Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations

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10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia

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Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century



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The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations Juanita Heredia



Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century

TRANSNATIONAL LATINA NARRATIVES IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Copyright © Juanita Heredia, 2009. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61737–7 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Heredia, Juanita, 1966– Transnational Latina narratives in the twenty-first century : the politics of gender, race, and migrations / Juanita Heredia. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–61737–7 (alk. paper) 1. American literature—Hispanic American authors—History and criticism. 2. American literature—Mexican American authors—History and criticism. 3. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. American literature—21st century—History and criticism. 5. Hispanic American women—Intellectual life. 6. Mexican American women—Intellectual life. 7. Transnationalism in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. 9. Race in literature. I. Title. PS153.H56H47 2009 810.9⬘928708968—dc21

2008051904

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Transnational Latina Narratives One Two

1

Denise Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante (2001): The Making of a Transnational Border Community

13

Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002): Translating Gender and Genealogy Across the U.S./Mexico Borderlands

35

Three Marta Moreno Vega’s When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004): The Diasporic Formation of an Afro-Latina Identity Four Five

61

Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005): A Diasporic Response to Multiracial Dominican Migrations Marie Arana’s American Chica (2001): Circular Voyages in the U.S./Peruvian Archipelago

85 109

Conclusion: Toward a Pan-Latina Global Alliance

131

Notes

135

Bibliography

153

Permissions/Credits

165

Index

167



CON T E N T S




This critical book has benefited from the support of many individuals, institutions, and other sources. I apologize in advance if I have left anyone out. I thank the Department of Modern Languages and the College of Arts and Letters at Northern Arizona University for allowing me a year’s academic sabbatical to complete this project that began in 2002. I am also grateful for two Intramural Summer Grants and various travel grants from Northern Arizona University that afforded me the time and resources to advance this study. I am indebted to the five authors whose works is the subject of this project: Marie Arana, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Angie Cruz, and Marta Moreno Vega. Their time, friendliness, and generosity over the past decade has made the writing of this book a truly remarkable experience. Thank you to Susan Bergholz for allowing me to reprint relevant materials. In addition, I have benefited tremendously from the friendships and intellectual exchanges with colleagues in Chicano/a, U.S. Latino/a, Caribbean, American, Latin American, diaspora, ethnic, gender, and transnational studies. I appreciate the feedback at the different stages in writing this critical book. My scholarly project has evolved from my work with my colleague and mentor, Héctor Calderón, which began with my graduate work in Chicano/a, Latino/a and Latin American literature at UCLA. My work in ethnic and im/migration studies was encouraged by another pioneer scholar, Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry, who I met during my years in Oregon. My colleague and friend, Barbara Curiel, and I have conversed over the years about ideas on gender and transnational studies, some that inform this study. I have also welcomed the critical support and advice from Frances Aparicio, Suzanne Oboler, Ralph Rodríguez, and Silvio Torres-Saillant in the ever-expanding field of Latino/a studies. I thank José Antonio Mazzotti for sharing



AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

Acknowledgments

pertinent materials on U.S. Andean studies. I am appreciative of Lisbeth Gant-Britton’s time and critical insights on diaspora, history, and comparative literary studies. I am grateful for the moral support of my colleagues in Ethnic Studies and Latin American Studies at Northern Arizona University. In particular, I thank Susan Deeds for her knowledge on Mexican culture and history as well as Geeta Chowdhry for her expertise on postcolonial studies. Eve Paludan deserves a big thank you for all her hard work in the support of this project. Furthermore, I acknowledge the students in my special topics graduate course on Latino/a Writers in the United States that I designed and taught for the first time at Northern Arizona University. I may have introduced them to the transnational Latina narratives of this study, but their enthusiasm and passion for the works provided stimulating and thought-provoking discussions that merit credit and recognition. I became more motivated to complete this book because I realized the urgent need to develop a critical study on these Latina authors and their engagement with local and global matters. My travels within the United States and to key Latin American cities, La Habana, Lima, and Mexico City, in the past ten years have energized this study. Thanks to the institutional support from Northern Arizona University, I visited the Archivo Nacional Filmoteca at the UNAM (National Autonomous University) in Mexico City as I researched Golden Age Mexican films, and criticism; the Arturo Schomburg Center for the Study of African American and African Studies in Harlem, New York City, to consult Puerto Rican and Dominican materials of the African diaspora; the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City; visits to El Museo de Yoruba and El Museo de la Revolución in La Habana, Cuba. I thank Héctor Calderón for his hospitality on two trips to Mexico City that allowed me to complete parts of chapters one and two. I am also grateful to Sheryl Lutjens for facilitating my trip to Cuba to visit important museums related to the African diaspora. Chapter one appeared in a briefer version as “From Golden Age Mexican Cinema to Transnational Border Feminism: the Community of Spectators in Loving Pedro Infante” in the journal, Aztlán 33.2. (2008). I thank the Chicano Studies Research Center at UCLA for permission to republish a version of this article. Modified parts of chapters two and five appeared in the article, “Voyages South and North: The Politics of Transnational Gender identity in Caramelo and American Chica,” in the journal, Latino Studies 5.3 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


viii

ix

(2007). I extend my gratitude to Palgrave Macmillan for permission to reprint these sections. It has been a professional privilege to work with Brigitte Schull and Lee Norton at Palgrave Macmillan. I appreciate their moral support, their promptness in answering questions and their enthusiasm. Returning to San Francisco for the tenure of my sabbatical to finish this project has been most inspiring. I am blessed for the support of family and friends. Having almost lost her to an aneurysm in 2005, I am so grateful that my Mom lives to see the completion of this project. She supports me endlessly with much love and affection and through all her wonderful meals. I am also indebted to both my parents, who were my first teachers of Latin American film, music, and literature. I cannot thank my brother Fel enough for all his patience and devotion to social justice. I am incredibly grateful to my husband Ian for crossing the Atlantic and for providing much encouragement and love, for cooking wonderful international cuisines and for reading the entire manuscript. Although we live in different parts of the United States, I continue to recognize my ongoing friendships, some since the 1980s, with William Chang and his family, Sally Hui, Bonnie Lai, I-Lin Kuo, Linda Mirelez, Dexter Porter, and Alex Quintanilla. Finally I return to my city, San Francisco, as a native daughter who knows her roots and routes around its geography and I never tire of learning more about its diverse cultures and meeting the people who give it life, be they Oaxacan descent students on the bus or an elderly Bolivian woman at a café. May my heart never leave this city.



Acknowledgments




During the decade of the 1980s, Chicana and Puerto Rican fiction writers in the United States, as a collective voice, emerged as the leading groups of U.S. Latinas to pave the way for other Latin American heritage women writers to follow in contributing to the American literary canon. The study of contemporary Latina narratives in this decade also received much critical attention with the publication of two collections, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings (1989).1 Critics in both works made an active effort to disseminate knowledge about U.S. Latina narratives where gender, along with race and class, became integral components that transcended academic disciplines at universities and conferences across the United States. In the 1990s, Latina writers reached another milestone by making a tremendous impact on the national literary scene in terms of a Latina literary boom, mentioned in the critical introduction of Latina SelfPortraits (2000).2 Women authors of Cuban, Dominican, Mexican, and Puerto Rican descent in the United States became more prominent because they were publishing narratives such as memoirs, novels, and short fiction that became mainstreamed by East Coast agents who made their works more accessible to a broader, national audience in the United States. 3 Toward the end of this decade, one also witnessed the emergence of a critical trend in transnational feminist studies that provided analytical tools to examine narratives by ethnic women writers, including Latinas, in a comparative context across national borders.4 For almost thirty years, substantial collective anthologies and individual articles on U.S. Latina narratives have been published that cover



Introduction: Transnational Latina Narratives

Transnational Latina Narratives

works of the twentieth century. However, hardly any critical study in the form of a single-authored monograph examines, from a transnational comparative perspective, the impact of twenty-first century narratives by a Pan-Latina group of women writers in the United States.5 Transnational Latina Narratives contributes to a critical discourse on Latina narratives published in the post-2000 decade by analyzing the intersection of gender, race, and migrations in the historical and social context of each writer’s national heritage in relationship to the United States. By juxtaposing writers of Dominican, Mexican, Peruvian, and Puerto Rican heritages/backgrounds, this study locates five particular Latina narratives by Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Marta Moreno Vega, Angie Cruz, and Marie Arana in a trans-American and transnational hemispheric dialogue between American and Latin American cultures, histories, and politics. Although these Latina narratives may be “made-in-the-USA,” their stories have roots and origins south of the U.S. border and in other global settings. Furthermore, this critical study demonstrates parallels in these narratives through the writers’ experiences of migrations physically and through memory between the United States and the respective Latin American nation. As a result of these voyages south and north, across time, I claim that these Latina writers participate in a revision of official and popular history across U.S./Latin American transnational borderlands. In other words, whether the characters in the narratives are located in a small town in southern New Mexico or a metropolitan city, such as New York, they are equally affected by shifting communities of im/migrants, residents, or citizens, in constant movement across cities, towns, and nations in the Americas. The contemporary U.S. Latina writers in this study have been educated primarily in U.S. academic institutions, both in outstanding creative writing programs (e.g., Iowa Writers’ Workshop, New York University, University of New Mexico) and graduate schools (e.g., Temple and Yale Universities). As a consequence of their formal education and personal experiences, these Latina writers have maintained cultural ties to their heritage by reclaiming their Latin American history and (popular) culture through film, literature, or music, to demonstrate a cultural affirmation of their hybrid identity, a fusion of American and Latin American inf luences, as a consequence of transnational migrations. In this critical study, I also draw attention to the identity formation of mixed ethnicities and races in connection to gender on both sides of the U.S./Latin American borderlands. These writers of Mexican, Afro-Caribbean, and South American diasporas ask us 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


2

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to consider the politics of gender and race in diverse Latino/a communities in the United States and Latin America. Although these women writers may be more U.S. than Latin American-based, they are fully engaged and aware of the cultural and historical legacies of el otro lado in Latin America and its effect on U.S. communities. Furthermore, it is important to clarify that class issues and socioeconomic status will be taken into consideration when addressing the intersection of gender and race because these three elements are inextricably linked in this study. Transnational Migrations Despite the fact that the Latina authors of these post-2000 narratives hail from different national heritages, one can still find similarities with respect to tropes of travels, voyages, and migrations across national borders. Virtually all of the Latina authors mentioned in this study trace a genealogy or a community that shifts back and forth, physically and mentally, in reality and in the imaginary between the respective heritage and homeland—the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Peru, and Puerto Rico—and the mainland United States. Although the Latina works by Chávez, Cisneros, Cruz, Vega, and Arana contain vastly different representations of histories, politics, and popular cultures, I maintain that these Latina writers allude to a legacy of colonial history, explicitly and implicitly, in a transnational context that begins with the Spanish Conquest of the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century and, other forms of U.S. domination that have repercussions for U.S. Latina/o communities up until the twenty-first century. In these narratives, a modern form of domination still pervades the communities represented in Chicago, the Southwest borderlands, New York City neighborhoods, such as El Barrio and Washington Heights, and New Jersey. At the same time, their U.S. communities are intrinsically tied to the homeland or heritage land through representing revolutions, wars, occupations, or other social movements situated in Mexico City, Santo Domingo, or Lima, Peru that led to the migrations of families to the United States. Without understanding the social and historical context of Latin America in a hemispheric dialogue with the United States in these transnational narratives, one cannot comprehend the political impact of continuous im/migrations of communities and especially, genealogies that stretch between the United States and Latin American nations. In 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Introduction


this respect, it is important to note the role of each Latina author as a historical commentator, as opposed to a historian per se, because each is well aware of the fact that nation-building in the United States and Latin America is often recorded as the efforts by men, often obfuscating the role of the marginal in societies (i.e., black, indigenous, Asian, mestizos, women, and the working class).6 These women writers are not only imparting gender matters or a woman’s perspective on official history, but also popular culture.7 At the same time, the writers present alternative histories to contest the hegemonic power of official history in their transnational narratives, because traditionally, their perspectives and voices have been omitted.8 Thus, Chávez, Cisneros, Cruz, Vega, and Arana find themselves in a specific liminal and mediating position as cultural and historical ambassadors with a dual vision of Latin American and American cultures in contact and in conf lict with one another. The field of transnational studies, or transnationalism, has received much attention in the social sciences from noted social scientists, Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, Luis Eduardo Guarnizo, and Michael Smith, to mention a few, in the early 1990s. These scholars began to explore critical paradigms based on theoretical and field research by examining and comparing communities in Latin America and the United States. Although the definition of transnationalism varies from one scholar to another, all essentially come to an agreement when they look at the experiences of transmigrants, people who migrate from a country of origin to a host one and maintain cultural, emotional, or physical connections to the residence of origin in the host country.9 While critics of Nations Unbound (1994) maintain that migrants “retain ties to their homeland” through family, organizations, and cultural practices in the host country, critics of Transnationalism from Below explore “how this process affects power relations, cultural constructions, economic interactions, and more generally, social organization at the level of locality” (Smith and Guarnizo 1998, 6). Rather than examining solely the physical journeys of migrants who cross national boundaries, Smith and Guarnizo are interested in understanding material and symbolic exchanges between the U.S. and Latin American residences at the local level. In the humanities, particularly in literary studies, few critics address questions of the transnational Chicano/Latino imaginary, but no one quite develops a critical paradigm using Latina narratives of the post2000 period. In his critical study of Américo Paredes’s work in the United States and abroad in Asia in The Transnational Imaginary (2006), Ramón Saldívar explains that “generating a transnational Greater 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


4

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Mexico [and Latin America], spanning the real and imaginary geographies of North America and staging new cultural designs, the meanings of which could not yet even be imagined . . . a site rich with possibilities for the repositioning of citizenship, the emergence of subjectivities, and the invention of novel spaces for vernacular politics in the mode of subaltern modernity” (394). Like Saldívar’s positioning of Paredes in the transnational imaginary, I suggest that the Latina writers in my study are involved in a decolonizing process by writing and relocating subaltern cultures from their respective national heritages and the United States to the forefront in order to participate and combat modernizing (colonizing) efforts from hegemonic forms (i.e., governments, corporations, institutional power, and patriarchy). Saldívar models his critique in many ways after postcolonial critic Paul Gilroy’s construction of the Black Atlantic imaginary “as a concept capable of transcending ‘both the structures of the nation and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity’ ” (2006, 394); Gilroy’s critique is important as far as situating transnational migrations that have contributed to the African diaspora.10 Both Saldívar and Gilroy signal a transnational agency designated for cultural representatives (i.e., writers, artists, and other cultural workers) of subaltern communities who are in movement or transit from one home to another, and who should also hold cultural citizenship beyond the border of their host nation. Transnational Latina Narratives looks at protagonists in each narrative who have struggled and fought for the right to control their destiny rather than have institutions take over their choices within the context of transnational migrations. Even though I provide specific examples, one can find overlapping experiences of cultural, emotional, historical, and physical movements in the five narratives. First of all, I consider the actual physical crossings of family members such as those in Caramelo and American Chica who maintain cultural connections between the United States and respective Latin American home country. In Let It Rain Coffee, I trace the historical memory of pivotal events that instigate a transnational link between the United States and the Caribbean. I also examine the symbolic journeys to the heritage through cultural memory such as the adult narrator in When the Spirits Dance Mambo who recalls music in her childhood in Spanish Harlem. Finally, I analyze the emotional ties to the heritage such as the fans’ interest in Mexican films in Loving Pedro Infante. In comparing these transnational practices, I also draw on the categories of gender and race to better understand each narrative. By dialoging with critics of Transnationalism from Below as well as Saldívar (2006) and Gilroy, I 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Introduction

6


Gender Matters In Transnational Latina Narratives, the post-2000 narratives by U.S. Latina writers offer a woman’s perspective on official history of the Americas by representing transnational multiethnic communities migrating between Latin America and the United States. By examining the narratives by Arana, Cisneros, Chávez, Cruz, and Vega, I draw parallels between these women writers of different U.S. ethnic/ national heritage backgrounds to demonstrate how gender, race, and nation, in their respective historical contexts, form part of a broader discourse on transnational Latina identities. In fact, the twenty-first century has set the tone for new transnational feminist cultural studies, one that engages the complex relationship between gender, and the politics of local and global migrations across national borders. In Between Woman and Nation (1999), Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem maintain that Transnational feminist cultural studies recognize that practices are always negotiated in both a connected and a specific field of conf lict and contradiction and, that feminist agendas must be viewed as a formulation and reformulation that is contingent upon historically specific conditions. (358) They further explain that “The task for transnational feminist cultural studies is to negotiate between the national, the global and the historical as well as the contemporary diasporic” (360). This critical investigation also engages in broadening transnational feminist cultural studies by taking into account the representation of gender in different geographical and historical periods that began in the colonial period in the Americas as these Latina narratives allude to, and mention explicitly the effects of colonialism on ethnically marginalized groups, including women in both, local and global contexts. In addition to the theoretical paradigms presented in the previous critical works, we need to consider the transnational context in the intersection of gender, race, and migrations that greatly informs the U.S. Latina narratives of this study. In the introduction to Feminist 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


am able to develop my critical paradigm on transnational migrations because this study also contests the hegemonic forces behind migrating bodies, locally and globally.

Introduction

7

Thus, while the current “color line” may suggest more complicated forms of racialized identities, the hierarchical relationships among racial groups and geographies have not disappeared. Yet, race does not figure in most “first world” considerations of postmodernism. And as Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan persuasively suggest, it is the cultural, political, economic and social consequences of the historical situations and transformations within (post)modernity that will enable a more sophisticated understanding of transnational, postcolonial, feminist practices. (1997, xvii) Alexander and Mohanty remind us that feminism, and the construction of gender for that matter, cannot be understood without incorporating a historical context of race as much in “First World” nations like the United States as in developing Latin American countries. In addition to this theoretical model, I suggest that the representation of im/ migrations and the formation of diasporic communities in the United States must be examined in connection to gender and race in a transnational context.11 The genealogical migrations represented in the Latina narratives of this study also consider previous forms of forced colonialisms, such as African slavery, importation of Asian labor, and internal indigenous migrations within Latin America and then, immigration to the United States. The triple play of gender, race, and migrations are crucial to understand the transnational component of this study. This hemispheric approach allows me to compare gender formation in the U.S. Latinas’ experiences of migrations between the United States and Latin America to critique gender relations across the borderland divide in the emergence of a transnational feminism or transnational consciousness of gender. Race Matters Transnational Latina Narratives is also a critical intervention in dismantling the boundaries between official history and popular culture by presenting a complex portrait of the politics of race, both in Latin America and the United States. The Latina writers in this study do not pretend to be authorities on history, per se, dealing with facts in fiction and revealing “the truth” of life-changing events. Rather, they engage 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (1996), Jaequi Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty assert:


in dialogues to uncover the effects and consequences of such “facts” of major historical events involving the United States in relationship to Latin America (i.e., Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848, Mexican Revolution of 1910, World War II, U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1916 and 1965, U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico in 1898). By contesting hegemonic forms of historical discourse at the national levels, these women writers form a critique of the imbalance of power in race relations in official history across national borders to point to a more egalitarian society. In Race Matters (1993) Cornel West observes, “We need leaders—neither saints, nor sparkling television personalities—who can situate themselves within a larger historical narrative of this country and our world, who can grasp the complex dynamics of our peoplehood and imagine a future grounded in the best of our past, yet who are attuned to the frightening obstacles that now perplex us” (1993, 7). In order to move forward, we must examine the past. Critical studies of U.S. Latino/a literature and culture that have addressed race matters have often done so within a national heritage context, such as mestizaje in Chicano/a literature or the African diaspora in Latino Caribbean literature. Rafael Pérez-Torres (2006), for example, looks at indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo cultures in the formation of the mixed-race Chicano/a identity in literary and cultural representations. Suzanne Bost (2003) constructs a comparative paradigm of mixed-race identities in the representation of mestizas and mulattas in literature of the Americas by African American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latinas, including Puerto Ricans. Agustín Laó-Montes (2007, 2008) does pay attention to a concentricity of diasporas when he discusses the formation of an Afro-Latino identity, more so in Latin America than the United States. Likewise, Torres-Saillant (2007a) negotiates the location of the African diasporic in Latino Caribbean identity, which is a good initial paradigm, but I further include the gender component in this critical inquiry. These aforementioned critics begin to address the complexity of the politics of many races and gender in contact and in conf lict within a single national group, which should be expanded more panethnically Latina/o by investigating the transnational migrations historically between the heritage land/homeland, and the United States. Race and racial discrimination hold different meanings in Latin America and vary greatly from one nation to another, owing to multiple social and historical factors that inf luence each nation’s colonial legacy. U.S. critics need to understand the implications of such politics of race in conjunction with gender and migrations to avoid the pitfalls of 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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homogenizing “a Latin American experience,” and assume that racism is the same in every nation south of the U.S. border. For instance, being of African descent has different connotations in the Spanish Caribbean and Mexico and in the U.S. Critics in Chicana/o studies have tended to focus on the European/indigenous binary model of mestizaje that echoes the rhetoric of nationalism that dates back to national consolidation under modernity after the Mexico Revolution. What about the participation of other races and cultures (i.e., African, Asian, MiddleEastern diasporas and at times, mixtures of these cultures) involved in the nation-building process in Mexico? How does that factor into the U.S. imaginary? Chicana or Mexican American women writers such as Chávez and Cisneros clearly have the ability to see beyond this binary model in the construction of Chicano and Mexican nationalisms and, therefore, represent more complicated representations of race in their narratives of transnational migrations as they include references to the African diaspora, for example. Likewise, Puerto Rican writer Moreno Vega traces the teleology of music and spirituality in her narrative, not only to the Caribbean, but to Africa as a locus. Dominican American Cruz incorporates African and Asian diasporas in her narrative to understand Dominican immigration and its diaspora to the U.S. Peruvian American Arana uncovers layers of ethnicities and races as a consequence of intercultural mixings within one nation, Peru, and then, the implications of its transnational migrations to the United States. The Latina writers in this study construct characters who cross national borders beyond the United States and Latin America also as they perform the roles of transnational ambassadors. Organization Transnational Latina Narratives consists of five chapters, with each dedicated to a particular Latina narrative writer within her local and national heritage context. By narrative, I include the novel and memoir. The critical framework of this study draws on previous historical literary studies on the Latino/a narrative that emerged in the period of 1991–2006, especially that of Chicana/o and U.S. Puerto Rican.12 Chapters one and two are dedicated to Chicana writers, Denise Chávez and Sandra Cisneros, who hail from a mestiza (hybrid) Mexican American background, and I explore that hybrid heritage in their narratives. Publishing contemporary narratives since the 1980s, 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Introduction


these Chicana writers form part of a generation that played a crucial role as pioneers of U.S. Latina literary feminism in American letters as they critique patriarchy and racism in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. In chapters three and four, Afro-Latina writers, Marta Moreno Vega and Angie Cruz, represent a younger generation of U.S. Latina writers, who have advanced the representation of race and gender identities within the context of Latinos/as of the African diaspora. In chapter five, Peruvian American Marie Arana represents a new voice in U.S. Latina literature by exploring multiracial societies from a U.S./South American perspective. Until the present moment, no study, let alone academic articles, exists on this group of women writers as a collective within the field of U.S. Latina/o literature. In chapter one, in the novel, Loving Pedro Infante (2001), by Chicana/ Mexican American writer, Denise Chávez, I explore the politics of gender relationships by revisioning Mexican popular culture through Golden Age Mexican cinema and the construction of a transnational identity. Race further complicates gender matters as the spectators are exposed to a cinematic historiography of the Golden Age period in Mexican film (1936–1956) in the geographical location of the Southwest in a broader context of U.S./Mexican borderlands history.13 Furthermore, this novel illustrates a dialectical relationship between U.S./Mexican cultural discourses in the formation of a transnational border culture in a society that is in transition between tradition and modernity. Chávez further demonstrates the change in gender roles from the inf luences of a cultural context in Mexican cinema to the emergence of the new transnational Chicana woman in the U.S. borderlands of the twenty-first century.14 Similar to Chávez in some respects, Sandra Cisneros also engages directly with Mexico, especially Mexico City, due to her early migratory experiences as a child. This nation is not a distant homeland, but rather a familiar one in memory and endearment. In the discussion of the novel Caramelo (2002) in chapter two, Cisneros illustrates the genealogy of a multigenerational Mexican American family that spans over a hundred years in their travels between Chicago and Mexico City. Primarily located in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the migrations between Mexico and the United States, Cisneros demonstrates the cultural (dis)encounters between people of Mexican American and Mexican backgrounds in the coming of age of a transnational Chicana narrative. On the one hand, Cisneros traces the history of the urban Mexican working-class immigrant labor force in the making of modern Chicago and, by extension, the nation-building of the United States. On the other 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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hand, Cisneros also chronicles pivotal moments in Mexican history with allusions to global colonialisms, from the European explorations of Asia and Africa, the Spanish Conquest to transmigrations of people across the world, while focusing on the U.S./Mexican border crossing.15 Cisneros demonstrates that these historical migrations of global cultures have inf luenced both, Mexico and the United States. In chapter three, I situate the novel, When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004) by Afro-Puerto Rican writer, Marta Moreno Vega, in the context of diasporic migrations from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1940s and the 1950s. Focusing on the emergence of the Nuyorican community in Spanish Harlem, Vega constructs an Afro-Latina narrative by representing the AfroPuerto Rican diaspora in the formation of U.S.-based communities. Vega further represents the complexities of gender and race issues in the historical period of the mambo and Latin Jazz musical movements in the 1950s, moments that are not studied as much as the subsequent Salsa one.16 She also traces the importance of Yoruba culture in the making of Afro-Puerto Rican identity in the United States and maintaining ties to this African heritage. Vega’s narrative looks at the AfroCaribbean cultural and historical context of transnational migrations to the United States. Hailing from New York City, Angie Cruz came into prominence with the publication of her novel, Soledad (2001). In chapter four, I explore the mixed-Latina/o identity in the novel, Let It Rain Coffee (2005a) by Cruz, who represents the relationship between Dominicans from the island and its diasporic community in Washington Heights, New York City. In Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz introduces a new vision in U.S. Latina literature by addressing questions of gender, race, and migrations across U.S./Dominican borders. By considering the hemispheric history of Dominican immigration to cities such as New York, Cruz is preoccupied with representing various racial groups, particularly people of African and Chinese descent, who have formed Dominican diasporic communities in the United States. Furthermore, gender is examined in connection to race in the development of a specific mixed-racial heritage Latina identity in the United States. Although some critical work exists on racial identity in the Dominican diaspora, the critical work in this chapter is needed on the intersection of gender and race, as Cruz presents both issues in relation to transnational migration.17 Peruvian American writer Marie Arana became the first Latina book editor for the Washington Post. Unlike the previous writers in this study, she is the only one born and raised abroad, specifically in Peru, for the 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Introduction


first ten years of her life, with brief visits to the United States as a child. Chapter five of this book considers the memoir American Chica (2001) that portrays Arana’s bildungsroman through her culturally mixed parentage, an American mother and a Peruvian father. Arana comments on key moments in Peruvian history such as the Spanish Conquest, and neocolonialism in the twentieth century. In tracing her historical ancestry, Arana also engages the politics of gender relationships, especially when women must cross racial, cultural, and national boundaries. By examining the relationship between race and gender in a transnational U.S./Peru context, this chapter contributes to an understanding of Peruvian diasporic identity in American letters, a task that barely receives critical attention.18 Transnational Latina Narratives contributes greatly to trans-American cultural and literary studies, owing to its comparative and interdisciplinary approach in the study of post-2000 U.S. Latina narratives. The research is enhanced by archival materials, personal interviews/critical conversations, and multidisciplinary criticism used to broaden the field of Chicano/U.S. Latino/a literature and culture on a global scale. This investigation also advances the study of comparative Latino studies to seek commonalities as well as differences within the Americas. The academic fields of Latino Studies, American Studies, Latin American Studies, transnational feminism, transnational ethnic studies, and comparative world literatures and cultures may benefit from this critical study of transnational Latina narratives. I share María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s sentiment when she envisions a curriculum “organized thematically rather than by national grouping, with requirements and introductory classes that emphasized a comparative approach to (1) history of immigration from Latin America; (2) the experiences of Latino/a immigrants with racial and sexual forms of governmentality in the United States; and (3) the innovative and resistive cultural and political practices developed by Latinas/os in response to this context” (2007, 510). Although in its initial stages, a transnational Latina/o studies curriculum will become a reality, rather than remain a dream as we progress through the twenty-first century.



12

ON E

Denise Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante (2001): The Making of a Transnational Border Community

Born and raised in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1948, Denise Chávez holds a special position in Chicano/U.S. Latino literature for her portrayal of Mexican and Mexican American characters in the U.S. Southwest literary landscape. As a novelist, playwright, actress, community activist, and professor, she is one of the first U.S. Latina writers to receive national acclaim for the publication of her novels, beginning with Face of An Angel (1994), by a mainstream literary press on the East Coast. While Chávez has written narratives, short stories, and plays, and has produced one-woman-act shows, the novel, Loving Pedro Infante (2001), is the feminist Mexican Revolution of her literary career, to lift a metaphor from the novel (D. Chávez 2001, 199). It is the culmination of all extreme emotions and actions: a fearless manifesto on Chicana feminist consciousness, desire, and liberation. Also noteworthy is the fact that Chávez is probably one of the few writers in the American literary tradition to demonstrate an extensive knowledge of Mexican cinema of the Golden Age period with which to bridge Chicano/ Mexican cultural discourses across transnational lines.1 In addition to her Chicana identity, Chávez is deeply committed to the study, incorporation, and critique of Mexican culture and history in her works (Chávez 2003). While earning an MA in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, her life changed when she met pioneer Chicano novelist and mentor, Rudolfo Anaya, who encouraged her to pursue a



CH A P T E R


writing career and publish her thesis as a collection of short fiction, The Last of the Menu Girls (1985), a coming-of-age work that contributed to the Chicana literary movement of the 1980s.2 Both Anaya and Chávez are committed to the literary and historical representation of the Southwest borderlands as a place with a particular history of cultural fusions and racial mixings (Gonzáles-Berry and Maciel 2000, 94). Chávez, however, voices the concerns of a cross-generational community that includes the elderly, spiritual healers, and gay men, as well as a cast of women characters who are often marginalized in mainstream society. While Chávez’s career as a fiction writer has brought her critical acclaim by earning national awards such as an American Book Award, it is also important to highlight her training as a drama major and experience as an actress in the development as a fiction writer (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 35–36). During this time, she met and worked with a versatile caliber of directors of international recognition who hailed from Greece and Russia, as well as the United States. Even though her parents divorced when she was young, her mother played a vital role in her artistic formation as well because she studied art with the renowned Mexican artists of the 1930s in Mexico, instilling in her daughter an appreciation and understanding of Mexican arts and culture. 3 All these formal and personal experiences with cultures outside her immediate Southwest environment would eventually lead to a transnational imaginary of what it means to live in, at least, two cultures, two nations, and two languages, to be a transnational ambassador. Chávez’s work, as she explains in the interview, “The Spirit of Humor” (2000), cannot be understood without the role of humor, especially, with respect to her Mexican heritage. She elaborates: When you grow up with people who appreciate laughter, you can’t help but learn from them. My family was a great education. I came to appreciate the power of humor. I love to laugh and I love to be around people who are funny and make me laugh. With humor, you can say some very deep things. Life has its sorrows and its tragedies, but humor is something that tempers the bitterness, the hard edges of life. You keep surviving. That’s the Mexican spirit. Ni modo, you keep on going. You can have a wicked sense of humor when you’re down and out and in the mud. You can laugh at the absurdity of life and the craziness. I never want to leave humor behind. It’s who I am! (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 37) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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As Chávez ref lects on the role of humor in her work, she points to an important connection with her Mexican heritage. Even though her family has lived in New Mexico for generations, they have had to struggle on various levels (i.e., divorce, single mother); yet, she perseveres and learns to take life as it comes with a bit of humor that she associates with the “Mexican spirit” of the transnational divide living in the U.S./Mexican borderlands in Las Cruces.4 New Mexico: One State, Many Cultures In the critical collection, The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico (2000), Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry and David Maciel provide a chronicle of pivotal historical events that affected the Hispano population of New Mexico from a Chicano/a perspective to contest the U.S. narrative of empire after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848. While New Mexico is not as densely populated as other Southwest states, such as California and Texas, it has a long history of cultural and racial encounters and conf licts that date back to the Spanish settlement in the sixteenth century. Of equal importance is the understanding of the geopolitics of culture in this state, for space and place do matter, especially between northern and southern New Mexico. The editors state: Cities such as Las Cruces, Silver City, Deming, Hatch, and Garfield have had predominantly Mexican-origin populations, from their founding to the present. Because of the region’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, its cultural patterns, language preference, and orientation are also very Mexicano. Here Mexican immigration has been constant within every generation, and the service, agricultural, and construction industries rely heavily on Mexican legal and, more recently, undocumented labor. Although the roots of many Chicanos and Chicanas in this region are also colonial, for this segment of the population, ties to Mexico have been and continue to be strong and ever present. (3) Since the colonial period, Hispanos have made northern New Mexico their home and established a strong cultural foundation in preserving the Spanish language of that era, maintaining a cultural and historical pride in their Spanish (European) origins and heritage, even if they have, over time, mixed culturally and racially with Native 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Denise Chávez’s LOVING PEDRO INFANTE


