Chicano critics, is only manifest when these gangs confront an old, defenseless woman like Aura (Leal, “Octavio Paz” 117-118). In turning the Bixby Boys into Aura’s enemies Viramontes discourages the essentialist view of a monolithic Chicano community, while she also invalidates two of the most common myths of Chicano unity and resistance: the revered abuelita and the pachuco.4 As these young men are “feminized,” defeated by the dominant culture that deprives them of active participation in society, masculine values are overstressed in their local environment through the abuse of those who are weaker than they. Viramontes’ concern with gang urban violence echoes works like Down These Mean Streets (1975), by the Nuyorican Piri Thomas and the more recent novel Drown (1996) by Junot 3

I am referring to “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” analyzed by Américo Paredes in With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), and to Rodolfo “Corky” González's poem “I Am Joaquín” (1972). The latter is an epic poem about the Mexican/Chicano enduring spirit since the Spanish conquest. It was made popular by Luis Valdez’s film version of the poem. 4 Gary Soto's poem “The Street” (1981), is also an intertext to the scene in “Neighbors.” The poem presents the relationship between a grandmother and her Americanized grandchild as one between cowboys and Indians: “The grandmother shuffles/ From one fruit tree/ To the next, her hands/ Skinned with dirt,/ Her breathing/ A hive of gnats/ She is Indian/ My brother believes,/ And lassoes her to a fence/ With the rope/ That pulled a cow/ To its death,/ A sow to the market” (5-6).

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Díaz, of Dominican descent. In these poignant, realistic novels drugs, alcohol, and delinquency are temporary evasions for young males who adopt a socially expected “cool” attitude and a fictitious sense of freedom to compensate for social anomie.5 Viramontes has demonstrated her particular concern with illegal and working-class women of Mexican descent through the recasting of the popular Mexican legend of La Llorona. In “Cariboo Café,” included in The Moths, and “Tears on My Pillow,” one of the stories in the anthology New Chicano/a Writing, she reinvents the legend according to the contemporary situation of displaced women on the U.S.-Mexico border. While these stories retain the symbolic representation of La Llorona as evil, Viramontes’ contrasts the myth with women’s reality as victims of urban violence and class discrimination. Her urban Lloronas go beyond the limits of domesticity driven by the search for a missing son, a missing husband, or the promise of a better life. According to the Manichean constructions of femininity described in the first part of this study (see section 2.4.), a woman must incarnate the values of maternity, permanence, domesticity, immobility, and privacy as representative of pure national identity. Therefore, La Llorona is a defiant figure in the sense that she steps outside the traditional boundaries of decorum and prudence. Her illicit affair and the murder of her children involve a transgression of the tenets of national morality. According to this moral, any kind of exposure to the public arena, like spontaneous or deliberate streetwalking, as Debra Castillo says, “is appropriate only for racially and socially inferior women who are assumed to be promiscuously impure” (16). Bearing these notions of female unworthiness in mind, Franco calls for a resemantization of the concept of motherhood and femininity, as in the case of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. They have defied the barriers of female decorum and transferred their “maternal thinking” to civic life, thus challenging the discourse of the power structure and proving that “mothering is 5

Viramontes is now working on a novel about urban violence in Los Angeles whose temporary title is Their Dogs Came with Them (Christoph 10).

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not simply tied to anatomy but is in a position involving a struggle over meanings and the history of meanings” (Franco, “Going Public” 513-514).6 Viramontes can be said to contribute to such resemantization through her refashioning of the legend of La Llorona. She invalidates the type of nationalist discourse that identifies woman with the “private” incorruptible essence of a community and consequently assumes she is unaffected by politics and history, which are assumed to affect only the “public” realm. In two very similar episodes in the stories “Cariboo Café” and “Tears on My Pillow,” the contradictions in the utopian presentation of the female occur within the confrontation between “maternal” and official national discourse. Viramontes confirms Franco’s assertion that it is difficult for women to accept the disappearance of their husbands and their sons in the name of nationalism and patriotism, and that there is no official discourse that represents them. In these stories the personalization of institutional relations and hegemonic powers through the stereotyping of the mother and the soldier work to show the mechanisms of institutional oppression. In “Cariboo Cafe” the washerwoman, worried about the basic needs of Geraldo, her missing five-year-old son who went to buy a mango and never returned, implores the soldier’s compassion: “He is only five years old,” “Señor, I’m a washerwoman,” “you see, he needs his sweater” (70). Her humble pleas clash with the cold, misleading, political rhetoric of the government official: “We arrest spies. Criminals. . . . Contras are tricksters.7 They 6

Sara Ruddick uses this term to refer to the care-taking, affective, nurturing thoughts that traditionally characterize the behavior of mothers, but that are not necessarily exclusive of women and mothers. See Sarah Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (1989). 7 Viramontes has said the story is set in El Salvador. Roberta Fernández has commented on this historical inaccuracy: “[T]here is nothing in the text to place [the woman in El Salvador]. […] through an unfortunate use of the word ‘contras’ Viramontes seems to be alluding to Nicaragua as the woman's country of origin whose violence she was forced to flee” (78). See Roberta Fernández's essay “The Cariboo Café” (1989).

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exploit the ignorance of people like you. Perhaps they convinced your son to circulate pamphlets” (69). In the second episode the woman’s request for an explanation for her husband’s arrest receives an equally hostile answer: “I gonna kill you” (110). The impenetrability of the language of dominant patriarchal institutions and these women’s failed attempts to communicate is, as Castillo has said, the writer’s commentary on their deprivation of the basic human right of speech (79). These women’s desperate wailing is swallowed by “a serpent’s tongue,” by the darkness and the night they are condemned to inhabit, a metaphorical representation of their invisibility. “It is the night of la Llorona,” the woman says, the night in which she joins other women coming “from the depths of sorrow” in their frantic search for their children (68-69). The aggression women have to witness and suffer, the brutalization of the family by the very institutions that require women’s immobility, docility, and the preservation of the family union, trigger off confusion and desperation. They anticipate what Franco calls a stage of “deterritorialization”—people’s abandonment of their home places, the desertion of their native lands, their displacement from their usual social and cultural environments (509). The washerwoman’s interior monologue exemplifies this crisis of meaning: These four walls are no longer my house, the earth beneath it, no longer my home. Weeds have replaced all good crops. The irrigation ditches are clodded with bodies. No matter where we turn, there are rumors facing us and we try to live as best as we can, under the rule of men who rape women, then rip their fetuses from their bellies. Is this our home? Is this our country? I ask Maria. Don't these men have mothers, lovers, babies, sisters? Don't they see what they are doing? (71)

“Tears on My Pillow” narrates a woman’s repudiation of motherhood under the constant threat that her children may die and her family may be destroyed. This story is also told through a revision of the popular legend of La Llorona, told by the old woman Mama Maria to little Ofelia, the naive narrative persona of the story. In this story the legendary female figure appears as a 236

desperate mother confronting a cruel soldier about the disappearance of her husband. When the soldier threatens to kill her she entices him to kill her children first “cause I don’t want ‘em hungry and sick and lone without no ama or apa or TV” (110). The cold-blooded soldier kills the kids, but she manages to escape and is left to wander endlessly and to haunt the dark streets in repentance and remorse. The contemporary version of the traditional legend, told by an old woman who has probably lived under the cruelty of a repressive regime, is related to the fear of imminent death and danger felt by the small girl living in the urban ghetto. Frightened Ofelia finds a supernatural explanation for her fear in the legend of La Llorona, which is in fact, as we detect in the nuances of her narrative, the evil power of social, cultural, and economic marginalization. A frequent pattern in some works by “ethnic” or “minority” writers is to move from alienation towards personal identity through ritual and ceremony, or to bring the self closer to the community and the family through the leitmotif of the journey backwards. Yet, these particular postmodern “urban” stories are located in an ahistorical, impersonal present where the sense of place and community is lost in a hostile, impersonal city, and the self, like La Llorona, is condemned to wander in perpetual loneliness, silence, and alienation. “La Llorona only comes at night,” says little Ofelia. “When it’s day, Veronica will always stay” (“Tears” 111). While La Llorona is the figurative representation of what she fears, Veronica, the girl’s neighbor, is a real embodiment of ugliness and disgrace: “I’m ascared of her cause her mama died a few months back [...]. And every time I seen her, I member of its possible for my mama to die too. And my stomach burns bad to see her, tall and ugly and bad luck stuck to her like dried pus” (111). Viramontes deals with ugliness here as the consequence of social marginalization. Poverty and misery are dealt with as inseparable from self-repulsion, marginality, shame, and invisibility, all of which Veronica seems to have accepted with resignation: “Veronica don’t talk to no one, and purty soon no 237

one talk to her. She just wants to be left alone til everybody forgets she’s around. [...] Then she can disappear like Lil Mary G. without no one paying no attention. You don’t need bras or nuthin’ when you just air” (113). Veronica disappears behind her ugliness just as Toni Morrison’s character Peccola in The Bluest Eye (1970) is “concealed, veiled, eclipsed” by her ugliness (39). Morrison’s commentary on the internalization of self-hatred may well be applied to Veronica and to other marginal sectors of American society: You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly […]. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question. The master had said, “You are ugly people.” They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance. “Yes,” they had said. “You are right.” And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it. (39)

Viramontes contextualizes her contemporary versions of La Llorona with references to the well-entrenched, institutionalized racism that other citizens direct against women. In “Cariboo” the also pathetic figure of the Cariboo Café owner displays this discriminatory attitude. A distorted version of the unscrupulous businessman, this wretched character is simultaneously a victim and an agent of racial discrimination, as well as a fierce defender of traditional familial values. The story reaches its highest ironic peak, when he, in the name of those values, betrays the heartbroken washerwoman. Like him, she is struck with delusions and sees in Macky the son she once lost. The child is the link between the respective stories of the woman and the bartender, and “coke,” the only English word he can say to order his favorite drink, a jarring evocation of the “promises” America harbors for the immigrants. The woman is the scapegoat of the cook’s own frustrated aspirations, the embodiment of social evil, a “weirdo,” an “illegal.” 238

Through the technique of interior monologue Viramontes highlights the cook’s mental commotion. The self-expiatory words with which he justifies his deep resentment of the illegal immigrants, may be seen as a satire of any autobiographical attempt at self-explanation. The “scum” taking refuge in his café make it the site of raids and other disturbing scenes in which the cook participates as a presumably involuntary observer. These circumstances led him to the two betrayals from which he needs to exonerate himself. Reflecting on the day the drug addict Paulie died of an overdose in his bathroom, he says: “The prick O.D.’s in my crapper; vomits and shits are all over—I mean all over the fuckin' walls. That’s the thanks I get for being Mr. Nice Guy” (The Moths 67). The insistence on his honesty and moral uprightness conceals a deep sense of guilt. Remembering the day he betrayed the immigrants hiding in his bathroom he says bitterly: “Now look, I’m a nice guy, but I don’t like to be used, you know? Just ‘cause they’re regulars don’t mean jackshit. I run an honest business. And that’s what I told them agents” (68). His moral appeal is however at odds with the multiple references to his mental and moral confusion, and with the uneasiness of his conscience. In his agitation, his mind “fries with the potatoes,” his stomach feels dizzy, he “go[es] bananas” and lets the chile overboil, burning himself and the patties. He yearns for his exwife, who always knew what to do. The absence of his wife and his son, of the human family relationships he craves for, finally becomes the main argument for his betrayal and evasion of responsibility: “I haven’t seen Nell for years,” he says, “and I guess that’s why I pointed to the bathroom” (68). Right before his betrayal of the Central American refugee woman with the two kids, he cries for the loss of his wife and for the loss of the son who lies crumpled up somewhere in Vietnam, and concludes: “Children gotta be with their parents, family gotta be together” (73). The projection of the images of his lost son onto the drug addict and Macky are fictional mental constructions demonstrating his lack of touch with reality. His whole story is 239

therefore a frustrated attempt to find meaning, to recover what has been lost. Like Arlene in “Miss Clairol” the cook deludes himself. In particular, he seeks refuge in a nostalgic recreation of the domestic space of the past, of Woman, and of the family values she represents. His own story is a symptom of his mental and emotional disturbance, of the fact that, like the immigrants, he has also suffered poverty, violence, and despair. Yet, the cook selfishly avoids seeing the suffering of others. Influenced by a work ethic of a culture that emphasizes independence, honesty, and industry, he turns a blind eye to the lonely, desperate illegal immigrants, to the woman, to the drug-addict killing himself in the bathroom. He only sees how detrimental their presence is to the “honesty” of a business that depends on them. Further reinforcing the dramatic irony pervading this story, the monologue of this heartbroken, confused character is juxtaposed to that of the resolute washerwoman. While he is contemplating the betrayal of the woman to the police on the grounds that “family gotta be together,” she is luxuriating in her motherly, caretaking role, happy in her delusion she has recovered the son who was taken away from her (The Moths 73-74). In these stories the symbolic representations of evil overlap with its “real” or material manifestations: the decay and malformation of bodies, the dirt, destruction, and violence of the streets, and the mutual aggressiveness and estrangement of the barrio inhabitants and family members. As speculative postmodern realist texts, they deal with the daily lives of those who are most vulnerable to the threats of these marginal areas. Viramontes uses “real,” events and scenes embedded in contemporary confrontations amongst citizens and non-citizens to undercut representations of Chicano/a men and women. Using the cinematographic technique of the close-up, Viramontes gives magnified details of the injured bodies and soiled public and domestic places that define the lives of her characters: Macky’s torn jeans and Sonyas’s scraped knees, the broken glass in the back alleys or the vomit and shits of the café bathroom in “Cariboo Café,” Fierro coughing up phlegm in “Neighbors,” the 240

red period spots on the death sheets of Veronica’s mother, or Veronica’s “spit all white in her mouth” in “Tears.” In “Neighbors” the spatial imagery draws attention to the isolation, alienation, and detachment of the two old people. We are told that Aura “always stayed within her perimeters, both personal and otherwise, and expected the same of her neighbors” (The Moths 102). Her “wrought-iron fence,” is a spatial as well as a psychological barricade, separating her from the incomprehensible “abyss of defeat,” “the graveyard” of the streets, but also preventing her own liberation. Both thematically and formally, the stories bring together the speech limitations of socially disadvantaged groups and the spatial limitations preponderant in marginal urban areas. A sense of danger and alienation comes through in Viramontes’ representation of the consciousness of the characters and in the portrayal of their relation to their social and domestic environment. The writer turns the silence resulting from physical suffering, psychological, geographic, and cultural exile and from the fear of unknown threats, into a language of its own. Thus, it becomes the main source of the “difference” and uprootedness of her characters. In “Miss Clairol” and “Tears” the series of prohibitions and absences restricting the girl’s movement also reverberate in the lack of interaction with and estrangement from her neighbors and her family: I ain’t allowed to stay after school and play with Willy on account of he bit me like a dog, and Arlene and Tia Olivia had a fight, sos I ain’t allowed to go to Tia’s house either and I dunno know where my brother Gregorio is sos I guess I just go straight home, put the TV on loud or something. (“Tears” 113)

“Tears on My Pillow,” told from the innocent perspective of the girl, focuses on her lack of understanding as a result of a lack of communication with those surrounding her: “Mama Maria never said goodbye, she just left and that’s that and nobody to tell me why tío Benny don’t live with Tia Olivia anymore or when is Gregorio gonna come home or if Arlene is fixed up to go dancing 241

at the Paladium tonight. No one to say nuthin’” (115). The sense of menace and loneliness is intensified in “Cariboo Café,” where the rules ever present in Sonya’s consciousness demonstrate her constant exposure to danger in the streets: “Rule one: never talk to a stranger, not even the neighbor who paced up and down the hallways talking to himself. Rule two: the police […] was La Migra in disguise and thus should always be avoided. Rule three: keep your key with you at all times” (The Moths 61). When lost in the dark maze of alleys of the ghetto Sonya only murmurs to herself. Like other illegal immigrants, she represses a cry for help because her safety depends on her remaining unheard and unnoticed. Silence is also an imposition on the little girl, Champ, unable to share her anxiety nor any of the thoughts that “people dismiss like parentheses” (“Miss Clairol” 102). Solitude pervades the lives of Aura and Fierro. She lives with the “caution and silence of an apparition” while he turns off his hearing aid in order to detach himself from the noise of the car engines. Voluntarily separated from this hostile, menacing world, Aura and Fierro live off the memories of an idealized time and space that have no “fertile soil” in which to grow. The sick urban space of the barrio, the remnants of demolished houses, becomes a metaphor for Fierro’s deranged mind from which memories have also been destroyed and uprooted. The devastation of Aura’s garden and the offensive graffiti sprayed on her walls by the street gangs are signs of alien, threatening forces within the barrio itself; a manifestation of the generational and emotional gap between the old woman, still attached to the old land and traditions, and the rough, despondent, “Americanized” but also marginalized youths. By highlighting Aura’s and Fierro’s indifference to the suffering of others, Viramontes identifies yet another feature of this postmodern ethos: a self-imposed detachment and distance from the horrors of experiences that threaten to disturb our safety and our conscience. The characters of these stories have all seen too much. Many of them are women and mothers who, like the female 242

figure of the revisited legend of La Llorona in “Tears on My Pillow,” are vulnerable to the indifference and brutality of dictatorial regimes and/or of racial and social discriminatory practices in the U.S. What Octavio Paz says of the Mexicans in relation to foreign colonial powers, we may say of women with respect to patriarchal powers in the stories discussed here. They are “ninguneadas,” “turned into nobodies” by it: “Espera siempre. Y cada vez que quiere hablar, tropieza con un muro de silencio; [...] si suplica, llora o grita, sus gestos y gritos se pierden en el vacío que don Nadie crea con su vozarrón” (40). Be it the case of the Central American immigrants, the rural workers in Mexico, the raped woman, or the old woman in the ghetto, Viramontes presents the contradictions of living simultaneously under a patriarchal colonial and a neo-colonial system. Under the former, women are expected to be silent in the name of the nation and the community. Under the latter, displaced men and women do not have national status or public strength as citizens. In these stories, women are generally powerless but resisting; they are always acted upon and induced to action by a dominant power that aims to silence them. The metaphor of the moths illustrates the vulnerability of these subaltern subjects within these power structures. The mentally deranged refugee woman in “Cariboo Café” speaks about her own predicament through this metaphor: “I think about the moths and their stupidity. Always attracted by light, they fly into fires, or singe their wings with the heat of the single bulb and fall on his desk, writhing in pain” (69). Beyond the tragic dimension of this image and of many of these inconclusive stories about the frayed edges of postmodern L.A., there is always the wish and the hope for human warmth, connection, and solidarity. In “Neighbors” this desire is expressed in the anticipated encounter between the two women. In “Cariboo Café,” it comes through the washerwoman’s frenzied screams “for all the women of murdered children, screaming, pleading for help from the people outside, and she pushes an open hand against an officer’s nose, because no one will stop them ” (74). 243

4.2. “Mericans” and “Mechicanas”: Sandra Cisneros with Ana Castillo8 The search for one’s Mexicanness has been a constant leitmotif in most pre- and post-movement Mexican American literature. As I said in section 2.3, the fact that a writer is of Mexican origin does not necessarily mean that his/her work should be devoted to the exploration of his/her Mexican roots. Amongst the reputed Mexican American writers, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Cecile Pineda, and John Rechy have explored questions of identity without dealing with what it means to be a person of Mexican descent in the United States. However, as Daniel Cooper Alarcón has observed, the prevalence of the question of Mexican ethnic identification in the literature produced by Mexican Americans stems from the geographical proximity of Mexico. The protracted political and economic relationship between the two countries since the nineteenth century and the constant arrival of Mexicanos, has favored the preservation of Mexican culture and beliefs in the United States. In spite of assimilation, Mexican culture, occasionally romanticized, idealized, or stereotyped, has been a usual referent in the literature produced by Mexican Americans. One of the most popular of Luis Valdez’s plays after his separation from UFWA (United Farm Workers Association), Los Vendidos (1967), was a comical debunking of many stereotypes that Anglos had of people of Mexican descent, and that Chicanos themselves had internalized. In spite of being a critique of the Mexican sellout and of American values, Los Vendidos also asserted that the recognition of some aspects of those stereotypes was necessary to support the revolutionary fight for social justice in the U.S. Much as the Pachuco, the campesino, and the revolucionario all conveyed narrow views of Mexican identity, 8

I have borrowed the term “Mechicanas” from Cherríe Moraga’s essay “Looking for the Insatiable Woman” (2000).

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they also became myths around which the communal history and predicament of Chicanos could be told. It is in this very spirit of asserting the importance of the values, traditions, and history of the community that much of the literature by Chicanos and Chicanas was produced during and after the so-called “Chicano Renaissance.” The illuminating or disappointing journey back to the old culture or towards a new culture, is the subject of novels of initiation such as Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Última (1972), Miguel Méndez Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974), José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), and Arturo Islas’ The Rain God (1984). In particular, Anaya, Islas, and Méndez create cultural and social spaces based on mythologies and popular traditions that summon forth and reclaim an Amerindian past. Likewise, the short stories of Estela Portillo-Trambley in the collection Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories (1976) tend to sentimentalize and isolate Mexican ways and culture, the Anglo Saxon presence being scarce if not absent from her works. Other works such as Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands (1987), and Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983) and The Last Generation (1992) have stressed the pre-Columbian aspects of Mexican culture in order to assert their affiliation with American indigenous struggles and propose affiliations between peoples of color in the U.S. More sardonic, critical views of homogenizing Mexican and American ethnicity, and of the commodification of Latino culture have emerged in the border performances of Guillermo Gómez Peña, in his essays, as well as in his recent collections The New World Border (1994), Temple of Confessions (1996), and Dangerous Border Crossers (2000). Daniel Cooper Alarcón argues that contemporary images of Mexico in the Anglo Saxon imagination are very homogeneous and can be reduced to the myth of the “infernal paradise,” an expression used by Malcolm Lowry in one of his letters (39). Cooper Alarcón traces the development of the myth from its Hispanic origins to its most recent Anglo manifestations. The rationalization of human life and the prevalence of scientific and 245

mechanistic values in Western society caused modern writers like Lowry, D.H. Lawrence, Willa Cather, and Katherine Anne Porter to look to Mexico for primitive, spontaneous humanity, for artistic and spiritual inspiration, or for a progressive, “revolutionary” political paradise. The result was a stereotyped, exoticized, and mythologized Mexico. As Cooper Alarcón puts it, Mexico would be represented as the “mysterious, dangerous place where death awaited; as a country of exotic but lazy primitives[...], a land of lost an hidden treasure waiting to be discovered and claimed by the superior Anglo American and English explorers” (59). He argues that the images of Mexico and Mexican identity produced by some Mexican American artists and writers are more fluid and changeable and do not quite fit into the Anglo stereotypes of Mexico. He provides a cogent analysis of various visions of Mexico in the writings of José Antonio Villarreal, Richard Rodríguez, and Sandra Cisneros that corroborates the contemporary use of Chicano/a as a signifier of an unstable, multiple identity. In accord with my emphasis on the representation of the border as a physical and spiritual site of contradiction and otherness, I will here call attention to Chicana writers’ demythification of ethnicity. Without ceasing to incorporate ethnic emblems, they give jarring accounts of Mexican American mythologization of Mexico and all things Mexican. Ana Castillo’s and Sandra Cisneros’ characters find themselves caught between their selfidentification as Mexicans and their inability to follow or understand Mexican customs, traditions, and beliefs. They claim and assert their Mexicanness in a self-conscious effort to define their oppositional, anti-American attitude, their difference from the rest of American society, or to come to terms with their parents’ and their own original culture. The desire for origins is often coupled with a wish for spiritual enlightenment and personal gratification. Yet, they will be confounded by the discovery that their internalized ideas of Mexicanness are based upon exoticized or reductive counterfeits. Notions about the Mexican/Latina turn against them in the U.S. in the form of 246

racism, class discrimination, and sexism. When in contact with their ostensible homeland, Mexico, and their presumable fellow Mexican people, they will confront unforeseen, disheartening reactions ensuing from a variety of local perceptions of their gender, race, and appearance. While many of these characters long for safe spatial and identity boundaries, a series of baffling confrontations with their Mexican or American others evince their position in-between multiple Mexican and American social places and cultural realities. Their American education and experience separate them from the “real” Mexico, while their racial traits and working-class background set them off and detach them from mainstream American society. The works tackled in this chapter draw intensively on the identification of the original—but in fact foreign—country and culture with the past. The representation of Mexico as a site of desire relates tangentially to the colonial tropes some of these characters have inherited from the Anglo American context and that we can trace back to European “colonizing” discourse (Duncan 43). The main trope, of which others derive, is the conversion of “geographical difference into temporal difference” (Duncan 40). Travel, an important motif in the stories dealt with here, is shown to involve a mental process by which the movement in space becomes a movement in time: “‘[A] foreign country is the past’” (Duncan 40). Extensions of this representation are the aesthetization and sentimentalization of the foreign as well as its appropriation as commodity (Duncan 4546). Perhaps the most engaging aspect of some these stories in terms of the position of their protagonists vis-à-vis Mexico and the United States is their liability to be represented differently depending on their geographical location. While they innocently assume certain representations about Mexico and the United States as “truths”, these “truths” are applied to them and turn against them when they most desire to be accepted as they are. Enlightenment into their irreversible condition as permanent “border crossers” usually follows. Movement in space, travel 247

across boundaries, allows some of these characters to gain another sense of self, “seeing differing aspects of identity and another grid of difference in a new context” (Pratt, “Grids” 3233). In “Mericans,” also included in the volume Woman Hollering Creek (1991) and set in Mexico, Cisneros deals with the incipient social formation of a borderland female subjectivity that straddles various cultural and gender spaces. In contradistinction to the positive image of the abuelita in Viramontes’ “The Moths,” the Mexican grandmother of this story is described by the young narrative voice as “awful.” The “awful grandmother” is said to be “inside” the church while Micaela and her two brothers wait for her outside. The spatial division inside/outside marked by the thick leather curtain of the church door establishes the distance between the Mexican traditional beliefs the grandmother represents and professes, and the children’s culture acquired in the U.S., “that barbaric country with its barbarian ways,” as she has it (19). From the point of view of Micaela, the young Mexican American female protagonist, the rituals performed by the grandmother and the people in the church are described as routinary, mechanical actions devoid of relevance to her. She observes them from a distant, indifferent perspective: [D]ropping pesos into la ofrenda box before the altar to La Divina Providencia. Lighting votive candles and genuflecting. Blessing herself and kissing her thumb. Running a crystal rosary between her fingers. Mumbling, mumbling, mumbling. (17) There are those walking to church on their knees. Some with fat rags tied around their legs and others with pillows [...]. There are women with black shawls crossing and uncrossing themselves. There are armies of penitents carrying banners and flowered arches while musicians play tinny trumpets and tinny drums. (18)

The grandmother, the only confirmed Catholic believer in the family, the last guardian of disappearing Mexican customs, prays, and gives thanks “in the name of the husband and the sons and the only daughter who never attend mass” (17). Meanwhile the 248

kids play outside in the sun, separated from the closed space of the church by a “heavy leather curtain,” and from their surroundings by the restrictions and discipline imposed by the grandmother: We must not wander over to the balloon and punch-ball vendors. We cannot spend our allowance on fried cookies or Familia Burrón comic books or those clear cone-shaped suckers that make everything look like a rainbow when you look through them [...]. We must not climb the steps up the hill behind the church and chase each other through the cemetery. (18)

For the girl, whose perspective we are given throughout the story, there exist further barriers outside the church. Mexican and American patriarchal codes interweave in her relationship with her brothers. She refuses to take part in her brothers’ violent games and wishes they played “flying feather dancers” instead of “B-Fifty two bombers.”9 Micaela does not share her brothers’ complicity based on their masculinity and their contempt for the opposite gender: “‘Girl. We can’t play with a girl.’ Girl. It’s my brothers’ favorite insult now instead of ‘sissy.’ ‘You girl,’ they yell at each other. [...] Something wants to come out of the corners of my eyes, but I don’t let it. Crying is what girls do” (18). She seeks refuge inside the church, where the awful grandmother “makes [her] kneel and fold [her] hands” (19). While the grandmother prays for a long list of relatives, the girl, “tired of winking saints,” begins to count her grandmother’s moustache hairs and plays with her legs until the old woman shoves her out the door. Cisneros here anticipates the convergence of gender, class, and cultural vectors that constitute her character’s split identity: She can feel comfortable neither in the old culture nor in the Mexican American patriarchal world 9

Cisneros is here referring to the Aztec ritual and pastime of voladores. Men dressed like feathered gods, and tied to a turning platform on top of a high pole, would fling themselves into space. As they were doing so, the ropes they were tied to would unroll, thus making the platform turn and causing them to circle around as birds in flight.