American people (Apache, Navajo, Ute, and Comanche), Mexican indigenous and Mexican mestizos. The European always dominates. On the other hand, southern New Mexico, which includes border cities such as Las Cruces, holds a different perspective as far as celebrating cultural heritage because of its geographic proximity to Mexico. Similar to other border cities, Calexico, Mexicali, Tucson, and El Paso, Las Cruces has received ongoing Mexican migration since the border was born. Longtime New Mexican citizens, consisting of Anglo-Americans and Hispanos, may also reside in this border region; however, as Mexican immigrants have populated this geographic area over years, they have also brought and maintained their cultural traditions and customs to pass down to younger generations. One such practice that Chávez writes about in Loving Pedro Infante is viewing Golden Age Mexican cinema in this border culture from a transnational feminist perspective. This nuevomexicana-mexicana displays a cultural pride in her Mexican heritage by celebrating rather than denying mestizaje, unlike the attitude of the Hispano population from northern New Mexico that prefers to reclaim the Spanish element of their New Mexican identity. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chicana writers like Denise Chávez have joined other U.S. Latina writers in expressing a transnational vision of the United States, Mexico, and Latin America in representing cultural production at the global level. In the novel Loving Pedro Infante, Denise Chávez critically portrays the community on the U.S./Mexican border, Cabritoville, New Mexico, mainly consisting of Anglo-Americans, Chicanos, and Mexicanos. What may appear upon first glance as a superficial portrait of small-town United States (gossipy women, jealous friends, extramarital affairs, and other similar melodramatic relationships)5 is, in reality, a dialogue between U.S. and Mexican cultural discourses in the formation of a transnational border feminist culture. By using the novel to critique Golden Age Mexican cinema, I maintain that Chávez’s protagonist, Teresa Avila, forms her feminism by negotiating values of the past (inf luenced by Mexican cinema and popular culture) with a more progressive Chicana vision of the future (informed by her community of peers and life experiences) to develop a transnational gender awareness in the U.S./Mexico borderlands. In a broader framework, this transcultural critique advances a dialogue with Mexican studies with respect to feminism, film, cultural, and literary studies. Through the medium of film Chávez develops masculine and feminine roles that cross transnational borders. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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A number of Chicana feminist critics have contributed to theoretical paradigms about feminist consciousness. In Feminism on the Border (2000), Sonia Saldivar-Hull explores connections between the narratives by Chicanas (Gloria Anzaldúa, Sandra Cisneros, and Helena Maria Viramontes), and testimonials of women in Latin America (Rigoberta Menchú, Domitila de Barrios). By comparing and critiquing specific histories and geographies, Saldívar-Hull helps form a border feminism that crosses national boundaries. In “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism” (1994), Norma Alarcón constructs a Chicana feminist theory rooted in the translating skills of the trilingual indigenous figure of Doña Marina or la Malinche. Alarcón’s transnational feminism uses historical texts from sixteenthcentury colonial Mexico, as well as circumstances of the twentieth century United States, to define a model for Chicana subjectivity. She explains: Since Chicanas have begun the appropriation of history, sexuality, and language for themselves, they find themselves situated at the cutting edge of a new historical moment involving a radical though fragile change in consciousness . . . Moreover, such subjectivity is capable of shedding light on Chicanas’ present historical situation without necessarily, in this newer key, falling prey to a mediating role but, rather, catching stunning insights into our complex culture by taking hold of the variegated imaginative and historical discourses that have informed the constructions of race, gender, and ethnicities in the last five hundred years and that still reverberate in our time. (127) Chávez’s novel depicts a transnational border feminism that is manifested through transcultural experiences of the protagonist, evoking both Saldivar-Hull’s critical paradigm of border feminism and Alarcón’s historical account of the minoritarian position of Chicanas who are continually transforming Chicana subjectivity. However, Chávez’s approach differs in that she engages the medium of film.6 Compared to the oral cuentos, recuperated by Saldivar-Hull or the historical memory that Alarcón covers in the figure of Malinche, cinema is visually accessible to a larger public outside Mexico and the United States.7 Pedro Infante was a legendary Mexican actor, singer, and sex symbol of the Golden Age of Mexican film (roughly 1936–1956). Although he died suddenly in a plane crash in 1957, his fandom persisted as a 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




transnational cultural phenomenon that spread from Mexico to the United States. Loving Pedro Infante focuses on the female members of a fan club for the actor, one that serves as a microcosm of a Chicano/ Mexican American community. It is, thus, the response by spectators, mainly women, that gives meaning and significance to this cultural era, just as much as the actual films.8 Chávez faithfully depicts the cult of admiration that emerged around this popular male figure, but she also demonstrates the emergence of a critical response among the spectators.9 In the transnational reception of Golden Age Mexican cinema, among the most affected spectators are contemporary Chicanos/U.S. Mexicans.10 Although Chávez’s apparent admiration for films of this era may seem like a nostalgic gaze at culture, viewing the construction of masculinity and femininity in cinema has played a pivotal role in gender identity formation for generations of U.S. Mexican men and women. In the interview, “The Spirit of Humor,” Chávez elaborates: History is very important for me. I grew up with Pedro Infante movies. The romantic dreams and types of relationships I saw in those movies were part of who I was, what I wanted in life, or so I thought. Those films have inf luenced generations of men and women in Mexico and the United States, as well as all around the world. I am only now beginning to understand the dreams of my ancestors and the women and men of my world. The questions I ask myself are, Are my dreams my mother’s and father’s dreams? Or my grandparents’ dreams? What are the contemporary dreams? What does it mean to love someone? In my novel, I explore the nature of real love, as opposed to the illusion of love, a celluloid phantasmal love. (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 43) Chávez explains that films represent ideal relationships as dreams, an escape from the strains of quotidian life and the burdens of reality, but she also ref lects on the difference between romanticism and realism with respect to gender roles in society. The Chicana women in her novel must struggle at various levels—in relation to film culture and the realities of their own lives—to understand their past, present, and future and construct their transnational border feminism. One can infer that the power of Mexican film culture over generations can be viewed historically as part of a “celluloid nationalism” achieved through melodrama.11 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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To understand the film references in Loving Pedro Infante, it is useful to locate cinema production in its historical context.12 In many ways, Mexican film functioned in the 1940s and 1950s in Mexico much as Mexican literature did in the decades after the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Like Mexican writers of the period—Rosario Castellanos, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, and José Vasconcelos, among others—filmmakers were concerned with the construction of a national identity in the twentieth century. By examining the past, filmmakers and writers were able to fashion a cultural nationalism and affirm an identity based on a dialectical relationship between the past and present. However, Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis (1995) suggests that film, more than literature, was able to capture the popular imaginary because it is accessible to spectators of different educational levels.13 Chávez’s explicit and multiple references to scenes in Mexican cinema in Loving Pedro Infante demonstrate the way that film plays an inf luential role in the perception of gender relationships between men and women in Mexico and other Latin American countries in the 1940s and 1950s, particularly the arrabales or working-class neighborhoods in Mexico City. Mexican cinema of this period also provided an alternative image of Latinos by dismantling tropicalized Hollywood representations (such as Desi Arnaz and Carmen Miranda) that often exoticized Latinos.14 Furthermore, Golden Age Mexican films offered a range of representations, from people living in the countryside to those in urban spaces, as Monsiváis points out, but these people were not marginalized nor stereotyped the way Latinos were in the U.S. films of the same period. When Mexican cinema of the Golden Age crossed national borders into the United States, however, it gained magnified popularity as a commodity encompassing the local, the national, and the global. In their critical study, Mexico’s Cinema (1999), film critics Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel explain: The producers of the Golden Age went beyond giving the people what they wanted. Their films ref lected the desires, social structures, morality and popular culture of the period [1945–1955]. These producers not only met with great success in building up the film industry to become one of the ten most important economic enterprises of the country, but they also captured important distribution markets throughout Latin America, Spain, 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Golden Age Mexican Cinema

20


This process illustrates José David Saldivar’s transfrontera theory, described in Border Matters (1997). Since popular culture materials such as Golden Age Mexican films readily cross borders, they have an impact in the real lives of Chicano/as and other Latino/as in the United States. Chon Noriega further explains, “Whether through the classroom, the movie theater, or the television set, Mexican cinema continues to circulate as a cultural presence in the United States” (1994, 1). Thus, one can argue that Chicano/as are developing a transnational identity in part as a consequence of their exposure to Mexican films of this period. Furthermore, cinema yields a kind of freedom that allows spectators, men and women alike, to explore their unconscious, whether through dreams, fantasies, or illusions. When Chávez refers in Loving Pedro Infante to the spectator experience in the Colón Theatre in El Paso, Texas, in Loving Pedro Infante, she states, “We are all children in the darkness. In here, no one watches us or tells us how we feel” (2001, 14).15 Yet, how does cinema manifest itself in Chicana literature to construct a transnational border feminism? In Loving Pedro Infante, Chávez constructs a community of the star’s U.S. admirers, the Pedro Infante Fan Club de Admiradores Norteamericanos #256. It consists of a multigenerational group of Chicanas/Mexicanas and a gay Chicano, illustrating the diverse cultural makeup of the border town, Cabritoville. The protagonist says, “The only real family I have, besides Albanita and Irma, are the members of the Pedro Infante Club de Admiradores Norteamericano #256. And the characters of Pedro’s movies, whom Irma and I know as well as or better than we do our own kin” (50). The community’s ties to the film actors and to each other thus transcend biological family relationships in Chávez’s new definition of the term, familia. The temporal framework of the novel shifts between the contemporary lives of the club members, the life of Pedro Infante in Mexico City in the 1940s and 1950s, and the world of the Golden Age silver screen, with its various historical contexts, including nineteenthcentury Mexico in a film such as Cuando lloran los valientes (When the Brave Cry 1945). Chávez compares growing up in Mexico in the 1940s and 1950s with living in Cabritoville in the 1950s and 1960s (153–154); Teresa describes the town as “twenty years behind the times” (27). 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


and the United States. At the height of the Golden Age, in the United States alone there were three hundred movie theaters in the Southwest, Midwest, and the East that exclusively showed Mexican cinema. (35)

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Chávez further experiments with spatiality as she switches between reality and film contexts to show the effects of dreams and (dis)illusions in the characters’ lives in her novel and the changing values of a border community in transition to modernization. In Hybrid Cultures (1995), cultural critic Néstor García Canclini observes a disjuncture between different developing cultures in border places like Tijuana that may clash as a consequence of capital’s inf luence. Cabritoville may compare on a smaller scale as it evolves from a farming community of goats (cabritos), roosters, and chickens to a modern town of “fences or barbed wire, or tall houses” (D. Chávez 2001, 318). Genealogy of Fan Club Members In exploring the politics of gender, Loving Pedro Infante also focuses on a community of friendships formed through bonding, betrayal, or secrecy. The relationship between the Chicana protagonist Teresa Avila (also called la Tere) and her best friend, Irma Granados (la Wirma), who appears to be named after Mexican actress Irma Dorantes, one of Pedro Infante’s wives, is crucial in understanding the complexity and evolution of friendships between women who represent different philosophies regarding romance and men. Even though Tere and Wirma differ quite radically in personality, Chávez shows that there’s more depth to this friendship than meets the eye. While Wirma analyzes situations and develops her intellectual life, Tere prefers to expand her spiritual life by communicating through dreams or those of the children, with whom she works as a teacher’s aide. Rather than resort to the traditional paradigms of womanhood available to Chicanas of earlier generations, Chávez is concerned with exploring the alternative models that are offered to independent and intelligent women in their thirties like Tere and Wirma, who often find themselves at the interstices of modernity (thinking independently and critically) and tradition (obeying, or living in the shadow of patriarchy). Irma maintains: Woman does not live by Man alone. You’ve always had the wrong attitude, Tere, that’s all there is to it. It’s the way most women think, and that’s what gets them in trouble. We’ve got to have the right man or no man. But who’s the right man? And what about this idea: maybe some women don’t even need a man. Or at least in the way that cripples them. (19) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




Through the characters of Tere and Wirma, Chávez critiques the development of women who are in the midst of finding their identities as participants in their cultures, as women with liberating impulses, and as socially engaged activists who care about the welfare and future of the community without having to depend on a man.16 But what motivates these individuals to take control of their lives and act this way? The novel highlights the bonding between the younger and older generations of women or mothers and daughters—Albinita, Tere’s mother, and Nyvia Ester, Wirma’s mother. When Teresa becomes physically ill after she is abandoned by her lover, it is her mother, Albinita, who comes to her rescue as a nurse (221). Although the older women initially followed the conventional paths set forth for women by marrying and having children, they learned through experience to lead independent lives. For example, Albinita needed to work when her husband passed away unexpectedly, while Tere was still a child. Irma’s mother, an immigrant woman with limited skills in English, had to support her eight children when her husband left them, shirking his responsibilities as a father. Even though these women belong to an older generation with a different set of values, they did not follow the archetypes of dependent women featured in Mexican films of the Golden Age Mexican.17 Though the older generation of Mexican women in the novel may be enamored of a cultural icon like Pedro Infante, they gradually distance themselves from the traditional values of the Golden Age films by not depending on men. Rather, they have learned to think for themselves and to act on their own decisions out of necessity, rejecting patriarchal authority. Albinita passes down wisdom to her daughter, “I have no respect for women like that, Tere. Women who run after men, women who chase men down when they don’t want to be found and then try to stay with them when the staying is nearly impossible” (240–241). Both, Tere’s and Wirma’s mothers, began by leading traditional lives, but then they discovered that they had to depend on themselves as women, single heads of households, as matriarchs to a certain extent, to organize and control their own lives. In addition, they hold governing positions in the Pedro Infante Fan Club, which means they know how to organize a community, an extended family. Chávez makes mothers their daughters’ best friends because, as Tere observes, mothers are not given credit in culture and history, but in the fan club, they are certainly revered, Chávez makes that certain. One of the ways that Chávez dialogues with native cultures of New Mexico is through the representation of the spiritual healer, Doña Meche, who also belongs to the older generation.18 This figure passes 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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down words of wisdom as well to awaken Tere to the reality of her love affair when she says, “. . . we can’t always be with the people we want to love” (203). Chávez, like many other Chicana writers, emulates neither the Anglo nor Chicano/Mexican forms of patriarchal domination, but instead insists on carving a space for Chicana subjectivity, psychologically as well as physically. For the younger generation of women, seeing their mothers as film critics helps the daughters develop more insightfully than the mothers, because they are the beneficiaries of their mothers’ experiences, which serve as lessons in life. By meeting with an older generation of women, Chávez sets up encounters between Chicanas and Mexicanas who dialogue across transnational borders. Loving Pedro Infante does not present an obedient Chicana protagonist who conforms to conventional social roles. Chávez prefers to explore the negative stereotypes that surround the “fallen” women. She constructs the character of Tere as a divorced elementary school teacher’s aide, who has an affair with a married part-time salesman, Lucio Valadez.19 The relationship between the nonconformist Tere and this traditionally assimilated perfectionist man becomes a catalyst for Tere, as she transforms from an easygoing, happy-go-lucky individual to a more cognizant and critical woman who thinks for herself. In the end, she leaves him. Lucio serves as a vehicle for Tere’s self-confidence and he admires her because she never loses her spirituality, or her faith in people, a characteristic in many of the female protagonists in Chávez’s works, including The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of An Angel. Lucio tells her, “You don’t understand. I like the fact that you have faith. I mean, just listen to you. And I do, believe me. You’re like a child. You believe the best about people. What more can I say?” (178–179). Lucio may seem condescending to Tere by comparing her to a child, yet, he also seems to compliment the positive outlook on life and her ability to trust people, a quality most people, like Lucio, lose as adults. In her spiritual characterization of Tere, Chávez further alludes to Santa Teresa de Avila, the character’s tocaya, or namesake. The renowned Spanish poet and nun of the sixteenth century was a ref lective and a spiritual savior of her community. Moreover, Santa Teresa was talented in the arts, she played musical instruments and enjoyed singing, as does Tere, who delights in performing songs like the ranchera, “Mi Tenampa.” Yet, Tere is well aware of the fact that she herself is not a saint, nor a virgin, nor sexually repressed, as women of those times were, and, in fact, she parodies herself in comparing a list of her values and philosophies with those of Santa Teresa’s (71). One of the main differences between the two lies in the exploration of sexuality. Since 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




Santa Teresa was a nun, she had to abstain. Tere, on the other hand, has engaged in sexual relations on various occasions and shows neither shame nor repentance, negative feelings encouraged by institutional Catholicism that are instilled into women. She does not condemn her open behavior of having sex outside of marriage, but rather accepts this part of her, as a natural course. Women, like men, make mistakes, but learn from them as well. Chávez makes it clear that Chicanas of Tere’s generation and sensibility act on their own impulses, not constrained by patriarchal domination. Tere’s community associates her affair with Lucio Valadez to be immoral behavior, judges her, and consequently, she is dismissed from work, a harsh economic punishment for a single woman, who needs to support herself. But, as secretary of the Pedro Infante Fan Club de Admiradores and a recorder of history, Tere does not allow this conservative judgment by the citizens of Cabritoville to control her life. While she may have compared her life’s experiences to those of the characters in Golden Age Mexican cinema before her relationship with Lucio, she rapidly learns that she must rise above the limitations placed on women in her community and the border between reality and the “celluloid dreams” of cinema. Tere brings a transnational border feminist consciousness to bear on the politics of gender roles, both in her own life and in film. In becoming a critic of Golden Age Mexican cinema, she learns as much about her feminism as about the films themselves. She learns that more is at stake than loving a cultural icon like Pedro Infante. Cinema and Reality: Gender, Race, and Class By incorporating specific films of the Golden Age period in Loving Pedro Infante, Chávez bridges Chicano and Mexican cultural discourses and creates a transnational community of film spectators who learn much about the politics of race on screen and in their lives. Throughout the novel, but especially in the chapters, “Minutes of the Pedro Infante Fan Club” and “Another Pedro-athon,” Chávez forms a cultural critique of a body of films to gain a better understanding of Pedro Infante’s role as a hero of the people in various cinematic contexts. It is the inequality of power between the female and male characters in most of the twenty-six films that Chávez mentions that has the greatest impact on the Chicano/a communities in her novel.20 In particular, the films, Las mujeres de mi general (1950), Angelitos negros (1948), and A toda máquina 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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(1951) play inf luential roles in shaping Tere’s awareness of gender, race, migrations, and socioeconomic status in both, the United States and Mexico. She says, “You can learn so much about Mejicano culture, class structure, the relationships between men and women, women and women, men and men, as well as intergenerational patterns of collaterality in Pedro’s movies” (51). By examining these films in a transnational context, Chávez critiques hegemonic forces like patriarchal domination and social inequalities that are rendered unto disempowered people in Mexico and, by extension, the Cabritoville community. The reader gains a better understanding of the relationship between male and female characters in the Golden Age films, but the heart of the novel is the response of the Chicana/o/Mexicana/o spectators and the transference of their responses from the films to their own lives. Miriam Hansen contends that the bonding between audience members, especially women, and screen characters enables the spectators to form a new concept of themselves in society. Jacqueline Stewart agrees with this sentiment, but she also adds that the relationship between spectators and the films they view is a f luid process subject to negotiation. Chávez’s novel exemplifies the power of film as a social instrument mentioned by these critics, but I suggest that some characters, such as Tere, “wake up” from too much dependency on the models of gender and race presented on the screen to confront the consequences of their own reality. Throughout the novel, Chávez invites the reader to witness the formation of Tere’s social consciousness in response to her critical study of the films (153). What began as an innocent social club among friends suddenly turns into a school of criticism on Golden Age Mexican cinema. Irma says, “You and I should have a Ph.D. from watching Pedro Infante movies, Tere. We know more about Raza than Raza. If I ever go back to school, it’s to get a degree in Mejicano culture. Then we could teach little Mejicanitos with brown faces who can’t speak Spanish and little gabachitos who do, what is means to be Mejicanos. And Mejicanas. And, in turn, to be human” (51). The fan club members are educating themselves, learning to comment critically on a history of their Mexican heritage, which is available to them via film—a form of culture that is accessible to a mass audience, literate or not. Furthermore, Chávez suggests that this tradition must be passed down to younger generations; otherwise, they will lose a sense of their cultural heritage and identity. In terms of connecting the different generations through cultural practices such as film spectatorship, Edna Viruell-Fuentes explains, “symbolic and affective expressions of 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




transnationalism matter both for the first as well as the second generation” (2006, 339). Spectators on both sides of the U.S./Mexico borderlands transform themselves from passive spectators to critical thinkers when they take film experiences that are relevant to their own lives and use them to ref lect on their own actions and relationships. Furthermore, Chávez uses the terms “Mexicano” and “Chicano” interchangeably because, to her, there is only one Mexico or, as the popular saying goes, “Como México, no hay dos.” Chávez also exposes the contradictions in films in which strong women are on the verge of liberating themselves from patriarchal domination and becoming conscious of their subjectivity, but fail to do so because they are dependent on male figures in moments of crisis. For example, Tere comments on the archetype of the soldadera, or soldier woman, in the historical film, Las mujeres de mi general (My General’s Women 1950). It is the story of la Adelita, a soldadera, who struggles to keep her man and child in the political turmoil of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. The protagonist Lupe (symbolic of La Virgen de Guadalupe) fights alongside her man, General Juan Zepeda (played by Pedro Infante), to defend the rights of the provincial working class to their land. Although the film portrays Lupe as an active revolutionary agent, she does not exist independently of her warrior revolutionary, Juan Zepeda. To complicate matters, Lupe is perceived as “the other woman” and a mestiza when an upper-class, literate, light-skinned woman Carlota (alluding to Maximilian’s insane French wife) attempts to seduce and conquer Zepeda, signaling a competition among women of different social classes. In her own life, Tere is also perceived as the “other woman,” a rival to Lucio’s legitimate wife. Tere identifies with the Adelita character as she, too, struggles to keep the relationship with Lucio, in the face of moral condemnation by society (D. Chávez 2001, 199). While the Adelita character must command a formal Spanish, Lucio always tries to improve Tere’s vocabulary to attain more acceptable and formal English. Similar to the soldier woman figure, Teresa needs to attain a degree of legitimacy (in relation to career, standard language, and social status) before she can be accepted in society, according to Lucio. Even in the film Arriba las mujeres (1943) that tracks women’s migration from the countryside to Mexico City, Chávez sees the potential for women to be liberated, but, in the end, she observes that women lose out to the men (124). Unlike the female protagonists in both films, especially in Las mujeres de mi general, whose title connotes a man’s possession of women as objects, Tere takes control of her situation and learns to educate herself for her own self-improvement, not 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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to win a man’s acceptance. By transgressing the U.S./Mexico cultural borderlands, Tere begins to form her transnational border feminism. Since the characters of Tere and Wirma are quite savvy and conscious of their working-class ethnic backgrounds in their border town, it is no surprise that questions of race and class, which are exemplified in the hierarchy of the Mexican class system in the film Angelitos negros (Little Black Angels 1948), chosen as movie of the month by the fans, attract their attention. Chávez unabashedly notes that this film was as much racist in choosing its cast of actors, as in its ideological message. While only one black actor was cast, the rest had painted faces, which shows the discriminatory policies against hiring black actors in Mexican society of the period (244–245). Despite the different cultural and historical contexts between film and novel, Chávez complicates border feminism not only by critiquing the role of privileged and light-skinned women in twentieth-century Mexican society, but she also focuses on the identity of the most marginalized woman, the black woman, in this highly stratified society. Through heated discussions among the fan club members, Chávez exposes the politics of race for the African diaspora in Mexico by intervening in this transnational discourse. In Angelitos negros, the protagonist, Ana Luisa de la Fuente, is a conf licted light-skinned daughter whose mother is the black maid/ housekeeper, of which she is unaware, but she does know her lightskinned father. Master and servant were never married and hid their liaison; the mother gave birth out of wedlock and allowed the child’s father to raise her. This unacknowledged relationship between the parents of different races is important because it alludes to the power imbalance, which implies possible sexual abuse and perhaps rape. The mother decides to hide her daughter’s hybrid identity as a mulatta, a mixture of black, possible indigenous, and European heritage, to protect her from downward social mobility, and shame in bourgeoisie Mexican society. But the mixed-heritage daughter, who works as a schoolteacher in a privileged school, develops a deep hatred and overt racism toward those not of her own perceived white racial and class background, including toward her own daughter, Belén, who is born black-skinned. At first she questions and blames her own husband, José Carlos Ruiz, a performer/singer played by Pedro Infante, for this dilemma, accusing him of having “contaminated” blood in his genealogy. Furthermore, he associates with black and mulatto performers, jeopardizing her dreams and future by mixing with what she considers “the wrong crowd.” As the fan club members discuss the film in the novel, Chávez condemns racism as far as questions of legitimacy, racial purity, and acceptance 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




into an appropriate class are concerned (153). She suggests that if people of color, especially women, are ever going to receive their due respect in society, they must become speaking and acting subjects of their destinies as the fan club members do. As Tere and Irma, culturally hybrid women themselves, critically discuss the nature of class and racial discrimination in this film, they realize that more is at stake regarding the politics of class, gender, and race, both in Mexico and U.S. societies. By crossing national borders between film and their realities, they become aware of the significance of cinema as a projection of constructed images, or celluloid fantasies, ones that may be incompatible with their own lives, but crucial in the formation of their transnational border feminism. Ultimately, they realize that they must transcend the limitations of the silver screen as they become educated women who learn more from their own life experiences. In terms of masculinity, Chávez constructs the character of Lucio Valadez, Tere’s married lover, to illustrate a hegemonic form of patriarchal domination. He lies to his wife, Diolinda, every time he secretly meets Tere at the Sand Motel, where she is symbolically sinking in this extramarital affair. He is also critical of her physical appearance and eating habits, evidence that he is yearning to control her body and mind (148). Facing the fact that she is involved with the antithesis of a Prince Charming, she compares her own experiences in her reality with those of the characters of Golden Age Mexican movies to transform her real relationship, an extramarital affair, from a fairy tale ending into an emotional disaster of disappointments. In drawing this comparison, Chávez evolves from representing Pedro Infante as a cultural icon of mythic proportions to pointing out his f laws as a man, one who is a cheater, liar, and womanizer like Lucio. In the end, Tere ceases depending on him as a model of masculinity and starts to rely on herself as a critical thinker determined to control her life and relationships. The relationship between Wirma and Mr. Wesley offers an alternative example of a marriage of equality between members of different heritages and racial backgrounds, a Chicana and an Anglo-American. Outraged at learning of such a match between her best friend and an older man of a different cultural and racial background, Tere discovers for the first time that she cannot depend on her best friend in the world, for now Wirma is committed to marriage, an institution she had critiqued earlier as a single woman. Nonetheless, Wirma defends her decision to marry Mr. Wesley because he respects her as a human 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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being. Furthermore, he offers Tere a job after being fired at school for being “the other woman.” It is imperative that Chávez includes this interracial match because she indirectly reverses the legacy of la Malinche, the concubine and interpreter for the Spanish conqueror of Mexico, Hernán Cortés. By contrast, Wirma is on equal footing with Mr. Wesley as they work toward reciprocity of affection, as opposed to physical, psychological, or sexual exploitation. Tere learns, in turn, more from her best friend’s experiences at love and romance, rather than from the fantasy represented in films that may delude women. In exploring masculinity, Chávez offers an alternative model in the relationship between Tere and her gay Chicano friend, Ubaldo Miranda, who is also a member of the Pedro Infante fan club.21 A victim of childhood sexual abuse by an older male cousin, Ubaldo has experienced a different side of patriarchal domination. He prefers to sing romantic songs like the Pedro Infante classic “Amorcito Corazón,” and reveals his emotional feelings more than men are expected to do. Ubaldo also follows an unconventional path as he forms friendships with women in the fan club, especially with Tere. Essentially, she is his best friend.22 Since Tere was raised in a predominantly matriarchal household and prays to a female God, she does not fear patriarchal control over her life and, perhaps, that is why she treats Ubaldo as an equal. In fact, the protagonist in Face of an Angel also believes in spirituality and feminizes God, unheard of in orthodox Catholicism. In effect, Tere is quite open and direct about her body and sexuality, “not a repressed virgin, nor nun” (150). Ubaldo and Tere also bond because they are considered outsiders, putos (literally, prostitutes) or “sexual outlaws,” for their nonconventional behavior or sexual orientation in their small-town community. They therefore form a community of their own or a “familia from scratch,” as Chicana feminist Cherríe Moraga would say. Unlike the attitude of the domineering male character of Lucio Valadez, Ubaldo is not afraid to admit that he admires a male actor such as Pedro Infante, an embodiment of physical beauty and the perfect male body. Infante’s sensuality and physique, though marketed for the masses, encouraged women and men alike to explore their bodies, to leave behind sexual repression and accept their sexual orientation and freedom. Chávez incorporates the character of Ubaldo to complicate her transnational border feminism, but also to contest the institutionalization of traditional masculinity exemplified by the patriarchal Lucio Valadez. Chávez asks us to reconsider a new form of masculinity in both, Mexican cinema and in Loving Pedro Infante. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




In fact, in the construction of the character of Ubaldo, Chávez alludes, in two ways, to certain myths surrounding the popularity of the real Pedro Infante. When Ubaldo disappears in the novel, a climactic moment, the search for his body is ambiguous because nobody is certain if he is dead or alive. Rumor has it that he left for Mexico to find a Pedro Infante look-alike boyfriend or “the real thing” (141). This incident is quite reminiscent of the disappearance of the real Pedro Infante after his death. According to Anne Rubenstein in “Bodies, Cities, Cinema: Pedro Infante’s Death as Political Spectacle” ( Joseph et al. 2001), nobody saw Pedro Infante’s face nor the body on the day of his burial, leading fans to doubt his death. Even today, many people, like the fan club members in the novel, believe that he never really died and that he must be hiding somewhere, similar to Elvis: “The King is not dead, but lives on forever.” Also, Chávez intimates through Ubaldo that Pedro Infante was as meaningful to men, especially gay Chicano/ Mexican men, as to women. She believes Pedro Infante opened a venue for men to feel comfortable about having male companions in public, as Ubaldo did, and about having other men as intimate, noncompetitive friends. Because of the characters of the policemen that Infante portrays in the film A toda máquina (Full Speed Ahead, 1952) Sergio de la Mora has read the film as having a homoerotic subtext that underlies the patriarchal competitive friendship on the surface (56–57).23 Interestingly, the Mexican police force was a strong presence at Infante’s funeral, playing mariachis in his honor because he valued them as human beings, not just as violent fighters of justice. In the novel, Chávez states, “What about all the mariachis who still love him and all the men from the Police Motorcyclists Union? They respected Pedro for the work he did in ATM: A Toda Máquina, in which he played a stunt-riding motorcycle cop” (137). Thus, Ubaldo also follows this troop of admirers and chooses to become part of a transnational border community of the Pedro Infante fan club, where Chicano/Mexican masculinity is redefined. In the chapter, “One Little Girl,” Chávez begins a critique of the role of women who were subjected to patriarchal domination beginning in the Pedro Infante films of the Golden Age. At the same time, Tere is changing her views on men, romance, and relationships. As a spectator, she realizes that she admires the exterior qualities of Pedro Infante (his physique, devotion to carpentry, singing), but no longer the characters he plays in the films. Tere takes a journey from celluloid melodrama to her real life. By accepting the f laws and mistakes in the real life of Pedro Infante, she also learns to accept herself (320). 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Chávez also infers that this conditioning begins in childhood as she observes the young actresses portraying young heroines in films such as Los tres huastecos (1948), Angelitos negros, and Nosotros, los pobres. It is no small coincidence that Tere wishes to become an elementary schoolteacher to guide children, still innocent, to follow their dreams. She can also serve as mentor to teach them more about gender equality after having learned from her own life experiences and from viewing Mexican films. As the novel progresses, Tere identifies less and less with the women’s roles in the Pedro Infante films (195). She begins to sympathize with them, wishing to form coalitions across national borders, but she is also aware that she must break with the tradition of the victimized woman and confront her reality as a transnational border feminist (196). Several scenes in Loving Pedro Infante show changes in Tere. As mentioned earlier, she rewrites orthodox Catholicism as she prays to a female God. She also acknowledges, accepts, and rejects her abusive relationship with Lucio. Symbolically and literally, Tere finds a voice in her talkative self and her singing, which annoys Lucío because he feels silenced, an inferior role for a traditional dominant man. She also realizes that she must break with certain values of the past, the history of women loving men as opposed to women loving themselves first (254). By burning the nightclub clothes she used to attract men at the Tempestad nightclub, Tere breaks with her dependency on men and asserts her identity as a self-motivated woman in control of her life, a transnational feminist. Chávez allows Tere to think critically and analyze situations without letting her emotions get the best of her, or the overpowering melodrama of Mexican cinema, both of which can overwhelm its spectator. Finally, she takes care of a little dog that she affectionately names Pedrito, explaining that they should be on equal terms and that the dog is woman’s best friend. In Loving Pedro Infante, Chávez further situates Mexican cinema as a response to the rapidly growing dominance of American mainstream culture that is responsible for the institutionalization of Hispanic culture in the United States. At one point, Tere and Wirma meet two very proud men of Spanish descent who hail from northern New Mexico, an area known for preserving and speaking “100% pure Castilian Spanish.” But la Wirma is not a victim of the cultural amnesia surrounding the history of Spanish colonization and she does not allow the men to condescend to her. Instead, she defends and legitimizes Mexican popular culture by recounting pivotal moments in Mexican 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia



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I’m the ambassador for Mejicano culture. My culture. I have to be. It’s because too many people both here and elsewhere think that Mejicanos are uncultured . . . What about the Mayan civilization? What about the pyramids? What about Monte Albán? What about Pedro Infante? Maria Felix? What about Cantinf las? Dolores Del Rio? It doesn’t matter if we’re in or out of Mejico, we’re always Mejicanos, with roots as deep as the cottonwoods near the Rio Grande. (191) Here, Chávez transcends national geographies and histories by tracing Mexican history to the pre-Conquest period before the political border became implemented. She also comments on the significant figures in both, official history and popular culture, superstars of Golden Age Mexican cinema—Pedro Infante, Maria Felix, Cantinf las (portrayed by Mexican comedian Mario Moreno), and Dolores del Rio—to reclaim a Mexican cultural legacy as an alternative to the familiar Hollywood Latinos (notably, Rudolfo Valentino, Rita Hayworth) that denied mestizaje. Chávez further exhibits her transnational consciousness when she refers to the Rio Grande, a geographical and political border between Mexico and the United States. This river is a metaphor for the cultural as well as physical crossings by Mexicans and Mexican Americans that take place despite attempts by border patrol and other law enforcement agents who try to prohibit this kind of cultural exchange.24 In this example, Chávez cleverly alludes to the historical period before the Treaty of Guadalupe of 1848 when the ancestors of Mexican Americans worked the land they owned before the Anglo-American conquest took place ( J. Chávez 1984). La Wirma has become a transnational ambassador, a cultural translator, of the legacies of cinema in popular culture and history.25 While borders, geographic or metaphorical, may conquer and divide communities, Chávez demonstrates her transnational border feminism by using literature and film to bridge communities on both sides of the U.S./Mexican borderlands. The Transnational Legacy of Pedro Infante in the Twenty-first Century I began the research for Loving Pedro Infante on a trip to Mexico City in summer 2003 to investigate Golden Age Mexican cinema and criticism 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


history. She strongly affirms,

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at the Archivo Filmoteca Nacional (Department of Film Archive) at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) and Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City that ended at the fiftieth anniversary of Pedro Infante’s death at the Panteón Jardin in Mexico City on April 15, 2007.26 At one point in her novel, Chávez mentions, “Irma Granados suggested we should think about raising money for the annual pilgrimage to El Panteón Jardin de la Capital de la República for the anniversary of Pedro’s death on April 15” (107). Life imitates art or, rather, literature. On both occasions, I posed questions to a cross-section of people from taxi drivers and waiters to journalists, academics, and a film director (Ismael Rodriguez’s son, whose father worked closely with Pedro Infante) regarding the importance of Pedro Infante for them and the nation.27 Most people still spoke of this cultural icon as if his spirit lived in their minds and in their hearts. In other words, Pedro Infante “no ha muerto” (he has not died) (see Rubenstein 2001). Infante’s spirit is present for me as well as I recall my growing up years in California, where my parents would take me to view Mexican movies at the currently nonexistent movie houses in the Mission District of San Francisco. But the memory lives on. Through televised Golden Age Mexican films on Spanish channels or teaching novels such as Loving Pedro Infante to younger generations, Infante’s legacy lives on in the United States and beyond. In Loving Pedro Infante, Chávez has created a bridge between Mexican popular culture, Golden Age Mexican cinema, and the transnational Chicano/Mexicano community of spectators, readers, receptors, and listeners, a broad audience that spans national spaces and temporalities. The dreams and illusions constructed by the media—by films, magazines, or other forms of popular culture—give men and women a sense of gender relationships across different kinds of borders. Like today’s telenovelas, or soap operas, Golden Age films constitute part of a transnational legacy on both sides of the U.S./Mexico borderlands. But as Chicana women become more empowered by education and social activism, they also develop a feminist consciousness that allows them to decide which road to take in seeking social justice and liberation for themselves and their communities. In Narratives of Greater Mexico (2004), literary critic Héctor Calderón ref lects on the uniqueness of the cultural heritage of New Mexico (also, the Spanish Southwest, the borderlands, Aztlán), a blending of “Native American, Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo-American cultures.” Chávez also represents those cultural components in Loving Pedro Infante, but elaborates it further into the making of a transnational border feminism, one 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




that crosses and bridges the U.S./Mexico borderlands physically and through memory. In 2005, I took a trip to the Border Book Festival, held every year in Las Cruces, New Mexico, which was based at the cultural center in the historical part of the town. The director, founder, and chief organizer, Denise Chávez, had amassed Pedro Infante memorabilia that decorated the center. One could see, for example, posters of plays involving a fan club of women obsessed with Pedro Infante, who even lit candles in his tribute. Chávez, herself, holds Pedro-athons (Infante film marathons) for those interested in viewing the Golden Age’s famous idol. As we approach the end of the first decade in the twenty-first century, it is important to maintain a cultural memory of traditions that made us cry, laugh, and essentially, ref lect on aspects of the culture, gender, and race that we sometimes took for granted in cinema. In this sense, Chávez is responsible for uniting a community of people of different nationalities, backgrounds, and interests at the Border Book Festival that takes place annually and attends to urgent political and social matters, whether they are local or global.