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where she already feels dominated and excluded. Yet, she wants to take part in both of them. As the most hybrid character of the story, she is therefore a mestiza in Gloria Anzaldúa’s sense of the word. Language is strategically used by Cisneroshere to highlight the borderline reality of the young female character, the double identity of the children, and their distance from their grandmother’s Spanish. Except for some Spanish words that are traces of a Mexican ethos in the female narrator’s identity (ofrenda, Mamá, familia Burrón), she speaks to us mostly in English and refers to her brothers with the American nicknames of Keeks and Junior. Her grandmother, however, calls her grandchildren by their Spanish names (Micaela, Alfredito, Enrique) and talks to the girl in Spanish, which, as she says, “I understand when I’m paying attention.” This time, she answers with a “‘What?’ which the awful grandmother hears as ‘¿Güat?’” (19). To the tourists visiting Mexico City, the kids playing outside the church are Mexican kids; exotic, local markers of authenticity to be photographed. Yet, as Keeks says to the surprise of the “foreign lady in pants,” they do speak English because they are, as he says, “Mericans.” The girl’s narrative voice concludes: “We’re Mericans, we’re Mericans and inside the awful grandmother prays” (20). “Mericans” is the signifier that Cisneros has chosen to designate both “Mexican” and “American,” yet neither “Mexican” nor “American.” “Mericans” stays in the girl’s mind as a signifier of her own multiple border identity, an identity that becomes increasingly problematic for Cisneros’ more mature characters. “Never Marry a Mexican,” also from Woman Hollering, is one of the writer’s most bitter explorations of borderland female subjectivity. The protagonist of this story, Clemencia, is the “beautiful and cruel” woman Esperanza wants to become in Mango Street. She has been an “accomplice” of men’s infidelities and confesses to have deliberately caused pain to other women (68). A strong, lonely character, whose voice we hear in the first person, Clemencia claims to be “too romantic for marriage. [...] 250

Not a man exists who hasn’t disappointed me. [...] Better not marry than live a lie” (69). All her men have been “borrowed” and she has taken from them the “sweetest part of the fruit” (69). Clemencia has long despised Mexican men, “the men clearing off the tables or chopping meat behind the butcher counter or driving the bus I rode to school, those weren’t men. [...] I never saw them. My mother did this to me” (69). The title of the story “Never Marry a Mexican” contains the key to understanding Clemencia’s revulsion towards people of Latin American descent, her coarseness, as well as her own somber fate as a descendant of Mexican immigrants. “Never Marry a Mexican” is the maxim she has inherited from her mother, who was herself scorned by her husband’s Mexican family: Having had to put up with all the grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white woman from el otro lado, the other side, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor. But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn’t speak Spanish. (69)

Clemencia’s aversion towards Mexicans and other Latinos, who, in her mother’s views are “fanfarrones,” “big show-offs” is apparently at odds with her resentment towards her mother for having married a white man after her father’s death: “[T]here was no home to go home to. Not with our mother. Not with that man she married. [...] it was as if she stopped being my mother. Like I never even had one” (73). And this resentment towards her mother apparently contradicts Clemencia’s own passion for the white married man that has become her lover. It is precisely upon the very premise “never marry a Mexican” that Drew, her white lover, refuses to leave his wife for Clemencia. “Never Marry a Mexican” contains the story of Clemencia’s complicated relations across cultures, generations, classes, and races; her resentment at those Mexicans who despise her for being an Americanized Mexican or pocha, and at those Americans who also spurn her for the color of her skin. She 251

defines her own identity in-between several social spaces and communities as “amphibious:” “I am a person who does not belong to any class,” “not to the poor whose neighborhood I share, not to the rich, who come to my exhibitions and buy my work. Not to the middle class from which my sister Ximena and I fled” (72). Her liminal “classlessness” recalls Gloria Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness, a consciousness that has partially been imposed upon her, and that she has partially chosen. This “amphibiousness” may bring about resisting impulses, but also confusion and unhappiness. The signifier “Mexican,” differing from itself in all the very distinct places she traverses, is fragmented in multiple movements away from and towards a variety of communities. These multiple fragmentations ultimately lead the main character to feel displaced. Being U.S. born, Clemencia is not to marry a Mexican. Ironically, though, she is considered to be “Mexican” in the U.S. For her lover Drew, she is “[his] Malinalli, Malinche,” “all golden and sunbaked, and that’s the kind of woman he likes best” (74-76). Clemencia’s body is racialized as the body of the indigenous woman, who, as we know from the myth of Cortés and Malinche, is always second best. Clemencia’s “race” is the visual trait of her Mexicanness, the exotic beauty that attracts white men like Drew. Yet, these very racial traits establish boundaries between her and Drew and between her and white women like his wife. Ultimately, as Norma Alarcón reminds us, there is no legitimate place for the mestiza in American society (“Traduttora” 69). As a marginal subject, her only consolation is, at first, the hope that, as Drew said, “all along it was me he wanted to be with, it was me, he said” (76). Then, after Drew has decided to leave her for her “own good” because “he could never marry [her]” (80), Clemencia finds personal relief in leaving the traces of her presence in his white middle-class home, the space that is vetoed to her as a lover: “[A] trail of [gummy bears] in places I was sure she would find them. One in her lucite makeup organizer. One stuffed inside each bottle of nail polish” (81). Immediately, however, she realizes the 252

futility of her silent rebellion: “Why bother? Drew could take the blame. Or he could say it was the cleaning woman’s Mexican vodoo” (81). Clemencia finds personal satisfaction in throwing the smallest of Drew’s Russian dolls into “the muddy creek where winos piss and rats swim” (82). Her tragedy and irony is that she never knows the effect of these symbolic vindictive acts, and that, in spite of herself, Clemencia keeps dreaming of Drew many years thereafter. Her first-person voice has no interlocutors; she has no language but painting to communicate her disgrace to others. Clemencia is what Debra Castillo calls a “voiceless aesthetic object” (39). She has inherited and accepted her own sense of inferiority and cannot but be complicit with her own fate. Charmed by the promise of love of a white American man, she experiences how her mother’s warning “never marry a Mexican” turns against her. But Clemencia’s silence veils her independence of thought, the expedient subterfuge with which, as a final revengeful act, she seduces Drew’s son after having been “waiting patient as a spider all these years” (75). She treats her lover’s son as her father treated her, as an object: “I can tell from the way he looks at me, I have him in my power. Come, sparrow. I have the patience of eternity. Come to mamita. My stupid little bird. I don’t move. I don’t startle him. I let him nibble. All, all for you. Rub his belly. Stroke him. Before I snap my teeth” (82). The subtext of the myth of Cortés and Malinche that Cisneros uses in this story is inverted and endowed with extremely radical feminist overtones. Clemencia ceases to be the love slave to become a self-assertive, vindictive woman without scruples. Nonetheless, Clemencia’s particular version of the story is probably never known or understood by the white man and the white woman. Clemencia’s hope is that her presence in Drew’s life will finally be acknowledged, but the end of the story seems to rule out such a possibility. Cisneros does not grant the reader the pleasure of knowing what it is Clemencia tells Drew over the phone and what the consequences of this phone call have been for her. The writer has 253

given us the Mexican American woman’s version of the story, which is probably very similar to many other Latinas’ unknown stories of frustrated love and deprivation. Clemencia’s blood has been poisoned by hatred and humiliation but her need for love and connectedness has not disappeared. Her vindictive act cannot heal the inherited wound that has scarred her life: “[N]ever marry a Mexican.” Despite her murderous and suicidal thoughts, Clemencia’s desire is not to kill or to hurt, but to “communicate,” “to find a language in which she can form the words” (83). At the end of the story, the voice of the beautiful and cruel woman who knew no boundaries and whose cruelty had no limits, acquires a different more compassionate, gentle mood. Assailed by the desire for human understanding, Clemencia wishes “to reach out and strum [the human beings that pass her on the street] as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lovely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone and say ‘There, there, it’s all right, honey’(83). The double discrimination of Mexican Americans inside and outside their country, exemplified by Cisneros in “Never Marry a Mexican,” has caused the search for identity to evolve around the defensive assertion of differential ethnic traits. As the works of Ana Castillo and Sandra Cisneros show, Mexican identification is made possible through the fetishization of Mexicanness, the illusion of Mexican authenticity that was favored by Mexican nationalism, Chicano activism, and the current postmodern market of ethnic exotica. In their respective Woman Hollering Creek and The Mixquahuala Letters Cisneros and Castillo have cast a sharp, deeply ironic look upon women’s idealization of Mexicanness. Their female characters’ search for their Mexican origins is often tied to the search for spirituality or an ideal Mexican lover. In “One Holy Night” the first-person voice of a young woman looks back upon a recent love story from a Mexican “town of dust, with one wrinkled witch woman who rubs my belly with jade, and sixteen nosy cousins” (27). The first lines of the story allude to the fantasy the protagonist was lured to believe: “He 254

said his name was Chaq. Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. [...] He was of an ancient line of Mayan kings” (28). Chaq Uxmal spoke to her in “a strange language no one could understand” (29) and talks about a day when his people will be avenged by his son: “So I was initiated beneath an ancient sky by a great and mighty heir—Chaq Uxmal Paloquín. I, Ixchel, his queen” (30). In the single room in the back of a garage where she loses her virginity, the protagonist sees the “guns—twenty-four in all. Rifles and pistols, one rusty musket, a machine gun, and several tiny weapons with mother-ofpearl handles that looked like toys. So you’ll see who I am, he said [...]. But I didn’t want to know” (29). Her dreams of a love story where she can be a Mayan queen blind her to the truth, for she does not want to be like the girls of her street who go with men into alleys: “Not against the bricks or hunkering in somebody’s car. I wanted it come undone like gold thread, like a tent full of birds” (28). Chaq Uxmal disappears and the nameless protagonist, now pregnant, is sent to San Dionisio de Tlaltepango, thus making the reverse journey her own mother made when she was sent from the Mexican village to the U.S. so that neighbors “wouldn’t ask why her belly was suddenly big” (33). The truth about Chaq is soon revealed. He is no Mayan prince, has no Mayan blood, but was born in a poor family in a street with no name in a town called Miseria. His real name is Chato, “which means fat-face”(34). Not only does Chato fall short of the young girl’s expectations and fantasies, but he also turns out to be a deranged dangerous criminal: “The next thing we hear, he’s in the newspaper clippings his sister sends. A picture of him looking very much like stone, police hooked on either arm...on the road to Las Grutas de Xtacumbilxuna, the Caves of the Hidden Girl … eleven female bodies... the last seven years...” (34). In Cisneros’ stories, romantic portrayals of Mexico and Mexican identity as the exotic Aztec or Mayan other are undercut by the disenchanting discovery of other harsh aspects of border Mexican American life. In “Bien Pretty” Lupe Arredondo, a former Berkeley student and exponent of Californian activism 255

and ethnic folklore, travels to San Antonio (Texas) in order to forget a frustrated relationship. A brief comment on the distinct Chicano identity politics developed in Californian universities is necessary to understand the ironic nuances of Cisneros’ narrative. Carlos Muñoz has argued that for the Mexican Americans of California, identity politics and a constant quest for Mexicanness have been more important than for the Mexican Americans living in Texas. The 1960s Chicano student movement of California, which has been briefly dealt with in section 2.3 of this study, placed a lot of emphasis on ethnicity (10). Unlike the Texan population of Mexican origin, Chicanos and Chicanas from California, more divorced and distanced from the mainstream of Mexican culture and society, have used ethnic icons and emblems in their social and political protests. As Jorge Klor de Alva observes, the references to pre-Columbian motifs have been particularly present in the Californian literature produced by Mexican Americans since the early 1970s (18-19). Cisneros, who taught and lived at the UC Berkeley campus and is currently living in San Antonio, has translated the differences between high California Chicano activism and Texan border culture in a story about the search for Mexican identity through the “eroticization” of the Mexican other. Cisneros protagonist, Lupe, a painter and a former Berkeley Chicana student, is a perfect exponent of Californian Chicano activism. She has participated in the grape-boycott demonstrations, has a friend who teaches Aztec dance at night, and was lured by her exboyfriend Eddie’s committed views and knowledge of Latino ethnic funk: “Eddie, who taught me how to salsa, who lectured me night and day about human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, but never said a word about the rights of Blacks in Oakland, the kids of the Tenderloin, the women who shared his bed” (142). Cisneros shows the ghettoization of ethnicity according to racial traits with Lupe’s resentment at Eddie for having gone off with a blonde: “He didn’t even have the decency to pick a woman of color” (142). Although Lupe is not conscious of her own obsession with the racialized 256

exotic, she shows a critical attitude towards the commodification of Mexican ethnicity as she is house-sitting for a famous Texas poet “who carries herself as if she is directly descended from Ixtaccíhuatl or something” (139). The house is decorated with all the befitting Mexican and Latino imports: (8) Oaxacan black pottery pieces singed Diego Rivera monotype upright piano star-shaped piñata (5) strings of red chile lights antique Spanish shawl St. Jacques Majeur Hatian voodoo banner cappuccino maker lemonwood Olinalá table replica of the goddess Coatlicue life-sized papier-maché skeleton signed by the Linares family Frida Kahlo altar punched tin Virgen de Guadalupe chandelier bent-twin couch with Mexican sarape cushions. (139)

Beneath this ethnic paraphernalia lie the roaches, a figuration of the deeper border reality that Lupe does not yet know and that will be revealed to her in Texas, a place that, as she says, “did scare the hell out of me” (142). For she is also prey to her obsession with the discovery of her authentic Mexican roots, which she hopes to find when she meets Flavio Munguía, a Mexican immigrant who works as a roach sprayer: So while you are spraying baseboards, the hose hissing [...], I’m thinking. Thinking you might be the perfect Prince Popo for a painting I’ve had kicking around in my brain [...]. [W]ith that face of a sleeping Olmec, the heavy Oriental eyes, the thick lips and wide nose, that profile carved from onyx. (143)

Flavio comes from a poor family and has gone to el otro lado to work as a dish-washer, a shrimper, a field worker, and, finally, as an exterminator, the only job where he does not have to keep his hands dirty like a vieja. He sees Lupe as an “American,” while she, refusing to be “lumped with the northern half of America” 257

cooks paella, wears cowboy boots, and looks to indigenous knowledge for spiritual healing. Flavio partakes of Texas border popular culture: He gets excited over American radio programs, works out at a gym, speaks nostalgically of his Tía Chencha’s soup, and wears imitation “Lacoste” sweaters provided by his cousin Silver (English for Silvestre). Lupe’s mystic ideas about the significance of the “communion with the infinite forces of nature,” “the search for our past” and “returning to one’s roots,” which she has found in the I Ching10 and the Popol Vuh contrasts with Flavio’s oral culture, passed on to him by his grandmother, and his unabashed American tastes. Lupe becomes aware of her emptiness and rootlessness when she accuses Flavio of being “a product of American imperialism” and is confronted with his blatant yet enlightening retort: “I don’t have to dress in a sarape and sombrero to be Mexican. [...] I know who I am” (151). At that moment Lupe realizes she wants to be Mexican, but is not: “[B]ut it was true. I was not Mexican” (152). Like other romantic and self-deluding characters in Cisneros’ stories, Lupe prefers to hold on to her fantasy of a man made by God with a face “like the clay heads they unearth in Teotihuacán” “with skin sweet and as burnt-milk candy, smooth as river water” (152). Flavio is part of the timeless dimension Lupe confers on Mexico, of a dehistorizing and detemporalizing view of the culture that understands any relation with the outside (in this case, the U.S.) as corrupting and stifling (Duncan 46-47). The end of her Mexican romance is anticipated by a reference to the past, the two female names tattooed on his arm and chest Lupe discovers as she is making love to him “in Spanish, in a manner as intricate and devout as la Alhambra” (153). Lupe has fallen in love with 10

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese manual with symbols and diagrams that were symbolically interpreted in terms of the principles of yin and yang. Originally used for divination, it was included as one of the "five classics" of Confucianism. The Popol Vuh was one of the three important works where some erudite Mayan natives recorded their oral tradition, mythology, and history in their local languages and Spanish script.

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“that beautiful Tarascan face of his, something that ought to be set in jade” (154), a face she is reminded of by any baby with the same skin color, by any moon-faced woman, and by the Mexican bag boys that carry her groceries to the car. Flavio becomes Lupe’s idealized object of desire, a representation of idealized, Amerindian Mexican masculinity: the earlobes, the “twist of sinew from wrist to elbow” in his arms, his voice “like the pull of the Ocean” (155). Her erotic fantasies will however be reduced to a “void,” a “nothingness” when Lupe discovers her lover’s life on the other side of the border, and hence, the inconsequence of his affair with her on the American side. Flavio tells Lupe about the family obligations taking him back to Mexico, his seven kids from his two marriages. Feeling like the abandoned and sick dog she has been watching out of the window of a taco restaurant, Lupe is left with the only consolation of the telenovelas, which do nothing but reinforce cultural roles of feminine powerlessness and masculine domination under the disguise of morality, love, and romance. Lupe’s final act of resistance is the celebration of her own selflove and freedom as a Mexican American and her symbolic redoing of the painting of Prince Popo and Princess Ixta; unlike in the traditional legend, the former becomes the sleeping mountain while the latter the voyeur. Lupe’s consolation is the reconstruction of Mexican myths in an attempt to assert, perhaps in spite of herself, her differential Mexican traits in a distinct American way. In The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) Ana Castillo uses the motif of the journey to the country and culture of origin to provide an incisive examination of fragmented Chicana identity. Teresa has addressed letters to her close friend Alicia in a time period that encompasses their travels to Mexico during their twenties and their subsequent relationship back in the United States through their mid-thirties. The multiple dimensions of the Chicana border self are emphasized by means of the structure of the epistolary novel, which, in the fashion of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), refuses a linear reading. Castillo proposes a 259

variety of possible “journeys” through her book, which in turn will elicit different interpretations. As Castillo herself has observed, her novel has no plot: “I never carry you through the beginning, developing the plot, and end. Because I don't think life is that way. You have a million variations and exits, like on the freeway, where you can keep making choices of redoing them” (Mitchell et al. 154). The autobiographical Chicana or “Mechicana” self that emerges out of these letters is unstable and uncertain about her identity. Castillo represents this unstable, relational self, a self that can only be understood and can only understand herself in relation to others, with the lower-case “i,” instead of the capital “I.” The book is not to be read “in the usual sequence” and, therefore, a different aspect of Chicana identity will emanate out of each and every one of the readings proposed by the author. Castillo also suggests we may read each of the letters as pieces of “short fiction” that read as separate entities. My own particular reading of these letters as individual but also related entities aims to highlight Castillo’s portrayal of the disenchantment that stems from the clash between her characters’ expectations about Mexican culture and society, and their actual experiences in Mexico. In her essay Massacre of the Dreamers (1994) Castillo has defined herself as a “countryless woman,” asserting the need for spiritual values while also rejecting institutionalized Catholicism and the old Marxist ideology of the Chicano movement. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Castillo has deeply committed herself to a consciousness raising that brings about “humanitarian restitution” (Massacre 13). Castillo has argued that part of the task of consciousness raising may also come through the recovery of “the female indigenous consciousness,” “a primal collective memory” that has been lost and women need to synthesize with their present needs (15-17). In accord with this view, Teresa and Alicia, the main female characters in the Letters, hope to find their lost spiritual and cultural origins in Mexico. Their first journey is full of 260

expectations and prejudices about a mythified country. In fact, in Castillo’s Letters the representation of Mexico often bears traces of the Anglo conception of the land of spiritual rebirth described by Cooper Alarcón in The Aztec Palimpsest (1997), and traces of the temporalization of ancestral cultures mentioned by James Duncan. But the novel is, above all, a cynical, humorous narrative about the discomfiture of the two Mexican American protagonists after their cross-cultural encounter. The novel is set in the 1970s, when, as Castillo puts it, “there was a great deal of desire on the part of Chicano activists to go back to México to find a place. The whole going back and relooking at the pre-conquest cultures and going to see the ruinas” (Mitchell et al. 152). As Teresa says, she felt “a call to find a place to satisfy my yearning spirit, the Indian in me that had begun to cure the ails of humble folk,” “a need [...] for the fertile earth,” a home, and Mexico is her choice (52). Once there, Teresa seeks to distance herself from those gringos who are in Mexico “to undergo an existential summer of exotic experiences” (24). She is there “to study its culture and language,” although the fraudulent shock at the school with “the heavy Aztec name” bores “a 3 inch hole to [her] native spirit” when she finds herself instructed by WASP Californian blondes who speak no word of Spanish (24). Teresa expects her Indian traces, fluent use of the language, and Spanish name will make of her one more among her Mexican “brothers and sisters” (24). Feeling gradually detached from Californian culture, Teresa begins to develop a concern about her Mexican past and about the social rights of Mexicans in the U.S. In California she is drawn to a Mexican man named Alvaro “by the Indian spirit of mutual ancestors” (57). But Teresa goes to Mexico also for the same reasons many Americans do: She is attracted to what is different, exotic, immutable, and primitive. Mixquiahuala attracts her as “a preconquest village of obscurity, neglectful of progress” (25); a town filled with the voices of “romantic, handsome youth” that carry “the treble of volcanoes, lyrics of lava, penetrating as obsidian daggers” (26). In The Mixquiahuala Letters Mexico turns out to be both 261

frustrating and illuminating for the two female protagonists. Teresa’s and Alicia’s expectations about Mexico as cultural home and spiritual haven are not satisfied, but it will be in Mexican social spaces where they will discover their difference as Americans, as well as their ignorance of a country they believed to be their own. From the other side of the border Teresa and Alicia will experience the confrontation of two cultures, two gender codes, and two ways of looking at the world. They will be caught in a series of perplexing situations that ensue from their rickety, hybrid identity. When they expect their mestiza or Mexicana looks to help them integrate in Mexican society, they are suddenly turned into targets of the Mexicans’ inferiority complex before the more respected gringo tourists. In the eyes of her Mexican Spanish instructor who “was particularly concerned with the progress of his blond students,” Teresa merely looks like the daughter of a migrant worker or a laborer in the North (which of course, i was). i was nothing so close to godliness as fair-skinned or wealthy or even a simple gringa with a birthright ticket to upward mobility in the land paved with gold, but the daughter of someone like him, except that he’d made the wade to the other side. (27)

Disturbing misunderstandings and surprises also ensue from their ignorance of Mexican gender codes. Teresa meets Alvaro in the U.S. and grows close to him during their cooperative work with illegal immigrants. Yet, during her stay with him and his family in Mexico, Teresa realizes Alvaro’s mother views her as a “tramp” who is after her son’s fortune, while he, for his part, believes he will entice Teresa to sex with promises of marriage (57-58). Away from the city of L.A., “where dark skin and a humble background had subjected [her] to atrocities,” Teresa is indeed lured by the possibility of beginning a new life as the wife of Sergio Samora, a rich Mexican entrepreneur. She is ready to marry not for love but out of necessity, attracted by the prospects of a comfortable life for her children and by the possibility of finding a sense of place and community: “The children that i’d have wouldn’t know that persecution. They wouldn’t suffer in the 262

hands of the ignorant, but would be raised in a land where copper-colored flesh was the norm. They would never know a day of need. Above all, they would have a sense of belonging” (68). Teresa will soon find corroboration of Alicia’s warning that her dream might be just a farce. She receives a telegram in which Sergio calls off their marriage with a falsely dramatic adieu. She sees then that for her wealthy lover—who had once toasted to “the incomparable bronze skin of the tropical woman” (66), thus making her proud of her Mexican looks—their engagement was no more than an excuse to take “to bed a liberated gringa” (100). While travelling through Mexico with Teresa, Alicia also has mystical dreams about the land and the culture her parents shunned in their fight for a rightful place in American society. She candidly looks for romantic love in the arms of Mexican strangers and, in Acapulco, is “enchanted by the haunting beauty of the deserted hacienda, the virile lover of skin like polished wood, the hypnotic sea” (32). Mexico comes to represent romance and the possibility of transcendence of history, represented by both its people and its landscape. Alicia also sees her expectations deflated by the sudden arrival of a wife Adán, her lover, had never mentioned. As Alicia’s and Teresa’s encounters with Mexico become more and more disgruntling, their view of the country begins to change. The tourists’ Acapulco is “one of skydiving, gliding through the air, water skiing, dancing to rumba music,” but their Acapulco is one of “Mexicans who were black and kinky-haired with shackled history, grease-covered mechanics, peopled who watched us slyly with unsympathetic notions of our vagabonding” (33). They even find that the myth of Mexican hospitality has its limits when they are greeted by Mexicans with a behavior bordering on hostility and the impression that they are “questionable worthwhile guests” in the country of their inherited origins (99). Perceived as outsiders, “tramps,” foreign “bohemian travelers” (87), they are presumed to be the sort of “women who don’t pay with money” (73), and sleep indiscriminately with any man that happens to cross their paths (79). In spite of the color of 263

their skin, their blue jeans and their accent make them suspicious. As Mexicans in the U.S., they have been deceived by the promises of the American dream and jilted by unscrupulous, insensitive lovers. As gringas in Mexico they are subject to the stereotype of the “liberated woman,” loaded with connotations of sexual availability (79). Castillo’s grim view of intergender relationships in this episode denies both of her two characters the possibility of finding fulfillment in a relationship with a man on either side of the Mexican border. Neither in the U.S. nor in Mexico do they arouse men’s interest as independent women, as people. Men want them to preserve and assure their sense of masculinity and, consequently, will not accept their independence of action or thought. Although both Alicia and Teresa have desired to be mothers and have high romantic expectations about love and motherhood, their respective infertility and abortion are metaphoric figurations of their failed hopes and their estrangement from two cultures. If, according to the nationalistic metaphor, women’s fertility ensures the reproduction and perpetuation of a community and its cultural values, Teresa and Alicia, torn between the impossible exigencies of two countries to which they do and do not belong, are not capable of contributing to this preservation. Their ideals have been “stamped out like cigarette butts” both in Mexico and the United States (22). As Teresa looks back upon their journey, Mexico evokes contradictory feelings: “Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates” (65). For Teresa and Alicia, Mexico is indeed an “infernal paradise,” for it represents their somehow romanticized original culture as well as their confrontation with their harsh destiny as Chicanas, with their need for a physical and spiritual homeland as well as with their prejudices and their fears about Mexico. But Mexico is not a mere setting for this confrontation with themselves and with each other; it is rather a place where their deep involvement with local people in social relations results in multiple cultural clashes that redefine their identity. Above all, Teresa and Alicia have to face 264

up to the fact that, in spite of the color of their skin and their Spanish, they do not belong: “The reason it was so blatantly painful [...] was that we had abruptly appeared in Mexico as two snags in its pattern. Society could do no more than snip us out” (65). The author of the Letters has argued that the reader has to decide for himself or herself about the possible fate of her two characters. We are to find our own path through her book. Her statement about borderlands reality is that, as she has said, “there is not a definitive Chicana answer” (Mitchell et al. 54-55). Alicia and Teresa can perhaps only find consolation in their friendship and mutual identification as Mexican American women, in the fact that in looking at each other, they can see an image of themselves: “We needled, stabbed, manipulated, cut, and through it all we loved, driven to see the other improved in her own reflection” (29). 4.3. The Border as Dystopia: Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2000) is admittedly an expression of Cherríe Moraga’s political views about the interdependence of public and private experience and the Chicana subject's arduous strivings at accommodating her cultural and social background and her personal inclinations. Since the publication of her prose and poetry collection Loving in the War Years (1983), and since her contribution to This Bridge Called my Back (1983), Moraga has written about the difficult negotiation of conflicting identities in the private and public spheres. All her drama, her poetry, and prose testify to her constant attempt to reconcile Mexican ancestry, lesbian sexuality, social commitment to Chicano politics, and the desire for family and community. Her writings often show that to stress one of these aspects of subjectivity and identity may surely involve the painful rejection of others. Nonetheless, in her latest published work, Waiting in 265

the Wings (1997), she sustains that “these categories of identity could never fully encompass the people in whom I placed my trust. In each of those worlds I found abrazo and rechazo, and I soon learned to make alliance with that less defined area and more liable project of common cause” (19). Like Anzaldúa, Moraga needs to be seen in a constant movement forwards and backwards, in a permanent tactical repositioning towards her community depending on the issues and problems she is addressing. She fluctuates between the autobiographical subject of knowledge that detaches herself from her family and her community, and the communal subject that wants to be incorporated within them with her particular difference. In Loving in the War Years (1983) Moraga talks about the temporary detachment from her people due to her sexual orientation. Even if she was not fully conscious of the hold her culture had on her, she gradually distanced herself from her people “because I thought it was the only option available to me toward gaining autonomy as a person without being sexually stigmatized” (Loving 99). Moraga says commitment to the Chicano male is necessary for a woman to be accepted in the community: “You are a traitor to the race if you do not put the man first” (Loving 103). In the essay titled “La Güera,” also included in the volume, Moraga narrates how both her white complexion and her mother’s desire to prevent her children from “being less,” poor, and illiterate, allowed her to pass as fully Anglo. However, she acknowledges to have felt a difference, though it was only much later she realized such a difference had to do with her Mexican and working-class background: [I] realized the major reason for my total alienation from and fear of my classmates was rooted in class and culture. [...] I had realized to the core of me that for years I had disowned the language I knew best—ignored the words and rhythms that were the closest to me. The sounds of my mother and aunts gossiping—half in English, half in Spanish. (55)

The speaker finally traces the love of women back to the love of her mother. It is by doing so that she can reconcile her lesbianism 266

and the struggle of her race and her people: “It wasn’t until I acknowledged and confronted my own lesbianism in the flesh, that my heartfelt identification with and empathy for my mother’s oppression—due to being poor, uneducated and Chicana—was realized” (Loving 52). At the same time, she says that “to be free means on some level to cut [the] painful loyalty [to the mother] when it begins to punish us” (Loving 4). Her own freedom was attained both in spite of and at the expense of betrayal. Moraga’s speaking subject frames her personal story within a history of woman’s betrayal of woman. As she argues in the groundbreaking essay of Chicana feminism included in Loving in the War Years, “A Long Line of Vendidas,” the story of Malinche demonstrates that in her culture the mother always betrays the daughter, and that after that betrayal, the daughter becomes a potential vendida or traitor to her culture. The autobiographical subject thus appropriates and redefines the myth of Malinche, a psychologically well-entrenched example of the Mexican belief in women’s treacherous nature, and the embodiment of “the female’s filthiness” that has long been circulated in the service of both Mexican and Chicano nationalist discourses (Loving 119). She confiscates the figure of the Mexican woman from the rules of the community even at the expense of destroying the very substance of Chicano nationalist discourse and cultural identity. The writer’s most startling argument is that women’s treachery is encouraged by patriarchy itself. Malinche/Malintzin was allegedly betrayed by her own patriarchal mother, who, like many other women, put the male first: She sold her daughter out to the Spaniards so as to enable her son’s inheritance of the estate that was initially destined to the firstborn female child (Loving 101). By rewriting the story of the mythical indigenous woman, Moraga redefines an emblematic communal figure according to her own experience as a vendida (a sellout), and according to her own relationship with her mother. In doing so, she sheds light upon the unspoken patriarchal prerogatives underlying the history of Malinche/Malintzin. Moraga sees herself, like many other outspoken Chicanas, as a Malinchista, a vendida. She has 267

betrayed her race by putting herself first, by taking control of her sexuality and by ignoring the precepts of male-dominated Mexican/Chicano culture. The patriarchal legacy of woman’s betrayal by woman conditions her betrayal of her people as it also conditioned Malinche’s: They were both turned into outcasts by their respective patriarchal mothers. In Moraga’s feminist revision of history, Malintzin is the Chicana’s alter ego. Yet, the familial and communal history of betrayal of woman by woman (mother against daughter) that Moraga shares with Malintzin, does not arrest Moraga’s autobiographical expression of the love for her mother and the race of her mother. The “I” of Loving in the War Years will repeatedly contrast the love for her mother with the “lack of feeling” for her father, as well as with the strained relationship with her brother: “[My brother] grew up male in our house. He got the best of both worlds. [...] Male in a man’s world. Whiteskinned in a white world? Why change?” (Loving 92). Moraga sees her mother as an example of resilience, strength, and courage: The woman in whose arms I am uplifted, sustained. [...] With this knowledge so deeply emblazed upon my heart, how then was I supposed to turn away from La Madre, La Chicana? If I were to build my womanhood on this self-evident truth, it is the love of the Chicana, the love of myself as a Chicana I had to embrace, no white man. Maybe this ultimately was the cutting difference between my brother and me. To be a woman fully necessitated my claiming the race of my mother. My brother’s sex was white. Mine, brown. (Loving 94)

“A Long Line of Vendidas” proposes a new version of history, family, and community in which Moraga recovers and feminizes the indigenist discourse of the Chicano movement and opposes it to the white masculinist discourse of her brother. The writer’s resentful memories of her experience with the “white oppressor” through her conflictive relationship with her father and her brother have shaped her occasionally simplified polarization between the white male oppressor and the oppressed indigenous female. Her own personal drama has however motivated the 268

search for alternative feminine models inspired in Aztec mythology that evoke a feminine power with which to fight the supremacy of the male and of heterosexism. Indeed, we may argue that Moraga simplifies some aspects of her culture through the equation of Chicano activism with Chicano community and with familia. Yet, this simplification should be understood as a direct consequence of Chicano political rhetoric, as well as a strategy to speak about her marginal position with respect to the three entities with which she needs to reconcile herself: the family, a cultural community, and a politically committed community. As a “conscious” subject partially outside her community and her family, Moraga feels outside them in the sense that her body and her skin endowed her with a distinctive knowledge and a unique conception of political resistance that Chicano traditional discourse had not yet embraced in the 1980s. Nonetheless, the speaker cannot do away with notions of familia, home, and resistance used by Chicano discourse, and she needs to redefine them according to her own experience as a woman and as a lesbian. Corky, one of the characters in her play Giving Up the Ghost (1986), says she needs to make “familia from scratch” (75). From the detachment of her lesbian experience and exile from her community, Moraga rethinks familia in order to go beyond the rigid gender roles that deny her sexual difference: There is a deeper love between and among our people that lies buried between the lines of the roles we play with each other. It is the earth beneath the floor boards of our homes [...]. Family is not by definition the man in a dominant position over women and children. Familia is cross-generational bonding, deep emotional ties between opposite sexes, and within our sex. (Loving 111)