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Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002): Translating Gender and Genealogy Across the U.S./Mexico Borderlands

Since the publication of The House on Mango Street (1984, 1994a) and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Chicana author Sandra Cisneros has captured and won the hearts of readers of all ages around the world.1 In 2002, the critically acclaimed MacArthur-winning Cisneros published Caramelo or Puro Cuento, a semiautobiographical novel that depicts a family history of continuous migrations between the closest neighbor in Latin America, Mexico, and the United States over a hundred-year period. While Cisneros focuses on the U.S./Mexico borderlands, she also alludes to global travels that have affected Mexico since precolonial times. By expanding on her previous works, The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek, Cisneros examines the transnational migrations of Chicanos/as and Mexicans who travel consistently between Mexico and the United States in Caramelo. 2 In being mindful of both Chicano and Mexican cultures and histories in Caramelo, I suggest that Cisneros, as a transnational ambassador living in the U.S./Mexico borderlands, represents a genealogy that engages the politics of gender and race in Mexican and Mexican American relationships to understand the consequences of globalization. Similar to Denise Chávez, Cisneros dialogues directly with Mexican cultural and literary discourses, both at the official and popular culture levels. 3 In Caramelo Cisneros revindicates the voices and concerns of the marginalized in both U.S./Mexican societies (e.g., immigrants,



CH A P T E R

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Migrations and Travels Questions of migrations and travels have preoccupied Cisneros for some time since she, herself, was an urban migrant child growing up in different neighborhoods in Chicago, moving from one home to another until the family finally bought a permanent house when she was eleven.4 With her Mexican American mother, Elvira Cordero Anguiano, and Mexican father, Alfredo Cisneros del Moral, the latter would become homesick for Mexico City and would move the family there every summer for his birthday. The yearly childhood visits that Sandra Cisneros and her family paid to the paternal grandparents in Mexico City have also inf luenced her to the extent that Mexico City has become as much a home as Chicago, where she learned directly about Mexican culture at a very young age. Thus, her experiences of coming of age in two distinctly different cities, cultures, and nations inform her sensibility as a Chicana who develops a transnational identity as a youngster. When Cisneros was a young woman in her twenties, she earned a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to complete the writing of The House on Mango Street that had been a pivotal writing assignment at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (1976–1978). Desperate to explore her freedom after finishing graduate school in Iowa, she took the opportunity to travel abroad to Europe on this grant. The experiences of being exposed to a variety of cultures and meeting a diversity of people of different nationalities across Europe also made Cisneros aware of transnational connections between the U.S./Mexico borderlands and other nations in similar political situations.5 For many years, Cisneros earned a living as a creative writing instructor and struggling writer to support her literary career by moving from one university to another out of necessity. Eventually, she became the literary director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center in San Antonio, Texas, in the 1980s where she organized cultural events to promote the vanguard of Chicana/U.S. Latina literature. Since she experienced such a tremendous cultural connection with San Antonio, which reminded her of Mexican and Latin American cultures, she made this historical city a permanent home after she bought a house in 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


indigenous, mestiza/os, women, and the working class) to bring attention and social justice to important global concerns that are often forgotten.

Sandra Cisneros’s CARAMELO

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As I am getting older, I am writing more about global connections. How do I make people understand that the war in Bosnia is affecting them? How does one connect with a massacre in Rwanda or a woman raped by pirates in the Asiatic Sea? How does one connect the killings of people in Chiapas to a worker here in San Antonio? What is my role as a writer to the citizens of this country? . . . I also take my responsibility seriously of being a woman who lives on the border of cultures, a translator for a time when all these communities are shifting and colliding in history. Chicanos have that unique perspective. (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 53) At the end of the twentieth century, Cisneros meditates on crimes committed against humanity on a global scale, which should matter to the United States because those living within its boundaries are not always attuned to international affairs. She, especially, draws attention to the violence brought upon women and native people, who have minimal control over their lives during times of social unrest such as war. Moreover, she expresses a deep concern about the ability to relate and translate these incidents and stories to the public in the United States and beyond because their lives should also matter to a global community in a time of need. Cisneros has taken her role seriously, not only within the U.S. context, but also as a transnational writer and intellectual, even before the 9/11 incidents. Caramelo constitutes part of that cultural, historical, and literary response to hegemonic domination as Cisneros comments on migrations of people between the United States and Mexico, emblematic and symptomatic of socioeconomic instability and political upheavals, transnational issues that should affect all of us. Through the genealogy of the Reyes family in Caramelo, Cisneros constructs a dialectical relationship between the United States and Mexico that not only affects gender and race issues for the family members, but both societies at large. The long-awaited Caramelo has received many glowing reviews from well-respected newspapers in the United States, emphasizing this narrative as a milestone for Cisneros. Newspaper critics have commented that the form of the novel is a mimicry of telenovelas (Spanish soap operas), an engagement with popular culture, and a preoccupation with the past. The prevailing impression from book reviews seems to critique Cisneros’s attention to historical details and excessive plot delays in the 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


1991. In the interview, “A Home in the Heart,” Cisneros ref lects on concerns she was developing in the 1990s:


development of the narrative (e.g., Sayers 2002; Mazella 2002; López 2002). Mainstream critics fail to mention in any depth the significance of the Mexico-United States borderlands as a discourse of intervention that contests dominant forms of oppression in the formation of the protagonist, Celaya (Lala) Reyes. Mexico needs to be engaged as a vital component. Héctor Calderón (2004) claims that “Though Cisneros was born in Chicago, Mexico is not foreign to her. During her childhood, like other Mexican American families, her family shuttled back and forth between Mexico and the United States. Like the Southwest, the Midwest has had a history of Mexican migration beginning early in the twentieth century. Her family follows a classic pattern of immigrations” (176). This commentary does acknowledge migration experiences as a site of struggle in the formation of a transnational Chicano border culture that should be discussed in greater depth in newspapers as well as wider academic circles to inform and educate an unfamiliar public with the historical context of immigration matters.7 The need to understand the historical background in Caramelo perhaps explains the reason that mainstream newspaper critics only provide a partial engagement with the rich layers of Mexican history, culture, and politics. Hence, the reviews fall short of taking into consideration the larger social issues relevant in Caramelo. Cisneros critiques largescale established institutions such as Hollywood, and the U.S. government, but she does so in a justified manner and with much humor and parody. The narrative strategy of providing footnotes, especially in the second section of the novel, “When I Was Dirt,” is particularly instructive to the reader who may be unaware of any Mexican history within U.S./Mexico relations.8 Cisneros, however, does not claim to be “objective” in the narrative of the footnotes, but rather uses an ironic tone to critique public figures; yet, she simultaneously pays homage to important Golden Age Mexican popular figures.9 Indirectly, Cisneros insinuates that there is no objective side of history, but rather a version just like fictional stories or cuentos that the protagonist Lala and her father, Inocencio, like to exchange. More critically, Cisneros suggests that official history, be it American or Mexican, is a subjective discourse, as well. Through deceptively simple language, the narrator Lala discloses that she is also the storyteller, or cuentista, in the epigraph at the beginning of the novel. This idea is interlinked with the second part of the title of the novel, Puro Cuento. In Spanish, it is literally translated as a “pure story” (an untainted truth), but vernacular speech reveals that the storyteller/cuentista is telling a lie (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 58).10 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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By contesting the “objectivity” of historical discourse in Caramelo, Cisneros prepares her critical readership to think about what serves as “truth” or puro cuento, the Spanish saying that can be understood as “healthy lies” in English. It is another way to allure the reader into the world of invention, or puro cuento, where Cisneros blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. According to Ellen McCracken, “In postmodernist fashion, Cisneros breaks down the borders between genres by merging this technique of scholarly documentation with fiction. This breakdown is central to the novel’s desire to call into question the distinction between fact and fiction” (2004, 243). In terms of invention and the creation of fictional stories that take place in Mexico in Caramelo, Cisneros explains: “I was working from my childhood that helped to create an invented Mexico, an imaginary Mexico, an imaginary homeland as Salman Rushdie would say” (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 51). Like Salman Rushdie’s position in relationship to the Pakistani and Indian communities in England before the publication of his Satanic Verses (1988), Cisneros may take it upon herself as a “champion of immigrants’ rights and severe critic of imperial nostalgia” (Said 1993, 308) in Caramelo. Because she cares about immigrant and ethnic communities in the United States, she delves into her memory to explore the motivations for leaving the homeland in Mexico in search of a better life in the United States. In doing so, Cisneros demystifies the notion of the “American Dream” for immigrants and their children in the United States because they are not always made to feel welcomed in reality and, therefore, this dream remains in the imaginary realm. Essentially, Cisneros combines her art of fiction with her role as a socially committed writer that arises from a global responsibility in Caramelo. Cisneros traces transnational migrations of Mexican immigrant families in the United States and their relatives in their respective homeland, primarily Mexico City in Caramelo. In the travels during her childhood in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Cisneros situates the protagonist, Celaya (Lala) Reyes, as a witness to the cultural differences between her identity as a Chicana in cities such as Chicago and San Antonio, which allows her to relate to her mother, and her experience of growing up in Mexico City, which allows her to understand her father’s culture. In essence, she finds herself in the “borderlands” of two distinctive cultures, a position that she must learn to negotiate as far as gender and race are concerned through transnational crossings. In “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Roger Rouse suggests that “the continuous circulation of people, money, goods, and information, 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




the various settlements have become so closely woven together that, in an important sense, they have come to constitute a single community spread across a variety of sites, . . . ‘transnational migrant circuit’ ” (Between Two Cultures 1998, 254). Thus, Cisneros factors the migrations between cities in the United States and Mexico as an extended Mexican culture that transcends the national political divide. This is pivotal in the formation of her protagonist’s transnational Latina identity that transgresses the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Colonial Legacy and Travels South to Mexico Since the colonization of Nueva España (present Mexico) by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, the colonizers implemented a racial and social hierarchy that was continued by their descendents, predominantly criollos (descendents of Spaniards born in Mexico/Latin America), in the form of a social caste system or castas to maintain power among the elite. Because fewer women than men traveled from Europe to the Americas such as Mexico, the male Spaniards often took advantage of indigenous women, thereby forming a “mestizo” culture, often illegitimate children, who did not necessarily belong to one race alone, but rather embodied a hybrid mixture, a mestizaje. Since the native or indigenous people of Mexico sometimes died of illnesses or could not handle the hardships of physical labor to gain material wealth for the Spaniards, black slaves from Africa were forced to inhabit and work in Mexico, adding another dimension to the cultural and racial blendings. If Europeans and blacks mixed, their children were considered “mulattos.” To maintain control and order among the elites, one was assigned a casta, a social category, at birth, depending on one’s color and race. If one was born into the indigenous or black ranks, for example, it was virtually impossible to move up the social ladder. To complicate matters, the Spaniards invented further labels and terms to name other ethnic mixings. Although this system of castas was institutionalized during Spanish rule, remnants of this colonial legacy continued even after Mexico gained its independence in 1810 and racial prejudices still persist until the present moment. Cisneros contests this rigid racial and social stratification in Mexico in Caramelo, but she also questions the politics and implications of race for Mexican immigrants and their children in the United States. In order to understand the politics of race in Mexico in relationship to the United States, Cisneros complicates the representation of Mexicans 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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in the United States as she describes various lineages within the national culture in Caramelo. In response to the U.S. imaginary of Mexicans, she is well aware of the limited visions and stereotypes that do not do justice to Mexican citizens on either side of the U.S./Mexico borderlands. In the novel, the Chicana/Mexican American protagonist, Lala, must defend her identity by explaining the diversity of Mexicans who exist on the other side of the U.S. border in Mexico. She affirms: There are the green-eyed Mexicans. The rich blond Mexicans. The Mexicans with the faces of Arab sheiks. The Jewish Mexicans. The big-footed-as-a-German Mexicans. The leftover-French Mexicans. The chaparrito compact Mexicans. The Tarahumara tall-as-desert-saguaro eyebrows. The negrito Mexicans of the double coasts. The Chinese Mexicans . . . The wise-as-a-Tula-tree Zapotec Mexicans. The Lebanese Mexicans. Look I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say I don’t look Mexican. I am Mexican. Even though I was born on the U.S. side of the border. (2002, 353) In this commentary, Lala is mocked by her mestiza-looking Mexican American friends who consider her a “sell-out” to Chicano nationalist identity because she is not as loyal as them to the cause, nor as dark-skinned, compared to them. Therefore, she cannot be a “true” Chicana or Mexican. Interestingly enough, Lala is too dark-skinned compared to her Aunty Light-Skin and her cousin, Araceli, in Mexico City, which makes her have less social status in that context. Like Chávez, Cisneros equates being Chicana for Lala with mexicana or Mexican because she experiences and lives in the culture firsthand, be it in Mexico or the United States through her father. Cisneros further dispels myths of how people in the United States, including Chicanos and Latinos, may perceive Mexicans to appear physically. Although Lala may not look like a Mexican, Cisneros demonstrates that she identifies with her Mexican heritage because, through travels to Mexico as a youngster, she learned about the internal cultural diversity and discrimination within her own family, which serves as a microcosm of the nation. Historically, Cisneros also points out different cultural heritages and races in this passage by alluding to African slavery, Chinese labor, Middle Eastern and European immigration that form part of a single nationality, Mexican. She reconsiders mestizaje nationalism by transcending the Aztec/Spanish binary paradigm, one traditionally recuperated in Chicano/Mexican nationalist discourse. Cisneros 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




carefully reveals that the politics of race is a complicated matter as much in Mexico as in the United States. After the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the Mexican government used the rhetoric of mestizaje to create a national identity to strategically unite Mexicans by erasing racial and regional identities. Guillermo Bonfil Batalla argues that, since the conquest, mestizos in Mexico have undergone a process of de-Indianization that is close to the idea of assimilation to the dominant Spanish culture, or in Mexico’s case, espousing culture through the Spanish language, religious conversion to Catholicism, and adopting other customs in the name of progress.11 Having been deterritorialized in the provinces, indigenous and mestizo people must migrate to the cities to find jobs for their families to survive. Being more culturally Western in the urban centers, these migrants must undergo a cultural transformation. Cisneros contests the institutionalization of nationalism by the Mexican government, as well as the U.S. homogenization of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, at the expense of erasing the heterogeneous nature of the cultural and racial configuration of Mexican identity, due to colonialism and historical transmigrations, which have displaced people involuntarily. She is also critical of the condescending treatment of Chicano/as by Mexicans. Essentially, Cisneros brings to light the contradictions of nationalist rhetoric that serves as a pretext to unite but in reality divides a community on both sides of the border. She adopts a more nuanced and informed transnational perspective of Chicano/Mexican identity from a Chicana/U.S. Latina perspective, informed by the politics of race that exposes the heterogeneous nature of nationalism on both sides of the U.S/Mexico borderlands. Even though Cisneros was educated at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, exposed to American literature, and lived in the United States for most of her life, she has created a broad-ranging narrative in Caramelo that is in critical dialogue with canonical Mexican literature, culture, and history.12 The alliances with this literary tradition are inevitable given her interest in her heritage and paternal family’s connection to Mexico. While Caramelo may be divided into three sections, in the second part, “When I Was Dirt,” Cisneros focuses on the paternal genealogy within the context of the Mexican Revolution and World War II. She traces the genealogy of Lala’s paternal grandparents who lived and met one another during this period. In Caramelo, Cisneros maps geohistorical patterns of migrations within and outside of Mexico that highlight battles and conf licts 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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between the United States and Mexico, exemplifying how hegemonic forces such as presidents and other government officials have always been at the forefront in making political decisions that affect people at the margins, usually ethnic groups and women. Cisneros also critiques the fact that peace has rarely been established between the two nations due to the competitive nature and struggle to control and take over land, as demonstrated by the creation of the physical political border that resulted in the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848. Mexican social movements and wars were not only heroic deeds, mythologizing figures like Emiliano Zapata, but they also caused divisions, pain, and suffering through betrayal and corruption to marginal people who were unable to decide their fate. In Caramelo, Cisneros observes, “It happened during the Ten Tragic Days when President Madero found himself a prisoner in his own presidential palace. Some of the troops were loyal to the president, some were on the side of the rebels, and the million citizens of Mexico City found themselves caught in the crossfire. For ten days, the streets were battleground” (126). How could so few control the lives of so many? In the paternal grandparents’ generation, Cisneros shows migrations within Mexico. She names the protagonist’s Mexican grandmother, Soledad (Loneliness) Reyes, and the grandfather, Narciso (Narcissism) Reyes, as embodying the negative spirit of the revolution through the gender divide. While the men had the national obligation to participate in war, women were left alone at home to carry on roles such as domestic household heads, but some went to war as well, or were caught at the crossroads of a civil war, as were the protagonist and her children in Cisneros’s short fiction, “Eyes of Zapata,” in Woman Hollering Creek.13 Cisneros does not glorify the revolution as official history books do, but rather demystifies this historical phenomenon because people’s lives, especially women, mestizos, and the indigenous, changed radically and unexpectedly. On a larger scale, Cisneros appropriates the Mexican Revolution as a foreshadow or premonition for political conf licts ensuing between the United States and Mexico, especially regarding migrations from provinces such as Soledad’s origins in San Luis Potosí (known for its silver mining) to Mexico City, followed by immigration to the United States, as discussed in the character of Inocencio. Cisneros addresses the grandmother’s history, especially her migration to Mexico City, where gender, race, and class conf licts were not to be dismissed. Since her mother died and father remarried, Soledad had to join relatives in Mexico City, also seen as an opportunity for upward social mobility. Cisneros takes time to develop 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




this character because Lala’s migratory genealogy is tied to Soledad. In this generation, Cisneros critiques the revolution for the displacement of marginal people on both sides of the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Cisneros also organizes this second section of Caramelo as an intense dialogue between the Awful grandmother, Soledad, and her granddaughter, Lala, who battle over the right to control the narration of storytelling of Soledad’s past. Each has a version or cuento of recalling of how “the facts” happened. While Soledad wishes to remember an idealized version of her youth, especially in how she met her husband Narciso Reyes, Lala prefers to be more realistic and resists the décor of hyperbole. These two competing perspectives exemplify the struggle over the authority to narrate, to be a storyteller or cuentista. The struggle between Soledad and Lala can also be considered a metaphor for the battle between Mexico and the United States to control authority over history. In other words, who narrates the nation? In this section, Cisneros traces Soledad’s migrations to Mexico City, because she meets her future husband, Narciso, son of Eleuterio and Regina Reyes, who invents a royal family past. Eleuterio immigrated to Mexico from the port of Sevilla, Spain, which is where the first Spaniards departed to conquer Mexico in the sixteenth century. Because of the status given to Narciso’s Spanish heritage, Soledad, a “mestiza” girl from the provinces, was not considered worthy enough for her future husband, who espoused all the positive qualities of masculinity as a soldier who was “feo, fuerte y formal” (rugged, strong, and formal). In the end, he marries Soledad primarily out of obligation, as she becomes pregnant with his child. As his father Eleuterio reminds him, we are not “dogs,” meaning barbaric. Since the Reyes name and reputation are at stake as “civilized” people with a “royal” legacy in society, Narciso must comply with this responsibility by assuming his rightful paternity. Through an extensive genealogical narrative on the paternal side of the protagonist Lala Reyes, Cisneros also delves into the past of the father, Inocencio Reyes, whose name may be translated playfully as “innocent kings.” In recuperating the migration of Inocencio, one notices that he practically lived a life of royalty in Mexico City because his mother, Soledad, treated him as a spoiled son since birth, a privilege of his gender and class status in Mexico.14 While he attended the UNAM (National Autonomous University) in Mexico City, preparing for a professional career, he had material comfort, servants waiting on him hand and foot, including the indigenous laundry woman, Amparo. Because of his philandering and carefree ways, however, he did not focus on his studies and sooner, than later, his grades declined. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Reminiscent of the father figure of the protagonist Clemencia in the short fiction, “Never Marry a Mexican” in Woman Hollering Creek, Inocencio Reyes was too fearful of his father about his “disgrace” of having earned awful grades that would expel him from university and end the father’s dream of his son achieving a professional career, representing honor and prestige to the family name. Creative and f lexible, Inocencio and a relative migrate to the United States to strike it on their own, f leeing the strict social codes of family conformity of the new bourgeoisie class that is modernizing Mexico City during the 1940s. At least, this is the official story. According to the narrator, Lala, Inocencio has another reason for escaping to the United States, that is to say running away from Mexico City, beyond confronting his father, Narciso. As we later learn in Caramelo, he had become involved with Amparo, who gave birth to their illegitimate mestiza daughter, Candelaria. This relationship would, undoubtedly, represent “a disgrace” to the Reyes family because Inocencio transgressed the boundaries of his class and race, but not gender. As Cisneros further explores the representation of the Reyes family in the capital of Mexico City, she observes that the politics of race and racism, in conjunction with class, begins among the family members, themselves, at home. In other words, the colonial legacy since the Spanish Conquest is apparent at the microcosmic level within the royal Reyes structure that seems to replicate social and racial patterns of the Spanish heritage. Soledad’s daughter, Aunty Light-Skin, and her granddaughter, Antonieta Araceli, for instance, represent the Castilian heritage of the Reyes household as they are proud to be lighter than other family members. By calling attention to the European/Spanish preference for lighter-skinned members of the family, Cisneros insinuates that other ethnicities and races, indigenous or darker, have a negative connotation not only in public culture, but among family members, themselves, who seem to create boundaries rather than bridges. Bonfil Batalla claims that this discrimination comes from the Spanish casta system that is inculcated in the minds of the younger members who notice that racial and social hierarchies extend until the present day.15 The Mexican American cousins, Lala and her brothers, find themselves confused because they have been exposed to a different form of racism in the United States, usually outside the family parameters, but in Mexico, they discover that racism through a hierarchy of colors and shades exists within the family circle. Like the young Mexican American characters in “Mericans” in Woman Hollering Creek, Lala and her siblings are sometimes “misunderstood” by their Mexican relatives (Calderón 2004, 177). 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




In the character of Candelaria, the illegitimate daughter of Inocencio and Amparo, though, Cisneros brings forth the politics of gender and race with respect to family name, honor, and legitimacy. Every time that Lala and her family visit Mexico City to see Soledad, whom Lala, as an adult, remembers as the Awful grandmother, she is tempted to play with Amparo’s daughter, Candelaria, who is described as having “skin the color of a caramelo” (34). Perhaps because both young girls are considered outsiders, Lala has “barbaric ways” due to her U.S. upbringing and Candelaria is dark-skinned; neither conforms to the social class hierarchy to which Inocencio’s family adheres. As the narrative progresses, Cisneros discloses that Candelaria is Lala’s half-sister. Described unsympathetically by other family members as “dirty” and like “a dog,” Candelaria is ostracized by her peers due to her class, gender, and race. Lala is also forbidden to play with Candelaria by her mother because everyone will begin to judge Lala as unladylike, overstepping her social boundaries. Ironically though, the physical description of Candelaria is reminiscent of how Soledad was perceived by her own mother-in-law, Regina, when she had migrated as a young girl, with her caramel-colored rebozo (shawl), from a small provincial town to the capital of Mexico City. Thus, Cisneros critiques the hypocrisy of the family and, by extension, the social middle class to which they belong, for failing to acknowledge Candelaria as a biological member and pretending to belong to a “higher class,” based on racial lineage and socioeconomic status, when in reality, the Reyes family is of mixed classes and races. According to Bill Johnson González, Caramelo “is overf lowing with examples of the Mexican middle-class’s ideologies of racial hatred” (2006, 14). By illustrating a conservative side to Mexican society as far as gender, class, and race are concerned, Cisneros parodies, to a certain extent, telenovelas that often represent archetypes of light-skinned characters as benevolent, while the darker-skinned characters have negative qualities or are unworthy of acknowledgment since they are in servile positions.16 Why would Inocencio hide his daughter Candelaria like a haunting ghost that he refused to accept and much less, share, with his legitimate wife, Zoila, and family in Chicago and San Antonio? Cisneros uncovers the double standard of gender roles that both, men and women, have had to endure for many years in Mexico and in the United States because Inocencio’s actions have repercussions for his legitimate marriage and all his children, with respect to his role-model behavior. Cisneros uses melodrama and suspense in this subplot in Caramelo to resemble an actual telenovela that the narrator acknowledges 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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in the title of the chapter, “A Scene in a Hospital That Resembles a Telenovela When in Actuality It’s the Telenovelas That Resemble This Scene” (402–409). Life and art mirror one another. The confrontation between Lala and Inocencio is reminiscent of a suspenseful buildup in a telenovela, but it does not end there. Migrations North to Mexican Chicago The presence of Mexicans in Chicago can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century, as it was rapidly becoming a leading industrial city in the United States. One of the first areas that Mexicans inhabited was Hull House on Maxwell Street, as mentioned in Caramelo (2000, 15). Historian Juan García (1996) notes the transmigration patterns of Mexican laborers who traveled north to the Midwest region to find jobs to support their families, but many also returned home to join their families in Mexico. Of particular importance, García emphasizes the fact that Mexicans who chose to work in the Midwest often preferred to earn a living in the cities, such as Chicago and Detroit, because they were compensated better and these jobs were more competitive than their counterparts in agriculture in the Southwest, as long as they could endure the climate and unjust labor treatment.17 He challenges the perception that Mexican immigrants are only farm workers as represented in the U.S. national imaginary at the time, but sets the record straight when he discusses the contributions of the Mexican immigrant labor force in the making of modern cities like Chicago, in spite of discriminatory policies set against them. Historian Gabriela Arredondo (2008) focuses specifically on how immigration affected Mexican identity in Chicago in the interwar period (1916–1939).18 Writer, Ana Castillo (1994), further explains that the Mexican population in Chicago had a special relationship with Mexican culture because the families often maintained many strong cultural practices and values that mirrored those in Mexico.19 Even in the generation of the children and, sometimes, grandchildren, they may identify themselves as Mexicans or mexicanos in addition to Chicanos or Mexican Americans. In Caramelo, Cisneros touches on the transnational identity of the Chicano and Mexican characters, both parents and children. In addition, Cisneros provides an ethnic history of Chicago, chronicling the first migration of the grandfather Narciso Reyes in the 1910s through Lala’s growing up years in the cultural revolution of the civil rights, hippie, and women’s movements in the 1960s by referring to Janis 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




Joplin, the Beatles, and films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). She underscores the representation of immigrants in the formation of metropolitan Chicago in the United States by paying homage to Maxwell Street, for example. She also refers, specifically, to the characters of the generation of the father, Inocencio Reyes, and his brothers, Uncle Fat Face and Uncle Baby, who immigrate to the United States to work as upholsterers after World War II. In this time period, Cisneros discusses the importance of Mexican upholsterers, Inocencio and his brothers, because they are often dismissed as an invisible group in the cultural memory of U.S. labor history that she honors. She also emphasizes the physical labor symbolized by their hands, a mano, to draw attention to modernization and exploitation. While the men construct furniture, the women, we learn, sew rebozos, traditions from the past that continue in the present, but to a lesser degree. In fact, Inocencio always comments on how the quality of the fabric and furniture has changed in upholstery over time as a consequence of modern technology. At one dramatic point in the narrative, Inocencio and his brothers argue over the upholstery family business because his two brothers wish to embark on a different business, leaving behind the past. For example, they would opt for the use of modern equipment instead of their hands. They insist that people are no longer employed in making these quality products by hand, but instead, rely on machines to facilitate production. In this instance, Cisneros critiques the hegemonic forces behind technology by acknowledging the contradictions that are involved in displacing immigrant workers in metropolitan areas. This coincides with a time when Chicago is transforming from immigrant labor to highly industrial work.20 Upon his arrival in the United States, owing to earning terrible grades at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, Inocencio learns that his status as a foreigner bestows unexpected attitudes toward him as an immigrant, a major difference from living comfortably at home in Mexico. Because Inocencio and his cousin are darker-skinned people and are unable to speak English f luently in the United States, mainstream Americans take them for immigrants and minorities and thus, treat them like second-class citizens. At one point, the young, f leeing Inocencio takes a seat “at the back of the bus” like African Americans while he is working in the South of the United States Cisneros points out that Mexicans have also become victims of segregation because of their skin color and lack of command of a defensive English in different regions of the United States. The conf lation of race, language, and immigrant status reach another level through 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Inocencio’s transnational experiences of discrimination in the United States. As Caramelo progresses in the third section of the novel in the United States, Cisneros focuses on the disparate backgrounds of Lala’s parents to explore the cultural encounters of people from opposite sides of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands: the father, Inocencio Reyes, a native of Mexico City from an upwardly mobile middle-class family who lived through the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the mother, Zoila Reyes, a Mexican American from a working-class immigrant family in Chicago who experienced the Depression in the 1930s. Although both parents may be associated with Mexican culture, their experiences in Mexico and the United States are completely different, and, at times, in conf lict with one another. While Zoila may be a racial minority, her husband is a Mexican immigrant, who then becomes a citizen. Both are marginalized in different ways, exemplifying a discrepancy between cultural and legal citizenship, according to Flores and Benmayor (1997, 6). Furthermore, the cultural and sexual wars at home allude to the larger national wars of political conf lict between the United States and Mexico in the twentieth century as one struggles for power and the other for independence. Before contextualizing the differences between Lala’s parents, it is important to point out how they met in Chicago. Through the mother Zoila’s eyes, Cisneros juxtaposes two important moments in her life to comprehend her position as a Mexican American woman from an urban working-class background. In her earlier days before marriage to Inocencio, Zoila fell in love with Mexican American Enrique Aragón (whose last name refers to a region in Spain and hence, his Spanish heritage) in the United States. She took great pleasure in hearing her name pronounced in Spanish by Enrique and thought highly of this gentleman who had class. Ironically, he had so much status that his father considered it beneath his social category to marry a woman like Zoila, despite the fact that both are Mexican Americans, born and educated in the United States. Furthermore, the Aragón family money was tainted, that is, earned illegally. Cisneros clearly illustrates that a social and ethnic hierarchy exists and is unofficially enforced, among Mexican Americans in the United States as well as Mexico, insinuating that class stratification has crossed transnational borders. When Zoila meets Inocencio in a U.S. Army soldier’s uniform, “feo, fuerte y formal” in Chicago, she is immediately attracted to his charms and class even though she can see through him as a fanfarrón, a show-off. Nonetheless, she marries him and gives birth to seven children, including the only 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




daughter, Lala. The encounter between Zoila and Inocencio represents a prelude of much cultural and national clashing. In order to maintain cultural ties to Mexico, the character of Inocencio Reyes represents a transnational identity himself, because he would make sure that the family, consisting of his wife, Zoila, his daughter, Lala, and his six sons, took summer trips to Mexico City in celebration of his birthday. In the chapter “The Little Mornings” (translated from Las mañanitas), in Caramelo, Cisneros exposes the cultural conf licts that exists between the Mexican American daughter-in-law Zoila, and her domineering Mexican mother-in-law, Soledad, who is critical of the way that Zoila raises her children—too much inf luence from U.S. culture that interferes with a proper Mexican upbringing. In fact, Soledad gives herself the right to criticize their “barbaric ways” as did the Awful grandmother figure in “Mericans,” in Woman Hollering Creek. In this Caramelo chapter, Soledad spoils her son, Inocencio, on his birthday by making him his favorite dish, mole (considered the Mexican national dish), and takes his side at the expense of distancing her daughterin-law. Rather than celebrate a moment of happiness among family members by singing the traditional mañanitas for birthdays in Mexico, Inocencio and Zoila fight because they are disturbed while still in bed. Furthermore, Soledad accuses Inocencio and his family of “behaving like ranch people” because Lala sleeps with them. Soledad implies that the U.S. Reyes family lacks etiquette and manners, according to her bourgeoisie Mexico City standards. Zoila perceives this gesture as a personal intrusion, lack of respect, and power struggle, but ironically, Inocencio does nothing because he is “his mother’s son.” This family clash leads to confusion for the young Lala because bonding should take place among women from a U.S. Latina perspective. Instead, Cisneros suggests that family and gender allegiances may be stronger in motherson relationships, than among women of Mexican background who are divided by cultural and class borders. With respect to national loyalty and seeking a sense of belonging, it is worth noting the character of Inocencio and his evolving status from immigrant to citizen in the United States in Caramelo. What Inocencio discovered was, not only a job as a manual laborer as an upholsterer in the United States, but he met his future wife, Mexican American Zoila Reyna, and he became a U.S. citizen by enlisting in the Army. Cisneros states: “Private Inocencio Reyes, ASN 3398.4365 has successfully completed the Special Training Course conducted by this Unit and is graduated this twenty-first day of June 1945 at New Cumberland” (377). However, this fact does not prevent an INS officer 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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with a Spanish surname to question and threaten to “deport” Inocencio back to Mexico, jumping to the conclusion that he is an “illegal alien” without adequate papers such as his green card. Cisneros explains, “The INS officers simply shrug and mumble,—Sorry. But sometimes it’s too late for I’m sorry . . . Instead of—No problem, my friend—which is Father’s usual reply to anyone who apologizes, Father runs after them as they’re getting in their van and spits,—You . . . changos. For you I serving this country. For what, eh? Son of a mother!” (377).21 In this scene, Cisneros exposes the U.S. government’s social injustice for not appreciating the Spanish-speaking or surnamed soldiers who fought and risked their lives for the United States in the name of freedom and democracy during World War II when American patriotism was high. While INS officers may be following procedures by interrogating Mexican residents based on the physical appearance of race, this process leaves minimal room for defending one’s honor before the government and ref lects an intrusion of one’s civic rights. On a broader level, Cisneros becomes an advocate for peace and social justice because she not only critiques the wasteful energy of governments who recruit young men for war, but the government also forgets to honor and acknowledge their efforts for defending the United States, and stigmatizes immigrants, legal or not, in the process. In fact, one of Lala’s brothers is later recruited to fight in the Vietnam War. The attitude from the government could be considered scapegoating or more formally, racial profiling, which tends to affect the youth in metropolitan areas and more recently, people of color in the post-9/11 period (Oboler 2007, 469). Again, Cisneros is concerned with telling the racial experiences of im/migrants for family members who wish to keep their culture alive for the younger generation, Lala and her brothers—products of a transnational identity. Cisneros focuses on how immigrants have struggled to make a home for themselves, their families, and their communities in a historical moment when Chicago barely had a Mexican/Latino population. Similar in certain respects to Los Angeles, Chicago has emerged as a “Mexopolis” that “contributes significantly, if not always in acknowledged ways, to the development of the cities in which they live,” according to Raúl Villa (2000, 234). In the third section in Caramelo entitled “The Eagle and the Serpent” (representing the Mexican flag), Cisneros situates the narrative in Chicago to announce the transnational nature of immigrants and their children, as a younger generation of Latino/as decides to marry outside their national heritage. The celebration of Zoila and Inocencio’s thirtieth wedding anniversary encapsulates a multigenerational and multicultural gathering that 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia



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Gender and Genealogy In Caramelo, Cisneros explores the politics of gender roles by constructing a feminist lineage through a triad of generations of women in the context of U.S.–Mexico transnational migrations. On the one hand, Cisneros challenges traditional representations of proper womanhood by presenting a social hierarchy and competitiveness among the women in the Reyes family—Soledad, Zoila, and Lala. On the other hand, the protagonist Lala admires them for being powerful women and inf luencing her to develop independent thinking. Soledad, a product and witness of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, embraces an omnipotent authority that instills fear and distrust in members of her own family, including her own daughter, Aunty Light-Skin, who has her own tragic story of a broken heart. Left orphaned by the death of her mother, Soledad inherits and wears a rebozo, a caramel-colored shawl, which symbolizes her hybrid mestiza identity. Unintentionally, she passes it down to her granddaughter, Lala. Because she is American, Soledad presumes that Lala cannot understand nor appreciate the cultural, familial, and historical value of the rebozo and Soledad resents the fact that she will wear it. Cisneros delineates the historical voyage of the rebozo as a symbol of mestizaje and further hybridities in Mexican culture to illustrate how a seemingly simple piece of cloth can connect many distinctive cultures, histories, and nations. In Caramelo, she explains: The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere. It evolved from the cloths Indian woman used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish shawls, and was inf luenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial court of China exported to Manila, then Acapulco, via the Spanish galleons. During the colonial period, mestizo women were prohibited by statutes dictated by the Spanish Crown to dress like Indians, and since they had no means to buy clothing like the Spaniards, they began to weave cloth on the indigenous looms creating a long and narrow shawl that slowly was shaped by foreign inf luences. (2002, 96, my emphasis) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


demonstrates how their sons and daughters-in-law will form new cultural diasporas through multiethnic and multiracial marriages and possibly, forming transnational communities in the United States.

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By tracing the transhistorical and transnational migrations of the rebozo, Cisneros not only alludes to the Spanish Conquest of Mexico, a historical event that affected the indigenous cultures through dealings and trades, but she also engages colonization in Asia, another culture that directly contributed to the fabric of the rebozo. She also explores the evolving significance of this symbol because it was associated with indigenous women in colonial times and therefore, not accepted by the elite criollos in Nueva España (present Mexico) society. Moreover, Cisneros introduces the politics of gender and race in this historical context by underlining that a woman revealed her status and cooperation by the appearance of her clothes, which was a way to monitor mestiza women’s bodies, already de-Indianized by conversion to Catholicism and speaking Spanish, and marginalizing indigenous women from other women (e.g., mestizas and criollas) in colonial society. Cisneros contests this control over women’s bodies and culture by having Lala wear the rebozo and challenges Spanish patriarchy and European imperialism that dates back centuries. Cisneros also takes a stand by educating younger women who may be confused or ambivalent about the symbol of the rebozo. By wearing varied-colored rebozos displaying fashion aesthetics on the one hand, Cisneros is also taking a political position on the historical symbol of the shawl by allying herself with indigenous women and mestizas, many of whom still wear rebozos in different styles in modern Mexico.22 Chicanas translate and transport rebozos not only across the U.S./Mexico borderlands, but also as a signifier of racialized gender roles across temporal geographies.23 As opposed to the denigrated status that the rebozo held during the colonial period, this shawl represents cultural pride in a transnational context, migrating from colonial Mexico to contemporary Chicanas/ Latinas. The rebozo also allows Cisneros to connect history with gender, race, and migrations that may not always be recuperated in official history books. This item can often be an elaborate woven cloth that women pass down to their daughters or granddaughters as a precious memento. Because the carefully woven rebozo can often be multicolored, it has become a timeless symbol of women who used it to wrap their children or carry food, especially during times of war (e.g., Mexican Revolution). To wear the rebozo means to acknowledge the women who have worked the land, taken care of their children, and, at times, fought in revolutions on land and at home. With the rebozo, Cisneros revindicates and acknowledges the women who have helped build Mexico and the United States on both sides of the border and beyond. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




In Caramelo, Lala realizes that her entire genealogy is tied up in this cloth through weaving layers of stories. In a feature essay “Truth, Lies, and Memory,” Cisneros reveals, “I’ve always thought that my literary antecedents were not writers but weavers . . . What is telling a story but keeping track of those threads?” (Shea 2002, 33). As she matures, Lala learns about gender and genealogy from Soledad and Zoila to understand herself. While the Awful Grandmother exemplifies one model of Mexican womanhood, Lala seeks and creates her own definition of transnational Latina identity, being exposed to U.S. and Mexican cultures simultaneously. In “Crafting Feminist Genealogies: On the Geography and Politics of Home, Nation and Community,” Chandra Mohanty reminds us that One concrete task feminist educators, artists, scholars, and activists face is that of historicizing and denaturalizing the ideas, beliefs, and values of global capital such that underlying exploitative social relations and structures are made visible. This means being attentive not only to the grand narrative or “myth” of capitalism as democracy, but also to the mythologies feminists of various races, nations, classes, and sexualities have inherited about each other . . . one of the greatest challenges we (feminists) face is this task of recognizing and undoing the ways in which we colonize and objectify our different histories and cultures, thus colluding with hegemonic processes of domination and rule. (Shohat 1998, 486) While Mohanty focuses on decolonizing history among feminists of different backgrounds, Cisneros recognizes internal racial and gender discrimination within a national heritage, Mexico, and its descendents, Chicano/Mexican Americans. She recuperates an alternative history of marginalized groups in both, Mexico and the United States, who continue to pay a price for a colonial history of labor exploitation and migrations as a consequence of globalization. Perhaps Cisneros’s Caramelo may have other cultural connections to Mexico and gender. This transnational narrative has important points of contact with Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska’s narrative biographies, Hasta no verte, Jesus mío (1969) and Tiníssima (1992) as well as Mexican photographer Mariana Yampolsky’s images of Mexican indigenous women.24 In the representation of the three main female characters in Caramelo—Soledad, Zoila, and Lala—Cisneros is actively engaged in a transnational dialogue with Poniatowska and Yampolsky, 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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women artists who share a concern for the rebellious, the underrepresented, and migrating women to Mexico City. Elisabeth Guerrero notes that Poniatowska “points out Mexico City’s f laws, even as she celebrates the courage of its inhabitants, particularly that of the socially marginal and of the artistic elite” (2007, 189). In Caramelo, Cisneros also represents positive and negative aspects of women living, moving, and traveling to Mexico City, or la capirucha as Cisneros would say. Unlike Poniatowska and Yampolsky, though, Cisneros extends the migratory representation to include the descendents of Mexican women in the United States, that is to say, Mexican Americans and Chicanas, who return to the heritage land of Mexico with transnational eyes from having lived in other cities, Chicago and San Antonio. As far as representing marginal women on both sides of the U.S./Mexico borderlands, Barbara Curiel observes that “Cisneros takes a historical skeleton, gives her f lesh, and uses her to construct a critique of the traditional relationship of masculine and feminine power in Mexico and among Chicanos. This narrative project provides readers with an alternative Mexican national narrative which challenges and rewrites the Chicano nationalist origins story” (2001, 404). Even though Curiel refers to “Eyes of Zapata” (1991), Cisneros also rewrites the Chicano/Mexican national narratives in Caramelo from a transnational Latina perspective. Women Migrating Across the U.S./Mexico Borderlands In the first generation of female relatives portrayed in Caramelo, migration takes place internally in Mexico. Though originally from the provinces in Mexico, the Awful grandmother, Soledad, immediately adopts the urban values of Mexico City and acts in a condescending manner toward her daughter-in-law Zoila and U.S.-born and raised grandchildren for their “barbaric ways,” whether they visit her in Mexico or she visits them in the United States. When Lala visits Soledad as a child, she learns of her female power as she poses like a “soldadera ready for war,” reminiscent of the historical figure of la Adelita, the soldier woman who fought during the Mexican Revolution. In another moment, Soledad reminds Lala that “you’re under my roof now,” by behaving as the matriarch of the household, expecting respect and obedience rather than open communication on equal terms with her granddaughter, Lala (Monsiváis 2006, 1–20). Cisneros demonstrates that culture and class differences instigate a clash between Soledad and Lala that will increase throughout the narrative, especially when 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




Lala is criticized for being too disrespectful and independent, by her Mexican grandmother, Soledad, ref lecting cultural and generational differences. In the second generation, Lala’s mother Zoila may be a dedicated wife and mother in the United States on the surface, yet she does not allow anyone to dictate her life nor her household, including her traditional Mexican mother-in-law, Soledad. Unlike the sweet nature of the father, Inocencio, Zoila is very direct with her children, especially the daughter, Lala. While Zoila may have Mexican roots, she is a product of an urban working-class Chicago in voice and attitude (Kevane and Heredia 2000, 54–55). Due to her class and her formation in the United States, she has developed, relatively speaking, more independent views of women’s roles significantly, with respect to religion. She is a freethinker and informs herself by reading newspapers and Mother Jones. When the Mexican American mother, Zoila, and the Mexican grandmother, Soledad, meet, it is allegorical cultural conf lict between the United States and Mexican nations. In the third generation, Lala is a product of both worlds, specifically Chicago and Mexico City, and symbolically, she must learn to negotiate the gender role models presented throughout her life. Unlike the orthodox Catholicism of her grandmother, and the double standard of her mother, as far as choosing to marry and raising seven children, Lala embodies a different sensibility in terms of her sexuality, economic freedom, and career choices—to be or not to be, an artist, or a writer. Like her friend, Viva Ozuna, she wishes to run away to San Francisco in the 1960s, at the climax of the Flower Child days, to become a famous musician like Janis Joplin or a writer—dreams not encouraged for young women by Chicano/Mexican culture at the time. Yet, what she inherits in this spectrum of transnational gender models in Soledad and Zoila is an independent spirit that allows her to challenge and contest patriarchal attitudes toward a woman’s servile place in society. Cisneros further explores a transnational Latina narrative when Lala travels to Mexico City as an adult without the escort of her family, not necessarily in search of roots, but rather sexual and spiritual freedom. In this journey, Lala decides to elope with her nerdy Chicano boyfriend, Ernie Calderón, planning the perfect timing for his marriage proposal, but their plans go awry. In recalling the neighborhoods of her childhood in Mexico City, such as Tepeyac, the home of the Basilica of La Virgen de Guadalupe, and el Zócalo, the historical center of Mexico City, Lala personifies the city as if it were an entity manifested from 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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I watch the world below going about its business, crisscrossing, a speaker blasting a fuzzy version of “Waltzes of the Flowers,” brilliant masons lining up for work, beggars begging, women selling pink meringue cake, vendors of cream of abalone, emery board sellers, students, clerical workers. Everything has always been here, will always be here. Millions of citizens. Some short and stocky, some lean and tall, some charming, some cruel, some horrid, some terrible, some a pain beyond belief, but all of them to me beautiful. In fact, the most beautiful in the world. (2002, 385) Cisneros inverts the convention of returning to the motherland of Mexico in search of roots by reclaiming Mexico City as a transcendental city, which gives Lala a new perspective on a woman’s affirmation of her newfound freedom from a transnational Latina perspective, symbolized through wearing the multicolored rebozo on her voyage. By traveling to Mexico City as an adult, Lala gains a better perspective of herself as a woman and learns to depend on herself for answers after being rejected and abandoned by her first boyfriend, Ernie. Cisneros constructs this young male character as an extremely devout Catholic and obedient son to his mother, somewhat similar to Inocencio’s spoiled behavior by his own mother, Soledad. Ironically, the male figure of Ernie refuses to have sexual relations with the young lady, Lala, because, while they have temporarily separated to ref lect on their elopement in the Federal District, he has decided to become a Catholic priest to please his mother and, because he feels guilty for almost committing to marriage. Horrified, shocked, and disillusioned at this decision, Lala chooses to become strong and independent, rather than depend on a man for happiness and fulfillment, very similar to the choices made by Tere when she leaves Lucio in Loving Pedro Infante (2001). The foundation of Lala’s independence is tied to the distance away from the comfort of her family who reside in the United States. Rather than become a victim of love as other weeping women do, Lala takes comfort in the spiritual strength of La Virgen de Guadalupe, who represents inner female power, not orthodox Catholicism—a definite Chicana/U.S. Latina perspective.25 The realization of a woman’s spiritual power aids Lala in confronting her family, especially her father, Inocencio, about her independence—deciding to elope without his blessing, a “disgrace,” and leaving the patriarchal home.26 Inocencio, though, does not condone 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


her past, present, and future, as if it contained her genealogy and more. She says:


his daughter, but rather blames himself for Lala’s downfall, her loss of innocence, and disobedience. Perhaps one reason that the father feels guilty is that he realizes that his daughter Lala is now an adult, a woman, a human being with faults and f laws, as he was. When he was young, he had a daughter Candelaria out of wedlock, an incident that his mother, Soledad, covered up until the trip to Acapulco. When Soledad revealed this hidden “secret” to Zoila, the family unity is disrupted and Cisneros begins to narrate the paternal genealogy. In Caramelo, Cisneros astutely interlinks gender with the politics of class and language as she demonstrates how Mexican nationals perceive Chicanos/Mexican Americans as inferior to themselves, owing to downward mobility. This is exemplified mainly by class differences, the latter frequently resulting from forced migration to the United States, and the lack of command of a standard Spanish. She further exposes the lack of compatibility among women in the same family, Zoila and Soledad. In doing so, Cisneros challenges the perspective of official national cultures by legitimizing a hybrid culture created in the U.S.Mexico borderlands, exemplified by continuous migrations of generations of Mexicans and Mexican Americans, perspectives held by Zoila and Lala, who contest the condescending attitudes by Mexicans toward them. Lala not only mediates between her parents, allegorical symbols of Mexico and the United States, each represented by the serpent and the eagle, but she must also reconcile the differences in her feminine genealogy between her grandmother and mother. Analogous to an amphibian, Lala represents a new generation of U.S. Latinas who negotiate their heritage, migrating the U.S./Mexico borderlands through travels and memory by developing a strong woman’s consciousness to form a transnational identity. Cisneros further complicates and demystifies the notion of a perfect harmony or even a sense of understanding that exists among the women in the Reyes family, but rather focuses on the reality of women’s situations, living disrupted lives beyond their control. She does not romanticize, but rather exposes real dilemmas of women in the same family who have different expectations of themselves, due to the politics of gender, race, and migrations. In a similar ideological and philosophical vein, postcolonial critic Edward Said explains the role of the migrant as the physical and metaphorical intellectual in connection to freedom and social justice in the shadow of imperialism. He says: Yet, it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. (1993, 332) While Said speaks of the migrant as a metaphor for the intellectual in his trajectories and travels, Cisneros distinguishes between symbolic migrants, real immigrants, and those in power, be they intellectuals or politicians, to discuss national and global issues affecting Mexico and the United States, not only in the colonial period through the twentieth century, but also in the twenty-first century. If one thinks of the colonizing attitude toward the geographical/physical border, it has become a war zone rather than just a diplomatic political divide.27 In Caramelo, Cisneros concretizes (genderizes and racializes) Said’s ideas about migration by explicitly holding institutions of power and domination in the United States and Mexico accountable for the senseless abuses, invasions, poverty, and violations brought onto marginal communities such as immigrants, the indigenous, and women on both sides of the U.S./Mexico borderlands. Beyond historical accuracy, Caramelo makes us reconsider the United States’s role in domestic and global matters. This novel by Cisneros engages in the task of rewriting the representation of U.S./Mexican border history from a transnational Chicana/Mexicana perspective to bring social justice and understanding to women and people of color in the Americas across time and space. When the protagonist, Lala, ref lects on her experiences in Mexico from a U.S. standpoint, she says, “Every year I cross the border, it’s the same—my mind forgets. But my body always remembers” (18). We should also remember. At the Tenth Annual Latina Letters conference that took place in San Antonio at St. Mary’s College in July 2005, Sandra Cisneros was invited to be the keynote speaker of an event that she helped to initiate a decade earlier when she was director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center. On the evening of her keynote address, she shared another humorous and touching story/cuento about a young aspiring Latina writer in San Francisco who wished to meet her idol, the Argentine tango master, Astor Piazzolla. While Cisneros read to a captivated audience, she was wearing a multicolored traditional Mexican dress with a white-lace rebozo. Toward the end of her reading, she emphasized the point of the story: to remember the supporting fans and 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




readers because she, too, remembered what it was like to be a struggling artist. In the King William district of San Antonio, Cisneros has made a home and community for herself.28 By defending the right to paint her house the color of her choice, Cisneros has also reclaimed her Mexican heritage on the U.S. transnational side. Her rose-colored—then, controversially, periwinkle-colored—house on East Gunther Street, is now considered part of the historical tour of the neighborhood.29 In 2007, I visited the Basilica of La Virgen de Guadalupe in the Tepeyac neighborhood in Mexico City. As I walked around the neighborhood I found the House on La Fortuna number 12, where Cisneros had visited her father’s family every summer as a child. I can now understand why Cisneros chose to live in San Antonio after having lived in Tepeyac. Though divided by a geographical political border, both cities are full of vibrant Mexican and Latin American colors (caramelo and a multitude of others), music, food, languages, people, and a spiritual sustenance that makes one feel part of the family of humanity, be it past, present, or future.30



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T H R E E

Marta Moreno Vega’s When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004): The Diasporic Formation of an Afro-Latina Identity

Although Puerto Rican and other Caribbean diasporic writers have been publishing in the United States, especially in New York City, over a century, it is during the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s that Puerto Rican literature in the United States in English received national literary recognition. Piri Thomas’ novel Down These Mean Streets (1967) and Nicholasa Mohr’s bildungsroman Nilda (1973) are works that express the concerns of the Puerto Rican diaspora regarding adequate education, employment, and health rights.1 During this period, writers in the United States, like Thomas and Mohr, identified as Nuyorican, a cultural and political self-designated term used by Puerto Ricans who are born or predominantly raised in New York City, after World War II, when waves of working-class Puerto Ricans began to migrate from the island to U.S. cities in the East and Midwest in search of better opportunities for themselves and their families. According to Marta Sánchez, it is no small coincidence that, due to close geographic proximity and similar socioeconomic conditions, Puerto Ricans such as Thomas formed close social alliances with African Americans in Harlem, New York, and thus, became highly inf luenced in linguistic code, ideological outlook, and consciousness of the social inequalities in their environment. In fact, Sánchez observes that Thomas’s novel’s “references to Puerto-Rican blackness serve as a reminder to us that both island and mainland Puerto Rican populations 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


CH A P T E R


have had strong historical connections to black Caribbean and African Americans’ cultures. Puerto Ricans (unlike Mexico, the country of origin for Chicanos and Chicanas) had a long history of slavery and a large ex-slave population” (18). In the twenty-first century, the main Nuyorican woman novelist who acknowledges the African diaspora heritage through the incorporation of spirituality and Afro-Caribbean music, is Puerto Rican (or Afro-Latina) author and educator, Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, with the publication of her semiautobiographical novel, When The Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004). Born and raised in El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s, Marta Moreno Vega is known for her works, The Altar of My Soul: The Living Traditions of Santería (2000) and When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio, both published by Random House. She received a Ph.D. from Temple University, where she formalized her study, Yoruba Philosophy in the Diaspora, of the West African Lucumí religion, Santería, also known as La Regla de Ocha (the law of the orisha) in the Americas, specifically Cuba. Vega defines Santería, the Way of the Saints, as the following: Historically, a religion practiced only by Africans and their descendants, Santería is now practiced by people of all racial and cultural communities, all who acknowledge the contributions and struggles of our ancestors. They honor the spirits of our ancestors, and are guided by them through the practice of spiritismo, ancestor worship. They recognize a divine connection between our secular and sacred worlds, embracing both with the power of the orishas. They seek to find a balance with the forces in nature, known as aché. They learn how to channel these forces in a way that fosters spiritual growth, good health, prosperity, and the unification of both our family and our community. (Vega 2000, 2–3) In When the Spirits Dance Mambo, Vega explores ancestral AfroCaribbean cultural practices in connection to Afro-Caribbean music, such as the mambo and Latin jazz that were brought from Cuba and Puerto Rico to the United States across the Caribbean borderlands in the 1940s and the 1950s, which she illustrates as intertextual references to musical lyrics, musicians, and songs in her coming-of-age narrative. According to Frances Aparicio, she explains, “Musical subtexts and intertexts suggest, first of all, a new definition and location of the literary text that questions and displaces the privileged site of literature 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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as an art for and by the elite. The postmodern politics of integrating popular music—neither classical nor art music—within fiction destabilizes the modern(ist) notion of art as a space exempt from the ‘vulgar’ reality of the masses” (1998, 5). Vega engages in these destabilizing and deterritorializing efforts in her novel by incorporating an alternative non-Western religion and popular music in the representation of an Afro-Latina identity. However, Vega’s involvement for Santería has a long cultural and personal history that is intrinsically tied to her genealogy and to popular culture. The experiences of migrations have inf luenced her life and career enormously in learning La Regla de Ocha. After visiting Cuba in 1979 to see the Carifest Festival in order to later duplicate ceremonies in New York City, she discovered a cultural connection to her African heritage and roots through Santería, an experience that reminded her of her paternal grandmother back in El Barrio (Vega 2000). Her worldview became clearer after visiting the homes of babalawos (Santería priests) as she witnessed rituals resembling those of her grandmother’s. Vega also realized that these practices have a history that merited further investigation, which resulted in her doctoral dissertation published as The Altar of My Soul as well as the production of a documentary, Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo (2002), for which she borrowed the title and translated into English for her novel, When the Spirits Dance Mambo.2 The documentary traces the sacred African religion, La Regla de Ocha (known as Santería) as practiced in Matanzas, Santiago de Cuba and Havana, beginning with Cuban slavery through Cuban hip-hop and reggaetón movements in the present. According to Jorge Duany, Vega has participated in the vaivén (or coming and going) between the U.S. mainland and the island(s) of Puerto Rico and Cuba, creating an extended nation across transnational boundaries in New York City. Though Vega is well-grounded in the United States, it is essential to understand her voyages to the Caribbean islands and other parts of the world to see how her African heritage plays a role in her transnational Latina identity. Before formally entering academia, though, Vega became the founder and director of the Caribbean Culture Center/African Diaspora Institute in New York City in 1975. She also cofounded the Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Program at Hunter College where she served as director for several years. As an organizer of significant conferences on La Regla de Ocha in Cuba, Brazil, and Nigeria, she has gained international recognition. Since her trips to Cuba in the decade of the 1970s, she has evolved her spiritual life by becoming a sanctioned 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Vega’s WHEN THE SPIRITS DANCE M AMBO


priestess of Santería, mentoring and training disciples in the spiritual traditions of the African ancestors or spiritismo.3 Similar to the other U.S. Latina writers in this critical study, Vega undertakes the role of cultural and literary transnational ambassador by illustrating how her heritage, both African and Puerto Rican, have survived in her present life in the United States by sharing the knowledge of Santería and Afro-Latino arts (e.g., music, literature, performance) in a place like the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City. Like Chávez and Cisneros in their social context, Vega has become a transnational practitioner for promoting Afro-Latino cultures in the United States and abroad by traveling to give lectures, organize conferences, or exhibit the documentary, Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo. The journey of becoming a priestess, however, has not been as easy as one may think as Vega searched for self-understanding and selfdiscovery. As a young female of color growing up in Spanish Harlem, she experienced the social inequality of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the United States, which already had a history of U.S. colonization since the Spanish American War of 1898 when Spain lost its last colonies in the Caribbean, including Puerto Rico, to the United States. Even though the United States granted Puerto Ricans U.S. citizenship in the Jones Act of 1917 by making it “a free associated state” and by giving it “commonwealth” status in 1952, Puerto Ricans were still treated like second-class citizens on the island and mainland.4 Furthermore, Puerto Rican culture is arguably, vastly different from that of the mainstream United States despite commercialization efforts (such as McDonald’s and Starbucks) because it maintains a Caribbean f lavor in its music, religion, Spanish language, and different political parties. In other words, Vega does not forget the impact of Spanish colonialism and U.S. imperialism that permeate the national consciousness of the young people of color on both sides of U.S./Puerto Rican geographical borderlands. In spite of these obstacles, Vega focuses on the historical trajectory of slavery brought from West Africa to the Americas that have inf luenced Puerto Rican culture in music and religion (La Regla de Ocha) because she witnessed how these elements were passed down in her own family in veiled forms.5 For the semiautobiographical novel When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio, Vega focuses on a transnational Puerto Rican genealogy in relation to her African heritage. In this narrative, she demonstrates how the grandmother’s practices and music inf luenced the growing up years of the young female adolescent protagonist, Marta (Cotito) Moreno, during the major migration waves 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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of Puerto Ricans to New York City after World War II. Vega portrays Cotito’s formation as a young woman of color emerging in a hostile world where options are limited due to gender, race, and class in her immediate neighborhood of Spanish Harlem before the civil rights, women’s movement, and Young Lords activism took place in the 1960s and 1970s. Through exposure to Afro-Caribbean music and her grandmother’s spiritual traditions, the protagonist Cotito becomes inspired by her heritage and matures into a confident young woman of color or Afro-Latina in the United States.6 When the Spirits Dance Mambo clearly situates black identity in Puerto Rican culture and literature in the United States. This is not to say that race has never been addressed previously in U.S. Puerto Rican letters. Vega emphasizes its role in the cultural practices of Puerto Ricans in U.S. mainland culture at a historical moment when few public visual representations of Puerto Ricans in New York gained mainstream recognition except for a film such as West Side Story (1961).7 Although this film garnered Oscars and did include “race” relations between Puerto Rican migrants and European ethnic groups (i.e., Polish, Irish, Italian), the role of blackness is not fully explored. Vega states in the dedication/ epigraph of her novel, “This book is a tribute to all the abuelas/os, parents and extended family born in Puerto Rico who created El Barrio so that those of us born away from their beloved island would always have a racial and cultural understanding of our place in the world” (2004, my emphasis). Evidently, Vega acknowledges the transnational significance of Puerto Rican ancestors’ racial heritage in developing a community for younger generations across the U.S./Puerto Rican geographic borderlands. As the narrative of When the Spirits Dance Mambo unfolds, Vega illustrates the historical migration of the Moreno family, which includes the parents, Flora and Clemente, the son, Chachito, the older daughter, Chachita, and the younger daughter, Cotito. She begins with the transnational migration of the protagonist’s paternal grandmother, Abuela Luisa, who was the first member of the family to leave Puerto Rico for employment in the mainland United States in New York City and gradually sends for her children, beginning with Clemente. Abuela Luisa has a great inf luence on Cotito’s life and later philosophy in search of her identity, by tracing her heritage to Africa as well as Puerto Rico. In the memory of the narrator Cotito, Vega states: Abandoned by her mother, Abuela Luisa was raised in the village of Loíza Aldea by her grandmother, María de la O. María de la O., 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




she said, was a dark, strong-willed woman who, Abuela believed, had been born into slavery. No taller than a broomstick, she had large brown eyes, deep marks on her face, and thick brown hair covered with a white kerchief. She called herself una africana de verdad—a true African—and spoke a mixture of Spanish and African words. (2004, 16–17) Cotito remembers the knowledge passed down by an Afro-Puerto Rican ancestor through the storytelling tradition because their relationship parallels that of Abuela Luisa and her own grandmother, María de la O. The elder generation, such as Abuela Luisa, possesses the experience and wisdom to transmit oral history to a younger generation of eager grandchildren hungry to learn about their past to make sense of their present and future, especially in a nation that encourages assimilation rather than diversity in the pre-1960s time period. Vega also pays attention to the physical features of the great-grandmother such as the skin color, the deep marks, and clothes to capture the race of the female ancestor that causes a visual impression of black womanhood on Cotito. In addition, the fact that Vega notes the code-switching between Spanish, and an African-based language, draws attention to cultural traditions that can only be passed down orally.8 As the narrative develops, Abuela Luisa performs certain rituals, such as calling on the spirit of Juangó. This the adult Cotito associates with La Regla de Ocha and music as she comes of age during the mambo craze in the 1950s. It is worthwhile to mention that, owing to the geographical location of her neighborhood, Cotito is as much inf luenced by the Motown boom in Harlem as the Latin bands at the Palladium (257).9 While the Moreno family lives in a modern city such as New York, the character of Abuela Luisa maintains close ties to natural healing whose origins are rural Afro-Puerto Rican or the Afro-Puerto Rican plantations. For example, she is associated with the natural world in terms of her practices of Santería, but Vega is cautious not to present this folk healing as exoticized, but rather as a cultural tradition. Unlike Cotito and her mother, Abuela Luisa is always the first one eager to go to the botánica to choose from a selection of plants and herbs brought from Puerto Rico to the city that function as medicine. The grandmother not only values a natural form of cure, but she maintains strong cultural practices that are often misunderstood or dismissed in mainstream society as “witchcraft.” Also at the botánica, Abuela Luisa is able to identify the plants and herbs by smell rather than visually. In fact, she once tells the vendor, Caridad, that she has mistaken the naming of 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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one herb for another. The attention that Abuela pays to herbs illustrates her knowledge of natural forms of cure that can benefit individuals, who may not believe in nor afford Western medicine. In terms of rituals, Abuela Luisa also blesses Cotito before she attends her first day of school in El Barrio to wish her well in her educational and spiritual endeavors. Since Cotito is young at the time, she does not understand these rituals nor appreciates them for their symbolic value. As an adult though, she recalls them to make sense of a growing interest in her heritage and making decisions about affirming her culture in the United States. The elderly with spiritual wisdom in the community such as Abuela Luisa play an important role in the community. Whenever people encounter her in public, she is revered as if she were a “high priestess,” even if it is not her official role. Abuela Luisa can also “read” the spirits in the eyes and soul of a woman Alma (which translates as soul), whose husband is being unfaithful. While Alma undergoes a hypnotic trance, Abuela reminds her that she should not tempt the spirits by not following their advice and hence, bringing her misfortune. Alma should confront her husband about his other woman to ensure respect for herself and their young children. One day, the community is taken by Alma’s agency when they witness how she throws her husband’s clothes out the window after finding him with the other woman. By following Abuela Luisa’s advice, physically and symbolically, Alma has cleansed herself, or her soul, of a man who brought unhappiness to her family as she reaffirms her freedom. Vega demonstrates that the power of the spirits is not a quaint “magical realism” technique of the supernatural in the novel, as is often read by Western thought, but rather a spiritual force that people believe in to guide their daily lives and inner strength. Above all, the spirits function as a vehicle for change and self-understanding in the present moment although they are associated with a past.10 Gender and Race Matter(s) at Home By having the character of Abuela Luisa hail from the town of Loíza, fifteen miles northeast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Vega alludes to a historical black town on the island, known for its preservation of African traditions such as La Regla de Ocha.11 According to Samiri Hernández Hiraldo, race and religion are intrinsically tied in this region of Puerto Rico, especially after the United States colonized the island in 1898. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