Unlike the more visionary ambivalent subject of Gloria Anzaldúa, Moraga does not experience her unstable, fluid subjectivity as “an addiction” or a “choice.” She writes bitterly about the frequent loneliness and ostracism of experiencing the borderlands in her ordinary existence: “You call this a choice!, to 269

constantly push up against a wall of resistance from your own people or to fall away nameless into the mainstream of this country, running with our common blood?” (Loving 97). The writer’s sadness and despair at the distance from her culture and her family has been poignantly expressed in The Last Generation (1992), a collection of autobiographical poems and essays. Published on the 500th anniversary of the Spanish conquest of America, the work is, as the writer herself says, “a prayer at a time when I no longer remember how to pray” (1). Beginning with a heartfelt lament for a lost, devastated Aztec culture, and the imminent loss of “lo Mexicano” in the United States, the introduction to this collection is written with a serious concern for the writer’s own fate and the fate of Mexican Americans in the U.S. From the writer’s autobiographical perspective, this concern is induced by her fortieth birthday and by recent historical events. Her book is, as she says, a response to times of change, to “the political urgency of the times,” to the LA riots, the spread of AIDS, the Gulf War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fruitless Earth Summit in Brazil. Under the title “The Last Generation,” the first section of her book relates the writer’s estrangement from her relatives at a family reunion. “I am the space in the middle of the sofa,” she repeats in a figuration of her marginal position in-between cultures and in-between generations. Moraga reflects on the paradox that her family is extending and her culture is becoming extinct. And she, the only one in her family who writes against history to perpetuate her culture, is ironically denied the chance to become a mother and perpetuate the race. In this text, the frustration of being culturally deprived is analogous to the frustration of being sexually deprived of motherhood as a lesbian: My family is beginning to feel its disintegration [...]. Ignoring this, it increases in number. I am the only one who doesn't ignore this because I am the only one not contributing to the population. My line of family stops with me. There will be no one calling me, Mami, Mamá, Abuelita ... (The Last Generation 9)

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In The Last Generation the apocalyptic awareness that comes through in the title is aligned with the hope of resurrecting “the ancient in order to reconstruct the modern” (3). This search for the ancient is suffused with a feminist consciousness that Moraga has put forth in her essay “En Busca de la Fuerza Femenina.” Drawing on the Aztec myth of the god Huitzilopotchli and his sister Coyolxauqui, Moraga makes a strong indictment against a culture that erases the strength of women and causes their current isolation in their communities. The myth relates Coatlicue’s betrayal of her daughter Coyolxauhqui in favor of her son, the God of War, Huitzilopotchli. The former attempts to kill her mother in order to avoid the dominance of her brother, but he comes to their mother’s rescue, banishing his sister to darkness after having murdered and dismembered her. The myth suits Moraga’s obsession with the dominance of the son over the daughter and with the violence and discipline cast upon the female body in a patriarchal society: Here, mother and daughter are pitted against each other and daughter must kill male-defined motherhood in order to save the culture from misogyny, war, and greed. But el hijo comes to the defense of patriarchal motherhood, kills la mujer rebelde, and female power is eclipsed by the rising light of the Sun/Son. This machista myth is enacted every day of our lives, every day that the sun (Huitzilopotchli) rises up from the horizon and the moon (Coyolxauhqui) is obliterated by his light. (The Last Generation 74)

Moraga states that the search for the female strength that remains in the darkness, represented by the rebel daughter Coyolxauhqui, is what drives her to write in defense of women’s freedom. Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of Queer Motherhood (1997) is perhaps Moraga’s bravest autobiographical account about female private experience. In this case, Moraga relates her own making of “familia from scratch” from the very moment she decided to become a mother, through the difficult pregnancy and birth of her child, to the first years of his upbringing. For Moraga, becoming a lesbian mother of a child has meant undermining the popular notion that butch lesbians, those who have a more “masculine” 271

subjectivity, are not “real” women. Moraga used to hold this rigid conviction herself until she was the lover of a woman who had a child. A deep emotional attachment to the child of her lover made her question the received notion that as a lesbian she was unfit to perform the role of “mother” or “father.” Later on she came to the recognition of her power to mother and of her need to be a mother “on [her] own terms” (20-22). This very confessional work describes Moraga’s fears and crises during and after her pregnancy: the fear of losing the child during and after his premature birth, and thereafter in life. No doubt, a young man born in a patriarchal, sexist, and homophobic world might reject his own mother if he were not raised with a “feminine soul” (3233). Waiting in the Wings is also Moraga’s passionate and hopeful affirmation that by giving birth to a child, she has been involved in the “regeneration of the raza and the creation of new razas (sic)” (38). The difficulty of reconciling motherhood and lesbianism in Chicano culture is dealt with in one of Cherríe Moraga’s most recent plays. In The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (2000) Cherríe Moraga has rewritten Euripides’ classical play to explore how nationalism, race, and gender interact with one another to regulate concepts of what is rightfully Chicano. More specifically, the play deals with the failed struggle of a lesbian mother to prevent her son from becoming an agent of patriarchy. The use of myth is particularly relevant for the exploration of the main character’s identity. The play incorporates Aztec cosmology, dance, and myth, and hybridizes the genre of tragedy, thus refusing the prevalence of Western forms. In its use of myth Cherríe Moraga’s drama is indebted to the last phase of Luis Valdez’s popular teatro. Valdez’s latest productions were different from the actos of teatro campesino in that myth was no longer used simply as a defensive strategy against the stereotypes about Mexicans held by mainstream America. The revision of myth in the search for the collective and individual identity and/or past characterized the latest works by Valdez, of which the play and motion picture Zoot Suit (1992) is 272

one of the most popular and best-known instances. In this type of theatre the body was given a greater role as locus of expression for ritual, dance, and ceremony. In line with the theatrical use of myth by other Chicano/a and so-called “minority” playwrights, Cherríe Moraga’s works represent subordinate or muted cultures, groups, and individuals, and inquire into the sources of their predicament. In The Hungry Woman Moraga has focused mainly on women’s gender and sexual issues. As we will see in part three of this study, in other plays she has combined this feminist awareness with a concern for social and enviromental issues that affect Mexican Americans, as well as for issues of collective identity and ethnicity. In the three plays addressed in this study Moraga evokes the concept of Aztlán to forge her own sense of nation by bringing together private concerns (trust, love, sexual desire) and communal ones (social equality and responsibility to the future generations of people of color in America). The Hungry Woman is set in an imagined future “Amerika,”11 where a civil war has “balkanized” the United States into various “ethnic” states, including Aztlán, the Chicano nation. Moraga’s imaginative setting bears resonance to Guillermo Gómez-Peña imaginative topography of the “New World Border,” which titles one of his performances. Just as in Gómez-Peña’s world, in this dystopian America there is no real intercultural dialogue, no mediation within and between cultures, there are no shared frontiers. Both Moraga and the performance artist emphasize the exoticized, superficial aspect of ethnicity. This depiction contains an implicit critique of the ghettoization of culture and the postmodern creation of a constellation of tribes. However, Moraga does not resort to bitter parody and ridicule for her critique as Gómez-Peña does; she prefers the more serious emphasis of tragedy because, as she has stated in an interview with this author, “it teaches deeper and harder than happy.” 11

In her writings Cherríe Moraga usually distinguishes between corporate Anglo “Amerika,” and “America” as a continent that includes North, Central and South America.

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The most important lesson and critique we may draw from this play has to do with the homophobia within the Chicano/Mexican community. Moraga’s imagined states have banished all their unwanted citizens to the border region between Gringolandia and Aztlán, situated in the remains of a dystopian “Blade Runneresque” Phoenix, “a city out of control” (7). For the Chicano/a queers Phoenix is Tamoanchan, which in Nahuatl means, “[w]e seek our home” (The Hungry Woman 24). The play focuses extensively on the feelings of estrangement and confusion of Medea, whose voice has a dialectical relationship with the voices of other characters. The double bind of the main character in the play has a metaphoric analogy in two spatial oppositions. On the one hand, the two physical or geographical spaces mentioned in the play—Aztlán and Tamoanchan—correspond to two apparently irreconcilable identities. On the other, we find the spatial divisions on the stage: The space where the “real” plot and action of the play develop (the story of the main character) and a space of mythology, imagination, counter-history, and countertradition that is represented by Medea and the Cihuatateo. In the “real” action of the play, the scenes move back and forth in temporal leaps from Medea’s present, that is, her confinement in a mental hospital, to moments in the recent past that have led to her mental derangement and hospitalization. As regards the “mythical time,” scenes, rituals, and prayers are interspersed within the main action of the play and performed by the chorus of the Cihuatateo and by Medea herself. In the original tragedy by Euripides, the fact that Medea was an outcast and a barbarian lessened the impact and the social scandal it would have otherwise caused in the fifth century BC amongst the most conservative sectors of society (Caramiñana 23). Moraga plays on this idea of the outcast and the barbarian to highlight the discrimination that lesbians suffer in a society that claims to accept diversity. In her version of the play, Medea has been expatriated from Aztlán with her son for having had an affair with a woman called Luna. Although happy in her relationship with Luna, Medea yearns for her land, her people, 274

and her culture, but she is also resentful of Aztlán’s queer cleansing. When her son Chacmool turns thirteen, the time for him to undergo the Chicano ritual of initiation into manhood, Medea’s ex-husband, Jason, claims him back appealing to a document she was forced to sign before her exile. Medea knows that allowing her son to go to Aztlán, even if he wills to do so, entails losing him to a Chicano patriarchal, homophobic nation where he will learn to despise his mother. She attempts to prevent her son’s departure by all possible means, including the seduction of her ex-husband, and considers returning to Aztlán with him. This will of course endanger her relationship with Luna, who accuses Medea of being insecure about her lesbianism and blames her for flirting with patriarchal power instead of fighting it. When all of Medea’s attempts to remain by her son fail, Luna has already abandoned her. Facing the imminent and unbearable loss of Chacmool, Medea kills him, goes mad, and then kills herself. Medea is in-between two irreconcilable worlds—one that claims her as a Chicana, the other as a lesbian—but cannot live comfortably according to normative definitions of “lesbian” and “Chicana.” To be a Chicana should not prevent her from loving another woman; her love for another woman should not entail her renunciation of her culture, her origin, and the right to being a mother on her own terms. Her perpetual violation of social codes sinks her into the despair of being a dissident in a world of discrete identities where there is no legitimate place for her. In this play Moraga reproduces the Chicano racialized constructs of gender that identify the Chicana as a woman of Indian origin, but, at the same time, she is critical of prescribed, non-contradictory notions of Chicano/a identity. All characters are other to each other and Chicano/a identity is not shown as univocal but polyvocal. In the dystopian Aztlán Moraga imagines, Chicano masculinity is enacted through a ritual of racial purification that involves the possession of the pure, virginal, heterosexual Indian woman. By marrying a young Apache and recovering his son, Jason hopes to conceal his family’s Spanish descent and his former affiliation 275

with the Anglos. He thus secures his legitimacy as national poet in a society where the assertion of masculinity and power is deeply tied to the purity of one’s Indian origins and race, always transmitted through lines of paternity. Going back with Jason is Medea’s only chance to go back to Aztlán as a “rightful” Chicana, for he occupies a legitimated sexual and ethnic position. For him, however, she is only a “malinchista,” a woman who betrays her race with a sexual life outside the confines of the normal, and who should therefore not be part of the Chicano nation. Medea raves against masculine authority in national matters by making use of an analogy present in many of Moraga’s works and that I will explore further in Chapter 6: the communal land and the female body. Men think women have no love of country, that obsession with nation is a male prerogative. So like gods, they pick and choose who is to be born and live and die in a land I bled for equal to any man. Aztlán, how you betrayed me! Y acá me encuentro in this wasteland where yerbas grow bitter for lack of water, my face pressed to the glass of my own revolution like some huérfana abandonada. (The Hungry Woman 15)

Through her character Medea, the playwright puts forward a vision of country, nation, and homeland that goes beyond the usual geopolitical principles of the nation-state. If very basic needs such as the affective, sexual “yearning” of the Chicana lesbian (to use bell hook's term) go unsatisfied, the concept of a fertile, productive, united nation as understood by Moraga is impossible. The idea of nation expands its meaning in Moraga’s imaginary to come to signify a place where the Chicana can base an identity without feeling uprooted. If that sense of belonging and everyday contentment among her own people is not satisfied, the Chicana is doomed to exile. Hence, the extended metaphor of queer expatriation upon which the argument of the play is built. Moraga points at the fetishization of race that is instrumental for the Chicano national project, but she also falls into a strategic polarization and oversimplification by portraying the father (Jason) as the white oppressor and the mestiza (Medea) as the one 276

holding fast to her “authentic” Indian identity. The Indianness Moraga vindicates has taken the homogenizing shape of the nationalist racialized formations in the United States, and it is naturalized through sexuality just as in the postcolonial discourses of Latin America (Kaminsky 19). Moraga herself has acknowledged the dangers of nationalist discourse: “Its tendency to separatism can run dangerously close to biological determinism and a kind of fascism” (The Last Generation 149). Yet, her thought is deeply impregnated with her own personal “nationalist” overtones. Moraga uses nationalist discourse strategically in order to vindicate the decolonization of a variety of spaces. Hence, the liberated, “decolonized” sexuality Moraga advocates is by no means predicated by the conventional notions of womanhood and motherhood that patriarchy has constructed as a function of nationalist discourse. Instead, Moraga deals with ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality as factors that interrelate and are articulated through one another in the constitution of the woman of color’s multiple, ambivalent sense of identity. This multiple identity is, in Moraga’s words, “culturally and sexually specific,” but it is also part of a “broader and wiser revolution” (The Last Generation 149-150). Her claim for a land and a space is not justified through exclusionary appeals to biological or sexual essentialism, but through arguments in favor of a more open view of culture, sexuality, family, and community. The narrowness of heterosexual, patriarchal nationalist thought becomes manifest in the confused identity of Medea. She is at the junction of the only two possible destinies that this dystopian Aztlán grants her. For this Chicana mother and lesbian both of them are stifling and repressive. She may either remain in Tamoanchán, “free” from a masculine ideology of “race” and ethnicity, but ultimately live as an outcast and an exile from her community and her son; or she may succumb to the laws of a patriarchal Aztlán and its sexualized myths of ethnic authenticity. A stranger both in Aztlán and in Phoenix, Medea finds herself trapped within the conceptual and geographical boundaries of the 277

exclusionary, homogenizing operations of a homophobic order. A strong, resolute character, Medea is an unusual kind of woman in her time, the kind of woman who wants to be worshiped and revered. Her tragedy is that all those whom she loves cannot love her on her own terms: I am the last one to make this journey. My tragedy will be an example to all women like me. Vain women who only know to be the beloved. Such an example shall I be that no woman will dare to transgress those boundaries again. [...] I, my kind, am a dying breed of female. I am the last one to make this crossing. The border has closed behind me. There will be no more room for transgression. (46)

All throughout the play a parallelism is established between the repression of Medea’s sexuality and motherhood and the colonization of the land. The Hungry Woman is therefore written in the spirit of a feminist Chicana nationalism that “decolonizes the brown female body as it decolonizes the brown and female earth” (The Last Generation 150). Medea claims to be the last one to “make this crossing,” the last woman of her race to seek to combine all these identifications in a concept of self and nation that is beyond patriarchal nationalist logic and that, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, “has a tolerance for ambiguity” (Borderlands 79). However, she is doomed to the estrangement and spite from a culture she desires but cannot claim as hers. She is even challenged by her son, who, as his name indicates is to be the “messenger” “entre este mundo y el otro lado” (The Hungry Woman 29), for the man “[she wishes her] son to be “does not exist, must be invented” (The Hungry Woman 69). Medea fears that in crossing over to Aztlán as a boy, Chacmool will become an accomplice of the society that has betrayed and expatriated his own mother. Moraga evokes figures of Mexican, Aztec, and Western mythology to situate her character’s plight in the particular context of Mexican/Chicano cultural narratives that have assimilated the history of the dominated to that of the dominating. These mythical narratives are mostly put in the mouth of the 278

chorus. As Simon Goldhill and John Gould have argued, in Greek tragedy the chorus embodies a collective voice, response, and experience that are rooted in social memory, oral tradition, and collective wisdom. The chorus has a topographical location in the sense that its social identity has connotations and implications in a particular civic frame, a social and political rooting. In The Hungry Woman the chorus is composed of four Aztec women who have died in childbirth, the Cihuatateo. In this play they are identified “by the four directions and four primary PreColumbian colors: EAST (Red), NORTH (Black), WEST (White), and SOUTH (Blue)” (The Hungry Woman 8). Unlike the chorus in the classical play, they are neither contemporaries of the characters of the main action nor members of the dominant culture as the Corinthian women that make up the chorus in the original piece. Instead, they are mythological cultural heroines considered to be sacred by Aztec warriors (Rebolledo, Women Singing 63) performing here a ritualistic and symbolic function. As a collective voice, the Pre-Columbian Cihuatateo contextualize the main action by telling Aztec stories and legends about women whereby the struggle of Medea becomes one of many women’s struggles. Significant for the hybridization of the dramatic piece and for the emphasis on the double temporality of the play is the fact that the actors and actresses playing the chorus of the Cihuatateo also perform the secondary parts of Medea’s caretaker in the psychiatric hospital (Cihuatateo East), the prison guard, tattoo artist and border guard (Cihuatateo North), Luna’s girlfriend (Cihuatateo West), and Jason (Cihuatateo South). Although the rituals and dances they stage and the stories they tell are backdrops for the action rather than the main focus of the play, they interrupt the main events of the play, thus creating a temporal rupture. This temporal break allows us to relate the time and space of the action in the play with the mythic time and space of Aztec ancestors—the time after death and before birth represented by the warrior women. In this mythic timeless space the warrior women are symbols of female strength. In addition, 279

the legends they tell have the function of retrieving the past aggressions against women as a function of Medea’s present. In line with the incidental use of ritual in post-colonial drama, the Aztec rituals and myths transmitted through the Cihuatateo are part of Moraga’s recuperation of tradition. These legends are a dramatic device used to establish the context of her play, and to frame the struggle of her protagonist in an Aztec/Mexican/Chicano patriarchal history (Gilbert and Tompkins 72-73). When considered in the context of Medea’s predicament, these myths constitute what Rachel Blau Duplessis has called a “liberated” mythopoesis. In other words, a use of myth that goes against the grain of the main function of myth: Instead of affirming the dominant culture, the affirmative role of myth is applied to the muted group (Duplessis 107). In this case, myth serves Moraga’s proposal of a “nationalism in which la Chicana Indígena stands at the center, and heterosexism and homophobia are not the cultural order of the day” (The Last Generation 150). The conflation and reworking of different popular stories stresses the idea of a suppressed sexuality and a suppressed female power. La Llorona’s story parallels that of Medea in that she is a woman who was abandoned and betrayed by her husband or lover, killed his progeny in revenge, and killed herself right afterwards, being condemned to wander and wail desperately in the darkness in search of her children. The Hungry Woman is an Aztec myth describing a woman whose hunger will never be satiated and whose desperate cries for food can also be heard in the night: In the place where the spirits live, there was once a woman who cried constantly for food. She had mouths in her wrists, mouths in her elbows, and mouths in her ankles and knees. […] Then, to comfort the poor woman, they all flew down and began to make grass and flowers out of her skin. From her hair they made forests, from her eyes, pools and springs, from her shoulders, mountains and from her nose, valleys. At last she will be satisfied, they thought. But just as before, her mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning. And still she hasn’t changed.When it rains, she drinks. When flowers shrivel,

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when trees fall, or when someone dies, she eats. When people are sacrificed or killed in battle, she drinks their blood. Her mouths are always opening and snapping shut, but they are never filled. Sometimes at night, when the wind blows, you can hear her crying for food. (Bierhorst 23-25)

As Moraga has said in the interview with this author mentioned above, the connections between the Hungry Woman and La Llorona are obvious: They are both insatiable women. According to Judith Butler, the presence of these female figures who fail to accept their role as castrated (as lacking, absent, and submissive to the male) is usually the expression of misogynist fear of the phallic mother, the mother whose destructive, devouring force is the negative side of the phallus. In Butler’s revision of Lacan, these constructions of woman have the derogatory, masculinist implication that “having the phallus,” that is, power, discourse, and control over the social, “is much more destructive as a feminine operation than as a masculine one” (Bodies 102). In a patriarchal order, Butler says, “there is no other way for women to assume the phallus except in its most killing modalities” (Bodies 102-103). Moraga invokes these figures and reinterprets them as instances of women’s unsatisfied (insatiable) desire in male-dominated societies and nations whose discourse require their chastity, daughterliness, and dutifulness in order to guarantee cohesive images of community. The triumph of male power over female power is underscored by the reference to the Aztec myth of Huitzilopotchli, one of the myths referring to the founding of Mexico. Anthropologist June Nash has said the myth exemplifies the transition that took place in Aztec society roughly between 1248 and 1345 from a balanced order where women enjoyed power and authority to an increasingly male-dominated society (350). The confrontation between the male god Huitzilopochtli and his sisters Malinalxoch and Coyolxauhqui, culminates with the triumph of those values such as force, arms, and valor he represents, and with a disruption of the lines of authority that included women in a bygone matrilineal society. Nineteenth-century anthropologists 281

interpreted this story as a “nature myth,” in which the male god represented the sun and Coyolxauhqui the moon, banished to darkness by the sun (Bierhorst 138). Moraga has herself given this double meaning to the legend and, as has been said, has often spoken about female power as represented by darkness, the moon, and the goddess Coyolxauhqui (The Last Generation 74-75). Significantly, Medea’s lover’s name in the play is Luna, and the final prayer of Medea is not addressed to the mother goddess Coatlicue, but to the rebellious daughter, Coyolxauhqui, the moon (91). The madness, resistance, and aggressivity of the Mexican Medea and her mythical predecessors are redefined as the resistance to the powers that, in the name of the nation, displace and control women’s bodies through the binaries virgin/whore, good/evil. The lonesome wailing of figures like La Llorona and The Hungry Woman are the muffled cries of the other, whose silence is, as Gayatri Spivak has said in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988), the very condition of dominant representations. Medea inhabits the realm of those qualified as the abject and the psychotic, the other, those “atravesados” whom Gloria Anzaldúa situates in the epistemological and geographical terrain of the borderlands: “[T]he squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the halfdead” (Borderlands 3). Judith Butler reminds us that, as the subject is formed through the force of exclusion, the abject—that which the subject rejects and abhors—is thought to be outside it but is in fact “‘inside’ the subject as its own founding repudiation” (Bodies 3). By this Butler means that the coherence and stability of the subject are founded upon a repudiation of aspects that are inside it. The queer ghetto where The Hungry Woman is set, is the actualization of an “uninhabitable” domain of abject beings, whose existence outside the domain of the normative, patriarchal Chicano subject is necessary for an autonomous, heterosexist Aztlán to exist. According to Butler, the domain of the abject is a critical resource that threatens to 282

expose the presumptions of the sexed subject (3). By telling the tragic story of this lesbian Mexican Medea, whose desire has no place in the social order, Moraga problematizes the “legitimate” terms on which Chicano/a identity is often articulated in the cultural and political arenas. In The Hungry Woman Medea is associated with the subversive power of the Aztec goddess Coatlicue, the androgynous, ambivalent goddess of night and day, good and evil. Medea’s eyes are the color of obsidian, which Anzaldúa also relates to the unconscious, dark, underground powers of Coatlicue. In her reworking of Lacan’s mirror stage, Anzaldúa says that the image in the obsidian mirror represents a cohesive sense of self. The obsidian mirror reproduces the act of being seen and immobilized by the gaze of the other, as well as of absorbing those deeper aspects that are not immediately revealed at a first glance. In the obsidian mirror one might get lost and see those deeper aspects surface (Borderlands 42). Anzaldúa’s and Moraga’s respective recastings of the figures of Coatlicue and Medea turn the self-image reflected on the dark stone into a symbol of a permanent state of transition between life and death, subject and object, self and other. The figures stand for the rupture with the “normal,” for that place where the new mestiza multiple identifications and ambivalent subjectivity may be articulated beyond geographical and conceptual limits. In The Hungry Woman Moraga gives voice to this marginal, confused subjectivity through the character of Medea. Her transgression of the established limits makes it impossible for her to find an acceptable self-image. The mirror is “cold, impenetrable” (12). “You can never get inside it,” she says, “unless you are a child or un muerto” (12). Medea is condemned to silence, alienation, and aporia, which, in line with the fate of the protagonist in the classical play, apparently confirms the triumph of the social order that has cast her out. In the classical play by Euripides, Medea’s only avenue of escape is retaliation and death. Similarly, in this contemporary version, the only possible act of resistance to the regulating laws 283

of gender, sexuality, and race on the part of the Mexican Medea is to kill her son Chacmool as an act of revenge against Chicano patriarchy and its laws. In this case, Moraga has related the Greek Medea to the powerful Mexican figures of La Llorona and the Hungry Woman. She also rewrites the Aztec legend of Huitzilopochtli so that, in her play, it is the mother who kills the son in order to prevent him from betraying women in the future. Throughout the play Moraga stresses Medea’s impossibility to find a space within the Chicano “ethno-nation”, but in the last scenes, she introduces an element of fantasy that, if only in death, makes the fulfillment of Medea’s desire possible. Chacmool appears to take his mother with him under the full moon of the night daughter goddess Coyolxauqui. By evoking what Lacanian feminists would view as a pre-Oedipal imaginary realm of Chicana female power, symbolized by the moon, Moraga proposes the resignification of the symbolic order that keeps mother and son apart. She therefore reworks the tragic ending of the classical play with an imaginary withdrawal of reunited mother and son from the dismal world forged by Chicano fathers. The dystopian vision of a balkanized multiethnic America where gays and lesbians are banned is a critique of the masculinist multicultural essentialism that divides and fetishizes cultural and sexual identities, and a call for a more open and flexible view of ethnicity, identity, and community. Moraga’s usual allegiance to the race of her mother, accounts for the feminist, indigenist ethno-nationalism of the play, a strategy of self-affirmation within the highly racialized ethnic culture of the U.S.

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Part III Crossroads

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It has been the aim of Part II to lay stress on these writers’ portrayal of social spaces as borderlands or nepantla sites of friction, inconsistency, and displacement. These representations are also in a constant dialectical relationship with a more optimistic spirit that translates into spiritual, imaginative, and/or political representations of counter-spaces or spaces of resistance. As lived and conceived by those on the intersection of cultures, languages, discourses, and genders, otherness is transformed into alternative, imaginative ways of viewing society and relations between individuals. Thus, the allegedly Mexican American “absolute other” is in fact a hybrid subjectivity capable of drawing from different cultures and forms of knowledge, as well as of providing an inlet into new ways of understanding social and cultural relations through spatial images. The two chapters that follow address the creation of imagined homes or social spaces corresponding to a desire to understand, recover, and act upon the “real” social spaces. In the light of Anzaldúa's new “mestiza consciousness”, these writings attest to the creative possibilities of the multiple Chicana borderlands experiences. Life in in-between social spaces favors not only the development of what Anzaldúa calls “la facultad”—the critical capacity to interpret the codes of the enemy—but also the ability to confront those codes with alternative meanings stemming from one’s multiple positions. In the literature and writings by Chicanas, this oppositional hermeneutics results in the creation of spatial images and literary constructions that encompass a multiplicity of occasionally clashing public and private concerns that are not mere celebrations of local color and folklore. As Chela Sandoval terms it, an “oppositional consciousness” is “the capacity to recenter depending on the kinds of oppression to be confronted” (14).

These writers insist on the importance of having a space of their own: place and locality as “popular” realms, spaces of the people and for the people; individual places of intimacy, privacy, but also of communal strength and resistance. At the same time, their writings continue to challenge the understanding of place, privacy, and home as bounded and homogeneous. As we will see subsequently, even in their more optimistic and invigorating pieces, Cisneros, Mora, Moraga, and Viramontes do not ignore inner social and material conflicts and the difficulty of harmonizing disparate interests. Yet, an impulse of political and communal solidarity is the source of spatial images (mental constructions) that integrate individual and communal responsibilities and dilemmas. As was said in the introduction to the spatial theories of Lefebvre, Jameson, and Soja (1.1.), these thinkers understand the production of space as resulting from the dialectics between social, geographical, and political realities, and mental abstractions. In the light of their work, we may say that in the writings of many Chicanas otherness is turned into a border creative spirit that goes beyond institutional, geographical, and conceptual boundaries. The images and constructs produced by what Anzaldúa terms a “ mestiza consciousness” evoke the interdependence of the abstract and the concrete, theory and practice, individual integrity and the materialization of a new more democratic social order. The traditional meanings of home, house, community, Aztlán, America are appropriated and resignified according to a desire to change the social, cultural, and national ethos and to confront and counteract some of the destructive and homogenizing forces of postmodernity. The desire to preserve the old culture and the old voices does not so much translate into a nostalgic lament for a lost history and culture, as into the recreation of the idea of America as national, social, and cultural space. Three spatial concepts will be useful for the political and literary representation of space in these works. Firstly, bell hooks’ term, “homeplace,” which in her collection Yearning (1991) 288

refers to the familiar, domestic space as a space of nurturing, creativity, resistance, and opposition. “Homeplace” alludes to the conscious resisting and supporting role women have had in the domestic realm. “Homeplace” is therefore opposed to “home” viewed as the “natural” habitat of women. Though hooks acknowledges that domestic tasks have traditionally been allotted to women, her aim is to emphasize the supportive, dignifying environment black women have created against the aggressive forces of racism and classism in the public sphere. Secondly, Michel Foucault's concept of “heterotopia”, though vague and apparently devoid of political implications, may be appropriated to describe the ways in which many of these writers create positive images of collective space. In his essay “Of Other Spaces” (1985) Foucault speaks about the contemporary view of space as related to other spaces, and briefly delineates the characteristics of what he terms “heterotopia:” a site that is related to other sites, a place where many heterogeneous places meet and are juxtaposed. Some of his heterotopias are negative, such as the asylum, the madhouse, or the prison, but some others are “happy,” such as the garden, the museum, or the festival. A heterotopia may be a place where different time periods and spaces build up, a place where certain rituals must be performed, or a place that has its own opening and closing system. Foucault does not specify if these are characteristics that distinguish heterotopias amongst themselves, or if they apply to all of them. Nonetheless, I have found the term “happy heterotopia” useful to describe positive, imaginary, literary representations of heterogeneous spaces: meeting places where differences are respected and where the past and the present, the masculine and the feminine, the young and the old, the more and the less fortunate, the Mexican and the American are brought together. Finally, the concept of “modest utopia” corresponds to the very explicit political aspiration underlying two of Cherríe Moraga’s dramatic pieces: that of creating a new social order based on necessary concern for and affiliations across race, class, gender, nationality, and culture. 289

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5 Homeplaces and Spaces of Their Own

How do we create spaces not only for our private selves but also for our collective selves? Spaces where we can together admit our dreams and fears, using our emotions as resources for discovery? [...] How do we create space for ourselves to be ourselves, our multiple Latina, Hispana, Mexicana, Chicana selves? Pat Mora, Nepantla (1993)