Although many black Puerto Ricans try to maintain their African heritage in dance, music, and spiritual practices, the allure and presence of Christian religions such as Pentecostalism have received a strong following since the beginning of the twentieth century as U.S. missionaries came to the island to “help the residents” in education, health, and eventually, religious conversion, thereby challenging Spanish traditions such as Catholicism.12 Because of the emphasis on positive values in the community, Christian religions such as Pentecostalism have grown to such numbers in Puerto Rico that African-based religions are often perceived as a threat, completely misunderstood, and not taken as seriously as a legitimate institutional religion under Western eyes. Evidently, more and more Puerto Rican families who migrate to the United States have converted, some having previously practiced as Pentecostals on the island.13 If Catholicism began to be marginalized in comparison to the Protestant faiths, then what can be expected of a religion like La Regla de Ocha, that is not even a Western faith? Vega explores the consequences of the colonial legacy of attempting to assimilate slaves and their descendents to the dominant Spanish/U.S. cultures and Catholic/Protestant religions, by silencing and disguising Santería. The protagonist, Cotito, first learns of her grandmother’s hidden cultural traditions through the dual names given to the Catholic saints. Naming, being named, and substituting names become important practices in developing a cultural identity and affiliation in Vega’s narrative. When the Spirits Dance Mambo constructs a dichotomy between family life and school for Cotito as she searches for her place in society. While Cotito is considered Marta Moreno, her legitimate name used at school by her schoolteacher and predominantly Anglo-American classmates, she is called “Cotito,” her name of endearment and preference, at home among her relatives and friends. She becomes aware of her dual forms of appellation regarding her bicultural identity. As far as the statues of the Catholic saints in Abuela Luisa’s home, Cotito experiences a similar confusion when her Abuela gives them two names. She ref lects: Maybe it was some kind of game. Like when Abuela called the warrior divinity Changó by the name of Santa Bárbara, hiding his African identity, or El Niño Atoche by the name of Eleguá. Like our Catholic saints whose names disguised the ancient god of Africa, many of us in El Barrio had nicknames that had replaced the names given by our parents at birth. (2004, 37) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Rather than question her grandmother’s actions at a young age, Cotito naively concludes that the grandmother is “playing games” with the Catholic saints’ names when in reality she is doing a couple of things. Abuela Luisa, like many followers of La Regla de Ocha before her, bestows “a legitimate Spanish Catholic name” unto the African-based orishas (goddesses/gods of nature) who were brought to the New World, or the Americas, by West African Yoruba slaves who wished to continue their cultural and religious practices. Because of Spanish colonization, slaves were forbidden to pray to any God other than the Catholic one and learn Spanish, for example, to assimilate to a new society as rapidly as possible. Yet, this forced conversion was not fulfilled 100 percent. Even before the official abolition of slavery in Puerto Rico in 1873, black people in the Spanish Caribbean syncretized and disguised their cultural and religious practices by inventing new names and forms, but still maintained the spirit and substance of their religion and orishas in the fusion of Catholicism and La Regla de Ocha, especially in Cuba, but also in Puerto Rico, Brazil, and Haiti (see Reid in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World 2004, Falola 118–121). In The Altar of My Soul, Vega states, “When I was growing up, my mother, my father, and grandmother kept their prayers to their ancestors and the worship of their divinities behind closed doors that were closed to me. Still, images of Santería divinities filled our home . . . And my grandmother, my abuela, maintained one of the most beautiful altars to an orisha I have ever seen” (2000, 1). Vega reverses this coloniality of power of hiding Santería on the island and the United States by maintaining the cultural memory alive in the present. She asks us to consider what it means for the descendants of Afro-Puerto Ricans such as Cotito to learn, appreciate, and be proud of the ancestral heritage of La Regla de Ocha in the face of hegemonic forces. In When the Spirits Dance Mambo, Vega portrays the Moreno family with much realism to illustrate the complexity of gender and racial issues in the 1950s. Although Vega captures many memorable moments in the novel, she also remembers how difficult it was to show the painful ones such as the double standard of gender expectations that disabled women’s agency. In representing the family’s life in the United States, Vega critiques gender inequality when the mother wishes to learn how to drive to benefit her family but she must learn behind her husband’s back in secrecy, because she does not wish to “disobey” him. While the father is the patriarchal figure who exerts authorial and physical force by earning a living to support his family, 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




honorable values that enable his masculinity and pride, he expects the mother to remain at home, to take care of domestic obligations and rear the children, all traditional values that define her femininity, but limit her choices. When an adult female does not conform to these predetermined social codes of behavior, she is perceived as a “traitor” and must suffer by paying the consequences for disobedience. In the Moreno family, the father becomes highly angered and dares to hit his wife in private when he learns of her hidden driving lessons. The children, in the meantime, mature witnessing these two behaviors defined by gender roles and try to intervene by preventing the father from physically abusing the mother. The power dynamics in the family, however, go beyond gender inequality as Vega comments on racism within the Moreno household. While the mother defends herself from the physical abuse of her husband, she retaliates by revealing some interesting facts about their relationship. She claims that her husband is jealous and overprotective of her, due to his minimal formal education as she completed high school and he just completed elementary school. Furthermore, she accuses him of overprotection of her because she is lighter-skinned and he is darker and almost black, which connotes that she has more privilege due to her race. Gender and race signify the imbalance of power between the parents, Flora and Clemente. While the father may feel superior owing to his gender, it may actually be superficial, because he may be feeling inferior owing to his lack of education and race privilege in comparison to his wife, which may be the real reason he wishes to punish her physically. In this example, Vega demonstrates how gender and race can be crucial in defining agency, authority, and voice in the family structure at the parental level, which has consequences for the next generation. Similar to Chávez and Cruz, Vega comments on how mass media can inf luence the perception of race among the younger generation of siblings in the Moreno family. Although the brother Chachito plays and teases Cotito at one point by comparing her to Africans as inf luenced by the media in films such as Tarzan to insult the color of her skin, she becomes conscientious of her darker skin color for the first time in the family. She begins to feel pangs of exclusion and not accepted like her older siblings owing to her color and race. Vega acknowledges the subtlety of racism that begins at home as innocently as the brother teasing his younger sister based on the representation of black people in films that maintained an imperial gaze at African cultures. Rather than be silent about these seemingly “innocent” games at home, Vega critiques the exposure to media at the time because this visual imagery 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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inf luenced people’s perceptions of Africans, which include African diasporic communities such as Puerto Ricans, not only among mainstream audiences, but people of color as well and the consequences affected youngsters in negative ways. Even though the brother Chachito may begin trouble by calling his sister African, the father Clemente blames the younger female Cotito for disobedience. In this scene, the father punishes Cotito harshly at home for breaking a glass that she threw at Chachito in retaliation for calling her African. Although the male sibling, Chachito, instigated the actions, for the first time in her life Cotito receives corporal punishment with a belt from her father, unable to forget the psychological, as well as physical, pain. Gender inequality escalates in the Moreno household at the sibling level in the family structure as well. Vega critiques how men automatically exert power, while women pay the consequences, even in the younger generation. Vega further demonstrates how the hypocrisy of patriarchal power is conveniently passed down from father to son, thereby accepting and forgiving the son’s wrongs because of his gender, yet, punishing the female siblings violently, perhaps even injuring them for defending their rights. While Cotito and her older sister, Chachita, are restricted from socializing and dating, that is, participating in public life with the freedom to choose, the older brother Chachito is at liberty to keep up with his “philandering” ways and takes advantage of his masculine power. In fact, Chachito is congratulated for drinking and having many women calling him at home because he is exhibiting acceptable masculine qualities. In fact, the father, at one point, toasts to his son’s quantity, rather than quality, of women he dates. Along with gender inequality among the siblings, Vega uncovers the relationship between Puerto Rican and African American parents, especially when it comes to interracial dating and marriage.14 The sister Chachita’s (whose real name Socorro translates as Help) story of hidden dating and forced marriage exemplifies another level of gender and racial inequality at home for she is perceived as a “disgrace” to her parents, very reminiscent of the character of Lala who elopes in Cisneros’s Caramelo in a previous chapter. Even though Chachita goes off to camp one summer after high school to earn her own money to buy clothes and other necessities, she has to sneak behind the parents’ back to date her African American boyfriend, Joe, to hide his gender and race. This implies that one’s skin color is a critical issue for the Moreno parents as they try to assimilate to the U.S. mainstream. When the mother receives a phone call learning that Chachita has not 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




been at camp all summer, she becomes worried and infuriated by her daughter’s behavior. Instead of caring about the welfare of her daughter, though, the mother Flora is more concerned about the “disrespect” to the family’s honor and thus, tainting the family name, for Chachita may have lost her virginity or become pregnant. This preoccupation exemplifies how the Puerto Rican mother is more concerned about what “the neighbors will say/el qué dirán,” rather than the well-being of her own daughter. Furthermore, upon Chachita’s return home, the mother does nothing to defend her when the father beats her physically for lying to them about her absence from camp, which shows that the mother supports the patriarchal system at the expense of alienating her daughter. Vega critiques the control of women’s bodies, vis-à-vis their virginity and double standard in strict parental vigilance because the family code of honor is relegated to women, not men. Chachita is then perceived as a traitor to the family, on several levels, for she is not only seeking her independence by being inf luenced by friends at school who have boyfriends, but she is also aware of the social bonding and interracial dating that is happening between the younger residents of African American Harlem and Puerto Rican Spanish Harlem. It is also hypocritical that Chachita should be deemed disrespectful by her parents because in some ways, their relationship ref lects an interracial mixing as well. In Chachita’s relationship with Joe, Vega illustrates a new generation of Boricuas in the United States who are integrating culturally and musically by crossing national and racial borders to create and legitimize new cultural fusions. According to Juan Flores, “Puerto Rican youth culture in our times offers rich examples and articulations of these transformed cultural relations and crosscutting, multidirectional inf luences” (see Negrón-Muntaner 2007, 215). Chachita and Joe’s relationship is a precursor of these cultural transformations and evolutions inf luencing the Puerto Rican diaspora and other cultural mixings in the United States. The mother Flora and Cotito not only differ in their philosophies regarding matters of dating, but also discussing sexuality openly. When Cotito begins to date a young man, Reynaldo, a friend of her brother’s, who is about to enlist in the Navy, she must hide this fact from her family fearing the inquisition and punishment for parental disobedience. However, Cotito is able to share this secret with Abuela Luisa because the grandmother is more supportive of younger people’s freedom and choices in their lives. More importantly, though, Cotito knows that Abuela has the power to speak with “the spirits” who can tell Cotito about her future. She says, “I called you because I want to 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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know my spirit guides” (190). Abuela Luisa also encourages Cotito to be open with her about the love for her boyfriend because the wise grandmother understands the needs of a young female adolescent who is transforming physically and emotionally. Unlike the mother Flora, Abuela Luisa is direct with Cotito about a woman’s desire and sexuality because she does not wish to partake in the repression of a woman’s body to legitimize the patriarchal system, which descends from the Mediterranean patriarchal code, in which women yield their power to men. Through the voice and spirit of Juangó, Abuela explains to Cotito, “I was in love many times when I walked on the earth. Love is good. It gives us a reason for living. It soothes the body and makes it come alive. It stimulates the mind. It makes what is between your legs throb with desire!’ ” (191). Although at fourteen Cotito is disheartened to learn that the passionate feelings she holds for Reynaldo will pass, she appreciates the direct advice of the spirit, especially regarding sexual urges, a taboo topic for women at the time. As a practitioner of La Regla de Ocha, Abuela Luisa is free of the colonizing effect of orthodox Catholicism/Christianity upon female desire in Western culture and passes down that message through the spirits to her granddaughter, Cotito. Migrating Popular Cultures In When the Spirits Dance Mambo, Vega offers an aesthetics of beauty that young Puerto Rican teenagers can emulate, especially adolescent females of color. She brings questions of race and beauty into play as the protagonist Cotito comes of age in a rapidly changing society that provides few role models of color in mainstream media. Rather than imitate the actresses or protagonists with fake Spanish accents in films such as West Side Story, Cotito takes as her model the saint in Abuela Luisa’s altar called the Catholic Santa Marta or more commonly, La Dominadora (the Tamer). This spiritual female figure can have the power to hypnotize and to control her beholders as the statue “held in her hands a large serpent that she had subdued with her charm.” As Cotito ref lects on models of beauty, she says: My vision of La Dominadora was a vision of the statue and of actresses and women in the neighborhood that I thought beautiful. My imagination created a perfect image eliminating Rita Moreno’s irritating accent in West Side Story, which did not sound like anyone 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




I knew, adding the powerful legs of Katherine Dunham dancing in the movie Mambo, including the swaying hips and enticing smile of Dorothy Dandridge and encompassing even the piercing eyes of Abuela as they had appeared in that sepia photograph of her as a proud young woman and the elegant strut of my mother. (82–83) Vega is careful to juxtapose two ideals of beauty and womanhood: one constructed by Hollywood for a mainstream audience such as that in the film West Side Story (1961), a reconstructed and invented Latino/Puerto Rican culture; as opposed to the natural beauty of African American and Puerto Rican performers with whom the young Cotito identifies because she is a dark-skinned, not a light-skinned U.S. Latina.15 Although Cotito comes from a “Latino” culture in the United States, Vega suggests that race can have more of an impact than culture if one is of a darker shade; consequently, Cotito identifies more with African American women models who resemble her and also have artistic ability in music and dance, elements that interest a curious Cotito as a maturing adolescent.16 Furthermore, Vega elevates the level of beauty of women from Cotito’s community, Abuela and her mother, to that of the public female figures viewed on film, to empower Cotito and the women in her family. On a critical level, Vega is distinguishing between different public role models exposed by the media for a coalition of young women of color such as African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Afro-Latinas. As Vega explores the inf luence of female entertainers of color for a young generation of Afro-Latinas in the United States represented by Cotito, she incorporates song lyrics from Spanish Afro-Caribbean musicians at the beginning of each chapter to capture the mood and spirit of the content of the story. Although many of these artists began their careers in their respective Caribbean country, be it Cuba, the Dominican Republic, or Puerto Rico, they eventually made the voyage north to the United States owing to economic, political, or social hardships on the islands.17 Some contributed to the Afro-Cuban mambo musical movement that would take the U.S. public by storm in the 1950s. Vega is subtly tracing a transnational history of mambo, which inf luenced Latin jazz, in this bildungsroman, to show the artistic contributions by musicians of color, who are often not acknowledged as much as the white Cuban counterparts, such as Xavier Cugat and Pérez Prado, in official music history.18 She is also pointing out that these cultural practices do not only originate in the Caribbean, but can be traced further back to African musical and spiritual inf luences, 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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especially if one looks at the instruments and cantos of the singers such as that sung by Afro-Cuban Salsa legend, Celia Cruz.19 Another underlying issue in the representation of Afro-Latino music in the novel manifests itself in the gender relationships between AfroLatina (Afro-Cuban) female singers (such as Celia Cruz, Xiomara Alfaro, Graciela Grillo, Celina González y Reutilio) and Afro-Latino male musicians (such as Machito and his Afro-Cubans, Arsenio Rodríguez, and Tito Rodríguez). While mambo and Latin jazz have been memorialized by classic musicians such as Tito Puente, Pérez Prado, Arsenio Rodríguez, and Machito and his Afro-Cuban band, the contributions by female singers, with the exception of Celia Cruz, are not acknowledged as often as their male counterparts. This gender inequality speaks to hegemonic domination in the music/entertainment business in the United States, as well as in the Caribbean.20 However, Vega intervenes in this critical and historical discourse by citing female singers like Celia Cruz, Xiomara Alfaro, and Graciela, all Afro-Latinas, in her narrative who also contributed to the musical/artistic movement beginning in the 1940s as they migrated from the islands to the mainland in search of better opportunities. In fact, Frances Aparicio reminds us that “To be rendered invisible is not synonymous with a lack of agency” in terms of singing female subjectivities (1998, 172). In other words, the women artists had much to say and sing because they had artistic talent, which is more than being “tropicalized” like Carmen Miranda from Brazil who popularized the image of the “Latina” lady with the gigantic fruit basket on her head. The Afro-Latina performers were still working within tropical settings but often with more agency and zeal when they commanded center stage such as Graciela’s all-female orchestra group, Anacaona. Furthermore, they exhibited respect for the musical traditions of their African heritage as opposed to the exoticism constructed by Hollywood to be perceived by the mainstream. Celia Cruz, the Afro-Cuban Queen of Salsa, is perhaps the female spiritual embodiment of the synthesized Afro-Cuban music since she made her debut with La Sonora Matancera in the 1950s in Havana, Cuba. Although she and her band received glorious recognition in Havana, as she carried tunes in an electrifying voice at times combining Spanish with Lucumí words, she decided to exile herself in the United States since Castro installed a socialist government in Cuba.21 In the chapter “De Qué Color Son Tus Bembas?” Vega appropriates the title from one of Celia Cruz’s famous songs, “Bembá Colorá,” which alludes to the physically abusive treatment of black women in the context of hegemonic patriarchal and racial authority that could 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




be slavery. Even though the lyrics may be translated literally as “What Color Are Your Lips?” this imagery does not refer to a woman’s sensuality or physical attraction in terms of her lips, but instead focuses on her bleeding lips as a result of being hit, or even raped, by a man. Historically, Vega draws attention to the relationship between master and slave in Cuba when black women did not have the legal power to defend themselves and had to endure physical, sexual, and verbal abuse from white male owners. She does not celebrate, but rather complicates the role of black women in music who perform these lyrics to emphasize their side of history, a voice that should not be discredited nor silenced. This concern on violence against women may also be traced in another chapter in Vega’s novel, “Usted Abusó,” also popularized by Celia Cruz (Aparicio 1998, 173). In the same chapter, Chachito changes his tune from being chauvinistic to escorting his sister Cotito to see the pioneer greats of AfroLatino music that include Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Machito, Graciela, and others at a concert “at the Apollo Theatre at 125th Street in West Harlem” (233). The f luidity of the physical borders between the Puerto Rican Spanish (East) Harlem and African American (West) Harlem in New York City speaks to the conviviality of people sharing musical tastes. Again, Vega illustrates cross-cultural exchanges between Puerto Ricans and African Americans against the older generation’s wishes. This is another important experience for Cotito because she views for the first time musicians of color, like herself, performing in public, standing and singing proud. In addition, one cannot underestimate the importance of the musical genre mambo, also part of the novel’s title, as it evolved from African-origin songs in Cuba performed by slaves and their descendants and then traveled to the United States via music. Vega begins another chapter, “Negrita Linda” (translated as Beautiful Little Black Girl) in her novel with the lyrics by Afro-Latina Xiomara Alfaro, a singer and dancer who toured with the Katherine Dunham troupe and performed in the chorus at Las Vegas venues such as the Flamingo. Alfaro married the pianist Rafael Benitez. Her sister, the late Olympia Alfaro or Omí Sanyá, was a priestess or “apuón” in the Lukumí Orisha religious community, performing a type of gospel music particular to this following. In the 1970s, Alfaro became ordained by her sister in the Oshún faith, which is related to Santería. The lyrics that Vega cites in this chapter have quite a relevant history in the African diaspora with respect to race and spirituality. A significant Venezuelan poet, Andrés Eloy Blanco, first wrote them in a poem called “Píntame angelitos negros.”22 Vega translates the lyrics from 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Spanish into English, “Even if the Virgin is white, paint black angels. All the little black angels also go to heaven” (60). Given the context of the chapter, Vega reverses the negative effects associated with blackness and race in the poem by revindicating the powerful side of being an Afro-Puerto Rican young female who merits inclusion into heaven and symbolically, other social arenas. In this example, Cotito suffers at the hands of her brother Chachito who acts condescendingly toward her as he insults the color of her skin. She says, I was afraid of being hit by my father, but my brother had caused the real hurt. This wasn’t the first time he had called me an African. Why did he always tease me about my color and hair? Papi, he, and I all looked alike. We had the same coloring and the same textured hair. So why was I the target? If girls my color were not beautiful, not desired, why did Miguelito (singer) have to beg for a black woman’s love? (76) Vega not only critiques the hypocrisy of marginalizing dark-skinned members within the Moreno family, but she also condemns the unfair treatment toward young black girls due to their gender and race. Cotito also realizes that a black woman’s beauty is more acceptable in music than in her own family, that is to say in her own reality, which makes her more attuned to Afro-Caribbean music and cultural practices like La Regla de Ocha. In recognition of the Afro-Latina musical tradition, Vega cites Graciela Grillo, also known as Machito’s sister, as a performer and singer because she is considered “the first lady of Latin jazz,” yet, she often lives in the shadow of her brother, a performer who participated in the Afro-Cuban and subsequent Latin jazz movements. Little does the public realize that Graciela developed her own talent with her vocal chords as Vega obviously cites in the song, “Oyeme Mamá,” translated roughly as “Hear Me or Listen to Me, Mom.” Graciela Grillo performs this piece as a response to her mother to defend her newfound freedom, especially regarding the movement of the body as the title of the chapter suggests, “Camina Como Chencha La Gamba,” despite the mother’s unwillingness to listen to the daughter owing to her subservient gender role in the family. In this part of the novel, Cotito is transforming physically and emotionally into womanhood as her mother explains the monthly visits by a “friend,” a euphemism for her period. By contrast, the older daughter, Chachita, counters the mother’s reserved attitude regarding a woman’s body because she dispels any myths about 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




a woman’s period to her naive sister because as a young woman, she needs to know how to defend her body. Like the freedom of Graciela, Vega maintains that young women of color should celebrate not repress their bodies as they mature and walk with attitude like Chencha, la Gamba. Vega is careful to underline the musical and artistic contributions by female as well as male Afro-Latinos during this period of the late 1950s to contest invisibility. If Puerto Ricans and Afro-Cubans were marginalized as im/migrants of color in the public sphere of the entertainment business, to be a woman performer added another burden in the musical entertainment world.23 Vega’s preoccupation with young women of color’s freedom to voice their perspectives and control their minds and bodies is further evident in her participation in the documentary Yo Soy Boricua (2006) directed by Puerto Rican Rosie Pérez.24 Although she is an established actress, Pérez makes her filming debut with a documentary of Puerto Rican history from a U.S. Boricua perspective by paying special attention to gender and race. Pérez combines personal experiences in autobiographical form with historical information regarding the island’s political status. The old facts are gathered from official textbook sources, what the mainstream public may already know about the island’s history. However, Pérez astutely incorporates personal testimonies from family members on the island to people in the community of El Barrio, who lived through an event like the Young Lords activism in the 1970s. In fact, Pérez interviews scholars such as Vega about the emergence of the civil rights movement and the Young Lords activism in the 1970s, as well as women’s roles in Puerto Rico and in the United States. Similar to Vega, the Young Lords also affirmed the right to revindicate the African heritage in U.S. Puerto Rican culture. As Iris Morales explains, “The organization [The Young Lords] opposed white supremacy and cultural genocide—the devaluation and destruction of our culture. Instead we celebrated our African ancestry and culture; members wore large Afros, and some assumed African names. We fought ‘colonized mentality,’ the psyche of inferiority resulting from U.S. colonial domination of Puerto Ricans” (see Torres et al. 1998, 219–220). With respect to gender, Pérez asks Vega about the condition of working-class women on the island during Operation Bootstrap in the 1950s. What is usually a footnote in official history, Vega expands upon in her conversation with Pérez who demonstrates this marginal history from another documentary La operación (1982) directed by Ana María García (in which Puerto Rican women on the island are interviewed about their forced sterilization experiences as they “allowed” 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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and “trusted” professional physicians to operate on their bodies without their knowledge or consent). Vega and Pérez critique the abuse of women’s bodies on the island that demonstrates how the United States basically used the women as guinea pigs for testing drugs as well as to assure safety before usage in the mainland United States. Like Vega’s documentary, Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo, which traces and uncovers the origins of La Regla de Ocha/Santería in slave communities in Cuba, Pérez disseminates information on the health conditions of Puerto Rican women and the exploitation of their bodies and rights on the island, even though they may have access to U.S. citizenship. Although the themes vary in each documentary, both Boricua directors share an interest in contesting colonizing efforts by the United States wrought upon marginalized people based on gender, class, and race on both sides of the U.S./Puerto Rican geographical borderlands. From the Apollo to Music and Art High School In When the Spirits Dance Mambo, the protagonist, Cotito, may come from a working-class background, but her ability as an artist enables her to be a competitive candidate to enter Music and Art High School in New York City on a scholarship. Encouraged as an adolescent by her teacher to attend Music and Art High School, little did Cotito realize that this would be a life-transforming event where she progressed from intended artist to educator to cultural worker/founder/director culminating in a career as a scholar and an ordained priestess.25 At first hesitant, the parents eventually permit her to leave the neighborhood of El Barrio and pursue her education among another cultural/racial mixture of people because they do wish that one child, at least, gets ahead in life. Surprisingly, the mother appears more reluctant than the father in allowing her younger daughter to leave the home to study an “impractical” vocation as an artist. Flora would prefer that Cotito study to be a secretary or a nurse, because these professions garner more financial stability, should a future husband ever abandon or divorce her, another pessimistic view on marriage. In the character of the mother, Vega illustrates the limited understanding that migrant parents may have of opportunities afforded by education to their children because they have often been targets of racial and social discrimination. The mother, for example, is not as encouraging as Cotito’s school adviser in promoting her career choice because she reminds her daughter that she is “una negra” (a black woman) who 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




will have a hard time being accepted in a society that denigrates people of color, especially dark-skinned people. This opinion is reminiscent of the racial labeling that the mother called the father: he is inferior because he is black and, therefore, doomed in society. Instantly, Vega points out the different incompatible ideologies that are bifurcating the family structure, especially between mother and daughter. While the mother from an older generation lives a life of resignation, who considers her life “over” and lives “broken dreams” by not pursuing her goal of becoming a nurse in the United States owing to her marriage and motherhood, Cotito’s generation still maintains hope in struggling and fighting for the rights of young women of color who wish to have options and lead fulfilling lives by choosing a career rather than conform to a man’s decision as her mother Flora did. By studying at Music and Art High School, Cotito realizes for the first time in her life that she left her family and familiar neighborhood surroundings in exchange for a better education, in order to achieve a fulfilling future. Vega recalls how this event affected her life.26 Following her adviser as a role model, Cotito thinks that she can also become an art teacher. This realization results from a double consciousness that is forming in the protagonist who belongs to two worlds: El Barrio, Spanish Harlem, which is predominantly Puerto Rican/Nuyorican where one has a sense of community through gossipy neighbors, speaking Spanglish or being part of a common culture; and the Music and Art High School that consists of privileged middle-class Anglo-American students who take their dominant status for granted. They speak standard English, have enough supplies for their classes without worrying about resources and the teachers, for the most part, do not ostracize them because they form part of a homogeneous community. Cotito, on the other hand, is put on the spot one day when her teacher instructs her to read a passage from a book in public. Unaware of the social codes of behavior as a new student in an estranged environment, she is humiliated by her teacher in front of her Anglo peers owing to her different accent even though she was born and raised in the United States. Vega demonstrates the insensitive attitude from the school system toward students of color, who are misunderstood and marginalized owing to class and linguistic standards, and the disempowering effects on Puerto Rican/Nuyorican youngsters who must endure this institutional form of racism. In When the Spirits Dance Mambo, Vega highlights the maturing years of the protagonist Cotito because her adolescence coincides with the Afro-Caribbean musical vanguard of the 1950s. Because of the double 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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standard set up for women in the Moreno family, the sisters Cotito and Chachita are initially prevented from socializing in public places like concerts because they are supposed to be señoritas, waiting for the men at home. When Cotito enters high school, though, her parents realize that she can be responsible and they allow her to attend her first concert at the Apollo in Harlem in the company of her brother, Chachito. A major step for Cotito, she is able to transgress the limited options available to young Puerto Rican girls at the time. In addition, she becomes exposed to her cultural heritage through Afro-Caribbean performances at a historical place for any musical artist of the African diaspora, the Apollo. Thus, Cotito gains a new awareness and appreciation of her heritage whose legacy she is able to carry beyond the Apollo. When Cotito begins attending Music and Art High School, she is one of the few students of color in the classroom, and is thus, self-conscious about her position as different. Therefore, she bonds with Donna, a confident African American female student, who also feels like an outsider, but speaks her mind nonetheless. Both girls share an artistic fascination for Afro-Caribbean music such as mambo, a precursor to salsa that would explode in New York City in the 1970s. At home, Cotito is already exposed to this kind of music by listening to records and the radio.27 Vega incorporates a variety of musical genres in this section of the novel to capture the musical spirit of the 1950s and a cross-cultural alliance between Puerto Ricans and African Americans. Vega, furthermore, illustrates the importance of expanding the artistic curriculum in education, especially for young Afro-diasporic students who should know the contributions of their cultural and musical forebearers, to maintain a cultural memory of their Afro-Caribbean heritage. One day, while the high school teacher, Miss Jackson, explains the importance of Beethoven and Mozart, icons of classical European music, in a Music Appreciation class, Cotito and Donna form an alliance to question this lesson on the musical canon of Western civilization. Feeling disrespected and dismayed, Miss Jackson in turn asks Cotito what kind of music she would include in the course. Put on the spotlight in front of her mainstream classmates, Cotito valiantly states in Spanglish: I blinked, then opened my mouth. “Tito Puente, Machito, Celia Cruz, Graciela, Cortijo y Su Combo, Ramito, Bobby Capo, Mirta Silva, Daniel Santos, Tito Rodríguez . . .” I rattled out so many names in a short time that I surprised myself. The concert, my mother’s love for jíbaro [Puerto Rican country] music, and my 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia



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For the first time in public, Cotito defends the legacy of her AfroCaribbean musical heritage so that she no longer remains invisible and takes pride in doing so. Furthermore, as a speaking subject, Vega ref lects Cotito’s willingness to take control of her formal education by having an input. In expressing herself in public, Cotito gains agency for herself and the unacknowledged women in her community, such as her Abuela, who proudly carries the legacy. It is clear that Vega supports a multicultural and multiracial academic curriculum to educate its student population, be they the majority or not. Years later, the adult narrator Marta Moreno Vega explains the significance of the Afro-Latino musicians for the young Cotito by demonstrating that she has roots that transcend transnational boundaries. She says: Our music had a beat that penetrated our hearts, calling spirits down and elevating our souls. Our clave (beat) rippled through our blood, creating kings and queens, who soared beyond the limited borders of our neighborhoods. Our tempo allowed us to dream. Tito Rodríguez reminded us of the meaning of love, Celia Cruz called on our African gods and goddesses. Graciela spoke to our beauty and sensuality. Machito celebrated the elegance of our men. Puente reminded us that we were the children of warriors, and Mario shone with our endless creativity. Vicentico and Mirta Silva acknowledged that we were also human, vulnerable, sexual, and enchanting. How could we make Miss Jackson understand? (251) In the mind of Cotito, Vega not only exposes the musical history that the protagonist knows and appreciates from within her community, but she also explores the hypocrisy of the Anglo schoolchildren for listening, enjoying, and appreciating African American music (such as Motown) but not verbalizing their opinions to learn about diversity in the arts. Cotito involuntarily becomes the spokesperson for her heritage. Vega condemns this silence of music appreciation of AfroLatina/o musicians in an institutional context because it resonates with the right to practice one’s spiritual practices that are connected to ancestors like Abuela Luisa that dates back centuries and exemplifies a struggle against Spanish and U.S. colonial powers. Vega critiques this 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


brother’s mambo records all popped into my mind, giving me a sense of pride and power. (250, my emphasis)

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censorship that can lead to cultural denial of the African-based heritage for younger generations. In addition, she emphasizes the significance of these particular performers, precursors to Latin jazz, because many retain the African spirit in performing their lyrics that illustrate the journeys across the transnational migrations from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States (as Vega pays homage to the spirits of the ancestors, or spiritismo, in Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo). To recognize a history of slavery in the context of colonization and empire means to understand the present day Afro-Caribbean musicians both— Vega and Cotito—represent in When the Spirits Dance Mambo. As Jenny Sharpe claims in Ghosts of Slavery, “By staging how a lost or forgotten past continues to exert its inf luence, active yet unseen, fiction makes the ghosts of slavery speak” (2003, xii). The Transnational Legacy of the World of the Spirits At the end of When the Spirits Dance Mambo, Vega concludes with the passing away of Abuela Luisa. Even though the grandmother is from Puerto Rico, where organized religions such as Catholicism and Pentecostalism prevail on the island, Vega makes it clear that Abuela Luisa practices La Regla de Ocha. The Moreno family members do not discuss death, for instance, as a terminal event, but rather as a passing into the world of the spirits, values that do not conform to Western thought about Christian religion. Instead, these cultural practices resemble those of Chicanos/Mexicans who believe in and celebrate “the day of the dead” on El Día de los Muertos. In addition, Vega invokes African spirits in the memory of the abuela to demonstrate that La Regla de Ocha is alive and well in contemporary times, not just the 1950s.28 In The Altar of My Soul, Vega shows how the celebration of La Regla de Ocha can have an effect on younger generations. She says: The healing and empowering knowledge of our history and the understanding of our destiny are what define us: they let us know that we were on this Earth. As I see the growth in my godchildren and other members of our family, the power and affirmation of our cultural legacy is affirmed. (263) Vega views her role as a priestess as similar to that of a transnational ambassador because she holds herself accountable for teaching the cultural practices to younger generations to make sense of their often 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




“misunderstood,” marginalized, and hidden culture and history. She further illustrates how this knowledge can be a form of empowerment to youth and communities of the African diaspora in Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, the United States, and beyond. When I visited the Caribbean Cultural Center/African Diasporic Institute in New York City in 2007, I was able to speak to Marta Moreno Vega about her cultural practices, music, and travels to Puerto Rico, Cuba, Brazil, Nigeria, and other places. I saw various groups of children and teenagers listening to lectures and scholars participating in and leading workshops at the center. Vega was also kind to introduce me to her staff who hailed from different parts of the globe. Although her memoir When the Spirits Dance Mambo may seem like she is just joining the literary collective of Latina authors, Vega has been highly involved in the promotion and expansion of Afro-Latina/o culture since the mid-1970s. She has not only collaborated with legends such as Celia Cruz and Tito Puente, but she also knows the Nuyorican literary scene and U.S. Latina/o literature quite well. As a scholar and community organizer, Vega undertakes the role of transnational ambassador of Afro-Latina/o culture, history, and literature, to educate younger generations through public activities at the Caribbean Cultural Center. By viewing documentaries such as Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo, Vega transports us musically and historically to Africa, the Caribbean, the United States, and beyond.



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FOU R

Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005): A Diasporic Response to Multiracial Dominican Migrations

Born and raised in Washington Heights, New York City, in 1972, Dominican American author Angie Cruz made her splashing debut on the literary scene with her first novel Soledad (2001), followed soon after by her second novel, Let It Rain Coffee (2005a), both distributed by Simon and Schuster.1 Although contemporary Dominican American authors have been publishing for an English-speaking audience to national acclaim since the 1990s, beginning with Julia Alvarez’s first novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Junot Díaz with his short fiction collection Drown (1996), Cruz’s literary voice is younger than Alvarez’s and exemplifies a feminist perspective that differs from Díaz’s work.2 Cruz’s novels are representative of writers of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in dialogue with the African American literary tradition as well as other U.S. Latino authors. In other words Cruz’s narratives incorporate the African element of her Dominican heritage in connection to class and gender matters, to introduce the significance of mixed-ethnic and multiracial identity across the U.S./Dominican borderlands.3 The Dominican migratory experience that began during Balaguer’s presidency in 1965 can even be considered as a double diaspora, that is to say an Afro-Dominican American diaspora. Let It Rain Coffee further represents a transnational narrative that engages the politics of gender, race, and migrations, covering four generations, with respect to voyages from Africa and Asia to the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti and then to U.S. mainland.



CH A P T E R


Before entering the world of creative writing, Cruz prepared for a career as a designer at the Fashion Institute of Technology while working at retail stores on Madison Avenue in New York City, stating that her only Dominican role model was the renowned designer, Oscar de la Renta. However, her life made a radical change upon meeting African American actor and producer Bill Cosby at a store on Madison Avenue. Mr. Cosby encouraged Cruz to follow her dreams, be it art or creative writing, and offered her an opportunity to create stories for children’s shows that he was producing at the time. In the interview, “Writing Has to Be Generous,” with Silvio Torres-Saillant, Cruz says, “He really cared, and he opened up my consciousness about what it means to be mulatta, and what it means to think about identity” (2003, 113). Essentially, Cosby reminded Cruz that she is part of the African diaspora as well as the Dominican one, connected to many cultures across transnational borders. This encouragement motivated Cruz to pursue a college education. As an undergraduate at SUNY, Binghamton, Cruz remembers being highly inf luenced by Afro-Caribbean and African American literature, especially the slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley. She realized that the history of Caribbeans and African Americans was related to her identity as a Dominican American in New York, especially as a descendent of the African diaspora. In the same interview with Torres Saillant, Cruz states, I never think of us [Dominican Americans] as disconnected from the African experience. I mean we are African diaspora and it is just that we have suffered different geographic displacements. Someone told me the Dominican Republic was just one big plantation. Imagine that. That’s our history, a history of plantation, and I had never thought about it that way. (113) In this statement, Cruz reveals the importance of recognizing the African heritage in her Dominican identity, especially the legacy of slavery as she uses the term “plantation.” This acknowledgment of the African diaspora situates Cruz in conversation with African Americans on many levels. When she returned home to Washington Heights from college in upstate New York, she recommended many African American texts, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1987), to her mother, who also attended college intermittently. Interestingly enough, Cruz grew up in a household that was across the Audubon 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Ballroom, the historical place where Malcolm X gave his last speech and was assassinated in 1965.4 By highlighting these literary, cultural, and personal connections to her Afro-Dominican heritage, one can better understand Cruz’s position on the representation of ethnic people/people of color of African and Asian descent, as much in the Dominican Republic, as in the United States in Let It Rain Coffee. She is a pioneer writer in the creation of Dominican diasporic letters in the United States because she honors the legacy of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora in her writings and recognizes the embattled racial discourse and gender identity on the island and in the diaspora of the U.S. mainland. After Cruz received a BA degree in English from SUNY, Binghamton, she earned an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University in 1999, where she studied under critically acclaimed Haitian American writer, Edwidge Danticat. She also founded WILL (Women in Literature and Letters), an organization of women of color from academia and the community who critique each other’s fiction in progress, after returning from a trip to Mexico.5 It is no surprise that Cruz participated in coalition and community building with other women of color because she is carrying on the cultural activism by Dominicans that has been taking place in her neighborhood Washington Heights since the 1980s and 1990s. During this period, both, Dominican immigrants and second-generation Dominican Americans, formed alliances not only among themselves, but also with other ethnic groups, African Americans and Puerto Ricans, to hold conferences to raise awareness and educate the community about problems they faced (i.e., immigration rights, health issues, social inequality in the educational school system, police brutality). Historical Context of the Dominican Republic Before understanding Dominican immigration to the United States after 1965 and the formation of a Dominican diaspora, with respect to gender and race matters in Let It Rain Coffee, it is crucial to look at the historical context of the Dominican Republic, which has always experienced some form of colonization. Since the colonial period in the fifteenth century when the Dominican Republic formed part of the island of Hispaniola, meaning little Spain, and thus, represented an extension of Spain in the Americas, the republic underwent several forms of colonial occupations beginning with the arrival of 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Angie Cruz’s L ET IT R AIN COFFEE


Christopher Columbus from Spain in 1492. The Taíno indigenous people, the native inhabitants, became practically extinct due to diseases and labor exploitation brought by the Spaniards. Hence, the Spaniards decided to import African slaves to Hispaniola to advance trade and mining for the Spanish Crown. Before long, other European nations such as England, France, and Holland began to inhabit the island, France being the most interested in what is now Haiti. The slaves and their descendents soon realized that they could not tolerate the unbearable inhumane circumstances of forced labor and exploitation and some escaped forming maroon communities in the mountains of Hispaniola, the present border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. While the French settled Hispaniola, they engaged in sexual liaisons with female slaves since few French women made voyages to the Caribbean. Soon thereafter, a new hybridized ethnic group, the mulatto population, emerged, often inheriting the paternal name and land. Hence, the mulattos and the increasing enslaved black population on Hispaniola became aware that they could govern themselves as they learned from liberals who overthrew the monarchy in France during the French Revolution (1789–1799). Toussaint Louverture became an important leader of independence for Haiti and struggled against the institution of slavery in Hispaniola in the Haitian Revolution (1791– 1803). Because Haiti became the first black nation to gain its independence in the Americas in 1804, the Spanish side of Hispaniola feared another revolt and black domination and governance in the Dominican Republic. Dominicans felt uncomfortable with the spreading of black culture, what Torres-Saillant refers to as negrophobia discourse in “The Tribulations of Blackness” (2000). Essentially, elite Dominicans in power wished to preserve the Spanish colonial heritage in terms of culture, language, and religion (Catholicism) to avoid other inf luences that motivated its independence from Haiti/Spain in 1844. In this process of antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism), all Dominicans learned to deny any aspect of their black heritage, including mulattos and blacks.6 This cultural amnesia becomes especially evident during the Trujillo dictatorship (1930–1961) when history books were rewritten to emphasize and celebrate the mestizo element of the heritage, meaning indigenous and Spanish, not the black component, even though the inf luence is clearly viewed in the skin color, hair texture, musical appeal, and spiritual practices of the working-class Dominicans on the island and later, the diaspora to the United States.7 Evidently, Dominican-Haitian relations have had a contentious history that has denied the African/black heritage for centuries and even 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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up until the present. Throughout Hispaniola history, Haitian descent people have had to migrate back and forth between their homeland in Haiti and the Dominican Republic to find work to sustain themselves because their land was not as productively fertile as that on the Dominican side and the national economic hardship motivated Haitians to migrate. Due to these transnational crossings and cultural exchanges, children born of Haitian parentage on the Dominican side became Dominicans of mixed Haitian heritage. In Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz acknowledges the fact that Haitian and Dominican cultures have blended and produced mulatto and other hybrid populations. In spite of the transnational migrations over time, Dominicans still refer to themselves as mestizos or indios, even if they are of dark skin, rather than use a term like black.9 Being Haitian has been equaled to being black, which has passed down a negative legacy to Dominicans. These labels also exemplify the cultural amnesia of elite Dominicans who wish to maintain a Spanish and Catholic inf luence over the mixture of races. This prevalent attitude also demonstrates that the dominant class espouses white/light skin and is embarrassed by the blackness in identity in contemporary as well as historical times. Angie Cruz, though, does not share these views with the conservative elite on the island, but rather presents an alternative side to the dominant historical discourse in Let It Rain Coffee. The historical context of race relations in Hispaniola (the present independent republics of Haiti and the Dominican Republic) inf luences Dominican society and its diaspora in Let It Rain Coffee. While Cruz illustrates a multicultural and multiracial family’s migration from the Dominican Republic to New York City in the 1990s, she also incorporates other past events in Dominican history that take place in Los Llanos and Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, to show the factors inf luencing the Colón family’s travels north. While Cruz’s first novel, Soledad, addresses the search for identity by a young Dominican American female from Washington Heights and a few scenes in the Dominican Republic, Let It Rain Coffee shifts geographies and temporalities between the island of the Dominican Republic and the mainland United States more continuously, with a richer social critique of gender and race in history and politics, by contesting the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic, both in 1916 and 1965 (97). Cruz demonstrates that U.S./Dominican relations have had a long history of social unrest throughout the twentieth century that have gradually led to the transnational migrations and displacement of exiled and working-class Dominicans in places such as New York City. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Cruz expands on the genesis of the creation of Let It Rain Coffee by addressing pressing issues to the marginalized, yet politically active people who may not always be represented in politics, nor in official history. When she ref lects on the making of the novel in the essay, “The Story Behind the Story,” she says: For years, I dreamt up stories about the active involvement of people in politics, gente del pueblo like my great uncle. I wrote down the stories of my great uncles the way I would have imagined them to have occurred. But even more interesting to me was that I continued to render stories from what I thought was pura imaginación. The book I was working on, Let It Rain Coffee, imagined a Los Llanos different than the one my family described to me, full of political activism and dissent. (2005b) Cruz further explains that during research for this novel she did discover that an uprising occurred in the eastern region of the Dominican Republic, Los Llanos, which would serve as the background for the politically active group, The Invisible Ones, in Let It Rain Coffee. By excavating materials from her own genealogy, Cruz uncovers the historical dimension of social movements that are closer to home than she (or the reader) expects. In this sense, her motivations for representing history are very similar to the other transnational Latina writers in this study, who are also heavily invested in addressing gender and race issues in the context of migrations between the United States and Latin America, testifying to their role as cultural ambassadors. The narrative structure of Let It Rain Coffee does not follow a linear chronological order as most historical books do, but rather Cruz constructs spatial and temporal fragmentation that allows the reader to enter the narrative as if he is recalling from memory personal experiences of migrations between the Dominican Republic and the United States. In the essay, “The Story Behind the Story,” Cruz explains: People ask me if my work is autobiographical, and my immediate response is no. But then I think about the memory of the body, the memory we inherit from our mothers, grandmothers, great grandmothers—those memories that our elders never speak but that live within us. And yes, my stories, and even more their unanswered questions, have to do with what I know as well as with all the things that I don’t know. With all of the things I could only imagine in the wonderful world of fiction. (2005b) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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This circular pattern is affected by ancestral memory or memory of the body in the narrative. In other words, Cruz allows us to enter the mind frame of a character through memory, fictitious as it may be. The novel may begin in the middle of its chronological timeline in the 1980s in Los Llanos, followed by another chapter on Washington Heights in the 1990s and then situate itself in Los Llanos again in the 1920s. The dispersal of memory in the narrative has as much an effect on the displacement of the reader as it does on the actual characters. Cruz employs these narrative strategies to show the mobile and precarious aspect of transnational migrants. Although Let It Rain Coffee alludes to the historical period of the dictatorship of Trujillo and his allies who governed the Dominican Republic (1930–1961) with much economic and political support from the United States, Cruz notes the significance of Haiti and the repercussions of the 1937 massacre that took place on the Dominican/Haitian national border.10 It is worthwhile to note that Dominican-Haitian relations are interconnected when it comes to race issues because Trujillo ordered the massacre of black people on the Dominican national border in 1937. At one point in Let It Rain Coffee, a Dominican member of the revolutionary group, The Invisible Ones, claims, “Many of us have Haiti in our blood,” thereby explaining the significance of the African heritage for Dominicans as well as Haitians (63). It is no small coincidence that this character would point to this detail of heritage because many Haitians, who immigrated to the Dominican Republic, came to work the land and settle on the Dominican side of the transnational border, eventually raising families. Because of their race, and skin color, they were not welcomed by Dominicans and thus, treated very inhumanely. In this example, Cruz acknowledges the racial intermixing between Haitians and dark-skinned Dominicans that transcend the artificial national borders set up by governments because these two groups share a cultural heritage: Africa. Because U.S. intervention resulted in dire circumstances for peasants in the provinces and the urban working class in the Dominican Republic, many liberal-minded Dominicans formed coalitions to revolt against the inhumane Trujillo government.11 Those who spoke their mind against Trujillo suffered severe consequences because they were harassed, tortured, or killed. This, in turn, established a wave of political exiles, an elite class who left the Dominican Republic before 1965 to go to the United States in search of a better life. Alvarez recuperates this moment in the novel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, the 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




story of a privileged middle-class family who must exile to the United States, due to their political position against Trujillo. In Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz engages Dominican migration to New York City, specifically Washington Heights, to show the effects of U.S. intervention in Dominican national matters after 1965. Paranoid over the spreading of socialism after the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the United States sent military troops to the Dominican Republic to monitor the politics and “discipline” its government with the use of violence to establish stability. Unlike dominant historical discourse, though, Cruz represents the urban working-class mulattos from el campo, symbolized by the Colón family in the novel, who resisted the Trujillo and Balaguer governments (65). Dominicans, especially the poor, began to migrate in great numbers to the United States after 1965 because the Dominican economy was deteriorating and the United States would rather deal with immigration rather than another socialist country like Cuba. Dominican immigrants and their children who departed for the United States were still able to return to the island if they had the economic means (unlike the Cuban situation after the Revolution of 1959). Through the representation of genealogy in Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz illustrates how the transnational divide can lead to disruptions on microcosmic as well as global levels. In the United States the Colón family, represented by Esperanza and Santo, migrates to Washington Heights, although the character of Esperanza longs to live celluloid dreams in Dallas, Texas.12 Within these patterns of transnational migrations and cultural displacements, Torres-Saillant suggests that the unacknowledged history of race (or blackness) is as much a factor in understanding communities traveling from the Dominican Republic to the United States as are economic factors. Lucía Suárez further explains that the migration to the United States does not always benefit unskilled Dominican immigrants because they continue to live in poverty and in a state of economic dependency on the mainland that may be worse than that on the island. In Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz explores the intersection of class, gender, and race, in the transnational migrations of the immigrant Colón family who were displaced from their homeland, but she also critiques the cultural imperialism that takes place with mass media consumption in viewing the program Dallas that began in the Dominican Republic. Esperanza and Santo represent a new transnational experience because they have been transformed before leaving their homeland. Don Chan, on the other hand, is washed up on the island and embraced by his new family and thereby, learns to appreciate the sense of community afforded him on the island. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Cruz carefully constructs a transnational genealogy in Let It Rain Coffee that traverses the Dominican Republic and the United States, but China and Haiti, as well. In the first generation on the island, Don José Colón de Juan Tolio makes his living as a fisherman in the eastern region of Los Llanos in the Dominican Republic and travels to trade and sell his products in the capital city of Santo Domingo in the 1910s during the first U.S. occupation of the island.13 On one of his journeys, he finds a young orphan, whom he names Chan, washed up from the sea and decides to adopt him as a son. All in Don José’s community are curious about little Chan’s background and hypothesize about his origins (96). Since he looks Asian, they wonder if he is from China. Much ambiguity surrounds his origins as a child because he is washed up on shore. Cruz alludes to the Caribbean Sea as a bridge and border for transnational migrations from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. Although this natural space transports migrants to a new homeland, their journey is always risky and may result in death. We are led to believe that Chan is an orphan since none of his biological relatives are mentioned, nor appear. Interestingly enough, this character is born from “the sea,” because that is the location where Don José finds him. Incidentally, Don José does not exoticize nor treat Chan in a condescending manner because, of Haitian descent himself, Don José is familiar with racism and marginalization as a black descent person in the Dominican Republic.14 Cruz refers to the history of Haitian and Asian/Chinese migrations to and settlements in the Dominican Republic that represents the first and second transnational crossings in the Colón genealogy.15 How have these newcomers dealt with their welcome on the island? On one of his trading trips to Santo Domingo, Don José encounters a greedy businessman who wishes to buy the young Chan to serve as his slave in the capital city. Don José realizes that he must keep his trade business close to shore in Los Llanos to prevent Chan from being stolen from him and suffer the destiny of a slave (97). Cruz explains, “Don José did not know what was going on in the city with the occupation, but the selling of children” (99).16 Cruz alludes to the history of Chinese labor as well as African slavery in the Caribbean in a manner that is reminiscent of Cristina García’s representation of the patriarch character of Chen Pan in her novel Monkey Hunting (2003). However, Cruz critiques the U.S. invasion on the island and inhumane effects of 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


The Older Generation: Migrations and Race among Dominicans


exploitation on youngsters and women, in particular, in the Dominican Republic.17 By understanding the historical context of the politics of race in the Dominican Republic these elements help inform the character of Don Chan as an adult and as an elderly man, who, as a child almost had a close encounter with enslavement. Because Trujillo modernized and industrialized the Dominican Republic since his term began in the 1930s with substantial support from the United States (i.e., Roosevelt), he incidentally created a socioeconomic hierarchy on the island that ref lected a society similar to Cuba in its prerevolutionary years during Batista’s presidency. In Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz further illustrates how the second U.S. invasion on the island in 1965 causes disruption and violence. At one point as an adult, Don Chan says, “The U.S. invaded us in ’65, so the D.R. (Dominican Republic) wouldn’t turn into another Cuba. And look at it, D.R. is another Cuba, it’s Batista’s Cuba. We’ve become whores for the tourists and U.S. aid” (30). Cruz subtly compares Balaguer’s post-1967 Dominican Republic with Batista’s Cuba in the pre-1959 period critiquing both dictators for promoting a capitalist society that privileged few and disempowered many like the Colón family members. Like the other authors in this study, Cruz critiques the United States’s narrative of empire in displacing peasants and the urban working class on the island that also explains the insurrections and uprisings against tyrannical governments supported by the United States in 1916, as well as in 1965, with Balaguer as president. Cruz exposes these national contradictions on the island because they eventually affected migrations to the United States. Similar to Chicano/a writers’ representation of the U.S. takeover of the Southwest with the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848, Cruz as a writer of the Dominican diaspora examines the frustration, struggles, and social inequality that Dominicans on the island have had to confront in the face of imperialism since the first U.S. invasion in 1916. Even though the United States has justified its intervention on the island in the name of democracy to protect Dominicans, it has actually worsened socioeconomic conditions for the disempowered. All Dominicans have reason to be concerned about their political relationship with the United States due to its interference in their domestic matters at home on the island and lack of interest in their welfare as immigrants to the U.S. mainland. In the second generation of the Colón genealogy on the island, Cruz constructs the character of Don Chan Colón to signal the growing disillusion with the tyranny of dictatorships such as those of Trujillo and Balaguer. The narrative begins with the character of Don Chan as an 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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adult, the grandfather of the family, who finds himself in his home, Los Llanos, in the eastern countryside of the Dominican Republic, a place known for cultivating progressive ideologies for disempowered people and holding uprisings against totalitarian governments. Don Chan can also be compared to an explorer, hence the last name of Cristóbal Colón (Christopher Columbus), but Cruz reverses the history and ideology.18 Don Chan intervenes to decolonize official history by organizing the disempowered and voiceless as he learned from his adopted father, Don Julio, of Haitian heritage. As the community becomes familiar with Don Chan over time, they make up stories of his travels to China, but Don Chan does not remember such voyages. The memory of China (Asia) is lost to Dominican national discourse.19 Considered a medicine man and healer by his community as well, Don Chan does not hide the fact that he is against Trujillo and his supporters, which brings tension with the younger generation, his son Santo (meaning saint) and especially, his future daughter-in-law, Esperanza (meaning hope), whose father is an advocate of Trujillo’s. In fact, Don Chan engages in clandestine meetings to overthrow Trujillo. It is here that he meets Miraluz, a better match for his son, Santo, because she shares similar political convictions as the father in terms of leftist political leanings, participation in resistance movements, and helping disempowered people such as farmers and factory workers such as herself. Cruz creates this female activist character to demonstrate that women contributed to social change in their own way.20 Don Chan is also in awe of Miraluz and supports her as his fellow comrade, rather than act condescendingly toward her. Evidently, Cruz is pointing to the fact that women do not have to follow strict gender roles that uphold a hegemonic patriarchy, when it comes to political and social activism. Although Santo Colón at first concurs with his father in his antiTrujillo political beliefs exhibiting a strong father-son personal and political affinity, we learn that he must take sides with the dictator to “save” his father and family. What leads to this behavior involves his love for the enemy’s daughter, Esperanza, whose father is Trujillo’s right hand. Santo realizes, though, that more is at stake in keeping his subversive father alive in the Dominican Republic. One way that the younger Colón family survives is by migrating to the United States in the hope of improving their quality of life and that of their young children. After Balaguer enters the presidency, the Dominican Republic enters a severe economic crisis that cannot sustain the island population. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




The United States decides to grant visas and passports to Dominican immigrants as a way to control their politics and prevent the birth of another socialist country in the Caribbean, like Cuba. Since Dominicans are forced to seek opportunities abroad, they naturally head for the United States, sometimes through Puerto Rico. In the character of Esperanza in Let It Rain Coffee, Cruz displays the contradictions in the dreams, and goals of the Dominican female immigrant who leaves her homeland in search of a better life for herself and future family. As smart and ambitious as she may be, Esperanza finds herself pregnant and decides to leave the Dominican Republic to work as a housekeeper in Puerto Rico, infuriating Santo. By giving birth to her daughter in Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, Esperanza secures her entry legally to the United States because the daughter, whom she names Dallas, is automatically granted U.S. citizenship. Thus, the nuclear Colón family, including Esperanza, Santo, and Dallas, can immigrate and reside legally in the United States to improve their economic status and offer themselves a better future, rather than endure the lack of opportunities that their contemporaries experience in the Dominican Republic. This generation represents a transnational migration that crosses geographic and cultural boundaries, enabling themselves to compare and contrast the limitations and possibilities in the United States with that of the Dominican Republic. Upon closer examination, the romance that ensues between Esperanza and Santo, however, is actually more complex. Although they marry, their relationship represents an allegory of oppositional political positions, capitalism and socialism, that originate on the island. They travel with these ideologies from the island to the mainland carrying on political legacies. These two sides consist of Trujillo supporters (Esperanza’s father and allies) and Trujillo subversives who are in line with the Cuban revolutionary ideals (Don Chan, his comrades, and Santo, at first, before meeting Esperanza). Unlike the revolutionary Miraluz, Esperanza earns a living by working as a maid in the middle-class homes in Puerto Rico in order to earn enough money to move and settle in the United States for a better life with Santo. Affected by popular culture such as television programs, Esperanza dreams of a fulfilling and plentiful life similar to that of the rich American Ewing family in the popular soap opera of the 1980s, Dallas, which explains the name of her daughter, Dallas. She also admires the honest character of the dutiful son, Bobby Ewing, which is the name she bestows upon her own son, Bobby. Perhaps deluded at first, Esperanza experiences a major culture shock when she and her family move to the United States and find themselves living a 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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lifestyle of survival as they fall prey to consumer culture in a tenement apartment in Washington Heights, New York City, rather than one of means and luxury.21 As urban dwellers, Esperanza and Santo confront firsthand the dilemmas of living as marginalized immigrants in a wealthy nation. Cruz illustrates the incongruencies between illusion and reality that first generation immigrants may experience despite advanced opportunities in the United States. When Esperanza and Santo immigrate to the United States, they move to a predominantly Dominican neighborhood, Washington Heights, in the upper west side of Manhattan. While Santo works as a taxi driver at varying day shifts, Esperanza earns a living as a home care aide. They make enough to make ends meet, barely making the rent.22 Frustrated and helpless, Santo’s family survives at the margins of a megalopolis. As a contradiction of modernization, Esperanza participates in consumer culture but is often left indebted; that is to say, she is not in control of her earnings and accumulates debt. This explains Esperanza’s hiding of credit card bills in her underwear drawer. As first generation immigrants, the parents Esperanza and Santo dedicate themselves to working full time but lack knowledge of how the U.S. economic system functions and manipulates poor people in the United States. Their children are forced to look after themselves most of the time outside of school. Since they live in a neighborhood fraught with drugs and violence, Bobby and Dallas are warned by their parents to stay at home and keep the latch locked. Cruz demonstrates how the workingclass Dominican family structure changes radically in the United States from that of the island where they can depend on the moral and real support of an extended family. By contrast, Santo and Esperanza seem to form a nuclear family in the United States but without the benefits and security of material comfort, nor the support of an extended family on the island. Furthermore, they work in employment that leaves no space for upward mobility and depend on an unfair economic system that punishes, rather than benefits, Latino immigrants.23 It is not until Don Chan steps into the picture, by migrating to the United States after the death of his wife Doña Caridad, that Santo and Esperanza regain the Dominican custom of an elderly taking care of the youngsters. As an elderly, though, Don Chan is plagued with health issues such as his inconsistent memory that at times results in confusion and mistaken identity. The role of Don Chan in the narrative is crucial because he represents the transnational connection to Dominican culture through his lapsing memory. By having Don Chan live with his son’s family in 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




their apartment in Washington Heights, Santo and Esperanza rely on him with respect to the care of the children. Don Chan, on the other hand, undergoes culture shock because urban life in the United States is much different from the country living of Los Llanos and the familiarity of Santo Domingo in his homeland. He is not only an elderly person but he speaks Spanish, and except for his son’s family, does not have a sense of community in an alienating environment like Washington Heights. Don Chan thinks, “So this is brick, and stoops, fire escapes, and lampposts. All things he had read about but had never seen. So this is a tree in a city: anemic, naked and alone among all the concrete. Music bounded inside apartments against the closed windows . . . Cars honked their way up Quepasó (What happened) Street, through boys playing stickball” (10). Evidently, Cruz captures the mood of an elderly immigrant living in a city as nature wilts away and suffers from malnutrition. On a more profound level, she insinuates that immigrants like Don Chan are like trees that suffer from a lack of emotional fulfillment and may lead lonely lives unless they make an active effort to find a sense of community on the streets through new friends and associates. The social alienation that Cruz portrays in the novel is only one factor that affects the Colón family. Don Chan’s political convictions from the Dominican Republic also cause potential divisions. For example, he still holds a grudge against Esperanza for taking his son Santo away from the island and converting him into a materialistic workaholic who must conform to U.S. capitalism, rather than following his father’s socialist activist ideas. As kindly as she tries to treat her father-in-law, Esperanza and Don Chan barely get along, an allegory of the economic and political clashing of capitalism and socialism, as much as family politics. This tension naturally affects Esperanza’s relationship with Santo, a taxi driver who goes dancing and drinking one night at the Palladium to alleviate stress, not to avoid resolving his family affairs. Cruz displays how the discrepancy in reaching different goals between Santo and Esperanza can divide Dominican immigrant families who must rely on one another to survive emotionally, if not economically. Cruz also alerts that this attitude may lead to the disintegration of the family, which naturally affects the younger generations who must find a way to move beyond the internal tension within the family and seek solace elsewhere. Let It Rain Coffee, though, takes an unexpected turn of events just as the Colón marriage of Esperanza and Santo finally decides to reconcile differences after much dispute and disagreements. As Santo finishes his last taxi shift of the night, a customer robs and mercilessly murders 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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him, a major loss and tragedy for the family. Although Santo dies as a modern tragic hero, the family must become closer emotionally to overcome the death of a father, a husband, and a son to meet new challenges of urban living in Washington Heights.24 Esperanza, who has inherited the role of mother and father, must work more hours to support her growing adolescent children. At the same time, like so many working-class Latina immigrants, she falls prey to the manipulations of the credit card system in the United States. She says, “When the phone rang, she jumped. Every day, the collection agency called to harass her even after she explained that Santo had died. They threatened her with court, said that they could repossess everything in her home over a certain value if she didn’t take immediate action” (94). Left a young widow, Esperanza realizes that she is living a nightmare rather than the rosy American Dream that she viewed on the televised night soap opera, Dallas. Esperanza fails to acknowledge the racial and social discrepancies between the immigrant Dominican Colón family and the privileged Anglo-American Ewing family in Dallas, often confusing reality with fantasy. In this example, Cruz critiques the power of consumer culture in Let It Rain Coffee because television has the capacity to reach a massive audience as film did in Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante, but the messages are not always beneficial to helpless immigrants of color who may be dependent on consumerism. Short of being brainwashed and addicted to an illusion and myth of the American dream, Cruz insinuates that immigrants should critique celluloid dreams and confront the reality of their circumstances.25 If means of communication, such as the mass media of television, are the only resources of news and information for recently arrived immigrants, then they do not have a broader vision of other potential in their lives (i.e., education for their children, savings to prevent financial debt). Cruz implies that although modern technology, such as computers and television, should expedite and facilitate the daily lives of individuals, these modern products, by no means, guarantee the most satisfying and fulfilling lives. In fact, technology may have the capacity to colonize and control the minds of individuals by constructing false expectations and misleading representations of a reality that may be irrelevant to their real lives. More profoundly, Cruz also criticizes the lack of representation of people of color (i.e., Afro-Latinos) in the media that should speak to gender and race issues not only in the United States, but also across transnational borders in the Dominican Republic and Latin America on a larger scale. The program Dallas does not fulfill such roles. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia



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While Cruz provides much historical context of the Dominican Republic for Let It Rain Coffee, she is also preoccupied with the formation of new cultures in the United States, the Dominican diaspora or Dominican Americans, who happen to be the fastest growing Latino group in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s. Bobby and Dallas, the children of Esperanza and Santo Colón, represent the youngest generation as the Dominican diaspora who differs from their parents because they are directly tied to mainstream American culture such as the educational school system on a daily basis. Bobby Colón, the younger son, is different from his father Santo in that he is not a domineering figure who can exhibit the physical prowess of masculinity that is expected in traditional Dominican culture. Cruz complicates the meaning of masculinity that is evident in the tension in the father-son relationship, because Santo expects his son to know how to defend himself physically like a boxer, as he did in the Dominican Republic. When Don Chan comes to Bobby’s defense against boxing with his father, Santo resents his father’s hypocrisy because he claims that Don Chan once encouraged Santo to become physically defensive among his male friends. In Bobby’s generation, Cruz illustrates that younger males do not necessarily need to conform to the double standard of having to prove their masculine prowess with physical force as previous generations have done. In fact, Bobby may provide an alternative model of masculinity in the United States as he develops and pursues an interest in computers by making use of his intellect. The reconfiguration of gender roles is quite prevalent in this character, who later becomes a victim of an unfair legal system. Because he is left without a father, partly an orphan who is reminiscent of Don Chan’s youth, Bobby learns that he must be his own guide and parent who must raise himself as his mother Esperanza works away from home most of the time. To avoid loneliness, Bobby befriends youngsters caught up in drugs and arms in Washington Heights. Though Bobby, himself, does not participate in these illegal dealings, outsiders such as police officers assume that he is part of a gang and thus, treat him like a criminal.26 For example, an unfortunate incident in his young life leads Bobby to a police arrest for holding an arm/ weapon. It is ironic that Bobby, the least likely offensive criminal in his group of peers, takes the fall for carrying a gun, a weapon he held to protect a friend, Hush, and his sister, Dallas, who was being threatened at 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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gunpoint by a real criminal who ironically managed to escape. The fact that Bobby is incarcerated without a fair court trial demonstrates the vulnerability of immigrants and their children at the hands of an unjust legal system in the United States that takes no pity on Latino adolescents, due to their race and class.27 Cruz critiques the assumptions and prejudices of the police because their sense of social justice punishes rather than protects victims like Bobby. When Bobby is released from jail as an adult, he gradually transforms himself by gaining computer technical skills. He becomes a computer expert because he took courses while in prison to gain marketable skills to combat the absence of his high school education. Cruz insinuates that young Dominican American males can and do contribute to American society in positive ways as long as they are given the opportunity and guidance to prove themselves as responsible and honorable people. She demystifies the common stereotype of the Latino youth in literature and the media who is often criminalized and ostracized in jail. However, Bobby’s character does not follow a determinist cycle of repetitive misconduct behavior. Rather, he proves himself as an emotional and financial backbone of his family in Washington Heights despite all the obstacles set forth before him by the legal system. In this sense, Bobby inherits and learns from the positive qualities of his grandfather Don Chan as a caretaker who passes down a Dominican custom across national boundaries in being accountable for one’s family. Cruz also comments on how gender relationships are reconfigured and altered the family. After the death of the father Santo, the Colón family undergoes a reversal of roles as the mother Esperanza becomes the breadwinner while the grandfather Don Chan stays within the domestic home to try to look after the youngsters, Bobby and especially Dallas, a teenager eager to explore her freedom. For example, she rebels against the matriarchal authority of Esperanza by cutting classes and spending time at Tower Records to follow her love interest. Due to the absence of the mother, Dallas attempts to act like an adult and disobeys her mother by leading an independent life, to the extent that she finds herself in trouble. Barely a teenager, Dallas is reminiscent of the character of Flaca in Cruz’s first novel Soledad. Both female adolescent characters struggle to achieve freedom from their families and overprotective mothers who threaten to send them back to live with their relatives in el campo in the Dominican Republic, to teach them a lesson about the hardships in life. Cruz carefully constructs cultural and generational disparities between daughters and mothers accustomed to values from the Dominican homeland where daughters know their place 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




and do not adopt liberal ways that women do in the United States as their new place of residence. Because the mother, the sole breadwinner in the family, must work to maintain her nuclear family in Washington Heights and the extended one in the Dominican Republic, her absence leads to too much freedom for Dallas. Since the daughter is only able to see the immediate consequences, at first she does not understand her mother’s ties to her homeland on the island, nor the motives behind her punishment. Coming of age in Washington Heights becomes a major challenge for adolescent Dominican American females in ways that differ from their female counterparts on the island. Dallas, for example, prefers to hang out with her neighborhood female buddies, like her Salvadoran girlfriend Hush, because they have more in common with one another than with the older generation. The loyalty that the young female friends have for one another transcends biological and transnational ties because they form a community of their own as if they were family. The relationship between Esperanza and Dallas definitely ref lects a cultural and generational gap that can exist within the same family and easily affect mother-daughter bonding across transnational lines, similar to Lala and Zoila in Caramelo. Even though mother and daughter live together, they hardly see one another at home due to their different schedules, so they coexist rather than cohabitate, which leads to emotional distance in the beginning. While Esperanza sees the positive side in earning a living to splurge on materials suitable to her needs, Dallas chooses to live on the edge and defy all forms of authority, educational and parental. When Esperanza learns of Dallas’s absences from school, she acts impulsively by cutting most of Dallas’s beautiful hair, symbolic of her femininity and sexual arousal in men.28 Esperanza’s act not only causes tension in the family but further distance grows between her and Dallas until a newcomer arrives at the Colón household. In the Dominican diaspora generation, Cruz illustrates how the formation of new friendships between adolescents leads to transnational alliances that permit community building to combat racial ostracization and gender limitations.29 Hush, Dallas’s Salvadoran best girlfriend who attends a Catholic private school, for example, presents an alternative model in Let It Rain Coffee. She represents the Latina student who is dedicated and devoted to her schoolwork because she believes in achieving educational success in her very limited life. In fact, Esperanza often reminds and scolds Dallas for not being more like Hush in terms of her academic motivation.30 The reason Hush is often present in the Colón household, though, raises questions of patriarchal sexual abuse 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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and the need to be self-reliant. Since her own mother, Soraida, is indifferent to her daughter’s victimization, Hush is not comfortable in her own home. Although he helped pay for her privileged education, Hush is harassed by the sexual advances of her stepfather, Oswaldo, but she cannot speak against him because it would be a sign of disrespect to her very religious mother. A devout follower of God, it is a paradox that Soraida turns a blind eye to the vulnerable situation of her teenage daughter at the expense of a child predator. Caught between family loyalty and saving herself, Hush is intelligent but refuses to live with an abusive stepfather and hypocritically religious mother who always quotes from the Bible, but does little to protect her own daughter from physical and perhaps, sexual abuse. In this family scenario, Cruz critiques the double standard of devout religious followers who do not practice what they preach in theory as she suggests that parental authority may not always benefit women due to the politics of gender in the power imbalance. Rather than endure the unfairness and alienation of her own home, Hush appears unexpectedly one day at the Colón household until her child is born. An obedient daughter and diligent student, it is ironic that Hush becomes pregnant but the identity of the natural father remains unknown throughout the narrative. The impact of this character, who is not Dominican, cannot be underestimated because she restores a certain peace in the Colón family. Bobby, for instance, takes care of her as if she were giving birth to his own biological child, not revealing the fact that he has fallen in love with her. Esperanza eases up and makes sure that the apartment is always clean for the mother-to-be and future newborn. Dallas cooperates but finds it rather hypocritical that her mother appears to be rewarding a pregnant teenager at the expense of punishing and limiting her own daughter who does not believe that she did anything out of order. While Don Chan is too old to act in a domineering fashion, the power structure in the Colón household is stabilized, due to an outsider who crosses transnational lines. Cruz comments on how Dominicans in the United States can build a community beyond biological ties and come to one another’s rescue as if they were living on the island, a cultural feature that is quite different from the individualistic values of a U.S. system that can often divide people into separate quarters. The narrative Let It Rain Coffee, though, shifts from potential optimism to further social realism as another unexpected incident affects all members of the Colón tribe. All is well until another tragedy falls upon the family. The fact that Hush refused to follow a proper 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




nutritious diet for an expectant mother (i.e., she ate paper rather than food throughout her pregnancy) foreshadows her physical and psychological state of mind of depression. She experiences a long and arduous labor resulting in the birth of a healthy baby girl, but she herself dies in the process as a symbolic martyr. It is almost as if Hush’s life had to be “hushed” or silenced at the expense of others, even though there is hope in that her orphan child survives to carry on her legacy of benevolence. On another level, Hush’s daughter unites the members of the fragmented Colón family in the United States, representing hope in them. Even though she is not related to the Colón family biologically, they do not give her up for adoption nor abandon her in foster care for they realize that she brings much joy to their lives across the transnational divide. Transnational Dominican Migrants Between the Island and Mainland Let It Rain Coffee represents the Dominican diaspora’s return to the Dominican homeland in the last part of the narrative to search for an answer to a question or problem. When Don Chan finally decides that he has tolerated the United States long enough as an elderly, he begs Esperanza to return to the Dominican Republic to die to which she agrees. Realizing that the environment of the United States is no place for a longtime dominicano to end his last days, Esperanza, who learns to be more patient as she ages, complies with Don Chan’s final request. She also decides to make it a family trip by taking Bobby, Dallas, and Hush’s baby girl, now a member of the family. Even though the baby does not hold blood ties to the family, it is imperative that Cruz include her because she shows the relevance of orphans in the Colón genealogy across national, racial, and gender divisions. We must not forget that Don Chan began his life as an orphan, later to be adopted and rescued by Don Julio from the sea, regardless of his different culture, race, and nationality. By returning to his adopted homeland in the Dominican Republic, Cruz draws a comparison between Don Chan and Hush’s baby girl because his family has adopted her as one of their own, despite the fact that she is not biologically nor nationally connected to them, but very much cherished. From one orphan to another, the baby brings a circular voyage to the narrative as she returns to the land where Don Chan landed as an orphan, a major trope for Dominicans throughout the novel. Because it is his adopted homeland, he must return to die in 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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the place where he began to live: the sea. Thus, the genealogical circle is completed by traveling across transnational lines. Instead of perceiving this voyage south as a relaxing vacation, the Colón family becomes stressed about this return home because it has been a long time and many things have changed, including Santo’s death and absence. Esperanza also takes it upon herself to bring gifts to her relatives on the island demonstrating a cultural connection and she also perceives them to be in a worse economic state than those on the mainland. While on the island, Dominican immigrants and their children are perceived as americanos because they have material goods and therefore, they must be leading fulfilling lives. Yet, this perception as Cruz has proved is not entirely true. For the first time, Dallas realizes that her mother Esperanza spent all their money, savings, and creating a huge credit bill, on gifts to bring to relatives and their children, who, in reality, feel more like strangers to Dallas and Bobby rather than familiar relatives. At this moment, Dallas learns more about her mother than she ever had in the past. Although she may not always agree with her, Dallas at least begins to understand her mother’s behavior and cultural ties to family members on the island. This also explains why they live in poverty as immigrants back in the apartment in Washington Heights. Dallas also realizes that she has extended roots and family ties on the island. The relatives think that Hush’s baby is hers and compliment her on the resemblance between supposed mother and daughter, even though there are no similar physical features. This attitude also ref lects that they accept a member into their Dominican family regardless of origins as Don Julio had accepted Don Chan. Cruz critiques the politics of migration in family relationships because they transform from biological to emotional bonding of caring individuals. She is also critical of the fact that spending limitlessly can lead to a spiral of economic dependency and furthermore, another form of psychological colonization that leaves individuals empty and disempowered as is the case with Esperanza. During this transnational migration to the island, Don Chan and his grandson Bobby pay a visit to the activist Miraluz (with whom he had also been in love). He continues to admire for she has maintained the spirit of her political activism, kept it alive, by organizing women on the island to make their own products under the label El secreto de Victoria (Victoria’s Secret) rather than work for a tyrant, abusive boss who exploits women economically and sexually.31 Miraluz, on the other hand, mistakes Bobby for his father Santo and compliments him on his looks and body. Dominican Americans on the island are “misread” or 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