The concept of “homeplace” as described by bell hooks has gendered connotations that perpetuate the association of women with the domestic realm. This African American critic sustains that, in the minds of young people in the black community, “houses belonged to women. They were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place—the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls” (hooks 41). In the particular context of hooks’ collectivity, the role of women was not merely to serve others; they constructed “a safe place where black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (42). The home may have been a space of oppression, but it was also a place where solace, comfort, self-esteem, and refuge from adverse public spaces could be found. Like hooks, Chicana writers have paid a strong tribute to the willing and conscious (not natural) self-sacrifice of women for the benefit of others. The abuelita’s house in Viramontes’ “The Moths” is an example of this particular representation of the home as a haven from a hostile world. The home is identified with women’s capacity to give and identify with the suffering of others, a capacity that Sara Ruddick has termed “maternal thinking.” Ruddick sustains that “maternal thinking” can be

transformed into a revolutionary discourse that is not tied to the biological conditioning of being a woman. When such thinking embraces self-assertion and the will to have a public voice, it becomes a challenge to a social order that relegates the nurturing and caretaking aspects of life to the private, domestic sphere. It is therefore a challenge to the traditional division between public and private, masculine and feminine spaces. The reconciliation of personal liberation and collective commitment has been articulated by Viramontes and Cisneros through reinvented spatial images that challenge these divisions by highlighting the interdependence of communal and individual freedom, of material and psychological needs. Independence and creativity are conflated with political commitment and collective enfranchisement in what Terry Eagleton terms an “aesthetics of materialist ethics” (The Ideology 413). In a more fanciful exploration of family history Pat Mora’s latest House of Houses (1997) creates an imaginary homeplace in the desert of the American cultural mainstream. This collective autobiography or “family memoir,” as she has preferred to call it, asserts the psychological value of place, community, family, history, and tradition for the construction of a future based on mutual respect, sustenance, and solace in a country that is not quite one’s home. 5.1. “Summoning Home All Those Who Stray:” Sandra Cisneros and Helena Viramontes For many women of Mexican descent the home or the house as Bachelard understands it—“a space of protected intimacy,” an archetypal image of the individual imagination, the center of our dreams, and the germ of our inner happiness, introversion, and creativity—rarely corresponds to its actual material experience. However, in the most optimistic writings of Chicanas like Cisneros and Viramontes, the evocation of spaces of intimacy is tied to a sense of individual freedom that is inextricable from collective needs. Thus, the poetics of space of these writers is 292

necessarily an ethical poetics that embraces issues of social and gender equity. In The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990) Terry Eagleton argues that the fact the discourse on the aesthetic has usually tended to exclude the routine aspects of life, the everyday, the banal, and the material, ensues from the separation of the realms of the ethical, the political, and the aesthetic aspects of human life within the modern bourgeois state. Eagleton’s main argument is that the conventional widespread notion of the aesthetic is tied to modern notions of autonomy, self-referentiality, and subjectivity that have developed within the European middle-class bourgeoisie. The concept of the aesthetic has disparate implications. On the one hand, it provides the middle class with the model of subjectivity that is necessary for its material operations. On the other, it underscores the independent nature of human thought, sensitivity, and action that will turn against bourgeois capitalist ideology. The symptom of modernity, Eagleton says, is that “[e]verything should now become aesthetic” (368). Morality, truth, that which satisfies the mind, have now become a matter of style, pleasure, and intuition (368). Culture and art are autonomous objects through which human beings have sublimated certain necessities and desires. Self-fulfillment is understood by modern ethical thought as a personal matter rather than a political one, so that aesthetics, as conceived by modernity, engages the relationship between the particular and the universal by beginning with self-identity and individual desire (413). Thus, the domestic realm, occupied by women, and the spaces occupied by the downcast and the poor cannot enter traditional concepts of the aesthetic unless they are disembodied or idealized representations of an essence. The American critic Jean Franco has pointed to the patriarchal bias of this notion of the aesthetic and the concept of subjectivity on which it is based. The private, Franco says, is the space of freedom and intimacy that is necessary for creativity and intellectual thought to develop, a space that men have enjoyed more often than women. Yet, she observes it is also in that very 293

intimacy of the private space that one confronts death, mortality, and the possibility of dissolution. Thus, she argues, the union with an ideal feminine is the means by which many male artists have compensated their own fear of death (“Going Public” 7476). The gender bias of Bachelard’s phenomenological approach to space corroborates Franco’s contention. The idea of home as a “space of protected intimacy” grounds itself upon a romanticization of women’s work in the home, upon the idea of “la maternité de la maison” (La poétique 57). According to Bachelard’s idealized vision, women’s care-taking activity ties the present with the past, wakes up the dormant furniture, creates an inner balance out of everything that is inside the house. The inside of a maternal house is an idealized haven from outside deadly forces. Men, on the contrary, can only build houses from the outside (La poétique 74). While traditional aesthetics assumes that the relationship between the particular and the universal prioritizes self-identity, privacy, comfort, and independence, the “aesthetics of materialist ethics” proposed by Eagleton assumes that the individual is one whose desire is always inseparable from the desire of others. The universal is thus reached through this implication with others, which brings to the fore public, political, and material questions of justice as well as debates about which desires should be curtailed and which should be fulfilled: “[T]he incessant process of arguing all this belongs to the public sphere, in which all individuals must have equal participatory rights whatever their distinguishing particularities of work, gender, race, interests, and so on” (The Ideology 414). This critic’s reflections on the political, material value of aesthetics are certainly in accord with Lefebvre’s desire to establish a dialectics between lived spaces and conceived or imagined spaces. Patricia Waugh has cogently argued that the aesthetic tendencies of many contemporary women writers resist classification within the established literary categories of realism, modernism, or postmodernism because their works are not complicit with the notion of the uniform, coherent, autonomous 294

self that grounds modern views of aesthetics. In Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (1989), Waugh contends that these fictions propose a self that, in spite of its fragmentation, acknowledges the need for connectedness and relationship with others. The work of many contemporary Chicana writers certainly opposes both the unified subject of rationalism and the schizophrenic postmodern subject through what we could call a politics of the local. Although influenced by a post-structuralist conception of the subject, the self that Chicana writers are speaking about has not emerged out of a merely escapist, or formalist signifying game. Rather, it springs out of the specific social, cultural, and political tensions of actual borderland spaces or locations such as the home, the neighborhood, the fields, and/or the body. In Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street (1985) the voice of Esperanza craves for a family house “that would be ours for always,” “a real house. One I could point to” (Mango Street 7-9). Esperanza is once told by a fortune-teller that she will develop “a home in the heart,” a remark that, on that occasion, she does not quite understand. In “Bums in the Attic” Esperanza, tired of “looking at what [her family] can’t have” (81), recalls her refusal to go on her family’s Sunday trips to the rich neighborhood where her father works. As we have seen in Chapter 3, in Cisneros’ work social differences translate into spatial images that correlate the geographical separation between rich and poor neighborhoods and the detachment between the material and the intellectual or spiritual realm. Esperanza herself comments on this correlation: “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth. They don’t look down at all except to be content to live on hills. They have nothing to do with last week’s garbage or fear of rats” (Mango Street 81). Towards the end of Cisneros’ work, a more mature and independent Esperanza longs for a house that is only hers: “Not a flat. Not an apartment in the back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s” (Mango Street 100). The young woman’s desire for an intimate, comfortable space of her own is a pre-condition for 295

artistic creation and imagination. Echoing both Woolf and Bachelard, Cisneros has her character say: “Only a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (Mango Street 100). The middle-class, feminist, aesthetic implications of Esperanza’s words are ineludible, but they have to be considered in relation to her incipient collective social consciousness. Her freedom as a woman and as an artist together with the social reality of those “who live too much on earth” will be the constitutive elements of her aesthetics: “One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house” (81). The “attic” is here particularly relevant as an alternative spatial image, an expression of intellectual, artistic, and political commitment. For Bachelard, the attic, symbolizing rationality and clear thinking, is the space of quiet and pleasurable solitude; one never wishes to descend from the attic (Bachelard 41). As Cisneros has stated in an unpublished interview with the author of this volume, the attic has similar connotations for her. The “attic,” however, has multiple connotations in different cultural contexts. For middle-class women, the attic is, as Debra Castillo puts it, “a forerunner of Woolf’s room and also its analogous representations in those other rooms where women have been confined by custom and tradition: the kitchen, the bedroom” (7). The Spanish meaning of the word in its adjectival form in Spanish means, as Castillo points out, “Attic (from Athens), and therefore signifies ‘elegant’” (8). Someone who has Attic taste is elegant and has the economic security to cultivate it (Castillo 8). Yet, in Spanish, the ático designates the place under the roof that is occupied by the servant or the maid in the houses of the middle and upper middle class in many Latin American countries (Castillo 8). The title of Sandra Gilbert’s and Susan Gubart’s well-known The Madwoman in the Attic (1984) refers to the mad woman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) as a metaphor for women’s repressed desire to write and express 296

themselves. This desire would be accomplished thanks to the feminist movement, and at the expense of other women “who live too close to the earth”—the working-class servants, maids, nannies—and also at the expense of the criolla, who is inbetween two classes, two cultures, and two value systems. As Jean Rhys’ novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) shows, the real madwoman in the attic is a criolla, a Jamaican lady whose lifestory the Caribbean author committed herself to writing. In Rhys’ novel the rage and derangement of Antoinette, the “madwoman,” are shown to stem from her double oppression as a colonized subject and as a woman who wants to participate in the middleclass ideology of the colonizer. In Cisneros’ story the “attic” may be seen as referring to the space inhabited by the middle-class feminist writer of workingclass origin who is mad (angry) and whom many people inside and outside her community may consider to be mad (crazy). It is also the space the speaker wants to share with the bums, the working class that Cisneros commits herself to sheltering in the house of her writing. As a descendant of working-class Mexican immigrants, Cisneros is not a criolla but a mestiza (in Anzaldúa’s sense of the word). She stands in-between working-class Mexicans whom she descends from and the American middle class she belongs to now. Unlike other female writers, she does not hide the existence of the marginalized. Castillo says that “it is hard to imagine an Attic attic” (8), but in Cisneros’ writing the house or “room of one’s own,” symbolizing the Attic taste (aesthetics as well as economic and intellectual freedom), converges with the other attic (the attic of the poor and the underclass). Cisneros’ story entitled “Little Miracles, Kept Promises” in the volume Woman Hollering Creek is perhaps one of the most representative examples of this writer’s borderlands consciousness, a broad vision of community and culture that embraces the interests of men, women, children, the poor, and the homosexual. Inspired by the popular votive Catholic traditions of the milagro and the ofrenda, Cisneros’ piece addresses the most 297

quotidian concerns of people of Mexican American descent.1 The story recasts these votive traditions by reproducing the texts of the prayers and dedications that accompany the offerings. A conflation of voices from the Mexico-Texas border, the story becomes a religious heterotopia that is both a manifestation of local culture and folklore as well as a reference to a variety of interrelated social spaces and issues. In these prayers and petitions Cisneros discloses multiple female and male subject positions according to the age, generation, gender, sexuality, origin, and social background of her protagonists. A family thanks the Santo Niño de Atocha for having helped their son quit drinking and abusing his wife and children; a couple asks San Martín to make their daughter “see some sense” and understand her parents are too poor for her to go to school and that her “place is in the home helping us out” (Woman Hollering 117). A woman asks to be set free from men, to be left alone like she was before; another woman, who is often abused by her husband, prays to be forgiven for not loving her husband anymore and to be taught to love him back; another one still prays for a decent man “who is not a pain in the nalgas”: A “man, man,” “someone who is not ashamed to be seen cooking or cleaning or looking after himself” (Woman Hollering 117). A young girl asks the virgin for help to lose weight so as not to end up “dressing saints.” The more resigned women pray that their husbands and sons will change their ways. Some prayers illustrate the social maladjustment of Mexicans in the U.S. Immigrants for whom “there is no one else [they] can turn to in this country” ask the saints for decent jobs, or for the pay that never comes and must be sent to Mexico to the kids and in-laws (120). The parents and grandparents of a young man pray that he will stay away from drink and drugs; a student prays to 1

The milagro or exvoto is a painted picture or silver reproduction of the miracle a saint has performed. It includes parts of the body, animals or people that have been healed by the saint. The ofrenda is any offering, including the above milagros, placed by the figures of the saints to thank them for their help or to demonstrate devotion.

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pass the British Restoration literature class. There are also other prayers for the arrival of the disability check, for the income tax “to pay los biles,” for a winning lottery ticket (Woman Hollering 122). Cisneros also records the health problems of Mexican Americans, ranging from the pimples of a teenager, through a woman’s hemorrhage after an operation, to the cancer treatment of a two-year-old. Finally, the story also addresses the question of the discrimination of homosexuals by the Church through a coded prayer full of shame and sadness in which a young man asks the Black Christ of Esquípulas to watch over the man he is in love with. Significantly, the last and longest of these petitions is Rosario’s, Cisneros’ mestiza character who learns to make the positive elements of her familial heritage compatible with the liberating aspects of American culture and values. Rosario rejects the traditional Mexican roles of mother and wife and resents the sneering comments of her relatives about her artistic ambitions. She scorns the figure of the Virgencita de Guadalupe which she associates with her mother’s and grandmother’s subservience: “Couldn’t look at you without blaming you for all the pain my mother and her mother and all our mothers’ mothers have put up with in the name of God” (Woman Hollering 127). Unable to look at the Virgencita without being reminded of women’s inaction in her culture, she conjures up an entirely different Guadalupe: “I wanted you bare-breasted, snakes in your hands. I wanted you leaping and somersaulting the backs of bulls. I wanted you swallowing raw hearts and rattling volcanic ash” (127). Cisneros’ rebellious protagonist might well find a visual representation of her Guadalupe in Yolanda López’s drawing Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978): Stepping into material history and out of the halo of saintliness that keeps her immobile, the Guadalupe represented in López’s work is an athletic figure dressed in modern sporting clothes who looks forward as she runs over the red, white and blue wings of an angel (probably a figurative representation of U.S. patriarchy). 299

She is holding a snake, the Aztec symbol of power. In representing herself as Guadalupe, López not only brings the religious idol closer to the reality of contemporary women; she also rescues Guadalupe from the position of immobility and “silent suffering” to highlight other attributes of Mexican women such as activity, impetus, and capacity for regeneration. In Yolanda López’s painting, Guadalupe is the new mediating, Chicana-feminist subject of the future who brings together modernity, the icons of a pre-Columbian cultural background, Catholicism, and the survival skills passed on to her by her female ancestors. In a similar vein, the female protagonist of “Little Miracles” finally grasps the strength and invigorating potential of Guadalupe as a crucial collective emblem within the history of the mestizo/a Mexican people and the history of Mexican American people’s struggle for rights. This power, she concludes, is perhaps no different from the power and strength that her female relatives have harbored with their patience, their endurance, and their sympathy for others: That you could have the power to rally a people when a country was born, and again during civil war, and during a farmworkers’ strike in California made me think maybe there is power in my mother’s patience, strength in my grandmother’s endurance […]. The power of understanding someone else’s pain. And understanding is the beginning of healing. (Woman Hollering 128).

Once she acknowledges this power, she ceases to be ashamed of her origins and claims her female ancestors back in a final gesture of thankfulness that materializes in her offering of a milagro to a Guadalupe that, like the figure in López’s painting, is a personal re-appropriation. In particular, Cisneros’ persona views Guadalupe as a representation of the ecumenicity of female power that she recognizes in all religious icons, “all at once the Buddha, the Tao, the true Messiah, Yahweh, Allah, the Heart of the Sky, the heart of the Earth, the Lord of the Near and Far, the Spirit, the Light, the Universe […]” (128): “Mighty Guadalupana, 300

Coatlaxopeuh, Tonantzín. What “little miracle could I pin here? Braid of hair in its place and know that I thank you” (129).

Figure 3. Yolanda M. López, Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, 1978, oil pastel on paper, 32 X 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

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Following the line of the female liberation plot adopted by Cisneros in some of her stories and in The House of Mango Street, in her latest work Helena Viramontes has left behind the harsh tone that characterized her first productions. The narratives I tackle here have adopted a more lyrical though no less critical tone about the conditions of Mexican Americans in the U.S. With her story “The Jumping Bean” (1992) and her novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) she has demonstrated her capacity for reconciling the poetics of oppression with the poetics of liberation. “The Jumping Bean” introduces a shift in the treatment of male characters and an optimistic note about the possibility of dignified and caring human relations that was far from present in most of her previous stories. In this story about a working-class Mexican family living in L.A., Viramontes focuses mainly on the figure of the father and on the figure of his eldest daughter, who, like Cisneros’ Esperanza, is a potential organic intellectual. The story is partially told from the perspective of the youngest girl in the family, a peripheral observer of the main events. Viramontes’ sympathetic characterization of the male character differs from her usually prototypical representation of Mexican American men as authoritarian, oppressive, and despotic. As the author has said, this story was written as a tribute to her father, and as an effort to “understand why this man was the way he was, the origin of all the rage that he took out on his family” (Christoph 10). The conflict between the self-assertive eldest female child of the family and the hard-working father that this story deals with, is no doubt one more of Viramontes’ critical assertions about patriarchal relations within the family. However, “jumping bean,” the mocking nickname used by the resentful construction workers to refer to the father, is a reference to his strength, resilience, and determination in spite of the inhibiting social environment of U.S. society. The insect is also a metaphor for the whole family’s struggle, their endless fight against their social confinement, and, more particularly, for the eldest daughter’s desire to break free of 302

the constraints of her social and family environment. The narrative alternates episodes that focus respectively on the figures of the father and the eldest child. It reaches its climax in a scene where the father has to choose between asserting his patriarchal authority over his daughter, or accepting the validity of her arguments and the possibility of her liberation. With this realistic depiction of a male Mexican immigrant worker inspired by her own relationship with her father, Viramontes undermines the stereotype of the Mexican worker, the “spic,” usually thought to be lazy and untrustworthy. The joke played on the father by his workmates (“what’s the difference between a spic and a drunk?” [“Jumping” 104]), reflects the social prejudice affecting Mexican workers. The joke’s punch line (“a drunk will sober up, but a spic will always be a spic” [“Jumping” 104]) hints at the widespread prejudice in the United States that people of Latin American origin are undependable and incapable of moving up in the social scale; hence, their permanent inferior status. This joke is Viramontes’ commentary on the ways in which popular culture is instrumental in the perpetuation of certain stereotypes and social prejudices based on racial categories. However, her partially omniscient narrator also comments on the “peripheral vision” and “standards” that produce such stereotypes. In fact, the story shows they are more grounded in social panic and resentment at newcomers than in actual facts. Significantly, the father cannot grasp the racist implications of the joke and feels “possessed by [questions like this that] he does not understand” and that his eldest daughter has to clarify for him (“Jumping” 109). The battered mother of the story is an example of the longsuffering working-class Mexican woman. Yet the eldest daughter poses a challenge to the endless pain of this woman and the social discrimination of Mexicans in the United States by refusing to be silent and seeking her way out of social depression through education. After nine weeks of school nonattendance due to her mother’s illness, the “truant officer,” an “official looking gringo” comes to fetch her. Echoing the official discourse (“You need to 303

be learning,” “You’ll end up like some old lady in the shoe” [“Jumping” 106]), he takes for granted Mexican immigrants’ equal opportunities of social mobility. In a house crammed with nine children, the only space of one’s own in the house is the toilet, and it is there that the youngest sister finds Maria de la Luz trying to read a book. As the name indicates, Maria de la Luz is a character full of hope, a woman for whom liberation is a possibility. “The Jumping Bean” anticipates Viramontes’ less tragic look upon women’s lives that has culminated in her novel Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). The final confrontation between father and daughter over the freeing of the caterpillar inside the bean, is Viramontes’ symbolic juxtaposition of two forces that should not be at odds with one another. As long as the father places his authority above the spirit of social resistance championed by his daughter and embodied by the bean, he becomes a potential threat to his own daughter’s liberation. The necessary, though not yet fully possible reconciliation between father and daughter, between women’s individual liberation and the liberation of the collectivity, is perhaps the most important message of the story. Emerging with surprising force at the end of the narrative, the silent, observant youngest sister is a redemptive center who does not yet speak for herself but who, by swallowing the bean over which the antagonism between father and daughter has arisen, transforms this family confrontation into positive energy. The character’s symbolic action, leading to the happy note on which the story ends, may be interpreted as the writer’s faith in a better future in which the home will be a homeplace where women’s freedom will be part and parcel of the whole community’s wellbeing. Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), the first novel written by Helena Viramontes, illustrates the complexity of social tensions in the lives of migrant workers. This novel has inherited some of the aspects of the other local migrant worker Chicano narratives like Tomás Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra (1970) and Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1973). Its setting, the 304

luxuriant, fertile landscape of golden California, cannot but remind us of that other migrant story told by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The setting and ideological ground of this novel are contemporary U.S. border politics and agribusiness. Viramontes addresses current global socio-economic issues such as the creation of a Mexican transnational labor force in the U.S. and their local repercussions: the militarization of the U.S. Mexico border, the indiscriminate raids on Mexican immigrants, sickness from pesticide poisoning, and the exploitation of pizcadores by agri-business. In dedicating her novel to César Chávez and her parents, Viramontes creates a continuum between the present where the novel is set—the end of the twentieth century—, the campesino revolt of 1962 led by the United Farm Workers Association (UFWA) founded by Chávez, and the story of her own parents, who worked as cotton pickers in the fields of Arizona. Other issues alluded to in her novel are the abolition of affirmative action and the harsh laws against the legal and illegal immigrants’ rights to the welfare services of health care and education in the state of California, enacted after the approval of propositions 187 and 209, respectively.2 Viramontes’ novel gives us a particular gendered version of the plight of Mexican immigrants by focusing on a female character. The narrative structure transgresses the convention of the uniform perspective of the Bildungsroman heroine. As various feminist critiques of the nineteenth-century feminine Bildungsroman have shown, this genre usually ended in marriage 2

Proposition 187 was a ballot initiative of the Californian group SOS (Save Our State) to fight illegal immigration. Endorsed by Republican Governor Pete Wilson and passed in 1994, this proposition denied illegal immigrants and their families’ welfare, health care, and public education. At that time, 7 percent of the population of California was illegal. Although some minor modifications have been made, this proposition is still operative in California. The gains of bilingual education and affirmative action programs in higher and junior colleges were threatened in the mid-nineties. Proposition 209, which put an end to affirmative action in admission policies at the University of California, was supported by California voters in 1996.

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or in death, reproducing what Patricia Waugh terms a “‘consensus’ aesthetics”.3 This aesthetics was based on the received notion that the consciousness of the female protagonist was motivated by interiority, morality, sentiment, and sensitivity (28). Through the combination of the Bildungsroman and the migrant novel, Viramontes reworks the pattern of the feminine romance plot, and breaks the rigid boundary between the private and the public spheres that grounds the realist romance novel. Nor can the novel be classified within the “women’s novels” of liberation that became popular in the 1970s. Intent on giving an alternative “feminine” perspective and on reversing existing stereotypes of womanhood, works such as Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1974) reacted against the realist romance plot, privileged women’s sensuality, and resisted the novelistic convention of marriage as the only way out for the heroine. Rosalind Coward has observed that in so far as the novels of liberation give a description of women’s development exclusively around sexual matters, they cannot offer an effective resistance to the patriarchal discourse that has strictly defined women’s inferiority on the basis of their sexual difference. Using Foucault’s argument that speaking about sex may also be a way of establishing, controlling, and classifying the subject and the body, Coward argues that these novels reproduce an ideology that has always viewed women in relation to their sexual experience. This ideology sustains that a woman comes to know herself only in so far as she deals with her sexual life, which entails that woman has access to knowledge, but not to power. Viramontes’ novel incorporates some of the elements of the “novel of liberation” plot such as the awakening to love and sexuality of a strong-willed female character, but, due to the writer’s borderlands Chicana feminist politics, it considers factors other

3

I am referring to Rachel Blau Duplessis’ above mentioned Writing Beyond the Ending (1985), Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Rosalind Coward’s “The True Story of How I Became My Own Person” (1989) and Patricia Waugh’s Feminine Fictions (1989).

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than sexual awakening and romance as essential for women’s self-development. In Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) Viramontes has used a technique very similar to that used by Rivera and Méndez in their migrant novels. She has juxtaposed a variety of male and female voices: the female protagonist, Estrella; the strong, long-suffering mother abandoned by her husband; Perfecto, the surrogate head of the family, a battered old man with an unspoken history, tired of the hard life in the U.S, and dreaming of his return to an idealized Mexico; and Alejo, an illegal worker who has migrated to the U.S. enticed by promises of the American dream. The third-person omniscient narrator refrains from passing moral judgement on the characters, its ambiguous position being that of both master and slave: a master in that he represents the pizcadores; a slave in that he becomes involved in their experiences and looks at the world through their eyes. In this novel the problem of the gulf between the intellectual and the working class is transcoded in the omniscience through which Viramontes has chosen to tell her story (Franco, “Going Public” 69). Through this fictional account, she becomes both an interpreter and a transmitter of the lives and concerns of the marginal workers who are usually concealed by everyday official “public” discourse, but she does so through the literary discourse of the privileged. The novel articulates the faith in the instrumental power of language that this writer has expressed in her testimonial essay “Nopalitos” (1989). Estrella craves knowledge and is eager to decipher “the diagonal lines written in chalk on the blackboard,” but is frustrated to see that the teachers are more concerned with her dirty fingernails (Under the Feet 24). Teachers use a language with her that hurts “like rusted nails piercing the heels of her bare feet” (25). Eventually, she establishes a mental link between the practical use of language and the box of tools of the old man Perfecto. Learning the names of those tools is connected to the learning of their function, their use, and therefore, to power:

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The curves and tails of the tools made no sense and the shapes were as foreign and meaningless to her as chalky lines on the blackboard [...]. Tools to build, bury, tear down, rearrange and repair, a box of reasons [Perfecto’s] hands took pride in. She lifted the pry bar in her hand, felt the coolness of iron and power of function, weighed the significance it awarded her, and soon she came to understand how essential it was to know these things. That was when she began to read. (26)

Thus far, Estrella has not owned books, except for the catechism chapbook given to her by her grandmother, which she had read and reread. She also reads over and over the words in newspapers thrown in trash cans, words publicizing an ironically inaccessible, aseptic world of consumerism whose existence depends on people like her: “Clorox makes linens more than white...It makes them sanitary, too! Swanson’s TV Dinners, closest to Mom’s Cooking. Coppertone-Fastest Tan Under the Sun with Maximum Sunburn Protection” (Under the Feet 31). The commercial advertisements of cleanliness and a healthy tan contrast with Estrella’s constant exposure to pesticides and polluted water and with her sunburnt skin from whole days of work in the fields. Viramontes has said the role of the writer should be akin to that of the subversive activist. The task of those who write from such a position is to clear away the “abstract” from words and bring them down to the “material.”4 Like the acclaimed Chicano writer Tomás Rivera, in Under the Feet of Jesus Viramontes comments on the blinding, mystifying power of language and representation.5 Estrella becomes aware of deceptive cultural 4

She mentioned this in an unpublished presentation titled “Being the Border: A Train of Thought, Imaginative Training” delivered at the International Conference of Chicano Literature, held in Granada (Spain) in 1998. 5 The title of Rivera’s novel, … y no se lo tragó la tierra,, refers to the main character’s fear that he might be swallowed by the earth if he questions the existence of God. This character’s resistance to oppression depends to a great extent on his defiance of Catholic stoicism and of the idea of an omnipotent divine will.

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representations of Californian agricultural work and its social context. Through this character, Viramontes ironizes on the ideals of Californian agrarian landscape as plentiful and almost pastoral. Indeed, the picture of the woman and her rural surroundings in the box of raisins that Estrella sees in the market, is a stylized depiction of landscape giving, as cultural geographer Jonathan Smith puts it, a “sense of completion, of stability, of permanence” (78). According to Smith, representations of landscape, especially those associated to memory and retrospection often rise above time and circumstance: “It is the sense of transcendence provided by the metaphorical elevation of memory that landscape, treated as scenery, unwittingly reproduces and recalls. It is this partial escape from the temporal flux which landscape, treated as scenery, unfailingly represents as an occurrence” (Smith 79). Luminous, golden scenes produce the illusion of stepping out of history. Landscapes seem to surpass the process by which they were created. Probably inspired by the work of Chicana artist Ester Hernández, Sun Mad Raisins (1982), Viramontes unsettles the idealization of the Californian landscape and the rural worker through an ironic contrast between representation and material reality. Vexed by the sentimentalized, disembodied image of the field worker in the picture, Estrella points at the disjuncture between such a representation and the harsh conditions under which she herself has to work: Carrying the full basket to the paper was not like the picture on the red raisin boxes Estrella saw in the market, not like the woman wearing a fluffy bonnet, holding out the grapes with her smiling, ruby lips, the sun a flat orange behind her. The sun was white and it made Estrella’s eyes sting like an onion, and the baskets of grapes resisted her muscles [...]. The woman with the red bonnet did not know this. Her knees did not sink in the hot white soil [...]. The woman’s bonnet would be as useless as Estrella’s own straw hat under a white sun so mighty, it toasted the green grapes to black raisins. (Under the Feet 49-50).

The representation of the woman with the red bonnet as a noncorporeal, aesthetized object, perfectly integrated with a non309

aggressive, idyllic nature, conveys a romanticized vision of field work that bears no relationship whatsoever to the material, socioeconomic issues that affect migrant workers like Estrella.

Figure 4. Ester Hernández, Sun Mad Raisins, 1982, serigraph, 55.9 x 43. cm. Courtesy of the artist.

The title of the novel, Under the Feet of Jesus, is another direct reference to Viramontes’ secular, materialist thought, as well as to the abstracting, deceiving reassurance of spiritual values, beliefs, and myths that are not connected with immediate 310

locations and experiences. Estrella’s pragmatic connection of talk with action needs to be contrasted to the superstition and blind faith in religion of Gumencindo, Perfecto, and Estrella’s own mother. The statue of Jesus under which Estrella’s mother keeps the immigration papers is, on the one hand, a representation of Petra’s religious faith as her particular form of resistance and strength. On the other, a figuration of the disenfranchised immigrants’ oppression under an economic system and a Catholic discourse of resignation that keeps them down. Towards the end of the novel, Petra’s crumbling faith and energy are symbolized by the fall of the statue of Jesus from its usual place, its head breaking from his neck, his eyes staring up at her “like pools of dark ominous water” (Under the Feet 167): How could she possibly think to protect her children if such a little clawing insect [the scorpion] could inspire a whole midnight of fear? [...]. That was all she had: papers and sticks and broken faith and Perfecto, and at this moment all of this seemed as weightless against the massive darkness, as the head she held. (Under the Feet 168-69)

In the climactic scene of the novel, Estrella’s friend, Alejo, poisoned by a chemical spray on the fields, is faced with the barriers of an American health care service that is too expensive for them to afford. Estrella finally realizes that she, her friend, and her family are part both of the cosmic life cycle as well as of the human capital and energy that produces growth, riches, and surplus value: She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and oil made gasoline. The oil was made from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisyfield to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line of the map. Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that? Estrella had figured it out: the nurse owed them as much as they owed her. (Under the Feet 148)

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In anger and desperation, she grabs the crowbar, one of Perfecto’s tools, and slams it on the pictures of the children of the white perfumed nurse that has charged them more than they can afford for a vague diagnosis. Thus, Estrella symbolically opposes the secure, private institutional domain that protects the leisurely life and economic well-being of the nurse and her family and that excludes people like her and her family from decent social service. At this point, confused by the discovery of the violence she is capable of inflicting, she comes to grips with her strength and resisting power: “They make you that way, she sighed with resignation. She tried to understand what happened herself. You talk and talk and talk to them and they ignore you. But you pick up a crowbar and break the pictures of their children, and all of a sudden they listen real fast” (Under the Feet 151). Estrella is suddently split into two selves. One is the resigned woman relying on religious and superstitious faith she has been brought up to become; the other, a practical, strong, fierce woman that will fight for herself and her people’s rights: “One was a silent phantom who obediently marked a circle with a stick around the bungalow as the mother had requested, while the other held the crowbar and the money” (Under the Feet 150). This internal split between the active and the passive self is the first stage towards an awareness of the importance of social struggle within this character’s Bildung. Indeed, the attainment of individuality and self-worth in the social context depicted by the novel involves breaking away from the circle of silence and anonymity to become a subject committed to the advancement of workers’ rights in the U.S. In this sense, Viramontes’s message is in step with the message of other Californian Chicana artists, such as the dramatist Cherríe Moraga and the visual artist Yolanda López. In Under the Feet of Jesus, the barn symbolizes the triumph of the socially active self over the “silent phantom.” Evoked throughout the novel as Estrella’s wide place of intimacy, this powerful spatial image becomes a cool place away from the sun 312

and the fields where she comes to terms with her love for Alejo, and where she takes refuge from the world outside. No doubt, Viramontes purposefully draws on this quintessential symbol of American rural life: an unerring sign of fertility and one of the many metaphors embraced by the “master symbol of the garden […] expressing fecundity, growth, increase, and blissful labor in the earth, all centering about the idealized frontier farmer armed with that supreme agrarian weapon, the sacred plow” (Smith, Virgin Land 123). The barn is an essential structure in the longlived myth of the “agricultural paradise” or the Myth of the Garden. The myth offered a representation of the simple, honest lifestyle of the common yeoman, and it was linked to equality, democracy, and freedom in nineteenth-century America (124). Henry Nash Smith mentions that this myth gained paradoxical relevance in the mid and late nineteenth century, after the passing of the Homestead Bill in 1862 and the occupation of large extensions of Southwestern land by an elite of monopolists. It served to “[mask] poverty and industrial strife with the pleasing suggestion that a beneficent nature stronger than any human agency, the ancient resource of Americans, the power that had made the country rich and great, would solve the new problems of industrialism” (205-206). The barn is appropriated and renarrativized by Viramontes and endowed with very different connotations in the context of postmodern industrialized agriculture and migrant Mexican labor. Besides figuring Estrella’s discovery of love and sexual desire, the “cathedral-like building” symbolizes Estrella’s new faith in the unity and struggle of the Mexican American community in the U.S, a hope momentarily threatened by Perfecto’s plans to tear the barn down and make enough money to return to Mexico. It is not fortuitous that Viramontes sets the last scene of her migrant story in the barn, which also acquires symbolic connotations at the end of John Steinbeck’s classic migrant novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and, in a more mock-ironic tone, at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Good Country People” (1955).

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The feminist leanings of Viramontes and her political commitment alter considerably the traditional connotations of this place, which, in Steinbeck’s novel, stands as a symbol of fertility, as well as of women’s practical sense, strength, and resources in the face of extreme desperation. In O’Connor’s story it is the scene of a mocking satire of the naive notion that “country people” are essentially good. In Under the Feet of Jesus the barn brings together the female protagonist’s awakening to love and sexuality with a resisting political awareness of the perversity of America’s social and economic system. Taking into account Viramontes’ association of words with tools in the novel, the barn, the place where these tools are stored, is also a call for words, a testament to the writer’s faith in their limited but still necessary power for an effective collective action. The final scene of the novel, describing Estrella’s slow and arduous climbing to the roof of this apparently private refuge, stands as a figurative representation of the return of her particularity to a universality that is by no means abstract. Estrella’s climbing to the top of the barn is, as Bachelard would want to put it, a poetic image of her own quiet privacy. Yet, Estrella’s thoughts in this moment of privacy lay bare the connection between her own needs and the needs of others. According to Eagleton’s proposal of an aesthetics of materialist ethics in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), the purpose of universality is “that the unique particularities of individuals may be respected and fulfilled” (414). Estrella remains as “immobile as an angel on the verge of faith,” and “[l]ike the chiming bells of the great cathedrals” believes “her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed” (Under the Feet 176). The space of the barn, significantly associated to a cathedral, a public building, figures Estrella’s new “religion” of social commitment and a space of political legitimacy for Mexican Americans as rightful citizens working American soil and producing economic benefits. The barn evokes a “public homeplace,” that is, a comfortable space for a collective self who understands itself in relation to the commitment to others within the ideal American 314

ethos of democracy represented by the agrarian space. By reappropriating this essentially American rural space and reinhabiting it, the young Mexican American female character transforms it into a space of gendered and collective resistance devoid of the exclusion and inequality concealed in the past by the Myth of the Garden. Like Cisneros, Viramontes proposes an aesthetics of materialist ethics through a poetics of space. This aesthetics presumes that the fundamental American ideals of intimacy, privacy, and freedom depend on others being free as well, on the individual’s committed engagement with the universal right of human beings to be acknowledged as autonomous and different subjects. 5.2. Pat Mora’s House of Houses and the Dream of a Homeplace with No Boundaries Gaston Bachelard has described the house as “a space of protected intimacy,” the germ of secure happiness (33-34), the space where the immemorial and the past are evoked, and continuity with the past is assured (36-37). The implicit ideas of this description are nostalgia, stasis, stability, and protection from the adverse forces of movement, history, and the passage of time. This view of space harbors the danger of conveying a coherent, non-contradictory sense of identity, a romantic and reactionary appeal to one’s origins or one’s tradition. bell hooks and Doreen Massey have both drawn attention to the fact that the nostalgia for a place and a culture is of no use unless it fosters the creation of something new. The appeal to local places has to be exploited for the invigorating transformation of the present (hooks 147, Massey 140). As hooks says, one must learn to see beauty in the culture, traditions, and spaces of one’s ancestors as a collective “lifegiving” endeavor that renews the spirit and enhances the wellbeing of all. When beauty is constructed collectively it becomes regenerating and uplifting (104-105).

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hooks’ faith in the beauty of the communal spirit for the reinvention of the future ties in with Pat Mora’s views that “[r]eturning to the source means [...] not to restore the past or to worship it as a false idol, but to build an authentic future” (Nepantla 18). The pride in one’s heritage, language, and tradition should lead to the appreciation of cultural differences in facing up to contemporary internationalizing and globalizing forces. The preservation of cultural heritages goes hand in hand with the defense of basic human rights, both of which should be seen as central to democracy (Nepantla 19). According to Mora, we have to understand global citizenship as the appreciation of and respect for the varied cultural heritages on the planet. Contrary to those who think the exploration of difference leads to balkanization, Mora argues that the diverse perspectives within a community have to be accepted, and that the recovery of a cultural past is a source of inspiration, tolerance, and psychological well-being (Nepantla 21-23). Her discourse is local, but by no means chauvinist or fetishist. Mora’s proposal of a notion of culture that is not exclusively based on consumption and commodification is inclusive rather than exclusive. Culture should not be vindicated as a means to assert the superiority of some over others, but to include, make known, make visible the cultures of the poor, the so far excluded, regional cultures, and folk cultures (Nepantla 26-32). The conservation of one’s cultural heritage is, as Mora puts it, one more commitment to social change and the survival of the oppressed, for ethnicity has a psychological value as a strategy of subsistence: “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” (Nepantla 35-36). Mora’s experience as a third-generation immigrant in an environment where references to her past and heritage were not accessible increased her curiosity for her family’s past and her awareness that the reasons for her Western Eurocentric education

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were to be found in the univocal, chauvinistic way of understanding America: I had grown up in an environment that did not value, and often hated, my cultural heritage. Those in positions of power, the audible voices of political, educational, cultural, and economic leaders, tried, some still try, to ignore or suppress—dark skin, the Spanish language, expressiveness [...]. Now some of us realize that America is a continent not a country. (41)

In step with Gloria Anzaldúa, Mora acknowledges the strength of being able to draw from two cultural heritages, of being an inhabitant of the border, or as she prefers to call it, “Nepantla”, the land in the middle. Although Mora refuses to construct a collective identity that is “frozen into nostalgia” (Nepantla 42), she insists that the retrieval of the past is “historically sound, politically expedient, psychologically healthy, linguistically necessary, morally essential” (Nepantla 46). Echoing the essay of the African American poet Audre Lorde “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Mora sustains that she does not merely write for pleasure but to provide a necessary nourishing sustenance for the spirit (Nepantla 50). She has also said that as a writer she cannot bring resolution to conflicts, but occasional joy (Rebolledo, “Pat Mora” 138). Her task as writer is, she argues, akin to that of the Mexican curandera, whose art is based on the verbal traditions of the present and the past. Like the curandera’s craft, much of the writing of Chicanas comes from an informal training of listening to oral stories and collective, popular wisdom (Nepantla 127). While curanderas heal physical wounds, Chicanas heal psychological, historical wounds “by providing opportunities to remember the past, to share and ease bitterness, to describe what has been viewed as unworthy of description, to cure by incantations and rhythms” (Nepantla 131). To be a border woman, Mora states, is to come from a tangled reality of conflict. The border, she says in an interview with Tey Diana Rebolledo, is present in her writings as a constant shifting back and forth, as the 317

effort to find accommodation in a space where conflict is magnified, and where resolution is not even believable (138). The very physical and geographical U.S.-Mexico border where she has lived is a “glare of truth,” a place of “stern honesty” that constantly reminds her of the differences between those who live comfortable lives and those who do not (Nepantla 14). The border is, nonetheless, a place of hope as well, for it is there that one confronts a new culture and the possibility of gradual change in the cultural landscape of the U.S. (Nepantla 144-145). The desert of El Paso, the Texan town where she was born, and the Mexican heritage of her parents and relatives have been very present in Mora’s poems and prose writings. She has written with a strong sense of audience, trying to capture the interest of the people from the region she usually writes about. Yet, she has also admitted she would be deluding herself if she thought herself to be writing for a single Chicano audience (Rebolledo, “Pat Mora” 132-133). Her community, she says in Nepantla, “is not only my ethnic community but also all like-minded souls seeking a more equitable world” (Nepantla 147). Mora’s localist focus on a cultivated garden in House of Houses (1997) is used to establish a parallel between human diversity and natural diversity, a parallel that is also articulated in her book of essays Nepantla. In the first lines of this collective autobiography Mora explicitly alludes to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957). The image of the house as a place of “protected intimacy,” a direct and explicit allusion to Bachelard’s work, discloses the speaker’s aim to reconstruct fragmented memories and stories and put them together through writing. In Mora’s imaginary house, “time loses its power” as it does in the individual memories of a happy childhood and past that Bachelard also traces back to the family house (La poétique 4). As the very title of her work, the book cover to the first edition, and the epigraph to the first section of the book suggest— “As the rose is the flower of flowers, so this is, the house of houses” (House 1)—, this house is a singular place in a singular

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landscape,both of them highly valued in the speaking persona’s imagination as the settings of her family memories. Similarly to Texas writer Norma Cantú in her “autobioethnography” Canícula (1995), Mora includes fourteen family pictures in the first pages of the book to add verisimilitude to her story. Displaying a desire to recover what is past, to revive old stories and lives, both the captioned pictures and the autobiographical text have the referential power of a family album.

Figure 5. Cover illustration of the first edition of House of Houses (1997). Courtesy of Beacon Press.

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Mora’s text gives content to the pictures and complements what they do not or cannot tell. The main purpose of Mora’s family memoir is therefore to revive community and family life through the gradual imaginary and literary re-construction of a house, its garden and the surrounding landscape. The words of her relatives and the speaker’s own words will create “My Word-house,” as she says in her poem “Foreign Spooks” (Nepantla 3). Like Canícula, this memoir evolves mainly around the world of women. The maternal world, garden, and home, central to the protagonist, are constantly alluded to through references to food, herbs and remedies, flower smells, folklore, women's suffering, solidarity, and comforting power. All through the narrative, there is a deep attachment to landscapes, especially to the desert, as part of the world the narrative voice tries to reconstruct. As Mora puts it, landscapes “leave their imprint” on the self (House 25) and, as Jonathan Smith observes, they “are believed to possess a reality surpassing that of the process by which they were created” (81): The power of geography, how the landscape imprints itself; and when we can’t see the world that is home to us whether mountains, desert or beaches, we yearn to see the shapes and vistas that live in our interior; after a rain to smell the plants and trees whose names or shapes we know; to hear bird whistles or wind thumps, rhythms that comfort us like a heartbeat comforts a child; a vague preconscious memory. (House 25-26)

However, the terms of Mora’s landscape creation go beyond aesthetics and styling and do not “lift us out of the dreariness of necessity” (quoted in Smith 81). In House of Houses Mora’s poetics fluctuate between two complementary poles: the desire for familial and communal unity, represented by the domestic space, and the reality of a fragmented, disperse and muted past and history that the speaker tries to reconstruct. In an unpublished interview with the author of this study, the writer acknowledges her own ethnocentrism, which like many Chicana writers she has claimed as a strategy for spiritual survival. Thus, the house, the 320

garden, the fountain, and the desert are fundamental symbols for the assertion of ethnicity and sense of place, signs “of life in an arid land” (House 3). The desert, which for Mora means freedom and personal growth (Rebolledo, “Pat Mora” 137), is here also a symbol of the thirst for knowledge of a Mexican American woman for whom the border has been a geographical as well as a psychological, emotional, and social division. The culture and history of Mexican American families have been split just as the land has been divided into countries and states (House 3). For Mora’s speaking subject, the adobe house hovering “near the Río Grande between El Paso and Santa Fe” (House 4) is a house of paradox and change. Unique and special as this imaginary house may be, it cannot be a closed space. As the narrator says and most of the works analyzed in this study have confirmed, “walls, like doors and locks can be confining” (House 12). But the house is a necessary, strengthening, and liberating presence if one conceives it as an open space, “if I have the physical and emotional space to enter and exit at will” (House 12). Following Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, the house is here a primary archetype through which the speaker may discover her own voice and the voices of those who were “often silent when they left these walls, reticent to reveal themselves” (House 12). The narrator is “after stories” from those old voices and bodies who can still remember. The feminine collective autobiographical subject has created a nearly ideal literary heterotopia where the living and the dead, the present and past coexist thanks to her recuperation of stories, anecdotes, sayings, recipes, and traditions. Indeed, Mora’s speaker’s imagined house, charged with private and collective memory, allows her to live the past as a dream or reverie without making claims to historical accuracy. This house of the imagination has emerged from an effort to create “a world we can call our own” (7), a collective space, but also from an effort to find private, personal comfort and solace. From the very beginning of this work, her speaking persona confesses that she retreats to this place to salvage what can be empowering about it. The ghosts of her ancestors whom she 321

summons and who speak to us directly, describe their movements from one home to another in the face of adversities such as the Mexican Revolution or times of economic hardship, the traumatic family separations or the abandoning of cherished places. This imagined house of houses is a familial space located between El Paso (Texas, on the border with New Mexico and Mexico) and Santa Fe (New Mexico), a building constructed out of the disparate life-stories of nearly five generations across a wide U.S.-Mexico border. In a humorous, lighthearted manner, this family memoir also shows the disparate ideologies across generations and genders. The staunch Porfirista leanings of Mora’s maternal aunt contrast with the more romanticized and politically critical view of Mexican history of the younger generation of Mexican immigrants, who have romanticized the figures of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa as heroes who “took from the rich” (House 30). Yet, as Denise Chávez’s image of the dark closet in The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) suggests, memory provides an incomplete version of the story and cannot salvage questions that remain in the dark, unanswered: Why do women speak so much about others, about family lives and so little about what they feel, about themselves? Why do they always adapt without a frown to their new and often hostile surroundings? Why don’t they ever talk about their sorrows? Why is the discovery of emotion in men’s words surprising for the speaker? The stories of Mora’s family dreamhouse are told in a scattered, non-sequential manner, thus imitating the also disperse workings of memory and the imagination. Joining all these stories and anecdotes is the motif of a common space in the narrator and compiler’s imagination. Made up of thirteen chapters, twelve of which are entitled after the months of the year, the structure gives coherence to this collective autobiography and evokes the circularity of time. Mora does not organize her work following a linear temporal sequence, but rather in a cyclic structure that evokes the rhythms of nature affecting all living creatures; both have, as Mora puts it, “[their] moods, [their] storms, [their] 322

seasons” (House 45). The title of each chapter contains popular Spanish sayings related to each month of the year—Enero friolero, Febrero loco, Marzo airoso—or to the nature and the seasons—Huerta sin agua, cuerpo sin alma. This temporal division into the yearly seasonal cycles also ties in with the Mesoamerican understanding of life and death as part of a natural cyclic process. In a particular recasting of the popular Mexican Catholic tradition of the Day of the Dead (All Souls Day), el día de los muertos, the speaker finds the imagery to celebrate her desired union with the dead and the continuity of her family’s Mexican American history. In Mora’s family chronicle the union of the living and the dead often expressed by Mesoamerican peoples through floral images (Gutiérrez-Spencer 31), merges with the Spanish Catholic tradition of flower arrangement in temples and shrines. The poetic and sensual allusion to the cultivated plants and flowers that pervade House and that contrast with the wilderness of the desert, are in tune with the homely microcosm, the domesticated oasis that Mora wants to create in a hostile environment. Women like aunt Carmen love gardening and taking care of plants and flowers that are foreign to the local vegetation of the desert and are rather more typical of Spain: roses, geraniums, begonia, and bougainvillea. Mora goes beyond the use of local metaphors that associate women with nature and mother earth as fertile and passive, or as debased and animalistic (Ortner 67-87). In this work, as in one of her poems included in her volume Borders (1986), Mora pays homage to the strength and survival skills of women: Desert women know about survival. Fierce heat and cold have burned and thickened our skin. Like cactus we’ve learned to hoard, to sprout deep roots, to seem asleep, yet wake at the scent of softness

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in the air, to hide pain and loss by silence, no branches wail or whisper our sad songs safe behind our thorns. Don’t be deceived. When we bloom, we stun. (80)

The desert, which has inspired Mora’s homage to women in this poem, is also used as a symbol of women’s endurance and power in House of Houses. The women depicted in House— Mora’s aunt Lobo, her mother, her maternal and paternal grandmothers—are strong women who devote their lives to others, who are not sure about their love for their husbands, but who persevere in bringing warmth to the “cold house” in the U.S. (Nepantla 67). They pave the way and struggle for the future generations of daughters and granddaughters. Thus, the distinctive plants and flowers are, on the one hand, references to a different landscape and a different culture that is not part of the desert; and on the other, figurations of female healing and nurturing powers, spirituality, and comfort. Women’s connection to the earth and to the soil through the cultivation of gardens evokes the creation of a sense of place and a herbal culture that survives against the years. Plants have many practical uses: “[P]lants, humans’ first medicines, through ritual and religion intertwine with our lives,” the speaker says and “become sources of food, shelter, warmth, weapons, clothing, dyes, cosmetics, wine” (House 8): For gum trouble, people chew wild pieplant, canaigre. If our eyes are red, Mamá washes them carefully with manzanilla. And, of course, we drink the teas I make for you—hierbabuena y gordo lobo, romero for rheumatism. Plenty of honey and lemon for a cough. (House 73)

Women’s Catholic prayers are also connected to flowers, in particular the rose: The rosary “originally connoted an enclosed rose garden,” and flower perfumes are said to have been offerings 324

to heavenly beings (House 249). The preservation of Catholic traditions needs to be traced back to the cultural life inherited by Mexican women from Spanish beliefs. As the research of cultural geographer Raquel Rubio-Goldsmith demonstrates, gardens cultivated by Mexican women of the northern desert (norteñas) during and after the Anglo American invasion of Mexico are symbolic constructions sustaining these women’s “visions of a Spanish paradise” they had inherited. These gardens also allowed norteñas to face the material hardship of the desert frontier. As she puts it, “I use the gardens of the norteñas to understand the ways these women merged their symbolic (psychological and spiritual) worlds and the material conditions of their everyday lives” (House 276). Influenced by Spanish customs, positivist ideas of Indian inferiority and the harsh life in the desert, norteñas expressed their cultural identity as superior Spanish, civilized Christians through walled gardens that would protect them against barbarism and the desert (House 276-277). While references to Indian tribes are not present in Mora’s chronicle, the connections between the tiny,sanctuary-like gardens described by Rubio-Goldsmith and the imaginary garden of House of Houses are evident. Like most of Mora’s female ancestors, these Mexican women were part of a great number of refugees who started their lives anew in the United States. Just like these norteña gardens, Mora’s garden is situated in the former northern deserts of Mexico. Furthermore, in both norteñas’ and Mora’s familial garden Catholicism is inflected with indigenous spiritual traditions such as the Day of the Dead, which were considered pagan in American Catholic parishes (Rubio-Goldsmith 284). Mora’s narrator shows the interdependence of sensuality and spiritual comfort, thus following the Mesoamerican belief that the dead sustain life by manifesting themselves in nature (Gutiérrez-Spencer 31). The Catholic ideology of a spiritual, dematerialized afterlife acquires a radically different meaning when merged with the notion that the dead nurture the living with their almost physical presence in nature: 325

[T]here’s something eerie or maybe appealing—all that Catholic dustto-dust stuff—about digging ourselves into earth, loosening the soil and burying some of our essence, or breath, even if we are alive becoming part of the compost. (House 68) The dead are lured back by what they love, sweet temptations [...]. The Egyptians, like the Maya and Aztecs, believed that nourishment needs to be provided to ensure life after death, supplies placed in the tomb, the house of eternity. (House 257)

In terms of the poetics of space, Mora’s House of Houses is a personal refashioning of the pre-Columbian Aztec concept of poetic writing, “flower and song,” reflected in the title of the first collection of poems of the Californian poet Alurista, Floricanto en Aztlán (1976). As Laura Gutiérrez-Spencer and Jorge Klor de Alva have stated in their respective essays, the metaphoric association between flower and song has been well ingrained in Chicano poetry since the late 1960s (29, 20). The title of Alurista’s poetic collection is an invocation of the power of nature’s vitality as the poet’s source of inspiration and resistance against oppressive social forces. In Mora’s House of Houses, the connection between flower and song (the senses and writing) underlies the construction of a house full of pleasurable sensory and cultural experiences that revitalize the speaker as they are being told; a happy, open, nurturing house, where there is room for the stories of a family in-between cultures and countries. Like the medicinal, ornamental, healing use her female ancestors gave to flowers and plants, the narrator merges sensory delight with sustaining homely remedies and recipes, spirituality with the regenerating function of bringing the dead back to life, of recovering a polyvalent past for the spiritual regeneration of the future. Much as the garden in Mora’s imaginary house in the desert is a kind of sanctuary or shrine against hostile outside forces, it is however no paradise. The speaker describes her female ancestors’ harsh experience of poverty, war, the crossing of borders, and the endurance of authoritarian husbands. As Mora has said in her 326

poems, “[t]he desert is no lady” (Chants 8), “[d]esert women know about survival” (Borders 80). Women like her mother and her maternal aunt Lobo know what it is to lose a home under the occupation of American homesteaders (House 200). These women have little to do with the role model of the glamorous, decorative, sensual, and enigmatic woman of Mexican and American mainstream society. Nor have these women’s lives embodied the ideal of romantic love that continues to be part of many U.S. and Mexican women’s fantasies (Nepantla 60-61); they are austere, self-denying, and life-giving. The writer has stated that she was always close to her mother’s side of the family, and in particular to two old women women who took care of her and her siblings when they were sick, mothering them as they would mother their own children: her maternal aunt and her grandmother. In House of Houses the personality and the power of these two women are described with images of struggle, though not of violence. At the time of the revolution, the broom becomes a “savage weapon” in the hands of her maternal aunt Lobo, a domestic symbol of her desire to get rid of dirt, disorder, and corruption (House 35). Her paternal grandmother, who has no useful weapons in the eyes of the soldiers, acts like “the law,” “like a General” when it is time to abandon their home in Chihuahua and leave for Juárez and then El Paso. These women, however, talk more about others than about themselves. Lobo, “the mother who never marries,” tells stories about the outside world but never about her own feelings: “I wonder about what she loved, what she feared. How she spent her days? Who were the men she noticed, hoped would ask her to dance, or hold her hand or whisper in her ear. ‘But tell me about you, Lobo’” (29). Lobo is said to have worked all her life, but never to have owned a house or a car, as all her money goes to her nephews and her sisters. The female narrative voice constructs her imaginary dreamhouse and garden out of the life-stories of the dead and living, male and female members of a scattered family. The narrating “I” has, to use Doris Sommer’s words, a lateral, 327

metonymic relation with the collectivity whose stories she has compiled, recorded, and transmitted. Some of these stories are complementary to official versions of history. Border conflicts of discrimination against people of Mexican descent are brought up with the story of uncle Lalo, whose family house is despised by a schoolmate as a place where one can only “exist”, but not “live” (House 219). Lalo’s white skin masks his Mexicanness, but his surname gives it away. When applying for enlistment in the Civilian Conservation Corps, he is told to change his name “Delgado” to an Anglo-sounding name. His devotion to his recently deceased father and his duty as an eldest son to bear his name, prevent Lalo from doing so. Lalo recounts various instances in which his white skin makes his identity as a Hispanic or Latino questionable to immigration authorities and local institutions (House 221). The book is also a homage to men like Mora’s maternal grandfather, who saved his whole family in the dangerous crossing of the Río Grande during the revolution, and who was forced to sell his property in Juárez for a low price to the Anglo hands supporting the Villistas (House 29). The man most revered and endearingly portrayed is the speaker’s father. As a child, he saved his grandmother from death, started to work at the age of ten delivering newspapers, and was fired during the depression for being “Mexican” (House 85-87). After a life of hard work and faced with the competition of larger optical companies, her father has to witness the failure of his optical business. The family reluctantly abandons their house in El Paso and migrates to Santa Mónica (California) in search of a better future. Sad memories of the speaker’s father’s last days of suffering from a degenerative disease, intermingle with memories of his authoritarian manners and harsh discipline with his wife and children, as well as with recollections of his lessons to his first female child on how to take care of herself when in danger. In the family of ancestors the writer brings together, men are also very fond of gardening: Mora’s father’s favorite flower is the rose, which he himself cultivates; abuelo Gregorio prays to Santa

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Clara and Santa Rosa who both planted gardens; uncle Lalo keeps a compost heap in his garden. A way of recording familial and individual stories and memories is through the smell of flowers and plants that evoke them. Mora records the smell of her maternal and paternal ancestors’ fear after having crossed the “river of sorrows” and the Texas desert during and after the Mexican Revolution: “[H]ard, sandy mesas; fossils who murmur the time of great waters; hawks and snakes; yucca and agave; roots and branches thorny for survival; the smell of fear, fear of dryness and fangs, human fangs and coilings” (House 45). Flowers and plants bring back the smell of illness, of the sustenance of homely recipes, and of remedies to ease the homesickness. The smell of the relief felt after summer in the desert during walks down the river, “the rain […] cleaning the air that tastes the lavender of blooming sage” (House 223). Like the garden, Mora’s inherited imagined adobe house of the desert “blooms” as a sacred place, and becomes what Foucault terms a “happy heterotopia,” where all the family secrets, stories, sayings, refrains, and riddles come together. A place that is constantly transformed by time and generations, where time does not matter because it “never stops building up” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 26). The Latin sentence in Natural History reproduced by the narrator’s father—as the rose is the flower of flowers, so this is the house of houses (“Ut rosa flos florum, sic est domus ista domorum” [4])—points at the uniqueness of the flower and the house, but also at their connection to other related flowers, houses, and gardens. This single garden is therefore a personal myth with singular gender and cultural connotations created out of memories of cultivated gardens in the speaker’s family. It is not a sign of conquest in the mode of Nash Smith’s Myth of the Garden, although it certainly is an imaginary reappropriation of space and a very moving account of the interdependence between people and, more specifically, women and nature. Both “private and communal; a space of labor and frustration, also of meditation, solace, hope, and sensory delights” (House 8), it symbolizes, like the Persian garden, “the smallest 329

parcel of the world” and “the totality of the world” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 26). Like the Mexican chinampa (floating garden), this is a sacred garden, a haven, or an oasis where local and foreign vegetation come together: mezcal, sage, camomile, flowers whose names have religious connotations (Flor de San Juan, Flor de Santa Rita, Manto de la Virgen), thyme, roses (the symbol of the beloved, the Virgin Mary, and the speaker’s father’s favorite flower), orange trees, daffodils, berries, cactus, canaigre, manzanilla, hierbabuena, gordo lobo, and romero. Remembered as a refuge for children to imagine fantastic stories about “the little people” (House 237), this is also a place to cultivate the senses for a female narrator whose husband lives too much “in [his] head” (House 236-7). Rather than adjusting to circumstances as many of her female ancestors did, Mora’s autobiographical persona creates a space of her own from the traditions and stories she has inherited. Instead of transforming herself to suit social demands as many women have done (Nepantla 69), the narrator transforms place according to personal and collective needs. In a culture where women have been socialized to please, the strength and stubbornness she has inherited from her ancestors, have helped her to claim and achieve her own narrative imaginative space (Nepantla 71). Like many other contemporary women writers, Mora has relished in private space, in the spacious room where she can “get away from people” in order to write about herself through her relationship to others (Rebolledo, “Pat Mora” 137). Viramontes and Cisneros have combined this very same vindication of private space for personal development and creativity with an aesthetics of materialist ethics that interweaves individual, social, and communal concerns. In House of Houses Mora has demonstrated a less social, more spiritual, sensual, and intimate conception of subjectivity—though no less positive, resisting, and uplifting. My analysis of Mora‘s House of Houses has aimed to underscore that the creation of a metaphoric communal and familial space can be psychologically positive and culturally invigorating even if it involves an ethnocentric stance for the sake 330

of recovery, not of exclusion. This fictional collective autobiography may certainly be read as a reaction to the homogenizing forces of postmodernity, a conscious effort to preserve imprecise, fragmented though vivid and poignant memories of a dispersed family, as well as a creative endeavor to reclaim spaces that were once Mexican and traditions that still prevail. As the narrative voice says and Mora herself asserts in an interview with this author, the imaginary adobe house between Santa Fe and El Paso is a metaphor of complex dualities: human frailty and strength, privacy and collectivity, dispossession and recovery, dislocation and imaginative relocation. Those who inhabit it are “fragile yet sturdy; a paradox like the house that’s green yet in the desert, visible yet private, unique yet organic, old yet new, open yet closed, imagined yet real, a retreat, private yet communal” (House 289). Although House of Houses undoubtedly shows an awareness that geopolitics and ideology shape human lives, Mora is more concerned with affirming that “the universe is more than matter” (House 263), that a multiple, collective spirit, culture, and history still breathe and can be recovered through writing.

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6 Modest Utopias: Cherríe Moraga’s “Queer” Revisiting of Aztlán [...] eliminar la utopía deja al presente y lo predeterminado como única opción. Vosotros pedís una utopía modesta, que la Constitución y la Democracia sean para todos. [my emphasis] (Manuel Vázquez Montalbán) Queremos que se respete la igualdad y a la vez la diferencia. Cuando nosotros planteamos recuperar la memoria, luchamos contra la unidimensionalidad del presente que interesa a los de arriba [...]. Sobre la utopía, ¿qué transformación social en la historia del mundo no fue utopía la víspera? Ninguna. [my emphasis] (Subcomandante Marcos) Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, “Marcos: el mestizaje que viene”

The emergence of nationalisms, neo-nationalisms, and claims to heritage and tradition effected by the crisis of the national state and the globalization of cultures and economies poses the questions of how to hold on to difference without denying interchange, of how to claim specificity without establishing hermetic ghettoes. Postmodernity has not only brought to the fore debates about identity and ethnicity, but also fostered new ways of confronting them. In The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), David Harvey sustains that the marked postmodern emphasis on community, locality, place, and regional resistances may lead to parochialism, myopia, and social fragmentation (352). As the geographer Doreen Massey observes, this need not be so if we regard local identities as something to be refashioned, changed, and be critical of (143). There is the danger of romanticizing and commodifying the past. This has inevitably happened with the idealization of the Chicano/a pre-Columbian heritage and, more recently, with the exaltation of the very fragmented, compartmentalized Chicano/a Movement. However, when identity and a sense of place are recognized as universal human

needs that do not subordinate individual freedom to collective demands, identity may be observed as a complex ever-changing phenomenon resulting, as Massey says, “of social negotiation and conflict” (141). It allows us to view local identities as part of a broader reality, as both unique and dependent on broader arenas and other places, rather than only as mere parochial issues (Massey 142-43). Globalization may have made the need for the expression of identity more imperious, but it has also made us aware that we also share in a global culture. Thus, local claims have a lot to do with the need to define one’s particular place in a global culture, that is, the distinctive way in which global changes affect a community and a place. The inevitable internationalization of culture and economy is therefore not at odds with analyses of the factors that converge in a given location and result in a distinct socio-economic, cultural reality. Abstractions about a global community cannot reveal the interdependence of relations among places and groups of people for, oftentimes, to claim a single, abstract, universal humanity in the name of globalization will not satisfy the needs of those who feel socially ignored or at a disadvantage. The appeal to a global or a national citizenship may often involve overlooking the legal, racial, sexual, and gender differences and power relations that make it impossible for some to become respected citizens. Although, as Massey observes, isolated land-based or community-based struggles will not bring about a world revolution, it may be possible to reach broad political conclusions by adopting an intellectual position that draws on the connections among social movements and institutions across locations (Massey 142). The interdependence of several social movements is intimated in the words of Subcomandante Marcos: Lo que está representando el movimiento indígena zapatista es un símbolo del que se resiste a ser sacrificado dentro de un mundo estandarizado […]. Por eso el movimiento indígena provoca la simpatía de sectores tan lejanos como los jóvenes, los anarquistas, los emigrantes, las izquierdas reorientadas, los

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deplazados de la Tierra en Europa, en Estados Unidos y en México. (Vázquez Montalbán 2).