“misunderstood,” because Bobby resembles Santo physically, but perhaps not emotionally. The son Bobby, though, learns to judge from one’s interior rather than exterior qualities. The Dominican Republic symbolizes a site for death and rebirth as Don Chan passes away calmly and peacefully in his homeland. Although his memory fails him as he grows older, exemplifying his instability, he has not lost his spirit of revolution for social change. Rather, he still believes in a better tomorrow, especially for his young grandchildren. The descendants of Don Chan will carry his legacy as they, themselves, are of multicultural/multiracial background “in their blood” and in practice. Although he cannot rely on his memory, Don Chan has the ability to see beyond national boundaries and embrace people of different nationalities and races within his own family. The idea of building new communities across biological lines and national backgrounds points to a new form of making social alliances in the Dominican diaspora generation, which had begun with the great-grandfather, Don Julio, a person of Haitian descent and the African diaspora, who took in a little Asian (Chinese) boy and named him Don Chan. In a sense, Cruz critiques the artificiality created by national geopolitical divisions, be they Dominican/Haitian or Dominican/Salvadoran because people will transcend them to share other cultural connections beyond the nation. The title of the novel Let It Rain Coffee originates from the song by a similar title in Spanish by the well-known Dominican merengue singer Juan Luis Guerra.32 He sings, “Ojalá que llueva café” (I/we hope that it rains coffee). This element of popular culture reverts back to the community of farmers such as Don Chan’s family in the Dominican provinces who hope and pray, waiting for a change in the weather to rain to enable them to grow their crops and plants such as coffee beans to be able to feed their families and communities in general. Guerra sings, “Ojalá que llueva café en el campo” (2000). Cruz, however, modifies this verse in the title of her novel in English because she changes the verb from the subjunctive form ojalá (hope) in Spanish where the people or gente del pueblo remain in a passive state to a command, “let it,” in English, enabling the people to make it rain or let it rain coffee. In other words, Cruz empowers the community of farmers to become active and take more control of their destiny and make their goals and dreams come true for themselves and their families. They will enrich themselves by “letting it rain coffee” and working with nature, as opposed to the modern destruction and exploitation of the land. This change in linguistics, obviously, has ideological connotations as an English 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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translation emerges from a daughter of the Dominican diaspora who looks back to her family’s community with hope and strength (Cruz 2007b). Because the Dominican Republic has had a tremendous history of instability and social injustices, where the marginalized, such as people from rural regions, the urban working class and women, have suffered at the hands of those in power in government and other institutions, Cruz resists and contests that domination by focusing on the power and voices of those on the sidelines, a revision of history through memory. She believes in and depends on the power of words to transform individuals and communities. In the lyrics of this song, “Ojalá que llueva café,” Cruz also reconciles nature with humanity, in this case the people who work the land, to defy unnecessary environmental corruption and waste. Rather than destroy nature with exaggerated concrete (i.e., modernization, media, technology), Cruz would rather negotiate with nature who, after all, provides the basic sustenance for our daily living. Nature is also what provides the Dominican Republic’s essential export products, such as coffee, sugar, and cacao in a globalized economy. In this sense, Cruz signals to a human awakening of our natural resources and human lives that should be respected, rather than exploited in a colonizing fashion. Cruz’s reconfiguration of the title of the song from Spanish to English provides the context for hope and empowerment in the community. It has also become a national anthem for Dominicans who wish to take control of their lives on the island and the diaspora in the mainland United States. Cruz forms part of a generation of authors in the twenty-first century who are concerned about the transnational representation of people of color in literature and society. While Cruz incorporates her Dominican heritage to explore the history and culture of African- and Chinese descent people on the island, she also traces the journeys of their children and grandchildren from the United States. Similar to other U.S. Latina authors before her, Cruz critiques the role of U.S. imperialism in the Dominican Republic, but she differs because she provides a U.S. Latina/Dominican diasporic perspective that is highly inf luenced by her connections and contacts with other cultures, especially African American and Afro-Caribbean cultural and literary inf luences. As a woman of color writer, Cruz’s oeuvre continues in the same vein as the inf luential progressive projects of Malcolm X in the 1960s and Chicana writers, Anzaldúa and Moraga, in the 1980s with the main difference that Cruz works within the age of transnational migrations between South to North, East to West, and beyond, in this Latina imaginary. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




In July 2007, I visited Washington Heights to meet up with Angie Cruz as she was in between stops, traveling from Texas to another gig in Massachusetts. We had brunch at a well-known Dominican restaurant called El Presidente, just across from the Audubon Ballroom. Having grown up in this neighborhood, she commented on the changes, more dominicanos or quisqueyanos, more family members, but also more rise in the cost and standard of living. As we spent time conversing and walking around the neighborhood, I could not help but notice Spanish on the radio, be it merengue, salsa, or reggaetón, signaling that Dominican, Caribbean, and Latin American cultures are alive and well in this city. In the writing and completion of her novels, Cruz has traveled to Italy, Mexico, and certainly, the Dominican Republic, among other places, resulting in personal and professional experiences that have enriched her life. Every time she returns to her neighborhood, she finds “the spirit of all that collective activity [the community]” that gives birth to her literary works (Cruz 2006). Cruz is the first Dominican American writer to place Washington Heights on the literary map and pave the way for others to follow.



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Marie Arana’s American Chica (2001): Circular Voyages in the U.S./Peruvian Archipelago

Marie Arana is the first Peruvian descent woman writer to receive critical national attention by locating the transnational U.S.-Peruvian migration experience on the map for an English-reading public. Despite the fact that Arana is contemporaries with Latina authors Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chávez, and Cristina García, the generation that boomed in the 1990s, she did not publish her memoir, American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood, until 2001; it was a finalist for the National Book Award, as well as the PEN/Memoir Award. Before becoming a nationally recognized author, Arana organized conferences for many years promoting and supporting the works of Latino/a and Latin American authors, or “cheerleading from the sidelines” as she would say, but was known more for her editorial, rather than her writing efforts.1 Since American Chica, Arana has edited The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work (2003), published two novels Cellophane (2006a) and Lima Nights (2008), and written the introduction for many books, including, Through the Eyes of the Condor: An Aerial Vision of Latin America (2007). Arana has finally received the due recognition for her role as a critically acclaimed trans-American Latina author. Born in Lima, Peru, in 1949, Marie Arana spent the first ten years of her life in Peru before moving with her family to Summit, New Jersey. Having learned many Romance languages, she pursued a BA in Russian languages and literatures at Northwestern University. Between the years



CH A P T E R


of 1972 and 1979, Arana and her first husband, a banker, lived in Hong Kong, Malaysia, and Singapore. She worked just as committedly as a teacher of French and Spanish at the Hong Kong International School and then earned an MA in sociolinguistics (through a certificate scholarship at Yale University in China) at the University of Hong Kong to become a lecturer (a British term for untenured professor) there. In the brief time she spent in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, she taught English and French at the American School and then moved to Singapore temporarily. Throughout her stay in Asia, Arana read obsessively and voraciously, until she came back to New York as a novice editor in book publishing (Harcourt Brace) in 1980. Although she spent many years with Simon and Schuster, she eventually landed the position of chief book editor with the Washington Post, where she worked until 2008. Arana did not intend to write American Chica as a memoir initially, but rather as a historical piece on Peruvian society in the early twentieth century. She received a fellowship to conduct research on Peruvian history at Stanford University in the late 1990s. However, Arana learned much more than knowledge on the economic rubber boom in the Amazonian region in Peru in the early twentieth-century period. She began to uncover “family secrets,” by delving into the past of her great-grandfather Pedro Pablo Arana.2 Much to her surprise, the mystery surrounding a distant relative, Julio César Arana, a rubber baron or cauchero, who committed atrocities against the indigenous population of that region, was an eye-opening experience for Arana about her paternal genealogy. She wondered why no family member ever mentioned the biological relationship with this mystifying ill-reputed man, Julio César. By putting the pieces of her genealogical puzzle together, she discovered the direct effects of Julio Arana’s actions on her own family, which tagged them with a bad reputation and forced them to go into hiding to avoid public confrontations and further damage to their family honor even though they, themselves, were not directly responsible for killing indigenous people. For the longest time, Arana explains that her father’s relatives had lied to her about Julio César Arana by declaring that he was not related to them. These incidents somehow lead Marie Arana’s father Jorge to move away from Peru to study engineering in Boston where he met and married his future wife, Marie Campbell, during World War II. Although the author, Arana, began to write an objective piece on Peruvian history, she ended up writing a memoir about her genealogy to demystify and clarify the legend of her distant ancestor, Julio Arana, and his tainted legacy on her personal life. In American Chica, Arana produces a transnational narrative that 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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addresses questions of gender, race, and migrations as much in Peru as in the United States. Marie Arana, also the first Latina book editor of the Washington Post, depicts the binational genealogy of her dual heritages that originate from a more distant nation (Peru) and the United States in her memoir American Chica. According to Suzanne Oboler (2005b), “Marie Arana, daughter of a Peruvian father and an American mother, explores the meaning of hybrid belonging in both the United States and the highlands of Peru in her autobiographical narrative, American Chica” (156). Oboler situates Arana as one of the pioneer U.S.-South American, specifically Peruvian American, writers in U.S. Latino/a literature. While American Chica may be considered part of a “new” Latina narrative tradition, the gender and race issues in a transnational migratory context resemble those of the other Latina writers in this study. Newspaper critics have commented positively on the significance of family and cultural issues across Peru and the United States. Many have also discussed the relevance of the hybridity of cultures, be it culture clash or a new cultural fusion, but they have barely skimmed the surface in presenting gender, race, and migration issues in a transnational context (see Anders 2001; Gimbel 2001; Manguel 2001). Similar to the critique of other U.S. Latina writers who incorporate genealogy, mainstream critics have failed to fully understand the complexity of Peruvian society in terms of culture, history, and political divisions and its effects on the Arana family’s immigration to the United States. Perhaps the lack of familiarity and depth with U.S.-Latin American historical relations in mainstream U.S. culture accounts for the lack of academic literary criticism on a narrative like Arana’s. Im/Migrations and Peruvians in the United States Peruvian immigration patterns to the United States have transformed drastically from the small numbers in the mid-nineteenth-century Gold Rush period in northern California to the larger waves that are dotting the United States in the twenty-first century with settlements in small towns as well as major metropoli.3 Some Peruvians are currently reclaiming and adopting the geoancestral term “Andean” to acknowledge and pay homage to their indigenous heritage in places like New Jersey and New York.4 In “Mapping the Andean Cultural Archipelago in the United States,” Zevallos-Aguilar addresses the situation of the “transnational Andean cultural phenomena” by tracking 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Marie Arana’s AMERICAN CHICA


the double migrations of Andeans from their towns to the cities in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, and then to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. By expanding Walter Mignolo’s (2000) critical paradigm of situating an indigenous culture within its local history with global implications, Zevallos-Aguilar finds that great diversity exists even within Andean culture and thus, he prefers to use the term archipelago because it “leaves room for ref lection related to diaspora, on cultural resistance, and on the dynamics of Andean culture between the places emigrants leave and where they settle” (132).5 While Arana certainly incorporates the Andean element in American Chica, she also complicates the nature of Peruvians’ mixed ethnic and racial backgrounds due to transnational and historical migrations. When Marie Arana illustrates her bicultural experiences of coming of age in Peru and the United States, one foot in each nation in American Chica, she probes into further Peruvian culture, history, and politics in her subsequent novels Cellophane and Lima Nights. Although primarily formed in the United States due to her formal education and career, Arana, like her fellow Peruvian American successor, Daniel Alarcón, is preoccupied with the representation of Peru in her narratives more so than the United States because she still holds strong cultural and familial ties to Peru. Whereas the critically acclaimed novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, their well-known Peruvian counterpart, writes about Peru in Spanish, Arana and Alarcón write about Peru in English.6 Most U.S. Latino/a writers are concerned with U.S.-based experiences with a look at Latin America through the parents’ eyes or brief visits, not being fully formed in the south. Because Arana is located at the interstices of being a U.S.-based Latina and Latin American author, I suggest that she can be considered a cultural and literary translator of Peruvian society and history through trans-American eyes similar to Daniel Alarcón because both, as bicultural Latino/as, critique pressing social issues like class, gender, race, migrations, and at times, U.S. imperialism, from the position of the north. Through a transnational Latina perspective, Arana is as much in dialogue with Peruvian social and literary figures as she is with the Latina authors in this study in American Chica.7 Since the female protagonist, Marie (Marisi) Arana, migrates across nations in American Chica, she is the one who is often displaced: yet, she observes two cultures simultaneously. In Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global (2004), Eidse and Sichel explain: Growing up global, nomadic children often enjoy an expanded worldview but may lack a particular national identity. Though 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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their parents may have strong ties to their home countries, these children often feel as though they are citizens of the world and must grow to define home for themselves. They belong everywhere and nowhere . . . they often gravitate toward those whose childhoods have been similarly unrooted, often finding affinity in blended cultural groups. Even into adulthood, they are bound by perennial outsider status, by memories of frequent moves, and by the benefits and challenges a mobile childhood has granted them. (1–2) The movement from one nation to another makes sense not only in the past, but also in the present for an author like Arana who finds her home in Peru and the United States. This phenomenon is important to study today because it resonates with the contemporary experiences of transnational travels of Latina authors who are in similar situations as those mentioned in American Chica. In the historical context of American Chica, Marie Arana explores the nature of racism in conjunction with labor exploitation in Peru by referring to the precolonial period. Arana complicates the traditional Incan/Spanish dichotomy because she mentions several indigenous societies (e.g., Chimu, Moche, Incan) that held their own hierarchical and social stratifications within Peru, even before the arrival of Spanish colonialism and consequently, U.S. imperialism, all of which have affected Peru to some degree in terms of its economic and political situation that have marginalized groups such as the indigenous and women. As a historical commentator, Arana says: There was a long tradition of exploitation in Peru. It had begun under the Inca with the mita, a system in which peasants were made to contribute years of labor to the state. They were told their work would bring glory to the empire of the sun. When the Spaniards conquered Peru, they adopted the same practice, forcing the peasants into their own version of the mita, this time for the glory of the crown. Things had not progressed much in the one hundred twenty years of the Republic. The villagers in the countryside now were being lured to work for new masters on the sugar and cotton plantations; they did not volunteer their most productive years for free, as their ancestors had done before them, but they accepted pittances: a few soles, a thatched roof over their heads, a ration of meat and a little rice. (2001, 96–97) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




Even though Arana focuses on the historical period of the early twentieth century in the Amazonian region in Peru in one section of American Chica, she traces part of the Incan period and the Spanish Conquest because it was the first encounter between the Andean people of Peru and Europeans. The Incas, the civilization of the time, were manipulated and enslaved to work the land and systematically, pay taxes for their living. Arana explains that “Fewer than two hundred men took the Inca.” She exposes the violent side of the Spanish Conquest of the Incan empire in order to draw a parallel with the modernization period in the twentieth century in her narrative. By sharing these numerical figures, she also insinuates that the conquest of the Incas had nothing to do with numbers, but more, with the advanced technology of arms and machinery that also compares with the enforced labor of the indigenous in the Amazonian region in the twentieth century. Because the Spaniards, headed by their leader Francisco Pizarro, had the armory and greed to deceive the Incan leaders in the name of Spanish crown and religion, they were able to strategically murder the Incan leaders by dividing indigenous groups through civil wars, thus breaking down their political unity (222–223). Arana further critiques this form of colonial government because the rhetoric of civilization and salvation does not benefit the people who work and live on the land, but rather exploits their bodies and minds. In American Chica, Arana exposes the colonial legacy of the Spanish Conquest as it continues with racial exploitation at the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the fact that Peru gained its political independence from Spain in 1824. She says, “The indios and the mestizos, unless they could pass themselves off as white, were made to pay for having been born darker” (115). The neocolonialism of the rubber boom in the 1900s affected the extended areas of the Amazonian jungle where the indigenous people worked and were murdered to the extent that the nineteenth-century ideologies of “civilization” and “barbarism” have reversed.8 Regarding her great-grandfather, Arana says: He had fully expected to enter the mercantile world when his duties in Cusco were over. He had not expected the chaos that ensued: the news about the atrocities; the freeze on all Arana bank assets; the realization that beneath his own ambition; speeches about progress; and attempts to mimic a gringo efficiency, there lurked a terrible, inescapable truth: The mercury would leave his mines the way rubber had left the jungle, the only way hard labor ever got done in the Americas—as when the Incas enslaved the 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Elite Peruvian rubber barons, such as Julio César Arana and his allies, are accountable for maintaining the racial and social hierarchy of the various ethnic/racial labor workers, not the other way around. How civilized is this endeavor in the name of “progress”? Although the indigenous were once accused of being the “barbarians” for attacking human beings and leaving head skulls, and the like, they are in reality vulnerable to the “machines,” introduced by modern technology, exported from Europe and the United States to their natural habitat in the Amazonian region, another form of colonialism under new disguise. Arana indirectly critiques the rhetoric of progress led by her relative, the ambitious entrepreneur Julio Arana, and by extension, the U.S. and European countries for manipulating the exportation of machinery that result in the colonization of a native people of Peru. Questions of nationalism and allegiance to Peru become myths for the indigenous of Andean origins because they live remotely from all political processes that serve the criollos and mestizos in the cities. Furthermore, Arana suggests that the indigenous and black people who provide the labor force for businessmen like Julio Arana are no different than their counterparts who suffered during the Spanish Conquest. Arana is cautious of the celebration of modernization and progress in Peru and the United States because it benefits few at the expense of many lives.9 As mentioned earlier, Marie Arana shows a transnational consciousness as she displays the politics and history of Peruvian society in American Chica when she refers to racial demarcations. She sheds light on the multiracial identity of Peru that differs from the perception of race in the United States. As the narrator Arana explains, As birthdays progressed, I saw that Peru has its sediments, too, and that its lines are drawn in color. “I’m indio with a little bit sambo,” someone will say on the telephone, if you’re planning to meet him somewhere for the first time, so that you’ll be sure to recognize him. Or a Peruvian will call a friend with distinctly Asian features Chino . . . We call each other morenita, cafecita, cholita: there’s a name for every shade of Peruvian skin. I’m reminded of my pre-political innocence now when I go to Latino conferences in this country, when an application asks me if I’m Hispanic. (2001, 117) 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


Chimu, the Spaniards enslaved the cholos, the half-breeds enslaved the negros—on the backs of the darker race. (52)


Arana discloses her naiveté as a young girl in failing to recognize the implications of ethnic/racial labels in her Peruvian past. In Peru, people are direct in calling one another by the shade of their skin color, a form of discrimination, which has a colonial legacy.10 Depending on the context, this appellation can be an offense because it fails to recognize people as individuals and perceives them as types. In the United States, Arana becomes aware of a different process regarding ethnic and racial labeling, but not necessarily any better. She critiques the homogenizing term such as the government-designated one— “Hispanic”—because it does not acknowledge the diversity among Latinos in the United States, who are composed of many races and heritages.11 Within the context of her childhood growing up in Peru, the young narrator Marie (or Marisi), at the age of seven, learns about such racial and socioeconomic divides when she is not able to invite the daughter of an Andean indigenous servant to her birthday party because the little girl is an “india.” The mother informs her unabashedly that by inviting her indigenous friend, the daughter Marisi puts her social milieu in jeopardy because other criollo or mestizo children will withdraw their participation in this social event due to the presence of someone outside the boundaries of their social and racial circles. This is an important moment in Marisi’s education about race relations in Peru because, as a youngster, she knows that she is powerless and cannot change the situation of racial boundaries.12 Race and Migrations to the United States While Arana and her family brief ly visit the United States when she is a youngster because the maternal grandmother is dying, questions of color and race affect the siblings on the U.S. side of the transnational divide. By riding the train to Rawlins, Wyoming, the Arana children must choose an appropriate public restroom that is either for colored or white. The mother’s immediate reaction is to lead her children to the white restroom because, after all, they are “American” and her children. Like the mother figure in Cherríe Moraga’s autobiography Loving in the War Years (1983), the mother in American Chica refuses to accept her children as half-American and half-Peruvian/Latino because she does not wish that the children be victims of racial discrimination. By negating their Peruvian heritage, she may think that she is protecting them, but she may also be causing further confusion, which may be 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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I had not yet turned seven, but I knew what race meant. There were Peruvians who measured color with what seemed the precision of laboratory calipers, but I had never suspected that any of it would pose a danger to me . . . But race in Peru was a subtler issue than in the United States. Indios came down from the mountains, in from the jungle, went to convent schools, mixed with mestizos, and their mestizo children mixed with the blancos, mixed with the chinos, mixed with the sambos, moved to the cities, mixed it up more. I cannot claim, at such a young age, to have understood any of it really, but I’d seen Peru in shades, felt it. Here in March of 1956, in the St. Louis train station, however, where black and white was spelled so boldly–where colors were carved on doors with directives-I do believe that for the first time I feared a little for myself. (174–175) What may appear upon first glance as a metaphor for a Peruvian lomo saltado (national dish of beef, French fries, rice, and condiments with various ethnic inf luences) with so much mixing of ingredients, in reality ref lects a process of social and racial hybridization permitted by national internal migrations from the provinces to the cities as well as upward mobility in class status. After all, Peru is the first Latin American nation to have an Asian ( Japanese) descent official president. Accustomed to seeing a variety of “shades” before her eyes, Marisi is shell-shocked when she sees, in print, for the first time in her life, the deliberate segregation of races based on color lines in the public sphere in the United States. Even though one can argue that these laws and policies are normative before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, Arana draws attention to the fact that the United States perceived itself as a “black and white” nation, therefore obliterating the incorporation of any ethnicities, cultures, and races that differed from these two models of races. For the first time, Arana as a child begins to question her identity and place in the United States. Where does she belong? In another example in the U.S. context, Arana and her brother George experience racist attacks from an older Anglo-American man who mistakes them for Mexican because they “spek Spanish” (192–193). The adult Arana realizes that racial segregation has a direct impact on her because she is not white. Unlike her older sister Vicki whose hair is black and skin is white, Arana says, “I, on the other hand, had suspected 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


problematic and lead to an identity crisis when they become adults. While traveling in the United States, the narrator realizes,


my skin would fool no one. There was nothing white about me. I was colored, for sure” (193). Aware of the difference in skin color among her own siblings, Marisi gradually learns that she is at a disadvantage in public because she is “colored,” meaning not white and therefore, not full of privilege like her sister, who may be able to pass for an average, typical white American and thus, never be racially harassed. In chapter two, “Fathers/Padres,” of American Chica, Arana disseminates the history of her paternal ancestor, the grandfather, Don Victor Arana Sobrevilla, to demonstrate how he stopped working and became reclusive in his Miraf lores home in Lima. Mystery surrounds his early retirement. Because of his lack of employment, his son, Jorge Arana, Marie’s father, was forced to work since the age of fifteen in order to sustain his five siblings. Since he studied engineering in Lima, Peru, his first job took him away from his family in order to build bridges in a modernizing period. This kind of “traveling” career led to a lifestyle of leisure with a woman who was “many shades darker” than he, upsetting, thereby, his class and race-conscious mother, Rosa. It is an interesting moment for a young professional of Jorge’s background because later, his father’s enemy provided him with a scholarship that enabled him to study at MIT, that is, receive a formal education in the United States, via Panama. Before the migration of the Arana family to the United States in 1960, when Marisi was ten years old, she refers to the historical and social context of her Peruvian father’s experiences in the United States. The father, Jorge Arana, had benefited from the “friendly gesture” of the Good Neighbor Policy, which permitted scholarships to young, upper middle-class Latin American men to pursue graduate studies in the United States in the 1940s because American soldiers were fighting in the war in Europe. Jorge Arana belongs to this class.13 Upon his arrival in the United States, Jorge learns of American ways by living a life of freedom and eventually, meeting violinist Marie Campbell, with whom he will fall helplessly in love and marry. He meets her in Boston, a city with a history of different immigrants. Arana sets up the marriage of her parents as if it were a “North and South collision” of cultures like the hemispheres in the Americas: the father, Jorge, descends from an educated privileged family in Peru, while the mother, Marie, comes from an industrial family in Wyoming and claims to be remotely related to one of the U.S. presidents, John Adams. Arana’s parents do not share any cultural or linguistic commonalities. The mother is a product of the United States and she is accustomed to more independent thinking than women of Latin American nations. As a consequence, the 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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cultural differences between Arana’s parents lead each to experience one another’s culture from the position of outsider: when the couple moves to Peru, she feels marginalized, as the father does in the United States. However, one commonality that does tie the parents, Jorge and Marie, has to do with hiding their pasts, part of family history by being secretive, to look forward to the future, by starting new lives in raising their children and traveling with them between two nations, Peru and the United States. In American Chica, the author Arana creates ambiguity as much as secrecy that surrounds the character of the mother, Marie Campbell. The elder Marie is different from Jorge’s vision of Peruvian womanhood because she comes and goes as she pleases from the Latino parties at the Boston dormitories, where they “drink champagne from a shoe.” She exudes more freedom and confidence than a conventional Peruvian woman, to which Jorge is immediately drawn and proposes. The decision to marry the mother Marie without posing questions about her past brings some obstacles for the couple that threaten their romance. When a Catholic priest refuses to marry the couple, due to Marie’s previous marriages, a judge must marry them. The wedding day then turns out to be a day of revelations for Jorge because he learns that she was married three times, she is six years older than Jorge, rather than three years younger and he is practically marrying a stranger. Nonetheless, Jorge, being the romantic that he is, does not question her at the time because he is too much in love. Marie, the narrator, though, does not learn about these facts in her mother’s life until she is in her forties when she seeks to know more about her mother’s love life before beginning a life with Jorge Arana in Peru with three children. The daughter realizes that the mother’s hidden past increases the tension in the parents’ relationship. Rather than discuss this topic openly, Marie’s mother and father prefer to live in denial and move ahead with their lives. It is not until Marisi is an adult that her mother reveals information regarding her first three marriages. The mother Marie intimates that she was so young when she married her first husband that she did not know what situation she entered and divorced him soon afterward. As for her second husband, it turned out to be an unfortunate situation because he was a wife beater, so she divorced him and moved on. When she married her third husband, she complied with this commitment to help him avoid getting drafted for the war. With the generous help of an uncle, the mother enrolled and took classes in the Music Conservatory in Boston to follow her passion and play the violin, a symbolic instrument that she takes with her to Peru after the birth 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




of her second child, her son, George Arana. Although distant physically from her homeland, the mother Marie can take a little bit of the United States with her and passes down her own artistic traditions and customs to her children, an appreciation for music, which the narrator/ daughter Marie admires. Interestingly enough, it is with “a Peruvian,” with whom Marisi’s mother finds some kind of comfort and solace, if not complete happiness, as she crosses transnational boundaries in her marriage and new lifestyle in raising her children in Peru. The Politics of Gender and Race in Peru Even though the protagonist Marie feels very much at home in Lima, living her dual identity as an “American chica,” her nuclear family migrates to the United States at the American mother’s request because she has given fourteen years to living and raising her children in Peru. The father, too nostalgic for his home, family, and Limeña traditions (cultural/religious processions such as El Señor de los Milagros and Santa Rosa de Lima) in Peru, becomes a transnational engineer, spending only months at a time with his family in New Jersey, thereby giving his wife and children more independence.14 As the adult narrator, Arana ref lects on her connection to a historic neighborhood Barranco in Lima: Venice may have its Bridge of Sighs, but there is another one in Lima—Puente de los Suspiros—and every time I return to Peru, I find myself drawn to it, as if it holds some secret, some deeper meaning about life and love . . . This is a modest trestle, spanning a dry little gorge in the historic district of Barranco. Cut from a hundred years or so ago, it is short and square and simple. It was not built to inspire voyagers to nobler ground or brave new worlds. It is where the lovers go. (2001, 300) Although Arana no longer lives in Lima as an adult, she reclaims this historical place in the city to understand her Latina identity, role as a woman, and romantic awakening. Like Cisneros’s fascination with historical places (i.e., Zócalo in Mexico City), Arana also feels a natural connection to the bridge in Lima because as old as it may be, it affects people spiritually as well as emotionally.15 The Bridge of Sighs in Barranco is not only historical, but it is symbolic of forming gender relationships across the United States and Peru that Arana understands from having lived and traveled to Peru. The bridge also represents 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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the strong bonding between her parents, people of varying cultures, nationalities, and races who cross boundaries and may break with their homeland traditions. While the bridge may be a metaphor of her parents’ marriage, it also represents the hybrid identity that links her dual heritages in Peru (father) and the United States (mother) and the process of negotiating cultural differences in her transnational Latina identity. Arana illustrates throughout her memoir that her identity as a Latina, first raised as a child in Peru, then as an adolescent in the United States, makes her a bicultural woman with an equal understanding of cultures, languages, and value systems in the United States—Peruvian borderlands. By emphasizing the cultural and social context of dual identity, Arana provides a lens as a transnational ambassador as to how gender in her cultural heritage can affect family, and particularly, relationships in the border crossings between Peru and the United States. Her experiences of race from her national origin’s residence inf luence her ideological views on culture and history, when, as an adult, she develops a consciousness of transnational gender identity in relationship to that history. Arana is particularly interested in representing and comparing the meaning of womanhood in Peruvian and U.S. societies because the attitudes toward women affected her mother deeply while she was living and raising her children in this “foreign” country. In American Chica, the narrator says, “They lived monitored girlhoods, in aesthetically pleasing places, with carefully selected playmates, and someday they would pass into chaperoned young womanhood, during which their virtues would be guarded like family jewels” (144). As Arana matures in Peru, she begins to notice how she is perceived by Peruvians in her social circle and notices that she does not conform to the social expectations of a señorita. The narrator Marie ref lects, “It didn’t occur to me that I was anything but a boy’s equal. I was my mother’s daughter, ready to pit myself against boys if I had to, ready to grin at them openly, as I’d seen my mother grin at the solteros, facing them squarely when they strode down the streets, tipping their hats her way” (144). At this moment, Marisi realizes that she is her mother’s daughter as far as exercising her right to choose her social company at a young age. She learned this behavior directly from her mother when she was a youngster. Thus, Marisi knows that she can transgress the social boundaries of gender divisions by following her own accord and play with boys her age as a female tomboy would in the United States. Arana, the author, also reminds us of the strong role that the mother Arana had in her children’s upbringing, despite all the opposition and battles she had to 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




endure and struggle with on her own in Peru. This attests to the fortitude in her character as well, which is exemplified in Marisi. As an adult, the narrator Marisi ref lects on her own experiences in her two marriages. She describes her liminal position of how she is caught between being a Latina and a gringa—in her first marriage, she felt that she was the perfect Latina wife. Even though she married an American, she followed tradition and the rules set forth by him by being the perfect wife and mother to their only son. Eventually, this relationship failed and ended in divorce. She did learn, however, much about her future career interests as an editor while she lived and worked in Asia in this relationship. In her second marriage, Marisi views herself as a more liberal “American” because she was more open with her sexuality, comfortable with her body, and taking the initiative in controlling the direction of her life. In addition to taking on the roles of mother and wife, she also followed her passion in pursuing editing and, eventually, publishing her own work (145). Essentially, Marisi Arana grows into an “American chica” from experiences in both marriages as she redefines the limits of her gender as well. By introducing the Andean element of Peruvian culture, Arana displays a growing awareness of racial diversity within one nation. In fact, the Arana children in Peru have close ties to the indigenous servants who treat them like their own children.16 The young Marie Arana quickly learns about the storytelling tradition from this Andean group, allowing her to identify with Peruvian indigenous culture unlike the rest of her relatives who would prefer to distance themselves from a racially marginal, working-class group. Everything she knew until that moment had to do with Peruvian society, especially the spirit of the pishtacos or indigenous ghosts learned from the family’s servants. This relationship with Andean people at a young age shows how Marisi crosses racial and class boundaries that broaden her consciousness as an adult narrator, for she does not limit herself to interacting with people of her own background. One of the ways Andean cultural practices inf luence the young Marie is through the storytelling tradition that is described to her by her parents’ indigenous servant Antonio. He explains ideas about the pishtacos, “ghosts,” and the spirits, all concepts that differ from the logic and scientific proofs of Western civilization. When the young Marisi begins to attend public school in the United States, her peers accuse her of telling “witchcraft” stories that make her appear as if she were crazy or losing her mind. Owing to the Andean component of her Peruvian upbringing, oral traditions form an integral part of her 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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formation. Thus, she does not conform to the Anglo majority at school because she has crossed cultural boundaries by negotiating Western with non-Western Andean traditions in storytelling. As a teenager, she is also marginalized among school classmates in New Jersey for speaking English with an accent (similar to Cotito in When the Spirits Dance Mambo), targeting her as a nonconformist immigrant. If they are not telling her to return to where she belongs (recalling her mother who was told to leave Peru), they are telling Marisi to “remember the Alamo,” which confuses her identity with that of Mexican descent youngsters. This comparison by Anglo-American youngsters ref lects more of the stereotyping found in U.S. media, be it representations in television, film, or radio. Arana is critical of the homogenization of Latinos in the United States because there is more at stake in terms of each group’s specific history and migration to the United States. Furthermore, she comments on the media’s representation and perception of each Latino/a group with this last comment that also connotes negative images of Latinos, particularly Mexican Americans, who lost territory symbolized by the Alamo due to the U.S. occupation of the Southwest in the nineteenth century. As for the development of Arana’s interest in Andean storytelling, the character of Antonio teaches the young Marisi about the symbol of the qosqo, or center, that provides her with the ability to trust her instincts and spirits to understand the world around her. He advises, “Let everything rush in the bad with the good alike. If you walk through life afraid of the bad, you will walk hunched over, broken, defensive. Stand with your qosqo to the world. Straight. Proud” (92). He also explains the meaning of Pachamama, goddess of the earth, and the power of the apus, a strong force from nature.17 He says: According to the Inca, the earth is made up of energy bubblesone apu’s domain is here, another’s there—and it is only natural that the earth should react violently when energy bubbles cross. Two force fields meet and you have confrontation . . . But the ability to take that phenomenon to a higher level-to go from shaking to awareness, from confrontation to enlightenment—is a goal we terrestrials seldom reach. (162–163) By learning of the belief system based on the symbology of nature, contrary to Catholicism with its emphasis on one God commanding nature, the young Marie begins to value Andean philosophical traditions as a form of self-empowerment. Arana the adult realizes that 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