In Chapter 1 we briefly reviewed postmodern approaches to identity and locality that focus on the difference within. The stress on identity is legitimate and may contain the seeds of social change, provided it does not construct defensive codes that deny internal differentiation. In subsequent chapters, we have also looked at Chicana literature and culture as a manifestation of how the concern with local issues does not necessarily involve a blindness to wider issues, to the interdependence of places, cultures, and identities. In this final chapter my argument is that Cherríe Moraga’s semi-documentary drama on regional or local issues is a demonstration of a critical reaction to global postmodern capital that is sensitive to race, class, gender, and legal differences amongst Mexican Americans. The two plays that engage me here are impelled by the dramatist’s concern for a multiplicity of issues, by a “modest utopia” where equality and solidarity might exist within difference. Moraga’s work has been inspired by actual local conflicts affecting people of Mexican descent, but she does not look at these conflicts as isolated and affecting everyone in the same way. As we will see subsequently, her drama exemplifies her concern with the relationships between the local and the global, between the private and the public, the individual and the collectivity. The two productions analyzed here propose alternative values through the interplay of social and ritual space, as well as through symbolic images, icons, and characters that, without relinquishing their own individuality, stand for the whole collectivity and a multiplicity of borderlands struggles. To use again Lefebvre’s key-terms, the representation of social space and lived space is in dialectical relationship with imaginary space, which Moraga identifies with Aztlán as a social and cultural utopia. In this sense, her plays are to some extent indebted to Luis Valdez’s mythical pieces and teatro campesino, so that part of their symbolic references need to be examined in light of Chicano/a cultural discourse. Yet, these pieces also explore the 335

conflicts within the Mexican American community with a particular sensitivity to issues of gender, sexual, and legal discrimination that were absent from Valdez’s theatre and from previous notions of Aztlán. As has been said in 4.3, Moraga’s feminist oppositional consciousness draws heavily on a multiple liberating discourse, a critical language of the displaced. She is always aware of the role that established cultural values about race, sex, gender, nationality, and culture play in the constitution of personal and collective identity. The feminist emphasis on the liberation of Chicana sexuality has come to a great extent from lesbian ideologues such as Anzaldúa and Moraga herself, who have addressed various forms of oppression based on gender and sexuality within their own community. Moraga has written about the rejection of lesbians from the traditional Mexican family structure. In Loving in the War Years in the War Years (1983) she sees this rejection as the main reason for her detachment from Californian Mexican American or Chicano activism in the 70s. In its equation of community and family building with Chicano political affiliation Moraga’s work echoes the nationalist rhetoric of Chicano activism. This is not to say that, as Laura Romero put it, that Moraga assumes that community necessarily “inhibits intellectual mastery” (126), but rather that this was occasionally the case in the particular identity politics of the late sixties and seventies. Hence Moraga’s need to look at both her community and family from a distanced or marginal position so as to return to them with critical insights. In fact, the author presents herself as a double outcast, for, as a woman of working-class origins, she did not find a comfortable political home either among Chicanos or among middle-class feminists. It is from this double displacement that her particular politics emerge. In the preface to This Bridge Called My Back (1983), Moraga notes how middle-class feminism cannot help her understand the interrelation of race, gender, and class issues she is concerned with. She reflects on the importance of social space upon people’s lives after observing that the “light” colored skin and the “black” 336

colored skin have different effects on people’s freedom of movement across two edges of the same town. Feminism does not always address these differences: Take Boston alone, I think to myself, and the feminism my so-called sisters have constructed does nothing to help me make the trip from one end of town to another. Leaving Watertown, I board a bus and ride it quietly in my light flesh to Harvard Square, protected by the gold highlights my hair dares to take on, like an insult, in this miserable heat. I transfer and go underground. Julie told me the other day how they stopped her for walking through the suburbs. Can’t tell if she’s a man or a woman, only know that it’s Black moving through that part of town. They wouldn’t spot her here, moving underground. The train is abruptly stopped. A white man in jeans and tee shirt breaks into the car I’m in, throws a Black kid up against the door, handcuffs him and carries him away. The train moves on. The day before, a 14year old Black boy was shot in the head by a white cop. And, the summer is getting hotter. I hear there are some women in this town plotting a lesbian revolution. What does this mean about the boy shot in the head is what I want to know. I am a lesbian. I want a movement that helps me make some sense of the trip from Watertown to Roxbury, from white to Black. I love women the entire way, beyond a doubt. (xiv)

Since mainstream feminism could not provide women of color with tools to understand the mechanisms at work in these disparate social spaces, This Bridge meant to illustrate a new feminist thought that considered the interdependence of race, class, and gender issues. In Moraga’s case, the combination of feminist consciousness and Chicano social activism has culminated in a proposal for the reinvention of the notion of America and of the Chicano imaginary home of Aztlán that takes into consideration all these issues. In an essay entitled “Art en América con Acento,” included in The Last Generation (1992), Moraga anticipates the coming together of Latinos in the U.S. and their gradual changing of the face of the country through their art, their culture, and their politics. Above all, the essay is Moraga’s expression of commitment to an art that conveys a non-assimilationist politics, 337

echoing the social outrages suffered by Latinos in the U.S., and that is culturally specific in a diverse American continent where geopolitical borders may one day cease to be divisory lines. Just like the “nomadic Mexican writer/artist in the process of Chicanization,” Guillermo Gómez-Peña (New World Border), and like Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga claims an identity that “dissolves borders” and redefines what an “American” is (The Last Generation 61-62). The challenge for America is “to remain as culturally specific and culturally complex as possible, even in the face of mainstream seduction to do otherwise” (The Last Generation 59). Moraga’s statements are radical because the cross-cultural alliances she proposes lay aside the predominance of Anglo American values. Her borderlands mentality also echoes Ana Castillo’s definition of the imaginary country of Sapogonia in the novel that bears the same title: “[A] distinct place in the Americas where all mestizos reside, regardless of nationality, individual racial composition, or legal residential status—or perhaps because of all of these. [...] [It] is not identified by modern boundaries” (6). In the essay “Queer Aztlán: The Re-formation of the Chicano Tribe,” also in her collection The Last Generation (1992), Moraga ponders on the political need to preserve the historical memory of the Anglo occupation and of the political militancy of Mexican immigrant workers in the 1960s. It is her view that a critical revival of the radical Chicano rhetoric and activism of the late 1960s and 70s could bring about “a broader and wiser revolution” encompassing gay and lesbian activism, the struggle against the wild exploitation of the earth, and the protection of indigenous peoples. Moraga’s understanding of America as a continent encompassing North, South, and Central America is implicit in this essay. In keeping with Vázquez Montalbán’s interpretation of the philosophy behind the Zapatist Literary Theory a revolution, Moraga voices her concerns about American capitalist economic and cultural imperialism, U.S. Third World immigrants, the disappearing culture of the indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the subjection of gender and sexuality to 338

heterosexual patriarchal mores. Moraga’s ideal imaginary home can only come to exist through what may be metaphorically termed a “decolonization” of all these spaces. “Queer Aztlán” is Moraga’s sober political assessment and denunciation of peoples and lands exploited by an irresponsible, disrespectful capitalism. The conservation and sustainable exploitation of a land that is being polluted and destroyed, the democratization of spaces where disenfranchised Mexicans and Chicanos work, and the liberation of the bodies of women, gays, and lesbians are presented as part of the same struggle for justice. As a writer, Moraga is committed to the liberation and democratization of multiple lands or spaces, which evinces her reluctance to give priority to one struggle over the other: Land becomes the common ground for radical action. But land is more than the rocks and trees, the animal and plant life that make up the territory of Aztlán or Navajo Nation or Maya Mesoamerica. For immigrant and native alike, land is also the factories where we live. For women, lesbians and gay men, land is that physical mass called our bodies. Throughout las Américas, all these “lands” remain under occupation by an Anglocentric, patriarchal, imperialist United States. (The Last Generation 173)

Queer Aztlán, the Chicano/a nation imagined by Moraga, does not represent a geographical space per se, but a modest social utopia that inspires social change. It is rather an extended metaphor, a spatial trope to designate a land-based, ethnicitybased, gender and sexuality-based borderlands struggle; a call for direct political action towards a more democratic, environmentally conscious understanding of public and private spaces. For this Chicana writer, the liberation of space or land is always tied up to gender, race, economic, and social relations. The geographic extended metaphors of Aztlán and Tamoachán in The Hungry Woman (2000), illustrate that for this writer space is associated to cultural and social as well as sexual identity. In the plays that will be tackled subsequently, the very specific representation of social and domestic space aims to depict the social and labor conditions under which her characters live. In 339

both pieces, social space is opposed to Aztlán, the imaginary place that exists in a politicized collective memory and that is often alluded to through ritual and ceremony. As the writer herself has said, the appeal to this space is a symbol of identification that highlights the various social endeavors to which she is committed: No es que creamos que vamos a recuperar nuestra tierra, sino que se trata más de un símbolo de identificación, y también de un modo de comprometer nuestra relación con México, o con toda América Latina, y con toda la gente indígena en toda América. [...] [Y]o trato de recuperar algo de lo que se perdió en mi propia experiencia, como persona de sangre mexicana, de sangre americana, toda esta mezcla. (Borrego 273-279)

Heroes and Saints and Watsonville are clear instances of Moraga’s revisiting of the communal imaginary space of Aztlán. Both social dramas illustrate the complexity of the Mexican/Chicano predicament with regard to issues of class, labor, race, gender, legality, generation, and sexuality. They also appeal to a solidarity that embraces a variety of struggles and propose imaginary spaces where differences are respected. The pieces are based on actual events that took place in California in the late 1980s: the 1988 cancer cluster in the town of MacFarland in the valley of San Joaquín, and the 1989 strike carried out by the female cannery workers of Watsonville. Following the tendency initiated by Luis Valdez and his teatro campesino Moraga uses theatre with a social, didactic purpose which, in her case, involves a feminist standpoint and stresses the interrelation of various categories of oppression in multiple times and multiple spaces. In both Heroes and Saints (1994) and Watsonville (2000) Moraga goes beyond teatro campesino and Bertolt Brecht’s social drama in that, as in The Hungry Woman (2001), she addresses the consequences of the social construction of female and male subjectivity upon people’s lives. Moraga shows her people’s (especially women’s) need for an alternative spirituality that does not necessarily adjust to institutionalized Catholicism and Anglo 340

American role models, and that instead borrows from various sources. In both plays, she also pays homage to women’s practical sense, to their concern for land-based and locality-based problems caused by globalizing economic forces. 6.1. Heroes and Saints The struggle for the land in the hands of agribusiness and the Chicano grape field workers’ protest against pesticide poisoining is the central leitmotif of this play. Set in the imaginary town of McLaughlin (Moraga’s fictional version of the real town of McFarland), the play stages the need to recover a variety of occupied lands. Aztlán is invoked in the second epigraph of the play, a famous phrase taken from “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” drafted by student activists in the Denver conference of 1969. It was in this plan where Aztlán was first mentioned as the Mexican territory occupied by the United States. The epigraph reads: “Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops” (87). The play refrains from making absolute claims to place and space based on a single, legitimate struggle. Aztlán, therefore, has multifarious meanings depending on the particular predicament of each and every one of the characters in the play. Moraga addresses the particular exploitative practices of agribusiness or capitalist agriculture in a town mostly inhabited by a transnational labor force of Mexican origin. As I have stated in the second chapter of this study, the creation of the United Farm Workers Association in 1965 by César Chávez meant a significant effort to secure workers’ rights through a union. The UFWA ensured the Mexican laborers a protection they had not enjoyed both during or after the Bracero Program, the agreement between Mexico and the U.S. to consolidate a temporary cheap Mexican labor force (1948-1964). Influenced by the political atmosphere created by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 70s, the union used the boycott, the protest, and picketing as 341

its major methods. The most important boycott was the grape strike of 1965 in Delano, but others have followed during the 70s and 80s, including the series of pesticide protests between 1984 and 1988 on which Moraga’s play, Heroes and Saints (1994) is based. Within a ten year period (1978-1988) a cancer cluster was discovered in the town of MacFarland and a high number of children were affected by cancer and born with birth defects. During the summer of 1988, César Chávez,1 to whom the play is dedicated, went on a hunger strike so as to draw popular attention to the protest. Heroes and Saints deals with the workers’ protest against a series of children’s deaths causing a great deal of commotion in the valley families and great curiosity and sensationalism outside it. The farm workers’ union, led by the activist Amparo, demonstrates against the poisoning of the water and the land by crucifying the bodies of their already dead children in public. In this street scene, with which Moraga begins the first act of her play, we hear the voice of the TV reporter Ana Pérez, broadcasting for the program Hispanic California. The broadcaster interprets the crucifixions as “cruel” exposures of young dead bodies. Throughout the play the events will be followed by this journalist, who represents the dominant, “Anglo,” stereotyped, exoticized view of “Hispanics.” Moraga critiques the detached, sensationalist portrayal of the protest as well as the manipulation of the workers’ allegations: 1

The figure of Chávez, president of the UFWA, inspired the Chicano Movement that emerged in the late 1960s and many subsequent cultural and social manifestations. However, some have erroneously considered him to be one of the leaders of this movement. In fact, his labor movement was never integrated within the Chicano Movement, a cultural response on the part of students and intellectuals. It was precisely his unwillingness to give UFWA a Chicano nationalist character that caused the eventual split of Luis Valdez’s teatro campesino from Chávez‘s cause. See Carlos Muñoz’s second chapter of his Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (1989). Chávez is nonetheless still invoked by Chicana/o writers as Cherríe Moraga or Helena Viramontes who see the Mexican migrant struggle as one of the main social problems that needs to be addressed by Chicano activists.

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ANA PEREZ: AMPARO: ANA PEREZ: AMPARO: ANA PEREZ: AMPARO: ANA PEREZ:

Why would someone be so cruel, to hang a child up like that? To steal him from his deathbed? No, he was dead already. Already dead from the poison. But ma’am... They always dead first. If you put the children in the ground the world forgets about them. Who’s gointu see them, buried in the dirt? A publicity stunt? But who’s— Señorita, I don’t know who. But I know they not my enemy. (Beat) Con su permiso. (AMPARO walks away.) (with false bravado): That concludes our Hispanic hour for the week, but watch for next week’s show where we will take a five-hour drive north to the heart of San Francisco’s Latino Mission District, for an insider’s observation of the Day of the Dead, the Mexican Halloween (She holds a television smile for three full seconds. To the “cameraman”:) Cut! We’ll edit her out later. (94)

Cerezita del Valle, the main character of the play, is one of the most tragic cases of malformation in McLaughlin, and the main object of the media’s enquiries. Inspired by a real child born of a farm worker mother, and also by Valdez’s bodiless Belarmino— the repressed revolutionary of the first play written by Valdez, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964)—Cerezita is a character with no arms, legs, or body. As Moraga states elsewhere, Cerezita is a “more revolutionary, revolutionary” than Belarmino by virtue of her gender (unpublished interview). In her stage directions Moraga describes her as a “head of human dimension, but one who possesses such dignity of bearing and classical Indian beauty” that she acquires nearly religious proportions (90). The bodilessness of this fantastic, grotesque, character, symbolizes both the sexual and gender constraints of women in Mexican/Chicano culture, and the consequences of social abuse, and deplorable living conditions of the workers in McLaughlin. In the confinement of her body and ideas, Cerezita also stands for the restrained organic intellectual. Amparo 343

describes her tragic case matter-of-factly, thus maintaining the half-comic, half-tragic mood that Bertolt Brecht considered necessary to produce the alienation effect in social drama (157): AMPARO:

That’s what they call her because she look like tha’... a red little round cherry face. I think maybe all the blood tha’ was apose to go to the resta her body got squeezed up into her head. I think tha’s why she’s so smart, too. Mario, her brother, el doctor-to-be, says the blood gots oxygen. Tha’s gottu help with the brains. So pink pink pink she turn out. [...] [...] Cerezita come out like this before anybody think too much about it. Now there’s lotza nuevas because lotza kids are turni out all chuecos and with ugly things growing inside them. So our pueblecito, pues it’s on the map now. The gabachos, s’cuze me, los americanos are always coming through McLaughlin nowdays. Pero, not too much change. We still can’ prove it’s those chemcals they put on the plantas. But we know Cere tourn out this way because Dolores pick en los files cuando tenía panza. (93-94)

Moraga also adds a touch of humor to Cerezita’s characterization by attenuating the dramatic character of her condition with a snigger at the false environmental consciousness and the commodification of the “natural” of some beauty products. Despite being just a head, or perhaps because of that, Cerezita has her sister Yolanda try on her hair countless sophisticated, natural beauty products, “the latest item that hits the market,” “so now my hair tends to smell more like an overripe tropical garden than anything else. You know, coconut and mango juice shampoo, avocado conditioners, etcetera” (107). Dolores, Cerezita’s mother, believes her daughter’s shameful malformation to be a divine design, and resents the work of women like Amparo who speak publicly against the government.2 Living in silence and ashamed of her daughter, 2

In the figure of Amparo Moraga pays homage to Dolores Huerta, the vice-president of the United Farm Workers Association (Heroes and Saints, “Author’s Notes,” 89).

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Dolores awaits the return of the husband who abandoned her and her family. Her Catholic devotion becomes a way of justifying her family’s ill fate, and prevents her from seeing the causes of the social oppression and abuse of her whole community. Moraga portrays this character both realistically and sympathetically by making her politically naive. The attitude of this long-suffering Mexican woman contrasts with that of her daughters Yolanda and Cerezita, and with that of women like Amparo. Yolanda, whose child has also been poisoned, joins Amparo in her struggle for the Mexican workers’ rights. Dolores’ resignation and the strict discipline she imposes on Cerezita are consistent with traditional Chicano and Western conceptions of femininity and justify the female labor functions necessary for the social reproduction of the patriarchal family. On the one hand, Dolores plays the role of the submissive but strong wife that the Chicano/Mexican patriarchal order requires for the preservation of communal unity through family cohesion. On the other, she serves a socio-economic ideology that justifies women’s domestic labor and exclusion from the public world. In the case of Chicana workers as portrayed in the play, the domestic ideal of family upheld by middle-class ideology does by no means correspond to their double day as homemakers and public workers. Moraga’s concern with the repulsion of homosexuality within the Mexican/Chicano community is addressed in Heroes through the character of Mario, pushed by his mother to choose between his homosexuality and his blood family, or as he puts it, to separate his body from his heart. Since there is not a place for Mario within the traditional family structure that women like Dolores represent and are in charge of preserving, he leaves for San Francisco, the alleged haven for gays. After his move to the city, Mario is faced with the increasing spread of AIDS and the subsequent stigmatization of the gay community through its identification with the illness. He finds out that “[t]he city is no different. Raza is dying everywhere. Doesn‘t matter if it‘s crack or...pesticides” (141). This despondency causes him to give up 345

all hope for a legitimate place within both the Mexican American and the Anglo American communities. Nonetheless, his participation in the people’s final cathartic burning of the fields, is an indication that his own particular plight as a homosexual needs to be one amongst the many Chicano/a social struggles. Neither Mario nor Amparo‘s impotent husband, Gilberto, fits the archetype of the Mexican/Chicano macho. Both of them voice their need to “make familia” outside prescribed gender and sexual molds, an idea that Moraga has also firmly asserted in her autobiographical Loving in the War Years (1983), in the play Giving up the Ghost (1984), and in her latest Waiting in the Wings (1997). Gilberto redefines the notion of Chicano manhood and of family in that he is by no means ashamed of his sterility and considers adoption as an alternative. By refusing to hide his homosexuality and abandoning the valley under heterosexual pressures, Mario opposes and confronts the Mexican/ Chicano patriarchal order that prevents a complete sense of solidarity from being built among Mexican Americans. Through the figure of Mario, Moraga illustrates a crisis within the patriarchal family and proposes a diversification of the institution through a revision of the sexual identity of its members. The discourse of the Catholic Church is shown to promote the limited concept of family and the social conformity of the Mexican poor. In the figure of the “half-breed” leftist priest, a representative of liberation theology, Moraga portrays the halfcommitted intellectual, as well as those who, in the name of God and religion, justify their inactivity and detachment from the collectivity. At the same time and not at all at odds with her critique of Catholicism, the playwright illustrates the power of religion and communal spirituality as an agglutinating force within the Chicano community by featuring a particular version of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Performed by the disguised figure of Cerezita in the final scene of the play, this new Guadalupe evokes and refashions the icon appearing in the banners accompanying Chicano/a revolutionary social protests and parades. 346

The play also calls the audience’s attention to the Catholic ideology of submission and acquiescence imposed on women, as well as to the rhetoric enforcing bodily and intellectual restrictions that diminish individual and collective will and impair an understanding of one’s place in a system of class oppression. It is significant that, in one of Juan‘s encounters with Cerezita, the embodiment of the poor, both characters recite an excerpt of the novel by the Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos, Balún-Canán (1957). This particular passage provides a historical context for the official, transcendental Catholic language adopted and imposed by the rich on poor indigenous peoples: JUAN

(reading from a small paperback): “Then, they named rich the man of gold, and poor the man of flesh. And they determined that the rich would care for and protect the poor in as much that through them, the rich had received such benefits.” [...] “And they ordered that the poor would respond on behalf of the rich before the face of truth.” [...]

CEREZITA (slowly turning to him): “For this reason our law states that no rich person can enter heaven without the poor taking him by the hand.” (101)

Cerezita, as we are told, is a “head”, a female intellectual who has the bookish knowledge and “the gift of tongues.” Yet, she is “tongueless” and “unable to speak freely” as she remains secluded at home by her mother. Just as Belarmino, the head in Luis Valdez’s The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964), Cerezita is both bodiless and speechless, a symbol of repressed and long-lost revolutionary thinking. Cerezita is therefore a clear metonymic representation of the gender and sexual submission of women, their public invisibility, their domestic confinement, the public concealment of the malformation of the inhabitants of McLaughlin. She is no doubt a symbolic allusion to her people’s 347

disembodied existence, silenced suffering, and repressed critical knowledge. Yet, her “classical Indian [Olmeca] beauty” and “dignity of bearing” turn her into a clear reference to the preColumbian culture around which contemporary Chicano/a ethnicity has been built and where many have found an alternative source of pride (Moraga, Heroes 90). Cerezita also exhibits, as Moraga says in the notes on this character at the beginning of the play, “a very real ‘humanness’ […] on a daily functioning level” (90). The playwright states that Cerezita’s mobility and its limits are critical aspects of her character. For most of the play CEREZITA is positioned on a rolling, tablelike platform, which will be referred to as her “raite” (ride). It is automated by a button she operates with her chin. The low hum of its motor always anticipates her entrance. The raite can be disenganged at any time by flipping the hold on each wheel and pushing the chin piece out of her reach. At such times, CEREZITA has no control and can only be moved by someone manually. (90)

Elin Diamond argues that Brechtian dramatic theory allows us to put the “historicity” of bodies on view onto the stage (89). In this case, the deliberate staging of the “absence of body” and the limited mobility of Cerezita as deliberate theatrical devices, have to be interpreted in the light of the social circumstances referred to in the play. On that account, the allusion to Cerezita‘s “bodilessness” and physical limitations, is to be seen as a Gestus3 or socially significant “gest” that urges us to reflect on the performer of this character and on ourselves as spectators in a social and historical context (Diamond 90). The Mexican and American sex-gender-class configurations that are highlighted 3

Brecht tells us that not all gests are social. A gest of pain (of deformity, in this case), Brecht says, “as long as it is kept so abstract and generalized that it does not rise above a purely animal category, is not yet a social one” (104). It only becomes a social gest if it shows the particular “manouvers by men” that degrade other individuals: “[T]he social gest is the gest relevant to society, the gest that allows conclusions to be drawn about the social circumstances” (104105).

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here through Cerezita are women’s domestic confinement and detachment from the public sphere, the malformation of Mexican American children, and the deprivation of sexual desire enforced upon Cerezita and other characters in the play. In one of the most moving speeches of the play, Cerezita incriminates Juan for being a “waste of a body,” not only for not being able to give sexual pleasure, but also for not doing anything for the town. As in Moraga’s autobiographical Loving in the War Years, in Heroes and Saints desire goes hand in hand with resistance against any kind of oppression. In her autobiography Moraga says that her lesbianism is what triggered her first poems: “My first poems were love poems. That’s the source—el amor, el deseo—that brought me into politics” (Loving iv). She also admits that it was not until she openly acknowledged her lesbianism that she started making connections with other sorts of oppression, like her mother‘s race, gender, and class discrimination (Loving 52). “My lesbianism,” she says, “is the avenue through which I have learned the most about silence and oppression, and it continues to be the most tactile reminder to me that we are not free human beings” (Loving 52). It is in the light of this autobiographical account that we may understand Moraga’s association of desire with political action. The first epigraph of Heroes and Saints clearly specifies the social function of a theatre that is essentially about showing experiences to raise consciousness: Before day breaks we shall set out from these yards and reach their city ... in the dawn showing in public places the full extent of our misery appealing to anything with a human look. What will come after, I don‘t know. (86)

The poem reinforces the importance of taking personal testimony to the public arena, thus making the personal political and the political personal following one of the most famous of feminist mottoes. This communal dimension of the theatre is no doubt 349

partly inherited from Luis Valdez’s critique of agribusiness in his teatro campesino, a theatre at the service of the farm workers revolution during the 1960s. The historical-materialist perspective of Valdez’s dramatic productions was based on simple allegories of exploitation that were essentially masculine, and on the dialectical relationship between master and slave that finally evolved into a synthesis or complacent resolution. Its main symbols were the oppressive patrón, the racist Anglo capitalist, and the poor exploited campesino. As Valdez himself has said, the archetypes appearing in teatro campesino symbolize the entire raza (Early Works 15). In these productions women were either vendidas (traitors to the revolution), or submissive wives and mothers. In the acto La Conquista de México (1968), included in the volume Early Works (1990), Malinche is depicted as treacherous, deceitful, and, significantly, speaking in English. Likewise, Miss Jiménez, the only woman appearing in Valdez’s popular acto Los Vendidos (1967), published in the same volume, is the stereotype of a completely assimilated Mexican American. She no longer understands Spanish and has forgotten about the struggles of the Mexican people in the U.S. In contrast, characters like Cruz in Valdez’s first play The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa (1964), embody the submissiveness and resignation of the long-suffering Mexican woman. Moraga’s drama complicates Valdez’s monolithic view of Chicano identity and of Aztlán with a feminist standpoint that also addresses the predicament of gay people and women within the Mexican/Chicano transnational reserve labor force. Her theatre is frequently symbolic and allegorical, but its emphasis on particular individual domestic stories, less simplistic than Valdez’s, aims at showing the effect of public forces on the private lives of men and women. Though humorous and ironic at times, this drama cannot fully draw on parody and caricature, as does the teatro campesino. Still in the fashion of Valdez’s actos, Moraga’s characters have, as their names indicate, an allegorical function. Their characterization might be at times sketchy as Moraga turns the characters into the mouthpieces for a variety of 350

the competing social discourses she intends to represent. Following the format of the episodic play, events are not staged in a linear narrative fashion, but rather in individual sketches that may not be chronologically sequenced. Cerezita’s malformation and seclusion oblige her to witness and be present in all domestic scenes, which in turn allows her to comment as a social ideologue on the consequences of pesticide poisoning and other family conflicts. Occasionally, however, characters are given more reality when they speak about daily life events within their domestic setting. This is the case, for instance, of the scene in which Yolanda and Cerezita talk about the McLaughlin mothers’ fear of poisoning their children by breast-feeding: CEREZITA: I remember the first time I tasted fear, I smelled it in her sweat. It ran like a tiny river down her breast and mixed with her milk. I tasted it on my tongue. It was very bitter. Very bitter. YOLANDA: That‘s why I try to keep calm. Lina knows when I‘m upset. CEREZITA: I stopped drinking. I refused to nurse from her again, bit at her breasts when she tried to force me. YOLANDA: Formula is expensive. Breastfeeding is free. Healthier, too. I’ll do it until Lina doesn‘t want it no more. (Heroes 95)

In Moraga’s political drama, the realism of these domestic scenes is coupled with the satirical depiction of Ana Pérez’s TV reports on the events in McLaughlin—representing the media coverage of Latino/Hispanic news—as well as with Amparo’s denunciatory, political speeches in the street protest scenes: AMPARO

(tentatively): Our homes are no longer our homes. They have become prisons. When the water that pours from the sink gots to be boiled three times before it can pass your children’s lips, what good is the faucet, the indoor plumbing, the toilet that flushes pink with disease? (Gaining confidence). We were better off when our padres hang some blankets from a tree and we slept

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under the pertection of the estrellas, because our roofs don‘t pertect us. A’ least then, even if you had to dig a hole in the ground to do your biznis and wipe yourself with newspaper, you could still look up hasta los cielos and see God. But where is God now, amigos? ¿Y el diablo? El diablo hides between the pages of the papeles we sign that makes us afraid. The papeles have no weight […]. But our children are flesh and bone. They weigh mucho. You put them all together and they make hunerds and hunerds of Razita (Pause). Yesterday, the school board refuse the gift of clean water for our chil’ren’s already poisoned throats. The board says, NO, there’s not’ing wroung with our water. We don‘t know for sure, it hasn’been proved. How much prove you need? How many babies’ bodies pile all up on top of each other in the grave? (Heroes 111)

It is through these speeches that the connection between private events and public, social affairs is made manifest. By means of a varied repertoire of social languages and registers (colloquial, official, parodic, intimate, humorous, revolutionary) Moraga achieves a similar effect to the heteroglossia described by Bakhtin in relation to low genres developed on the stages of local fairs and buffoon spectacles. Against the official centralization of discourse, these “languages” questioned the authenticity of any discourse and constituted a heteroglossia both “vis-à-vis the accepted literary language,” that is “vis-à-vis the linguistic center of the verbal-ideological life of the nation and the epoch” and a heteroglossia “consciously opposed to this literary language” (Bakhtin 273). Further underscoring the popular character of her drama, the play requires the involvement of the audience, which may play the part of the pueblo and the protesters participating in the struggle. An effective performance of this play would therefore seek audiences’ participation in the final field-burning scene. Heroes and Saints reaffirms the writer’s conviction, expressed in her prose works, that Aztlán is not a harmonious home, but a “divided nation” where women need to be silent and passive and gays and lesbians are not inhabitants of the family house (The 352

Last Generation 157-159). Thus, Moraga pays homage not only to the struggle of male workers, but also to the strength and resilience of women and homosexuals through figures such as Cerezita, Mario, and Amparo. Cerezita del Valle is, as we have said, the most symbolic of all characters, as she conflates Moraga’s triple concern with social issues, women’s oppression, and homophobia. Her sympathetic understanding of others, her revolutionary mind, and her final self-immolation in resistance to the growers at the end of the play, turn her into a Christ figure, a kind of epic-heroic representative of her community. She is both the hero and the saint her people need, a symbolic embodiment of silent collective subjects that simultaneously recognizes and is critical of gender, sexual, and social difference, while also seeking to create a common ground for solidarity. As Cerezita says towards the end of the play, “heroes and saints” is “all we can really have for now. That’s all people want” (134). As Luis Valdez said and later demonstrated in his actos and in his play and film Zoot Suit (1981), the Chicano community needed heroic figures, myths that would give a sense of unity and group cohesion to fight against oppression (Early Works 13). In Moraga’s play the character of Cerezita is meant to achieve this aim through her triple commitment to sex and gender issues, immigration, and labor struggles, which we may identify with Anzaldúa’s mestiza borderlands consciousness. Like Valdez’s social drama and agit-prop actos, Heroes and Saints stimulates social action through improvisation, communal involvement, and deep emotional effects. But it also goes beyond Valdez’s dualistic dialectics: It stages the conflict between an oppressive capitalist agribusiness and the poor, but its focus is the multiple cultural and social problems that prevent Chicanos/as from carrying out an effective social movement. This representation on the stage of a multiplicity of subject positions or “discursive practices” emerges from a feminist emphasis on the collective subject, a subject whose existence depends on its relationship to others as well as to social forces. Contemporary feminist theory emphasizes this relational 353

constitution of the subject, and as Charlotte Canning has indicated in an analysis of contemporary feminist theatre, theories of the subject as traversed by social discourses have deeply affected the representation on the stage of subjectivity and community by feminist dramatists (179). The cast of characters testifies to Moraga’s willingness to deal with the convoluted mixture of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class oppression shaping the multiple subjects she represents. Her view of subjectivity also challenges traditional feminist Marxist analyses based on the dichotomies subject/object, 4 voluntarism/determinism. Moraga still has faith in the individual and in the power of communal solidarity and, therefore, her dramas stage street scenes including all those activities that attempt to destabilize the capitalist labor system and its exploitation, such as strikes, protests, boycotts, etc. These activities propose alternatives for the future based on the subject’s desires, needs, passions, and capabilities outside the sphere of work. Moraga’s message is therefore that labor, like sexuality and gender, is not assigned to men and women by society or by nature. By highlighting the economic, cultural, and political value of specific labor practices, and by considering gender as both limiting, enabling, and ever-changing, Moraga affirms the need for solidarity, which she understands as a will to develop communal projects that encompass people’s differences. The place where the action occurs has a decisive significance for the transmission of this collective ideal or modest utopia. It is, as the writer has said, “an image that reflects the heart of the story to be told” (unpublished interview). The land, the fog and the overworked, overirrigated dirty fields are “constant presences in the play and visibly press upon the intimate life of the Valley family home” to the point of becoming as important as the 4

See for example, Catherine MacKinnon’s famous essay “Feminism, Marxism, Method and the State,” where she considers gender socialization in heterosexual relations as the main process through which women come to see themselves as inferior sexual beings.

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characters (91). Moraga brings public and domestic arenas on the stage, so that it becomes a heterotopia, a space which, according to Foucault, conflates spaces that are usually seen as foreign to one another (“Of Other Spaces” 25). But this playwright is also very aware of “representational spaces,” that is, of the symbolic importance of imaginary spaces. She exploits the colonial allegory of the earth as indigenous, fertile, and female I discussed in Chapter 1, but she does not associate the preservation of place and locality with women’s immobility. In her plays land has very clear gendered connotations: The personification of the native, unexploited land and its constant presence surrounding the spaces of social conflict is a nostalgic, idealized memory of an unconquered indigenous landscape, a constant reminder of the current degradation of the land at the hands of capitalist monopolists. The old backdrop landscape of the memory is aestheticized, inert, and pure. Moraga establishes a triple analogy between the Anglo colonization, ravishment, and exploitation of the land in southwestern territory, the consequences this “rape” has for all its inhabitants and workers, and the limitations of male and female sexuality by heterosexual norms and Catholic precepts. Through this triple analogy Heroes and Saints conjugates an antagonistic position against the exploitative practices of agribusiness, a constructive concern for the particular desires and needs of each character: the desperation of the women as they witness their children’s malformation and deaths; their struggle in the face of the father’s abandonment of the home; Mario’s repressed sexuality; Cerezita’s confined and disregarded intellect and erotic desire; Juan’s also repressed potential for political action. The piece cannot however offer definite answers to the problems it addresses. As an open play, it emphasizes, like many other Chicano/a literary works, what Ramón Saldívar has called in his analysis of narrative, “the dialectics of difference,” conflict over resolution. In spite of an apparent cathartic synthesis of struggles in the final collective burning of the fields, Heroes and Saints resists a single-minded picture of Chicano/a identity, and 355

points at the problems in a working-class town ensuing from the savage rules of the post-capitalist labor system. Cerezita’s final speech is a prophetic, transnational invitation to productive sacrifice and revolution in the name of the land and the people, a speech in which the people of S.Joaquín Valley are identified with other peoples in America: “[They are] Guatemala, El Salvador. [They are] the Kuna and the Tarahumara [...] for the same blood runs through [their] veins” (Heroes 148). Cerezita hopes for a day in which these people will be “[f]ree to name this land Madre. Madre Tierra. Madre Sagrada. Madre […] Libertad. The radiant red mother . . . rising” (Heroes 148). With her frequent allusion to the earth as the mother, Moraga evokes a political project of social change, the “modest utopia” of Aztlán, the symbolic social ideal whose significance she has redefined in the course of the play, but which has yet to bear the fruits of “real” social transformation. 6.2. Watsonville A sequel to Heroes and Saints, Watsonville: Some Place not Here (2000) is also a play of social protest and has most of the characters in Heroes and Saints as protagonists. According to the playwright, the play is “based loosely” on the actual strike led by female cannery workers in the town of Watsonville, California (Watsonville 344). Both Moraga and Ana Castillo visited the area and conducted a writing workshop in 1987. Moraga interviewed several of the workers and their stories inspired many of the anecdotes, the language, and characters in the play. The Watsonville strike began in September 1985 after the two major canning companies of the area cut the wages of the workers by forty per cent. Ana Castillo documents that the committee that conducted the strike had to face the women’s deep disagreements with the union leaders, who were not ready to provide for a labor force that was mostly Mexican and female (Massacre 55-59). The protest lasted eighteen months and 356

spread throughout the state, thus drawing a lot of support, especially from Chicano organizations. Wage concessions were finally achieved, but not health benefits, which triggered a hunger strike and a pilgrimage to a Catholic Church in the area. According to Ana Castillo’s report on the strike, many of these women had to stand up to institutional opposition despite their little education, their language barrier, the disadvantage of being women and mothers, and the occasional lack of support from their husbands or partners. However, the strike was beneficial in the sense that it unveiled women’s double day as housewives and workers and it made women more acquainted with their rights and the legal system. Still, these benefits were achieved at the expense of many women’s loss of their husbands, who took exception with their wives’ involvement in the insurgence. Castillo also says the strike adopted Mexican cultural overtones and that scabs interfering with it were labeled as “traitors to la raza” (Massacre 54-56). Moraga’s Watsonville has also been inspired by other real events that took place in this working-class area: the earthquake that struck the town in 1989, and the alleged apparition of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the side of an oak tree in Pinto Lake Park in 1992. The piece begins at a point when the workers are already organizing after the company has lowered their wages. Under the suspicion that workers may soon mobilize, the company suddenly raises their pay, but does not deduct their union dues from their paycheck. The strike begins and Juan, an ex-priest working for a Christian association, offers the support of the organization he represents. While the strike is in progress, the Supreme Court upholds a bill against health care, labor, and education rights for clandestine workers, an allusion to proposition 187, passed in California in 1994. After the Court’s endorsement of the bill, the union suddenly ceases to stand up for the rights of all workers. Hence, the strikers see their mobilizations and the unity of all Mexican workers under threat. In the meantime, an old woman, Dolores, witnesses the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe. For the strike organizing committee, this apparition holds political 357

potential for keeping workers with legal and illegal status together in spite of the Senate bill. Juan asks a local Church authority to acknowledge the event publicly as a miracle, but he is denied this support. The strike continues for a year and the union negotiates better contracts for legal workers. Chente, a union representative and former bracero, insists that legal workers should sign the contracts. The strike leaders rebuke his offer as that of a vendido and decide to insist on their opposition to the bill and on better conditions for all workers by bringing into the strike the whole food-processing sector, including field workers. Their protest culminates in a procession on their knees to the oak grove where the image of the Virgin has appeared. As the pilgrimage is in progress, an earthquake hits the area of Watsonville, but none of the workers is harmed. They become the center of attention of the mass media as the Mexican workers saved by the ”Miracle Tree.” The conflict between the legal and the illegal is temporarily suspended and the play ends inconclusively with the symbolic sentimental union between the clandestine worker, Lucha, and the community organizer, Sonora. Sitting by the deathbed of the old woman Dolores, Sonora voices her commitment to a better future for Mexican immigrants in the U.S. and to the spiritual strength and cultural heritage she has inherited from women like her. Dedicated to the Mexican American female cannery workers of Watsonville, and to Moraga’s grandmother, the play casts female characters as powerful and resolute, although not by any means above failure. Moraga is concerned with the restoration of pride to a larger community of men and women. The play therefore merges the assertion of a Mexican/Chicano workingclass consciousness with the feminist imperative to acknowledge the significant role women have played in the community’s search for dignity. Yolanda López’s silscreen series Women’s Work is Never Done is an interesting visual counterpart to Moraga’s work. The artist has addressed the theme of Mexican American women’s labor and social resistance addressed by Viramontes and Moraga. The piece titled Women’s Work is Never 358

Done: Homage to Dolores Huerta (1995), brings to fore the strength and endurance of Mexican American female fieldworkers, and the pain and danger they incur when exposed to fruit and vegetable pesticides. López’s portrayal of the women’s covered bodies and faces for protection against poisoning, clearly draws attention to their poor labor conditions, their scarves acting also as a mask suggesting their social invisibility and anonymity in spite of the straightforward, aggressive look they cast toward the viewer. On the left hand side of the painting, the figure of Dolores Huerta rises over the workers holding a protest sign, reminding us of the Farm Worker’s Association organized social action for the defense of workers rights and the validity of their protests at the end of the twentieth century. In the light of the didactic tradition of teatro campesino, Moraga’s female characters may be seen as models for individual and collective action. One of the most important characters in Watsonville is the old woman, Dolores Valle, the traditional Mexican self-sacrificing woman in Heroes and Saints. In this play she is an old cannery worker who prefers prayer to political action, but who will finally take active part in the strike, and will lead the pilgrimage to the sacred oak tree. Her husband, Arturo, has no job and spends most of his time drinking and watching TV. He strongly opposes his wife’s participation in the strike, underestimates her work in the protest, and eventually abandons her. As we know from testimonials of Latina workers, similar attitudes to Arturo’s are often the reaction to the powerlessness felt by men in an environment where it is easier for women to work, and where men have lost all authority by losing their role of breadwinners (Martínez Torres 247-248). As in Heroes and Saints, Moraga brings together a variety of points of view to create a dialogic play. One of the main aims of this play is to highlight the ways in which a patriarchal culture and the institutional barriers against clandestine workers make it

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Figure 6. Yolanda López, Women’s Work is Never Done, 1995, silkscreen. Courtesy of the artist.

difficult to establish communal alliances between men and women of Mexican origin on the sole basis of culture and working-class background. The episodic scenes of the play address a variety of social and familial problems that draw attention to how gender relations and legal status complicate class oppression. As all of these characters tell their personal borderlands stories, the spectator becomes aware that class, gender, and legal status are factors deeply conditioning failure or success. Lucha, an illegal worker and single mother of two, works both in the factory and in the fields. She believes in the American dream, wants to leave behind a past and a present of struggle and pain, and wishes her kids may one day be fully assimilated 360

Americans with no memories of suffering. Sonora, a community organizer who belongs to a second generation of migrant workers and looks like a gringa, has refused to assimilate completely and lose the historical memory of her people. Sonora has devoted her life to helping Mexican migrant workers, for, as she puts it, she cannot “forget that dirt under [their] fingernails” (371). Her position contrasts with that of Chente, the prosperous union organizer, once an illegal bracero. He has now no qualms about betraying illegal immigrants if they pose an obstacle to his own social mobility. As the sold-out or vendido of the play, Chente voices the unions’ usual disregard for clandestine immigrants. With his sexual harassment of Lucha, he exemplifies male supervisors’ not uncommon extortion of young female workers in exchange for legal papers (Martínez-Torres 247). In this respect, the play is critical of the fact that the class struggle of union organizing does not encompass issues of gender and legal status. Moraga transmits the cultural overtones the strike adopted by incorporating music ranging from traditional compositions such as décimas sung by the older huelguistas to rap songs of the younger people. Music is also used as a device to give a historical context to the experience of clandestine immigrants. She follows Brecht’s idea that music may be used with didactic purposes to show the relationship between the emotions of the working class and its socio-political situation. Music becomes a socially significant “gest” or Gestus if it illuminates the conditions that influence the way people behave (Brecht 85-86). The following décima de anhelo, “Mi patria“, sung by one of the strikers, is a nostalgic lament for a country one has had to abandon by force: Mi patria es pura riqueza pero está mal repartida en el campo allá no hay vida sólo miseria y tristeza Cuando a crecer uno empieza ver que al norte todos van y no quedando otro plan me fuí de la tierra mía

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y hoy no sé si vuelva un día 5 ay dios, a mi Michoacán. (371)

The occasionally humorous lyrics of the rap song composed by Moraga herself, “Raza, Rise Up,” provide a socio-historical frame for the play’s main events, thus drawing the spectator’s attention to the economic circumstances underlying the strike. Lucha’s son takes the lead and is cheered on by the strikers: JOJO:

“It was nineteen hundred and ninety-six and patroncito tried the same ole trick, cuttin’ back wages of moms and dads saying ‘Four twenty-five that ain‘t so bad.’ Raza, ... Rise Up!”

LUCHA:

¡Andale, hijo!

AMPARO:

Go home boy!

JOJO:

“So Chisme started on the broccoli line, ‘va a haber huelga, if y’all don’t mind.’ Carmen and Lupe and Yolanda, too Todas juntas, they were all too through.” “Raza”

ALL:

“Rise Up!” (Watsonville 366)

The rap song is also used in street-protest scenes where strikers call for the union of all workers and for opposition against the bill limiting the rights of clandestine immigrants: JOJO:

5

To try and make matters just a little worse, Washington’s revvin’ up its hearse. Talkin’ bout wetback “get your butts back home.”

In With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), Américo Paredes argues that the décima, which came in with the first settlers, was incorporated within an oral tradition that transcended the borders of Mexico both north and south. The singers of décimas, decimeros, dealt with subjects related to the domestic affairs of the community. Décimas may be satirical, humorous and didactic. They may also memorialize a person and lament his death (132).

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Gente knowin’ home is in the bones. Gente knowin’ home is in the bones. Raza, ALL:

Rise Up!

JOJO:

Raza Cósmica is our middle name, A veces we don’t hear it, ‘mid all the profane. But every-so-often, la virgen comes down, dicen a su gente, “y’all gather round.” Raza,

ALL:

Rise up!

JOJO:

Les traigo un mensaje, in case you might forget, you were here first by the name of Aztec. Tarahumara, Apache, Yaqui— Indio bloodlines to name just three Raza,

ALL:

Rise up!

JOJO:

With the strike comin’ round to year number two ladies on the line wanna try something new “Huelga de hambre” is the battle song Legal or not, we all belong we’re obreros unidos, one thousand strong. Raza, […]. (409)

Another use of the Brechtian social gest in Watsonville is the strategy of the play within a play. The main idea of the gest is that “the spectator should be put in a position where he can make comparisons about everything that influences the way human beings behave” (Brecht 86). A language is “gestic” when it is not only mere gesticulation; it focuses on the particular socially relevant attitudes of some human beings towards others (104105). “One’s efforts to keep one’s balance on a slippery surface”, Brecht says, become a social gest “as soon as falling down would mean ‘losing face’; in other words, losing one’s market value. The gest of working is definitely social, because all human activity directed towards the mastery of nature is a social 363

undertaking, an undertaking between men” (104). In Act I, Scene Three, Moraga incorporates a humorous acto in the fashion of the agit-prop pieces of Valdez’s teatro campesino. This play within a play is a reductio ad absurdum of the deplorable conditions of female workers in assembly lines that lays stress upon the social division between the workers and the forelady. The forelady of Mexican descent impels the workers to work faster with loud, urgent shouts (“¡Andeles! ¡Andeles! […] Move those hands! ¡Rápido, Rápido!” [355]). To add comic relief to their strain, the obreras call her names like “bruja” and “vaca fea” behind her back (355-356). The sketch is targeted both at a particular audience in the play, the women strikers, and at the general public. The dialogues and attitudes of the stock characters—Obrera, Veterana, and Ms. Oprimida—emphasize the gestic features of the performance. Following the Brechtian alienation-effect, the dramatic action draws attention to the performativity of their roles. Humor and defamiliarization provide an ironic critique of the social conditionings underlying the main incidents (Brecht 136-140). OBRERA:

Oye, veterana. How many fingers chu got left now?

VETERANA:

Déjame ver, obrera. (Counting) Todavía tengo three talls ones on the left hand. Y en la derecha, tengo... (Counting) … un medio dedo in the middle, half a pinkie, y un pedacito de pulgar. ¿Y tú, obrera?

OBRERA:

Bueno, yo...yo soy (Shaking out her fingerless gloves) ALL THUMBS! (355)

Veterana instructs Ms. Oprimida on assembly line work as they both observe the obrera increase her working pace to the ridiculous, preposterous rhythm of a “satirized cumbia” (355) under the orders of the forelady. The inexperienced Ms. Oprimida ends up cutting herself to the alarm of her co-workers and the complaints of the forelady. The play finishes with the women’s rebellion against the forelady and with cries of “Don‘t ‘agonize.’ Organize!” and “¡Qué viva la mujer obrera!” (356). 364

As in Heroes and Saints and in The Hungry Woman, religious and/or indigenous symbols are presented as necessary agglutinating cultural elements. In Watsonville the miraculous appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe dressed as a cannery worker identifies Dolores’ cult of this image with the daily struggles of the people. The progressive priest, Juan, defends the image of the Biblical image of the Virgin as an “angry woman” (Watsonville 395), as opposed to her image as a “long-suffering santa,” before the official representative of the Catholic Church (395). Juan complains that all the Church tells these women is to “open [their hearts] and forgive [their husbands their offenses]” (394). The play follows the Brechtian imperative that it is important to challenge the neutrality of the ideological impositions of history, the signs of the past that characterize bourgeois thought (Brecht 190). Moraga stages the clash of two representations of the Virgin: Guadalupe as traditional role model for the passive attitude of women encouraged by official Catholicism, and Guadalupe as a strong, assertive woman fighting against injustice. Opposing the image of the all-forgiving, ever-suffering, ever-loving Virgin advocated by Catholic institutions, Juan reclaims her as a symbol of female power, and as the defender of the “lowly” and the “hungry” for whom she speaks in the scriptures. The confrontation between Juan and Monsignor testifies to the fact that the Catholic Church supported by the Mexican community in the U.S. has been, as Ana Castillo has observed, more often a source of control and restriction in women‘s lives than a sign of relief and consolation (Massacre 48-49). The apparition of a different Guadalupe in the fictional Watsonville of Moraga’s play is an accommodation to the social needs of women, an instance that they need the sort of spiritual, material comfort that the Church cannot provide. The cult of Guadalupe proposed here is, Ana Castillo observes, “an unspoken, if not unconscious, devotion to [women’s] own version of Goddess” (Massacre 48). Carla Trujillo has seen these alterations of the image of the Mexican Virgin in women’s worship as the accommodation of an 365

image that represents nation, culture, and country to the social and sexual claims of women: In this manner, she is retained because of her connections to our history, or her representation as the all-accepting mother who replaces the church’s eyes of judgement and scorn with those of acceptance and love [...]. The redefined Virgen can represent the validation of us in our culture without the benediction of men, the pope or any of his supporters. (223)

Chicanas embrace the all-loving qualities of Guadalupe, but reject her as a model of “proper” behavior for women because such a model serves the power historically held by men and inspired by the patriarchal authority figure of God (Trujillo 224). As in the paintings of Chicana artists such as Ester Hernández, here the Virgin is also retained for the validation of a sexualized Chicana lesbian body. Thus, Cerezita’s public appearance in the guise of Guadalupe at the end of Heroes and Saints may be seen as the symbolic “coming out” of a repressed desire for sexual freedom and collective action, as well as the assertion of women’s right to be present and have authority in the public sphere. In Watsonville the character of Sonora, the Chicana activist, may be seen as Moraga’s alter ego; she echoes the writer’s search for an alternative spirituality that integrates the personal struggle for a free sexuality and the collective struggle for the freedom of the people. Both of these social commitments are symbolized by the revised figure of a female earth Goddess. Sonora worships the image of Guadalupe on the oak tree in a ritual that echoes the devotion for the tree of life of the Mesoamerican Olohnnes. The play upholds spirituality and culture as elements that sustain the Mexican/Chicano community. As Moraga notes in the stage directions for the set, Mexican people—Mexican, IndianCatholics—have close ties to the land. Her directions highlight a significant spatial division between the “private property” where the “pueblo” (which, as Moraga remarks, in the context of her play means more “people” than village) works, and memories of “the land as belonging to no one but the earth itself” (Watsonville 366

345). Private property is represented by “chain-linked and barbedwire fences and corrugated aluminum walls” (345). To contrast this view of the land, the places where the main action is set and that Chicanos and Chicanas customarily inhabit, “the cannery, the kitchen, the union hall, the picket line, the park, the hospital, the warehouse” are to be “housed within a circle of a grove of aging oaks” (345). With the association between Chicanos’ and Chicanas’ daily life places and the revered, ancestral trees, Moraga is not only establishing a connection between the Chicano/a people and their indigenous origins, but also revealing an eco-critical attitude that calls for the reconciliation of human activity and the responsibility towards nature.6 Presiding the whole action and reminding us of the importance of spirituality for solace and communal belonging is Dolores’ altar, “always candle-lit and sainted, which opens through a window to the oldest and tallest oak of the grove” (345). Together with the natural ritualistic space, this element of Catholic devotion is a constant reminder to the audience that outside the main events taking place in the social space of the town Watsonville (the strikes and the protests), there still prevail a whole cultural, spiritual heritage and the ideal of a respected, communal land. Thus, the apparition of the Virgin and the earthquake are to be seen as manifestations of many Mexicans’ faith in a better future. They are magical-realist events with a resisting social and spiritual message. Sonora’s final sentimental union with Lucha is illustrative of her devotion to a social cause in a place “that is not home, but the place of journeying/transformation, revolución” (421). Lucha’s love declaration to Sonora, and Sonora’s reassertion of her political commitment are a reaffirmation of the necessary alliance and love between “illegal” Mexicanos and “legal” Chicanos. The play therefore ends with a call for Chicanos’ and Chicanas’ 6

I am indebted to Priscilla Ybarra (Rice University) for this observation in “Crafting Chicana/o Ecocriticism: Identity-in-Process and the Ethics of Relinquishment” (Proceedings of the III Spanish Conference on Chicano/a Literature, 2002, forthcoming).

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engagement in the fight for social justice on behalf of their Mexicano/a counterparts who cross the border in hope of a better future. Yet, for Sonora that social commitment also goes hand in hand with an attachment to a historical and cultural past. Her presence by the deathbed of the old woman Dolores is a sign both of her devotion to an idealized spiritual Mesoamerican heritage, and of her indebtedness to the strength of the first generations of female Mexican immigrants. Sonora reincarnates the figure of Cerezita, the committed Chicana borderlands intellectual that recovers the past with the purpose of building a better future: SONORA:

I am going back before the burial before they lay my town to rest before blight before plague before the final earthquake I am going back to salvage what is left of my mexicanismo my womanhood, my honesty going back into your arms, the arms of my teacher that is not home, but the place of journeying tranformation, revolución. I am going back a la tierra sagrada rising up through the limbs of the aging oak and the thick torsos of Redwood mourning I am going back to live in those days in resurrection of the past of the ancient of the miraculous I am going back to find my future. (Watsonville 421)

Cherríe Moraga‘s revision of the mythico-symbolic nationalist space of Aztlán in Heroes and Saints and Watsonville bespeaks a nameless craving that has less to do with a lost Aztec territory than with making the social spaces where the Chicanos/as live and work inhabitable (The Last Generation 150-151). Aztlán opens up when creative antagonism takes place: the 1987 female 368

cannery workers strike in Watsonville, the grape boycott of S. Joaquín or the protests of Chicano/a queers that have been the object of Moraga‘s political writings and plays. The tone of Moraga’s writings is direct and compelling. Her social dramas have a particularly enlightening, informative, and healing power in the sense that they are like public pronouncements. They not only show the social powers at work in local places, but also inscribe themselves within a transnational project to be developed in a future America where the spiritual and social needs and rights of people of color and of Chicanos/as will be respected. Her plays, portraying this struggle for a democratic society and sustaining kinship, reconcile two fundamental aspects: a social concern for the land—embracing the workplace, the town or living space, and the body—and a re-defined cultural and spiritual tradition. Like Pat Mora, Moraga defends mother earth and the nurturing, caretaking values of mothers but, more strongly, she voices a challenge to unbridled capitalism and to the traditional heterosexual family structure which patriarchal Chicano activism has often supported and on which many forms of labor still rely. For this artist, the spiritual and geographical land or place of Chicanos/as is potentially found in any everyday site—the home, the body, the factory, the field, the street—, but its rightful inhabitability, oftentimes denied to people of Mexican origin, has to be gained through a combination of social and cultural struggle. This artist’s desire for the modest utopia of Aztlán as personal and collective national space, manifests itself every time individual subjects seek to redefine divisions in the social spheres of labor, sexuality, and family. It is only by voicing and striving for their aspirations and needs that they will overcome the constraints of institutional Catholicism, Chicano patriarchy, and corporate “Amerika.”

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Conclusion

So, don’t give me your tenets and your laws. […] What I want is an accounting with all three cultures—white, Mexican, Indian. I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails. And if going home is denied me, then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/ La Frontera

In this journey towards and across Chicana social and imaginary nepantla spaces, Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the borderlands has provided me with the main critical trope to examine the critique and/or reconceptualization of space in works by Mexican American women.1 As Chicano writer and critic Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez puts it, the imaginative geography of what he terms the “wandering borderlands” manifests itself in very distinct and often dissimilar ways depending on the particular bicultural Mexican American context in which a work has emerged—be it the northern or southern geographical U.S.Mexico border, or any other social space where both cultures exist. Therefore, the apparently generic metaphor of the borderlands has become inflected with the particularity of the literary texts engaged here, so that each of the works is examined in the light of specific socio-cultural contexts and individual 1

As I was finishing this conclusion, Debra Castillo and Socorro Tabuenca published Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (2002), a groundbreaking, transnational study on the representation of the border by Mexican and Chicana writers. The study is a relevant critical re-evaluation of the social and imaginative geography of the border in literature, as it expands the perspectives of U.S. and Mexican scholars and critics with that of an emerging body of Mexican and Chicana women writers. These writings, they argue, challenge the pre-eminence of the border as a universalized metaphorical space in critical and theoretical studies.

mentalities. While each short story, novel, drama, and autobiography has retained its cultural and literary distinctiveness, it has also come upon the socio-political imaginary through a critical practice that has weaved in various theoretical threads to inquire into the relationship between the spaces of intimacy and the public spaces of modernity. In a second sense, therefore, the borderlands has described a transdisciplinary “going beyond,” a constant straddling of genres and academic fields. Through this metaphor I have accounted for the interdisciplinary methodology of feminist cultural studies I have followed in the study. This methodology is still, as Norma Alarcón says, an unfulfilled “cognitive desire.” “Border crossing” is the allegory this critic chooses to describe the activity of the academic who goes beyond boundaries and who therefore does not find a “space” or a “home” in any of the already established academic disciplines and critical languages. Although Alarcón applies this description to Chicana critics, it is certainly applicable to any critic who sees his/her work as a political intervention, and who draws from a variety of disciplines and critical discourses. This predicament is often shared by all those interested in the dialectics between form, historicity, and culture. By historicity and culture I understand not only the ideological circumstances and “structure of feeling” that make a work possible and that this work may or may not question and change, but also the critical assumptions brought upon the text, which often need to be questioned and placed under erasure. In the case of the Chicana critic, Alarcón sustains that she is usually caught between European textual aesthetic theories of “écriture féminine” and an Anglo-American criticism that tends to produce general theories about the oppression of women. Alarcón does not dismiss either method, but argues that neither is “complex enough to explain our diverse sociosymbolic formations, positionalities or heterogeneous histories” (“Cognitive Desires” 70). Hence, as she says drawing on Richard Rodríguez, for most Chicana critics, a “cognitive desire” is not only “a hunger of memory”, the longing for a lost past; it is additionally a “hunger” 372

for critical intervention on someone’s else’s interpretation of that past (“Cognitive Desires” 66). We are therefore not simply referring to the recovery of the past, but also to how that past can be apprehended in relation to the place Mexican Americans have occupied in the legal, economic, social, and historical discourses of Anglo-America (66). Alarcón establishes a “tenuous” connection between those Chicanos and Chicanas working on the border or trying to cross it even at the risk of losing their lives, and those Chicana critics that are constantly on the move between disciplines in the academy. She situates the Chicana critic in the place of the “différend,” a site of conflict that does not presuppose a monologic logic or discourse, and where the critic is both an insider and an outsider with respect to multiple structures which “cannot easily be translated into each other” (68). Without doing away with or dismissing the already existing disciplinary and critical discourses, the borderlands has made it possible for me to travel between them, making them more permeable and porous to each other. It is thus I have interpreted the conflation of social and imaginary spaces in these hybrid texts as a reenactment of politics and aesthetics. One must admit that the scope of the performative effects of this “resistance literature”—to use Barbara Harlow’s term—and its creative politics is limited and unpredictable, since much of it is inevitably subject to unfair readings and to the laws of an “ethnicized” market looking for exotica. Indeed, these works may be bought and read due to what Robert Carr, evoking the art critic Robert Hughes, has called “the shock of the new,” the commodifying pressures of an increasingly “ethnicized” market (Carr 80). That “shock” might be the chief reason why we decide to read these works, but they do eventually make us aware of the bicultural social dynamics in many social spaces and of the demands of their counterpublics. I firmly believe with Ellen McKracken that despite the obvious marketing conditionings, there is a strong social critique in the writings that I have chosen

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to discuss that it is difficult to bypass.2 They are to some degree contributing to the “opening” up of American social and cultural public spheres. They have also helped Cultural, Chicano and Ethnic Studies reach more dialectical, less compartmentalized and parochial approaches that take into account the diversity of experiences and backgrounds that inform the texts of the socalled “minorities” in the U.S. By voicing female subjectivities socially and geographically emplaced in the United States while always imagining themselves in threshold spaces, Chicana writers suggest that it is not so easy to cross to the other side, that to migrate to the U.S., as Adrienne Rich puts it, is not necessarily to be “twice born” (Love 143). In Rich's view, the pressures to assimilate delete aspects of ourselves and make us “less dimensional than we really are” (143). For the recovery and remembrance of these sometimes lost different dimensions of the self, Rich says we must turn to the testimonies and oral traditions that were never written and were superseded by others. As I have shown, the recovery of the past effected by these writings through oral, personal, and familial testimonies, as well as through myth and history, calls attention to what Rich calls “the politics of location.” These are the circumstances in which women have been silenced and dominated, the ways in which being in a particular place on the map at a particular time in history has determined what they have become and what they desire to be: “where, when, and under what conditions have women acted and been acted on, as women” (Love 213-214). The textual and ideological representations of the Chicana borderlands in these fictional, dramatic, and autobiographical writings by Mexican American women have been read as instances of the ways in which “real” sociogeographical locations and cultural contexts shape Chicana 2

For a detailed analysis of the middle ground Latina narratives occupy within capitalist market structures that do not fully engulf them see Ellen McKracken’s New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999).

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subjectivity and its imaginary spatial images of collective resistance. Approaches to space as the intersection of physical, social, mental, and political terrains have informed my critical interpretation of these writings. Feminist theorists like Judith Butler and thinkers like Henri Lefebvre view the body as a “social space” where social rules and norms and individual desires and impulses meet. Current critical approaches to space presuppose that the material disposition of objects and people has cultural meaning and results from power relations. Whether we are speaking of symbolic or actual social spaces, gender relations have an important role to play in our understanding of space and are at the root of such dichotomies as private/public, national/foreign, personal/political, and physical/mental. Without doing away with such binaries completely, I have looked at the cultural codes that inform the spatial configurations in the writings by Chicanas, and explored the extent to which these configurations challenge dominant spatial divisions. The question I have set out to answer is therefore the following: If by virtue of their mixed origins, mixed cultural values, and mixed allegiances and feelings to both U.S. and Mexican culture, Chicana writers inhabit ambiguous social and imaginary spaces that we may describe with the geographical metaphor of the borderlands, how is this different space made manifest in their writings? These borderlands spaces are always multiple and mobile social and psychological sites of contradiction and resistance (the battlegrounds and the crossroads). On the one hand, Chicanas have represented their everyday spaces as topographies of absence, conflict, otherness, alienation, and negativity. On the other, they have envisioned spaces of political and cultural innovation and regeneration. The creative consciousness of those women living variegated borderlands has (en)gendered radically new Mexican American images that dissolve the boundaries between public and private spheres, the material and the aesthetic, the self and the other, the home and the world, the national and the foreign, the present and the past. Through imaginary 375

configurations of space whose radix is at times to be found in the political aesthetics of the Chicano Movement, at times in a combination of working-class and feminist literary traditions, and/or in the fusion of personal and collective mythologies, Chicanas have proposed new ways of looking at the world in less compartmentalized, unambiguous, divisional terms. In the first part of my analysis of the works (Part II) I have focused on the ways in which this literature reveals social relations in space to provide a “cognitive mapping” of life in the interstices of codes and economies. The borderlands is present even in the apparently most local and familial zones, in the very heart of the home, family, the community and the self. In the case of Isabella Ríos’ Victuum and in Viramontes’ and Cisneros’ narratives, the domestic realm is the borderlands, for it is in that sphere where Mexican and American patriarchal orders intersect. In the midst of these two orders, the Chicana is imprisoned— locked in and locked out—by the restrictions imposed by Mexican/Chicano culture, and by the Anglo mainstream culture and an environment where she is rebuked as “Mexican” and as “woman.” It is in the domestic realm and the female body, often impinged upon by dominant middle-class notions of domesticity, beauty, and romance, that Mexican American women will first see their expectations deflated and feel their triple marginalization as women, working-class subjects, and “Mexicans” in U.S. society. As argued in Chapter 4, the references to the difficult and dangerous crossing of borders are constantly present in the writings by Chicanas. As a corollary of transgression and dislocation, crossing entails confusion and aporia. The border, that place that, according to Anzaldúa is so difficult to inhabit because it is a place of contradictions, is where the characters of Viramontes, Cisneros, Castillo and Moraga stand. Viramontes’ characters are the illegal, the poor, the elderly, the sick, the unwanted, and the victims of urban violence and economic exploitation. Both Viramontes and Cisneros have refrained from giving a univocal view of what it is to be Mexican and/or 376

Mexican American and have pointed at the internal divisions within the self and the community. These divisions have suffused Ana Castillo’s first acclaimed epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters, where the two female protagonists are never safe. The border between Chicana fetishized identity and lesbian identity is where Cherríe Moraga’s Mexican Medea goes mad. Her Hungry Woman is a dystopian tragedy that draws on the Mexican and European legend and myth of La Llorona and Medea, both of which relate the tragic fate of women who dare cross borders. By relating the stories of some of their protagonists to the figures of Medea, La Llorona and Malinche, Chicana writers evoke rebelious female figures who go beyond the limits of “female decorum” and the national imaginary in spite of socio-cultural pressures. In some of the works analyzed in chapter 4, ethnicity, the reconstruction of myth, and historical materials, are a momentary refuge for the displaced. One of the premises of this work has been that, since the 1960s, ethnicity and identity politics in the U.S. have been fundamental strategies of cultural and social affirmation: a defensive reaction against a discriminatory social system, male domination and, more recently, to the consequences of global economic disorder, rampant demographic change, and neoconservative approaches to immigration and education. Yet, I have also drawn attention to the critical attitudes of some Chicana writers towards the fetishization of ethnicity and otherness. In some of these writings ethnicity, if momentarily healing, is nonetheless no unconditional remedy for displacement. As the sociologist Manuel Castells puts it, ethnicity may “build havens, but not heavens” (64). In the writings of Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, as well as in the narratives by Cisneros, Castillo, and Viramontes, ethnicity is charged with socio-political content and becomes a resisting cultural practice, a necessary symbol of social struggle and of the struggle for new meanings. In contrast, most of the works I discuss in the fourth chapter of this book acknowledge that ethnicity is not the panacea against social discrimination, cultural domination, and political oppression. 377

Manuel Castells sees the internal flaw of the “ideal” cultural communes that display little internal differentiation: “[T]heir strength, and their ability to provide refuge, solace, character, certainty and protection, comes precisely from their communal character, from their collective responsibility, canceling individual projects” (67). As was the case with the Chicano/a political and cultural “invented” community, communalism has often led to fundamentalism, narrow-mindedness, thus transforming, in Castells’ words, “communal heavens into heavenly hells” (67). The ideal of community, feminist political and social theorist Iris M. Young argues, denies difference, and “detemporalizes” our understanding of social change (301-302). The opposition between individualism and community, identified with the opposition man/woman, public/private, may have some critical force, but it does not describe the complexity of personal and social relations in time and space. The term community usually refers to the people of a place with we identify and share a set of attributes. Yet, common identification also entails exclusion, the denial of differences within oneself, of similarities with others, as well as disregard of the complexity of social life (Young 311). This seems indeed to be the message of Helena Viramontes, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Cherríe Moraga. Despite their awareness that the displaced have a pressing need for an imaginary haven, they often represent the borderlands of cultures, values, and economies as battlegrounds. For all their references to ethnicity as a symbolic source of identity and selfhood, some of the works by Cisneros, Castillo, Moraga, and Viramontes adopt critical stances toward the exoticization, mystification, and fabrication of cultural difference. They highlight inner conflicts caused by economic, cultural, gender, or racial clashes showing that there is no definite Chicana subject taking one single position towards Mexican, Chicano/a, and American cultural values; hence Anzaldúa’s metaphor of the “thin edge of barbwire” to describe a home where the Chicana committed subject is by no means comfortable nor safe (13). 378

The contemporary Mexican American writers examined in this book deliberately explore the traumatic consequences of life in multiple borderlands, but they also inquire into the creative and resisting possibilities of living in-between histories, cultures, and economies. The rootlessness of a life on the edge spurs the desire for crossroads and passages, for spaces that bring together the multiple subject positions, concerns, and cultural interests of Mexican Americans. Thus, Chicanas have attempted to transcend national, regional, social, gender, and geographical boundaries in their writings. The pieces analyzed in Part III of this work (chapters 5 and 6) do not cease to deal with the complexity of life on the border, but demonstrate a willingness to transform social spaces and aesthetic and political practices. They also aim to give spiritual sustenance through images that encompass the private and the public, the individual and the collective, art and life, ethics and aesthetics, the physical and the metaphysical, the local and the global. The attic, the barn, the imagined house in the desert, and “queer Aztlán” may well correspond to the spaces of “close intimacy” described by Bachelard, but they also correspond to the conflation of what Lefebvre would term “lived” and “representational” spaces, that is, the private and public spaces of everyday life and of art. They are examples of how in these writers’ creative politics, life turns into what Eagleton has termed an “aesthetics of materialist ethics.” Based on the knowledge of social power structures, cultural exchanges, and individual and collective desires, spatial images have emerged to challenge the division between the abstract and the concrete, the physical and the mental, the inner and the outer. They have also been re-aproppriated to offer alternatives to the mainstream American symbology on the Western expansion and the “civilization” of the Southwest. For writers like Viramontes, Cisneros, and Mora, the borderlands adopts the form of homeplaces where individual and collective confidence, pride, sustenance, and political resistance may be drawn. In Cisneros’ “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” the communal space provided by the church and by the tradition of 379

exvotos and ofrendas becomes a heterotopia related to many locations and individuals in south Texas. In Mango Street and Under the Feet of Jesus individual outgrowth and collective resistance are adjoined through the spatial images of the attic and the barn. The borderlands has been manifest in imaginary social spaces of respect for difference, in the modest social, enviromental utopias as Cherríe Moraga’s “queer Aztlán.” Her social dramas based on real events, Heroes and Saints and Watsonville, assemble several places in one single space. As Michel Foucault argues, “the theatre brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of spaces that are foreign to one another” (“Of Other Spaces” 25). Indeed, it would be otherwise difficult to bring together, as Moraga does, the fields, the home, the workplace, the street, the body, and the space of ritual and ceremony. The stage is itself a heterotopia that allows Moraga to talk about Aztlán as encompassing many aspects of the “real” lives and struggles of Chicanos and Chicanas, Mexicanos and Mexicanas. Finally, the borderlands has been connected to dreamlike spaces that bring together the scattered lives of an extended family living on and beyond the border. In her family memoir or collective autobiography Pat Mora evokes a sentimentalized space “in which time never stops building up” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces” 26); the garden, the desert, and the open house on the border are the imaginative places where the stories of the living and the dead come together. The construction of House of Houses out of bits and pieces of family history turns the work into what Foucault would call a “heterotopia of compensation.” Mora’s imaginary house, conflating different spaces, times, stories, languages, and sayings, compensates for incomplete memories, for the jumbled history of a family traversed by the U.S.-Mexico border. “To be disoriented in space is to be psychotic” (49), contends the American critic Judith Fryer in Felicitous Space (1986). Fryer bases her assertion on the work of the social anthropologist 380

Edward Hall, who maintains that each of us has in some way internalized a space that is the mold or envelope where we cast our actions, behaviors, and on which our sanity depends. In this study I have argued that the space Chicana writers have internalized is not necessarily fixed or stable. Although this instability may at times be the source of uncertainty and confusion, it does not make them psychotic. The real and imaginary borderlands or nepantla spaces created in these writers’ works respond to site-specific social, political, cultural, and personal configurations and respond indeed to a sense of place. Thus, we have observed that spatial images and structures have served these women to meditate on what it means to live on the threshold, and to propose alternative ways of looking at the world, at society, and at women themselves. These spatial images and literary constructions, emerging out of chaotic social spaces and many-sided, resistant, and often perplexed subjectivities, suggest that space is not easily fragmented or divided without pain. Life on the threshold by choice or obligation places the subject on a battleground but also on a crossroads, as the threshold also bears a constant potential for the reinvention of the self and, by extension, for the transformation of the social and imaginary contours of the United States.

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402

Index A Acuña, Rodolfo, 103, 137, 148 aesthetics, 172, 173, 206, 221, 296, 298, 330. See, Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic agribusiness, 44, 306, 341, 350, 353, 355. See industrial agriculture. Alarcón, Norma, 23, 48, 88, 113-119, 123, 128-130, 157, 198, 252, 372, 373 Alurista, 106-108, 326 Anaya, Rudolfo, 108, 125, 145, 245; Bless Me Ultima, 122, 145; Heart of Aztlán, 108; The Legend of La Llorona, 120 Anderson, Benedict 94, 95, 115 Anzaldúa, Gloria: Borderlands/La Frontera, 15-21, 24, 38, 42-62, 76, 78, 88, 91, 108, 114-128, 219, 230, 245, 249, 251, 265, 269, 278, 282, 283, 287, 288, 298, 317, 336, 338, 353, 371, 376- 378 aporia, 58, 219, 283, 376 Armstrong, Nancy: Desire and Domestic Fiction, 307 Arte Público Press, 111 Arteaga, Alfred, 127 attic (as spatial image), 297, 298, 379, 380. autobiography, 24, 32, 35, 42, 49, 146, 349, 372. Collective autobiography, 16, 33, 42, 292, 318, 322, 330, 380 Aztlán, 21, 47, 48, 66, 101, 103, 105-110, 131, 145, 245, 273-278, 282, 288, 304, 326, 333, 335, 337, 339, 340, 341, 350, 352, 356, 368; Plan espiritual de, 341; Queer Aztlán, 339, 379, 380 B Bachelard, Gaston, 18, 85, 141, 175-178, 292, 294, 296, 314, 315, 318, 321, 379 barn (as spatial image), 312-315, 380 Barrera, Mario, 99, 100 barrio, 17, 130, 141, 142, 146, 147, 148, 150, 154, 155, 156, 160, 164, 166, 179, 181, 207, 225, 226, 228, 240, 242 Barthes, Roland: Mythologies, 56, 57 Bassnett, Susan, 34, 223 Baudrillard, Jean: Cultura y simulacro, 65 Baym, Nina, 80, 81, 86

beauty ("beauty system"), 156, 174, 193, 203-212, 376. See love Bhabha, Homi, 67, 76, 96, 210 Bierhorst, John: The Hungry Woman: Myths and Legends of the Aztecs, 281, 282 Bigsby, C.W.E.: Modern American Drama, 223 Bildungsroman, 145, 161, 163, 167, 177, 222, 306 Bilingual Press, 111 Blau-Duplessis, Rachel, 162 Blea, Irene: "Spaces like the Barrio", 142 border: U.S.-Mexico border, 130, 234, 319, 323, 371, 380 Border Feminism, 128 borderlands: as critical practice, 19–20; 21–38 as social and imaginary space, 38–60, Brodzki, Bella: Life/ Lines, 34, 146 Brontë, Charlotte: Jane Eyre, 297 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 125, 126, 190 Butler, Judith, 52, 68, 69, 90, 91, 128, 129, 282, 283, 375 C Cabeza de Baca, Fabiola: We Fed them Cactus, 147 Candelaria, Cornelia, 119 Canning, Charlotte, 354 Cantú, Norma Elia: Canícula, 320 Caramiñana i Pérez, Angela, 274 Carbonell, Neus, 232 Carby, Hazel, 36 Carpentier, Alejo: "De lo real maravilloso", 187 Carr, Robert, 373 Castells, Manuel, 30, 377, 378 Castillo, Ana, 16, 19, 34, 35, 135, 139, 173, 219-222, 244, 246, 254, 259, 260, 261, 264, 338, 356, 357, 365, 376, 377, 378; Massacre of the Dreamers, 260, 356, 357, 365; The Mixquiahuala Letters, 220, 222, 254-265, 377 Castillo, Debra, 23, 88, 112, 129, 157, 189, 191, 206, 234, 236, 253, 297, 298, 371 Catholicism, 50, 98, 117, 152, 162, 185, 187, 188-214, 248, 260, 297, 301, 309,

312, 324-327, 340, 345-347, 355, 357, 365, 367, 369 Chávez, César, 102, 106, 305, 341, 342 Chávez, Denise, 222, 323 Chicana feminism, 128, 130 Chicano (label), 93, 102, 126 Chicano activism, 57, 93, 97, 98, 102, 108, 118, 123, 135, 254, 256, 268, 336, 369; Chicanismo, 66, 102, 110; Chicano Movement, 16, 48, 102, 107, 112, 123-125, 149, 342, 376 Chicana identity, 259, 260; Chicano/a identity, 17, 93, 219, 275, 282, 355 Chicano identity, 93, 125, 255 Chodorow, Nancy, 150, 151, 152, 153 cholos, 49 Churchill, Caryl: Top Girls, 224 Cihuatateo, 274, 279, 280 Cisneros, Sandra, 78, 123, 135, 139, 141, 145, 168-171, 185, 193, 203, 206, 219222, 244, 246, 250, 254-256, 288, 292, 295-297, 314, 330, 376- 379 The House on Mango Street, 174–85, 210– 11, 222, 250, 295, 296, 295–97, 302, 380; Woman Hollering Creek, 174, 207, 211–17, 247, 249, 250, 253, 254, 256, 258, 247–59, 298-302 Cixous, Hélène, 51, 53, 87, 165 Coatlicue, 57, 121, 257, 271, 282, 283 cognitive mapping, 31, 376 collective self, 145, 164, 315 Cooper Alarcón, Daniel, 57, 108, 110, 244, 245, 246, 261 corrido, 24, 230, 231, 232 Coward, Rosalind, 81, 306 Coyolxauhqui, 271, 282 Culler, Jonathan, 52, 165 cultural geography, 19, 30, 72, 76 cultural studies, 21, 29, 30, 36, 37, 75, 82, 130, 372 curandera, 152, 318 D de Hoyos, Angela, 118 de Lauretis, Teresa, 79, 128 del Castillo, Adelaida, 119, 120 Derrida, Jacques 24, 33, 52, 58, 59, 60, 6870, 86, 165, 219, 231,232 desert, 293, 319, 321, 322, 324-329 deterritorialization, 44, 236 Díaz, Junot, 234

404

discourse genre, 32, 36 domesticity, 141, 153, 156, 158, 159, 174, 191, 193, 201, 203, 212, 234, 376 drama, 34, 35, 57, 118, 144, 223, 224, 272, 335, 340, 344, 350, 353 dystopia, 83, 265, 273-276, 284, 377

E Eagleton, Terry, 59, 60, 177, 379; Literary Theory, 24, 28-31; The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 292–295, 314. Enríquez, Evangelina, 136 ethnicity: commodification of, 17, 245, 256, 316, 333, 373; postmodern understanding of, 67–72 ethnonationalism, 48

F family, 18, 34, 35, 43, 45, 59, 80, 110, 118, 135, 136, 137, 139, 141, 142, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153-177, 180, 186, 191- 202, 210, 214, 216, 236, 239-241, 248, 251, 255, 257, 259, 262, 265, 268- 275, 277, 292, 295, 298, 302, 304, 307, 311, 312, 316- 330, 336, 345, 346, 351, 352, 354, 369, 376, 380; "making familia from scratch" (Moraga), 269, 271 Fanon, Franz, 105-107 fantasy (as destabilizing strategy), 166169, 284 female body, 17, 57, 78, 86-91, 115, 116, 186, 189, 197, 198, 252, 271, 272, 276, 278, 306, 343, 348, 366, 369, 375, 376. As borderland, 203-217 femiminism: and postmodernism, 69 femininity, 17, 51, 86, 110, 114, 116, 150, 153, 154, 185, 194, 195, 197, 200, 201, 206, 207, 210, 226, 228, 234, 345 feminism: middle-class feminism, 336 feminist drama, 223–24 feminist theory: and spatial metaphors, 84– 91 Fernández Buey, Francisco, 15, 16 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 104, 105 Fernández, Roberta, 235 Ferré, 192, 193, 196 Fiedler, Leslie: Love and Death in the American Novel, 86 Flax, Jane, 68

Foucault, Michel, 68, 75, 76, 289, 306, 329, 354, 380 Franco, Jean, 83, 116, 157, 294 Frank, Joseph: The Idea of Spatial Form, 85 Fraser, Nancy, 131 Freire, Paulo, 260 frontier, 314; versus borderlands, 23, 24 Frow, John, 25-32 Fryer, Judith, 81, 380 Fuchs, Lawrence E., 95, 96 Fuss, Diana, 89

hooks, bell, 18, 22, 48, 74, 76, 115, 288, 289, 292, 316, 317 house: as prison, 142-217, 158, 160, 227– 228; as protected intimacy, 18, 19, 83, 292, 316–32 Hughes, Robert, 373 Huitzilopotchli, 271, 281 Hungry Woman (myth), 280–81 Hurtado, Aída, 30, 102, 111 hybrid genre. See out-law genre, autobiography I

G garden (as symbolic space) 289, 312-314, 319- 330, 380 Gilbert, Helen, 280 Gilbert, Sandra, 297 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 81, 200, 201 Gilroy, Paul, 36, 37 global (in relation to local), 17, 20, 35, 39, 65, 67, 72-74, 104, 130, 181, 220, 225, 305, 317, 334, 335, 377, 379 Goldhill, Simon, 279 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 273, 274, 338 Gould, John, 279 Graff: Professing Literature, 24, 27 Grebler, Leo, 136 Guadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of, 44, 123, 124 Guadalupe, Virgin of, 44, 110-117, 122124, 192, 197, 257, 299-301, 346, 357, 364-366 Gubar, Susan, 297 H Hall, Stuart, 29, 68, 70, 381 Harvey, David, 65, 333 Herrera-Sobek, 23, 121, 228, 230, 231 heterosexuality 47-50, 115, 120,162, 193, 209, 210, 268, 275, 277, 280, 282, 339, 346, 354, 355, 369 heterotopia, 62, 75, 83, 289, 298, 321, 329, 355, 380 Hinojosa, Rolando, 125, 127, 172, 222 Hispanic (label): 97, 98, 101, 103, 105, 112, 125, 126 homeplace, 62, 83, 288, 291, 292, 305, 315 homosexuality, 115, 297, 346; gay, 338, 339, 345, 350; See lesbianism homosociality, 115

identity: postmodern understanding of, 67– 72. See Chicano, Chicana, Chicano/a identity. imaginary space (related to social space), 16, 18, 335, 340, 355, 373 industrialized agriculture, 314. See agribusiness. intertextuality, 29-32. See discourse genre. Irigaray, Luce: "And the One Doesn't Stir...", 186, 202; Speculum of the Other Woman, 193; This Sex Which Is Not One, 87 J Jameson, Fredric. "Postmodernism or the Cultural...", 53, 65. See cognitive mapping, and Political Unconscious, The K Kallen, Horace, 95, 96 Kaminsky, Mary, 118, 119, 277 Kaplan, Caren, 35, 42, 49, 60, 82, 88, 116 Kearney, Michael, 120, 121 Keefe, Susan, 147 Kennedy, Gerald J., 222 Kingston, Maxine Hong: The Woman Warrior, 115, 166 Kitchen Table Press, 111 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 108, 256, 327 Kolodny, Anette, 24, 81 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, 115 Kristeva, Julia, 51-53, 86, 87, 186, 190 L La Facultad (Anzaldúa), 54, 55, 60, 287

405

La Llorona, 57, 120, 121, 122, 123, 216, 217, 229, 234-238, 243, 280-283, 377 Lacan, Jacques, 51, 86, 186, 281, 283 Lafaye, Jacques: Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe, 117 landscape, 49, 76, 217, 263, 306, 310, 319, 320, 325, 355 Lauter, Paul, 170 Laviera, Tato, 38, 40, 41 Leal, Luis, 21, 22, 103, 233 Lefebvre, Henri, 76-78, 288, 294, 335, 375, 379 León-Portilla, Miguel, 15, 219 lesbianism, 43, 50, 51, 53, 54, 60, 265, 269-277, 282, 336-338, 366, 377 liminality, 15, 22, 61, 91, 251 Limón, José, 117, 120, 121, 122 Lionnet, Françoise, 146 literature (as discourse), 24–33 local (related to global), 17, 18, 20, 33, 34, 39, 41, 65, 72-74, 127, 130, 131, 155, 179, 214, 220, 225, 233, 247, 250, 258, 265, 287, 296, 299, 304, 305, 316, 317, 324, 328, 329, 331-335, 352, 358, 369, 376, 379 Lomelí, Francisco, 23, 34, 126, 144, 145, 146 love, 80, 85, 116, 121, 137, 141, 162, 174, 176, 191-197, 203-217, 228, 253-269, 273-278, 299, 300, 307, 314, 315, 324326, 337, 349, 366, 367. See beauty Ludmer, Josefina, 84, 195 Lugonés, María, 219 Luscher, Robert M., 222 Lyotard, Jean-François: The Postmodern Condition, 65 M MacCannell, Dean and Judith Flower, 203212 Macherey, Pierre, 28 MacKinnon, Catherine, 354 Madwoman in the Attic, The, 297 magical realism, 187, 188, 190, 367 MALCS, 111 Malinche (or Malintzin), 57, 110-114, 118123, 191, 212, 229, 252, 253, 267, 268, 350, 377 malinchismo, 110-123, 267 margin (in feminist theory), 22, 46, 50-57, 61, 115, 146

406

marriage, 100, 141, 160-163, 174, 176, 183, 193, 195, 198, 203-205, 210, 214, 250, 262, 306 Martí, José: Nuestra América, 103-105 Martínez Raventós, Dolores, 206 marvelous realism. See magical realism. Mary Louise, 34, 222 Massey, Doreen, 72-74, 316, 333, 334 maternal thinking, 234, 292 MAWNA, 111 McKracken, Ellen: New Latina Narrative, 373, 374 McWilliams, Carey, 101 MEChA, 131 Medea (myth of), 121, 265, 272-284, 377 melting pot (metaphor). See Zangwill. Messinger Cypress, Sandra, 114 mestiza consciousness, 18, 21, 42-57, 91, 114, 115, 128, 207, 249, 251, 252, 262, 276, 283, 287, 288, 297, 299, 353, 371 Mexicanness, 93, 94, 244, 246, 252, 254, 256, 329 Mexico (representations of), 108–10, 244256. middle-class womanhood, 80, 81, 141, 144, 150-167, 203, 206, 210, 212, 216, 252, 293, 296, 297, 345, 376 migrant workers, 102, 160, 169, 305, 311, 361 mind (versus body), 89-91, 168–71 Mirandé, Adolfo, 136 Mitchell, Juliet, 51 modest utopia, 61, 289, 335, 354, 356, 369 Modleski, Tania, 215, 216 Mohanty, Chandra, 53, 129, 138 Monk, Janice, 82 Mora, Pat: Borders, 24, 323, 326; House of Houses, 293, 316, 319-332, 380; Nepantla, 15, 292, 317-321, 325, 328, 331 Moraga, Cherríe: Heroes and Saints, 224, 340-356, 359, 365, 366, 368, 380; Loving in the War Years, 118, 245, 265-269, 336, 346, 349; The Hungry Woman, 121, 220, 224, 265, 272-284, 339, 340, 364, 377; The Last Generation, 245, 269, 270, 271, 277, 278, 280, 282, 337-339, 352, 368; This Bridge Called My Back, 88, 265, 336, 337; Waiting in the Wings, 265, 271, 272, 346; Watsonville, 34, 340, 356358, 360, 362-368, 380 Morrison, Toni: The Bluest Eye, 238

motherhood, 113, 120, 155, 162, 183, 191, 193, 197, 198, 202, 234, 236, 264, 270-272, 277, 278 myth: female revision of, 110–23; liberated mythopoesis, 280–82 N Nash, June, 281 nationalism, 18, 37, 39, 40, 48, 59, 68, 73, 74, 88, 91, 94-97, 101, 103, 107, 108, 110, 115, 117, 128, 148, 235, 243, 254, 272-280, 282, 284, 339, 352, 366; and sexuality, 115–23, 276–78 Norwood, Vera, 82 novel: in relation to short story, 172; migrant novel, 306, 308, 314; of female liberation, 303, 307 O O’Connor, Flannery, 314, 315 Oboler, Susan, 30, 98, 99, 101, 102 Olivares, Juan, 178, 179 Olsen, 83; "Silences", 168, 169, 170, 171; "Tell Me a Riddle", 198 Olsen, Tillie, 81, 170; "As I Stand Here Ironing", 198; "Silences", 176; "Tell Me a Riddle", 198 Omi, Michael, 97 oppositional consciousness, 287, 336 Ortego, Philip D., 112, 124, 125 Ortiz, Fernando: transculturación, 71, 244 Ortner, Sherry, 90, 324 out-law genre, 42 P pachuco, 49, 233 Padilla M., Félix, 102 Padilla, Amado, 147 Paredes, Américo, 23, 24, 222, 230, 231, 233, 361 Parker, Andrew, 115, 116 Pateman, Carol The Disorder of Women, 79, 166 patriarchal mother, 185, 268 Paz, Octavio, 112-121, 233, 243 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 71 phallic mother, 281. See Terrible Mother phallogocentric, 165 Plath, Sylvia, 81, 84 Political Unconscious, 31, 229 Postmodern realism, 173 postmodernity, 65

Pratt, Geraldine, 83, 88, 178 Pratt, Mary Louise, 171, 172, 173 private realm (related to public), 17, 20, 74, 78-80, 83, 131, 136, 150, 151, 158174, 184, 196, 235, 240, 265, 287, 293, 295, 307, 335, 339, 345, 347, 349, 355, 372, 375-379 R racialization, 47, 94, 97, 108, 157, 257, 277; of ethnicity, 94, 118, 284; of gender, 117, 118, 120, 230, 252, 275 racism, 47, 49, 100, 148, 157, 238, 246, 289, 354 Ramón Saldívar: Chicano Narrative, 355 realism, 75, 167, 224, 294, 351 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 152, 188, 279, 318, 319, 322, 331 relational subject and self, 152, 164, 260, 353 Rhys, Jean, 298 Rich, Adrienne, 170, 374; Love, Bread and Poetry, 374; Of Woman Born, 202 Ríos, Isabella (Diane López), 19, 376; Victuum, 34, 135, 139-169 Rivera, Tomás: ...y no se lo tragó la tierra, 125, 145, 172, 222, 257, 305, 308, 309 Rodó, José Enrique: Ariel, 103, 104 Rooney, Ellen, 70 Rosenfelt, Deborah, 170 Rubin-Suleiman, Susan, 185 Rubio-Goldsmith, Raquel, 326 Ruddick, Sarah, 131, 235, 292 Ruiz de Burton: The Squatter and the Don, 147 Ryan, Mary, 80, 131 S Said, Edward, 67 Saldívar, José David, 23, 126; Border Matters, 24, 105, 123, 127 Saldívar, Ramón, 23, 126; Chicano Narrative, 126, 165 Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, 23; "Border Feminism", 128 Salvaggio, Ruth, 84, 85 Sánchez, Rosaura, 23, 137, 208 Sandoval, Chela. See oppositional consciousness. Saragoza, Alex, 108 Schenk, Celeste: Life/Lines, 146 Schlesinger, Arthur, 95

407

sexuality, 61, 62, 83, 120, 131, 298, 339, 340, 369; female sexuality, 86, 137, 190, 197, 229, 268, 307, 315; in Anzaldúa, 336; in Cherríe Moraga, 277, 278, 280, 283, 336, 345, 354, 355, 366; male sexuality, 197 short story, 24, 34, 35, 171- 173, 221, 313, 372; as popular genre, 171–73; shortstory cycle or sequence, 171-174, 207, 221, 222 Showalter, Elaine, 80, 87, 88 silence, 47, 61, 84, 112-116, 141, 169, 171, 186, 190, 192, 195, 228, 229, 237-243, 253, 282, 284, 313, 325, 344, 349; in Helena Viramontes, 235–44 Simmen, Edward, 101 Smith, Henry Nash, 314, 330 Smith, Jonathan, 310, 321 Smith, Sidonie, 35, 89 social space, 17, 19, 35, 60, 62 Soja, Edward W., 75, 76, 225, 288 Sollors, Werner: Beyond Ethnicity, 95, 96 Soto, Gary, 222, 233 Soto, Shirlene, 120 space: and women in literary theory, 79–91 social space (in geography), 72–79. See Lefebvre Spivak, Gayatri, 24, 47, 50, 52, 69, 70, 88, 115, 282 Steinbeck, John, 124, 306, 314, 315 Subcomandante Marcos, 333, 334 subject position, 68, 127, 221, 299, 353, 379 supernatural, 116, 120, 144, 152, 163, 164, 237 Suro, Roberto, 98, 100, 225, 226 symbolic order, 51, 80, 86, 160, 161, 284 T Tabuenca, Socorro, 371 teatro campesino, 272, 335, 340, 342, 350, 359, 364 Terrible Mother archetype, 122 Third Woman Press, 111 Thomas, Piri, 234 Tompkins, Joanne, 280 Tonantzin, 57, 117, 118 Trujillo, Carla, 365, 366

408

V Valdez, Luis, 106, 109, 233, 244, 272, 335, 336, 340, 342, 343, 347, 350, 353, 364; Los Vendidos, 244, 350; The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, 343, 347, 350; Zoot Suit, 273, 353 Vaquera-Vásquez, Santiago, 23, 371 Vasconcelos, José, 103, 118 Vázquez Montalbán, Manuel, 333-335, 338 Villarreal, José Antonio: Pocho, 125, 135, 245, 246 Viramontes: "Miss Clairol", 207, 208, 209, 240- 242; "Nopalitos", 141, 170, 308; "Tears on My Pillow", 207, 237, 241; "The Jumping Bean" 303-304; The Moths, 174, 185-196, 234, 239- 242, 248, 292; Under the Feet of Jesus, 171, 174, 302- 314, 380 W Waugh, Patricia, 68, 83, 120, 122, 152, 153, 156, 164, 166, 294, 295, 307 West End Press, 111 West, Cornel, 130 West, John O., 121 Williams, Raymond, 37 Wilson, Pete, 100 Winant, Howard, 97 Wittig, Monique, 51, 53 women of color, 88, 115, 128, 129, 208, 337 Woolf, Virginia, 81, 84, 170, 171, 176, 297; "Professions for Women", 51; A Room of One's Own, 168 Y Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 53 Ybarra, Priscilla, 367 Young, Iris M., 378 Yúdice, George, 24, 46, 53 Z Zangwill, Israel, 94, 96 Zapatista Movement, 334, 338 Zavella, Patricia, 136-138