“I was a product of natural forces, that I was another version of earth, that I could prevail against evils if I would only learn how” (157). The discussion that ensues between Marie Arana and her mother regarding hunting and digging for bones reveals different perspectives on fate, destiny, and cultural practices. While the mother believes that God is responsible for the young Marie’s near-death accident when she fell and ripped her dress, the narrator Arana maintains that an evil spirit of the mountain in the form of a ghost caused her fall, thereby paying her respects to nature. The mother tries to explain her position regarding fate, but Arana is suspicious of her mother’s Christianity, versus her belief in Pachamama, which translates to, or may be understood as, the power struggle between two cultures, two philosophies, and two nationalities (249), allegories for Andean Peru and the United States. From a Señorita de Lima to the Condor in the U.S. Landscape Arana portrays her maternal and paternal genealogy to illustrate national conf licts between her grandmother’s cultural background in Peru with her mother’s values and traditions from the United States. Like the other Latina authors in this study, Arana complicates the family portrait by introducing the factors of nationality, language, and race in the relationship between her Peruvian grandmother and Anglo-American mother. Interestingly, both female characters have an enormous impact on the narrator, Marie Arana, born and raised in Peru until the age of ten. The generation and values of the Peruvian abuelita Rosa Arana, or grandmother, plays an inf luential role in the lives of the children and grandchildren while they live in Peru. She also makes her home in the capital, exemplifying that she is “a thoroughly social Limeña” (2001, 120). She enjoys the company of people from her class, a comfort zone, but would most likely feel uncomfortable if she were separated from that ambience (see Oboler’s “The Foreignness of Racism: Pride and Prejudice Among Limeños in the 1990s,” 2005a). Marie’s abuelita is preoccupied with the ladylike manners of her granddaughter, to teach her how to be a señorita de Lima, a symbol of traditional and proper womanhood. Unlike American customs and values, the extended family in Peru must be involved in everything, especially the rearing of the child since birth. The relationship between the abuelita and the father Jorge resembles that of Soledad and Inocencio in Caramelo as well because a 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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Latin American mother passes down the custom to her daughter-inlaw of spoiling the son, which in reality enables men yet disempowers women as role models to their daughters (2001, 67). When the Anglo-American daughter-in-law refuses to follow this tradition, she is perceived as too “liberal” or “not well educated” that causes conf lict between Peruvian and U.S. women in American Chica. In the chapter “Mothers,” the narrator Arana makes a clear distinction on “the art of motherhood,” by claiming that cultural traditions do matter. On how to raise a child, it is clear that abuelita views this natural process as a social phenomenon while Marisi’s mother finds it a private affair. In the second generation, the American mother, also named Marie Arana, struggles to raise her children without any American relatives in Peruvian society where she herself is estranged, considered an outsider due to culture, language, and nationality. She speaks a “tentative Spanish,” similar to Zoila’s “crooked Spanish” in Caramelo, an element that is frowned upon in a traditional Latin American context. She is also perceived as a “cow” who has a biological role rather than an emotional or psychological one in raising her children. In addition, she is criticized for her lack of religious beliefs and the possible negative effects on the children. Because she does not follow an orthodox Catholicism, she is ostracized in Lima, a major site of historical religious conversion, linguistic and cultural assimilation, and social conformity that began in the Spanish Conquest (reminiscent of Mexico City as another example of a colonial city). This cultural and religious legacy still lives on in the present and has transferred to the transnational Peruvian diaspora.18 Similar to the Andean storytelling tradition, Marisi learns about European legends and myths from her mother, further developing her bicultural upbringing. Many stories involve a sense of adventure and exploration of freedom in the open landscape. Instead of depending on her husband, Jorge, to make school arrangements for the children and choose an appropriate school, Marisi’s mother takes control of her children’s education by teaching them herself while they live in Peru. She decides to order books and textbooks from a Calvinist institution, rather than keeping them under the abusive behavior of a Peruvian teacher who discriminates against them because they are from a higher class than the rest of the school children in their classroom. The mother, Marie, also imparts an education in the arts as she plays the violin and her children associate her with music, which restores a sense of peace in the household and reminder of the American side of their heritage. Although Marisi may play innocent childhood games in Peru, she learns much about her mother’s position as an outsider in Peruvian 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




society during one incident. During a kissing scene her young male friend Carlos Ruiz reveals a secret that Marisi’s gringa mother does not belong in Peru because she is not Peruvian. Arana ref lects on who does belong in Peru and begins to question the position of the barbaric Spaniards who were in reality, foreigners, that is to say outsiders, who invaded Peru during colonial times. She also begins to feel a contradiction with her earlier pride in how a Spaniard ancestor was a tragic warrior who fought during Peru’s independence in the nineteenth century (149). Arana explores this sentiment to ref lect on the negotiations “foreigners” must consider upon entering the boundaries of the nation with respect to gender, race, and migratory status. Because of the mother’s self-consciousness as an outsider in Peruvian social circles, it is no wonder that Marie senior bonds with other females who are ostracized by the ladies’ social circles of the privileged classes. The mother, Marie, and father, Jorge, meet another interracial couple during one of the visits from Europeans to Peru. The husband is a native English man from Dover who, upon laying eyes on Carmen, the daughter of an indigenous laundress and neighbor to the Aranas, asks her to marry him. One of the reasons this couple does manage to get along is because Carmen learned English from her mother’s boss, who was also responsible for taking care of her formal education, a privilege indeed for a mestiza woman. The engagement causes an uproar in the Peruvian elite circles. Arana appropriately recalls the Peruvian adage: Pueblo chico, infierno grande. Small town, big hell. The author correctly critiques the narrow mindedness of the community because she knows from firsthand experience that her own parents have suffered from rumors, gossip, and hypocritical judgment by the same people who claim to be moral church-goers and law-abiding citizens. In addition, the bonding and friendship between Marie’s AngloAmerican mother and the mestiza Carmen cause the society club’s señoras to shake their heads in disapproval as well: “This one was too extranjera (foreign), that one too indígena (indigenous). What could the two possibly have to say to each other?” Their position as outsiders unites them against a rigid society that would prefer to live by class and racial demarcations rather than social interactions across transnational borders (165–166). The young Arana and her siblings learn from these experiences and they, themselves, begin to see beyond the U.S./ Peruvian borderlands of social constraints that serve them well when they move permanently to the United States in the late 1950s. 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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During the narrator Arana’s first visit to the United States as a child, she learns of the possibilities afforded her while living on her maternal grandparents’ ranch in Rawlins, Wyoming. While the title of the chapter on Earth addresses the traditions and folklore of Andean Peruvians, the title of the chapter on Sky explains the space of American culture through its “wild” landscape as Marie learns how to ride a horse, steal candy, and spit that makes her a kind of active tomboy, rather than a señorita de Lima. Because the U.S. landscape is so open, Americans feel the need to roam over it freely without hesitation or restrictions. They can build vertically or horizontally; however, for the Peruvian indigenous, the Earth is sacred as if it were Mother Nature and therefore, it must be respected. Arana, as a youngster, is able to compare these different philosophies on one’s relationship with the environment, the U.S. landscape, the limits and possibilities of freedom, and the implications for Marisi’s transnational Latina identity. As already explored, Marisi’s appreciation and understanding of nature had already begun with the indigenous’ introduction to Andean storytelling when she was younger in Peru, a cultural memory that the narrator and adult Marisi Arana maintains until the present day as she collects rocks from her travels to different countries.19 The Peruvian Diaspora: New Jersey and New York In the third generation, the narrator, Marie, must negotiate the differences in gender roles inherited from different cultural and national contexts in the United States by the mother and Peru by the abuelita. Because the bicultural youngsters have firsthand experience of living directly between two cultures, two languages, essentially two ways of thinking during their developmental childhood stages, they must develop a “third” culture at the border of the two. One way that they negotiate the values of their grandmothers and mothers is by learning from their experiences in reaching maturity in womanhood and independence in major cities in the Americas, places that allow these experiences of transnational Latina identity. In American Chica, Arana portrays transnational experiences between multiple sites in both metropolitan cities and smaller ones, in Peru and in the United States. The protagonist Marie Arana forms her Latina identity and independence in Lima and Wyoming as a youngster migrating with her family across the transnational border of Peru and the United States in circular 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




fashion. However, it is in New Jersey and New York that she gains a new awareness of her freedom as a Latina in the U.S. context. In the chapter “Independence/Independenica” in American Chica, Arana demonstrates the social challenges of her nuclear family, mother, father, older sister, and brother, when they migrate to Summit, New Jersey, in 1959 and try to adjust to life in the United States as the father travels for his work abroad while the mother manages the household in New Jersey, including when they are in a financial crisis and the “bills mount.” The mother takes the initiative and works in a dress shop to earn money to make ends meet even though her Peruvian husband is not accustomed to having a wife who works, which goes against traditions for the privileged classes in Peru. Another reason the mother initiates the move to the United States for her family is that she would like her children to receive an “American” education and enjoy the privilege of growing up with choices as adults, especially for her daughters, “American chicas,” who must also adapt to a new culture across the transnational divide. In American Chica, the daughter Marisi comes of age while living with her family in New Jersey in the early 1960s. In Summit, New Jersey, Arana notes that her family “were the only Latinos in the neighborhood” (2001, 283). Although the father observes that she is assimilating to American ways, the daughter insists, “But I was sure that somewhere inside me I was also Peruvian” (282). During her teenage years, the young Marisi develops hobbies such as ballet and an interest in opera, musical inf luences from her mother. In order to follow her passion in ballet practices, she must travel to New York City twice per week, at first accompanied by her mother, but eventually on her own. She expresses her feelings about her relationship with the city during one of her Peruvian abuelita’s visits: It had never occurred to me that New York could be anything but enchanting just as it was. I loved its gray glass, its whirligig humanity, its surly ruckus. I’d been commuting to the city since before my twelfth birthday. At first I’d go from school to the train to the Hoboken tubes, to Thirty-third Street and then take a bus up Eighth Avenue. Eventually I took the bus all the way from New Jersey to Port Authority, which was the simpler way to go, and then I’d walk uptown, swinging my ballet bag over one shoulder. I had begged Mother to let me study ballet and voice in New York. It was not her idea. But when she saw how resourceful I was in calling up studios, inquiring about fees, scheduling 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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auditions, she supported me. The first few times, she went with me, but when she saw that I was the one doing the navigating, she decided I could commute alone. New York may well have looked daunting to my grandmother, but it was a city that knew my feet. (2001, 293) In less than two years, Marie develops a personal bond with this major metropolis, which is quite remarkable for a young girl who was raised for most of her life in another city, another country. The young narrator Marie gains self-empowerment and independence mainly in the U.S. context, significant attributes for a young Latina who is often the target of racial remarks and humiliation in the public school system regardless of her socioeconomic background. She is still perceived as a “foreigner” and told to “go back where she came from.” By comparing the experiences of female protagonists in urban contexts in the United States and Peru, Arana like the chapters on Cisneros and Cruz in this study form a kinship in sisterhood in search of freedom in their transnational Latina identity. This scene of traveling urban space also attests to the fact that Marie Arana joins the pan-Latino literary and cultural chorus, which includes Chicanas/os, Nuyorican, Cuban American, and other U.S. Latino writers, who are transnationally reclaiming their cities. Toward the end of the narrative as an adult in her fifties, Arana ref lects on how much her New Jersey high school and various neighborhoods have changed since she was a student—now many more Spanish-surnamed students attend. This dramatic social transformation exemplifies how much Latinos/as continually have an impact on urban areas and as Mike Davis would say, “reinventing the city.” Postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha states prophetically, “It is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out. It is there that in our time, the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced” (1990, 320). On a visit to the Washington Post in 2007, I was able to see Marie Arana, as book editor, directing and organizing people on assignments and other newspaper endeavors. As author and cultural collaborator, Marie Arana lives and commutes between two capital cities, Lima and Washington, D.C., where major global decisions are made on a daily basis affecting a myriad of people’s lives. She had just returned from a six-month sabbatical trip to Peru, where she had f lown over the Andes in Huaylas, Peru, for the first time in her life. She undertook this endeavor that she describes in the introduction 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia




to Robert Hass’s Through the Eyes of the Condor (2007).20 While she shared many thoughts on her writing, her travels, and her family, I learned that this Latina writer is still learning much about herself, whether it is her Asian/European/African heritage or other adventurous explorations of the earth and the sky, in Peru, in the United States, and beyond. After visiting the historical neighborhoods of Lima as a child and as an adult and seeing many aspects of Peruvian culture, it gives me great pleasure to be a witness to the transnational experiences and expansion of the Peruvian diaspora more recently in Tokyo, Paterson (New Jersy) and undoubtedly, my own San Francisco.



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As the first decade of the twenty-first century draws to a close, it is truly a pleasure to witness further development of U.S. Latina/o narratives, especially with an important trend toward transnational connections. In this age of globalization, the “new” narratives by Latina writers in the post-2000 period further complicate representations of identity, by adding the multiracial and gender factors in the equation as the writers migrate across continents, nations, cities, and towns to understand rapidly changing communities in the United States and beyond. This group of Latina writers has made it a priority to investigate and illustrate in their narratives causes that have affected their communities and families during historical migrations and global colonialisms. These women writers are also interested in addressing transnational experiences that have been inf luenced by modernization through media over time (e.g., film, music, television) to confront how technology is affecting the image of their communities. More importantly, Latina writers can have a direct impact on the public by contesting limited portrayals of Latino/as in other sectors of society. By incorporating a dialogue between Latin American and U.S. culture, history, and politics, these Latina writers are critiquing forms of power (e.g., the government, legal system, education) that have made decisions and thus marginalized the voiceless on both sides of the transnational divide. But their counternarrative voices do not stop at contestation. Marie Arana, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Angie Cruz, and Marta Moreno Vega create cultural and literary bridges between Latin America and the United States that transcend the barriers of communication that have prevented any dialogue in the past. In other words, these Latina writers are interested in opening up new conversations about the past with



Conclusion: Toward a Pan-Latina Global Alliance


transnational eyes to a more fulfilling and just society in the present and future. In this sense, their narratives serve as testimonies to official histories, which often omit the “whole” truth of the story. All five writers in this study, while very dedicated to their respective U.S. communities, have traveled to Latin America and beyond for personal and professional reasons to earn the title of “transnational ambassadors.” They share stories from these experiences to demonstrate the complexity of living outside the U.S. parameters and the negotiations they must process in terms of gender, race, and migratory experiences when they return to the United States. At times, each writer has found herself in more than one cultural and national role. Because these Latina writers are situated in a special position as “insiders” and “outsiders,” both at home and abroad, they have been capable of experiencing firsthand and through memory moments of inclusion and exclusion in both, Latin American and U.S. contexts, thereby, gaining a special perspective on the politics of gender and race in transnational fashion. Transnational Latina Narratives is also a critical study that brings a comparative focus to the study of U.S. Latina literature to illustrate commonalities and differences within diverse Latino/a communities in the United States and their respective Latin American heritages owing to historical circumstances. In a moment in time when “communities are colliding in history,” according to Sandra Cisneros, we must face the music and beat of seeking global alliances across nationalities, languages, and other differences to seek understanding and peace in this world. Although the creation of nations and nationalities should reward an individual with the pride of his or her heritage, it can also divide people from one another and in extreme cases, cause civil unrest, segregation, and wars. The Latina writers in this study respond to the consequences of these hegemonic forms of domination and colonialism because they affect their communities and genealogies. Through their transnational narratives, the writers encourage people to connect with other human beings on a basic level, such as caring, aiding, and sharing, which can only begin with mutual respect and learning. Transnational Latina Narratives further addresses the idiosyncratic complexity of race within a national heritage. The Latina writers in this study are not only contesting race issues and discrimination within the U.S. context, but they analyze and comment critically on the dominant forces in Latin America. In addition, they concur that a process of mediation must always take place among different racial groups when the migration factor is added. Their narratives pose questions such as the following ones: How does being an Afro-Latina differ from being 10.1057/9780230623255 - Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century, Juanita Heredia


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an African American in the United States? What possibilities exist for political coalitions between Chicanas and Dominican Americans, for example, to build transcultural alliances in the face of U.S. hegemony? How can Boricuas and Peruvian Americans negotiate urban spaces as old migrants and new immigrants move in the metropolis? In particular, these Latina writers have also proven to be at times more conscientious than their male counterparts in representing an active role of women in history, in their communities, and at home. In the generations of the transnational characters in their narratives, the women writers bring to the forefront questions of gender, genealogy, and feminism to seek social justice across national borders. How may one understand the actions and situations of a Latina in the United States without knowing her matriarchal and patriarchal genealogy? How does she gain a social consciousness about her place in Latin America and the United States? How do migrations affect the dynamics of gender relationships and the construction of femininity and masculinity in Latin America and the United States? As the first decade of the twenty-first century approaches its finale, Latina narratives have opened the door for further dialogue among diverse cultures by exemplifying that critical conversations can help and heal rather than divide communities. I hope future generations of readers, such as my colleagues, friends, and students, can continue to learn from this group of writers who have taught as much about their cultures and histories as official discourse. The civil rights struggles and social movements by women of color like Latinas have and should continue to transform American society and the world at large in the twentieth century—their legacies should not be forgotten.



Conclusion




Introduction: Transnational Latina Narratives 1. It is also worthwhile to note that U.S. Latina narratives of this period in the 1970s and 1980s mainly consisted of Chicana (Mexican American), mainland Puerto Rican woman writers, and a few U.S.-based Cuban writers who were publishing in small presses such as Arté Público Press (formerly Revista Chicana-Riqueña), Bilingual Review, and Third Woman, some initial avenues that were open to ethnic women writers of Latin American heritage/descent. During this time most authors preferred to be identified with their national heritage (e.g., Chicano, Nuyorican, Cuban American), rather than panethnically by adopting a term like “Latina/o.” Since the texts by the women writers in this study share the common theme of transnational migrations, I use the term, “Latina/o,” situationally to refer to the collective, but I use the national identification if the context warrants it in the individual chapters. 2. For a study on U.S. Latina narratives as a Pan-Latina collective that engages postmodernism, ethnicity, and gender, refer to Ellen McCracken’s New Latina Narrative (1999). This critical work approaches Latina narratives within an intercultural context, that is to say, the critic engages narratives by Latina writers as an ethnic group that consists of a diversity of Latin American diasporas. Rather than focus a chapter on the work of individual author, though, McCracken presents a critical paradigm sustained by a variety of Latina writings of the 1980s and 1990s, whereas, I focus my analysis on the intersection of gender, race, and migrations within the transnational context of one post-2000 Latina narrative per chapter. 3. Prominent U.S. Latina narratives of this decade that were mainstreamed include Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993), Denise Chávez’s Face of An Angel (1994), Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992). The highly inf luential literary agent who promoted Castillo, Chávez, Cisneros, and Alvarez in this decade is the renowned Susan Bergholz, based in New York City. 4. See Between Woman and Nation (1999) edited by Caplan, Alarcón, and Moallem. This critical collection provides different theories in the multiple definitions of the construction of transnational feminism across global contexts. See also Alexander (1996), Grewal (1994), and Shohat (1998). 5. In the post-2000 period, I would like to draw attention to some fine critical contributions to the study of U.S. Latina narratives, that is to say, chapters, and complete works based on a single national heritage dedicated to a Chicana, Puerto Rican, Cuban American, or Dominican American woman writer’s individual narrative or her collection of works, such



NOT E S

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7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

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as Madsen’s Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature (2000), Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border (2000), Brady’s Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies (2002), Yarbro-Bejarano’s The Wounded Heart (2001), Moya’s chapters on Cherríe Moraga, and Helena María Viramontes in Learning from Experience (2002), Kevane’s Latina chapters in Latino Literature in America (2003), Calderón’s chapters on Sandra Cisneros, and Cherríe Moraga in Narratives of Greater Mexico (2004), Aldama’s chapters on Ana Castillo in Postethnic Narrative Criticism (2003) and Brown on Brown (2005), R. Rodríguez’s chapter on Lucha Corpi in Brown Gumshoes (2005), Sánchez González’s Latina chapters in Boricua Literature (2001), Rebolledo’s The Chronicles of Panchita Villa and Other Guerrilleras (2005), Ortiz’s Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (2007), Di Iorio Sandin’s and Pérez’s Latina chapters in Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism (2007), Dalleo and Machado Sáez’s chapters on Julia Alvarez and Cristina García in The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (2007), and Caminero-Santangelo’s chapters on Julia Alvarez, Ana Castillo, and Demetria Martínez in On Latinidad: U.S. Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (2007). The main Pan-Latina collection, with a focus on (Latina) women writers, to emerge most recently in this post-2000 decade is Quintana’s Reading U.S. Latina Writers: Remapping American Literature (2003). I would like to add that none of these works treats questions of gender, race, and migrations quite as I will in my study. Some Latina authors in the 1990s did publish family narratives such as Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992). The characters in these works were often exiled families who left the homeland and the children or younger generation often invented a nostalgic view of the homeland of a previous generation rather than their own. This process is quite different from the transnational crossings that I observe in the Latina texts of this study. Frances Aparicio and José David Saldívar have highlighted the importance of popular culture in assessing the dynamics of power relations based on gender, border, and/or race matters in cultural production. See Listening to Salsa (1998) and Border Matters (1997). See Mignolo’s Local Histories/Global Designs (2000), Bost’s Mulattas and Mestizas (2003), for example. I extend my gratitude to Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry for pointing out this valuable information on im/migration studies in a transnational context. See Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc (1994, 1995), and Goldring (2002) for further understanding of transnational migration. In the field of cultural studies, Chabram-Dernersesian maintains that a critical transnationalism “must entertain other types of geopolitical and linguistic complexities . . . that arise from making strategic connections with other people of colour in the Americas (here and there) and from engaging racial, class, sexual and gender dynamics that are often erased when referring to so-called “Spanish-speaking groups” (1999, 183). Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall are responsible for advancing postcolonial studies through questions of cultural identity and diasporas, especially within the Black British context. In From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000), Juan Flores ref lects on ideas over the Latino imaginary in the context of U.S./Latin American relations of colonization since the nineteenth century. He explains that since the encounter between Western and non-Western cultures and nations in the Americas, beginning with the conquest in the fifteenth century, Latinos, and their ancestors, have always found themselves in positions of forced migration, motivated by economic or political forces inf luenced by law officials. He pays close attention to the transnational aspect of migration for Latinos who have never felt “at home” in any single nation or homeland, but rather had to negotiate at least two locations of residence, living, and settlement, as a result of displacement from Latin America to the United States (198–199). For further Chicano/Latino and postcolonial studies on diasporas, see Calderón (1990, 2004), Dalleo and Machado Sáez (2007), Flores (2000), Hall (1994), Gilroy (1993), Grosfoguel (2005), R. Saldívar (1990, 2006), J.D. Saldívar (1997), and Torres-Saillant (2004, 2006).



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12. Consider the critical works on Chicana, Puerto Rican, or U.S. Latina narratives by Calderón (1991, 2004), Kevane (2003), Madsen (2000), McCracken (1999), Quintana (2003), Saldívar-Hull (2000), and Sánchez González (2001). 13. See John Chávez’s The Lost Land (1984) and Gonzáles-Berry and Maciel’s The Contested Homeland (2000) for social and historical context of New Mexican history and its particularities. 14. Denise Chávez discussed the impact of Golden Age Mexican cinema first in her interview, “The Spirit of Humor,” in Latina Self-Portraits (2000) and in further follow-up conversations (D. Chávez 2003, 2005). See also Heredia (2008) that expands on Chávez’s transnational feminist border identity. See Menchaca (2007) on race and mestizaje. 15. Cisneros discusses the idea of a global perspective in Caramelo in the interview, “A Home in the Heart,” in Latina Self-Portraits (2000). Also, see Cisneros (1997a, 1998a) in which she discusses belonging to a family of humanity in a global context. See Heredia (2007b) for the relationship between gender and race in the context of transnational travels and migrations between the United States and Peru, which is further elaborated in chapter five of this study. 16. For more inquiry into the musical genre and cultural phenomenon of Salsa, consider Aparicio (1998), Fernández (2001, 2006), Flores (2000), and Sánchez González (2001). 17. Let It Rain Coffee not only addresses Dominican culture, history, and identity in New York City, but it is also important in tracing the consequences of historical migrations across the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa. See the critical readings by Torres-Saillant (2000, 2004, 2006) who discusses the impact of blackness on Dominican identity on the island and mainland. Also, refer to Gilroy (1993) and Hall (1994) for further discussion on diasporas, especially with respect to the notion of the triangular Black Atlantic—Africa, the Caribbean, and England (or Europe/United States). I suggest that a similar migratory pattern can also apply to the Spanish Caribbean, especially with respect to the slave history, cultural/racial erasure, and immigration to, and, emigration from, the Dominican Republic. It is just as significant to incorporate Jenny Sharpe (2003) in this critical paradigm because she takes gender and women’s experiences seriously in her study of the Afro-Caribbean literary tradition. 18. In meeting Arana at the Washington Post in 2007 she discussed the relevance of her two worlds, Peru and the United States, in her life and works. For further reading and understanding of the social and historical context in Peru, see Mariátegui (1971), Mignolo (2000), Oboler (2005a), and Quijano (2000). See Heredia (2007b) for the relationship between gender and race in the context of transnational travels and migrations between the United States and Peru, which is further elaborated in chapter five of this study.

One Denise Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante (2001): The Making of Transnational Border Community 1. Norma Cantú (Canícula 1997), Sandra Cisneros (“Mexican Movies,” “Bien Pretty,” in Woman Hollering Creek 1991 and Caramelo 2002), Francisco Jiménez (The Circuit 1997), and John Rechy (The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez 1994) are among the Chicana/o authors who refer explicitly to Pedro Infante and/or Golden Age Mexican culture in their works, but Chávez actually makes this cultural production a central topic in her novel. 2. The Last of the Menu Girls was published by Vintage in 2004 with a new introduction by Denise Chávez, who explained certain editing revisions that she had made from the original publication by Arté Público Press in 1985. 3. In 2005, Chávez shared important information with me regarding her mother’s connection with Mexican culture and the arts and its impact on her as she was growing up in Las



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5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

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Cruces, always crossing to other places like Texas and Mexico. She grew up with a strong knowledge of Mexican culture. See also Rebolledo’s essay, “Denise Chávez” (2004) where she mentions her mother’s interest in Mexican culture and taking a course from muralist, Diego Rivera. In The Chronicles of Panchita Villa (2005), Tey Diana Rebolledo examines humor, specifically irony, in Chávez’s Face of an Angel and Loving Pedro Infante, to explain its role in allowing Chávez to discuss taboo topics, such as sex and demystify serious matters, such as religion (169). See also Aldama (2006). For an elaborate discussion on the presence of gossip (chismes) in Chicana narratives, see the chapter on Sandra Cisneros in Mary Pat Brady’s Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies (2002). See Fox’s The Fence and the River (1999) to understand different kinds of mass media in the representation of the U.S./Mexican geographic border since the Treaty of Guadalupe in 1848 (70, 94, 130–132). I differentiate, to some extent, from using Gloria Anzaldúa’s concept of mestiza consciousness in Borderlands/La frontera (1987) in comparing it to my formation of transnational border feminism. In her work, Anzaldúa maintains that Chicanas owe much to their indigenous roots that informs their hybrid identity by dealing directly with Aztlán and Aztec history and mythology. In Loving Pedro Infante (2001), Chávez speaks more to a transnational consciousness in response to two separate, already formed nations, Mexico and the United States. She dialogues with the cultural production, Golden Age films, as a result of these national boundaries. Also, Chávez’s engagement with the films is a more realistic portrayal of contemporary cultural conf licts and relationships while Anzaldúa is more of an idealist, utopian, and somewhat nostalgic view of Aztlán. In Cinemachismo (2006), de la Mora discusses the importance of forming fan clubs both in Mexico and the United States to pay homage to Pedro Infante and his films. In fact, the first fan club in Mexico is called Club de Admiradores, a title that Chávez adopts in her novel, but she takes it to the extreme by giving it a high number, #256. In Migrating to the Movies (2005), Stewart develops a concept of reconstructive spectatorship that “draws on the notions of f luidity, negotiation, heterogeneity, and polyphony.” She observes that “By placing movie theaters in this constellation [as a reconstructive process], we can imagine how the cinema as a public space functioned as an important corollary (or alternative) to other spaces in which modern Black life was experienced” (100–101). Chávez’s characters in the novel must also negotiate and reconstitute the space of cinema in their lives as Chicanos/Mexicanos. For critical explorations on the role of Chicano/a and/or immigrant and women spectators of film, see Miriam Hansen’s Babel and Babylon (1991), Rosa Linda Fregoso’s The Bronze Screen (1993), and Vicki Ruiz’s article (1993). While Hansen details the response by immigrants and women to films at the beginning of the twentieth century in search of an alternative public space and conformity to a certain degree, the audience in Chavez’s novel is only partly composed of immigrants, but definitely consists of a majority of women who are Chicana but who refuse assimilation to the dominant Anglo culture. In this sense, the spectators in Loving Pedro Infante perform the oppositional discourse put forth by Fregoso and Ruiz. In Celluloid Nationalism (2003), Dever says that “melodrama, as a rhetorical strategy, relies on excess, exaggerations, and a seemingly unending reiteration of its world view. Its history [since the French Revolution] as a modern genre illuminates how it could become such an effective tool in Mexico’s post-revolutionary forge” (79). Furthermore, melodrama could bring Mexico to “national unity” and, like the muralists, Mexican cinema would render “the terms of citizenship in this new nation.” To understand the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, it is helpful to examine the historical period of the time (the 1940s and 1950s) in terms of cultural politics and the nationstate formation of Mexico. During this time, Mexico was undergoing a rapid process of



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modernization as it nationalized its cultural artifacts—everything from oil to cinema (see Fein 2001, Fox 1999, Monsiváis 1995, and Rubenstein 2001). After having a relatively steady economy in the 1930s under the auspices of President Lázaro Cárdenas, the Mexican government negotiated with the U.S. government and cultural curators (Rockefeller and Whitney) to promote its nationalism in culture and the arts. The United States offered to Mexican cinema directors, producers, and artists not only capital, but also raw materials, in terms of modern technology to advance their state of the arts to help build the Mexican cinema industry. Seth Fein has argued that Pedro Infante became instrumental in the commodification of selling a certain image of Mexico, that is to say he was a defender of social justice and patriotism in the face of evil and tyranny in the films of this period, which, in World War II meant specifically Germany and Italy. In reality, this transnational circulation of economics was the beginning of the neocolonialist/imperialist relationship between the United States and Latin American countries. As the United States attempted to enforce the rhetoric of the Good Neighbor policy in the name of democracy, it is also extended its economic power to favor nations like Mexico and essentially the implementation of the Golden Age period, and to remain indifferent to neutral countries like Argentina and the decline of its cinema project. Mexico became an important ally due to its geography as the closest Spanish-speaking neighbor and, therefore, its skills of speaking Spanish to control/manipulate other audiences in Latin America, who were disappointed with Hollywood’s portrayal of Latin culture (see Fein 2001). Monsiváis elaborates on the function of Mexican cinema of this period. In “Mythologies,” he states: Mexican cinema, above all in the period (1939–1955), makes great use of what is stored in the cultural memory of the people: expressions of love, forms of horror and catharsis, dishonor and excess, shared ideas about poverty and wealth, religious certainties, new forms of sexual appetite and hunger, songs, a sense of humor petrified in jokes and amusing, theatrical ways of evoking tradition . . . A modest but implacable cultural revolution is replacing literature as the centre of mass veneration, promoting at the same time, and without contradiction, both literacy and opening up a new space for a new audience, that draws its inspiration both from old customs and from the demands of modernization. (1995, 81) See Aparicio’s introduction and definition of tropicalization in terms of the representation of Latinos and Latinas in both, literature and popular culture. The rhetoric of tropicalization was not enough for wider global Spanish-speaking audiences. It is/was too formulaic, as far as the role of the Latin lover is concerned (Aparicio and Chávez-Silverman, 1997). For more on the Latin lover, see Hansen’s (1991) chapters on Rudolph Valentino. This cultural exploitation of Latino/a images by Hollywood can be considered a colonial phenomenon similar to Edward Said’s cultural critique of European fetishism of Asian/Indian cultures in Orientalism (1979). In A Taco Testimony (2006) Chávez states that for the research on her novel she visited the Colón Theatre on the Texas/Mexico border; it is presently a restaurant. See Gonzáles-Berry and Maciel’s The Contested Homeland (2000) for community building and the formation of coalitions in New Mexico. Since the Chicano movement in the 1960s, Chicana writers have responded to the negative representation of women in various ways. These types of women appear in Golden Age Mexican cinema, such as in the classic Pedro Infante film, Nosotros, los pobres (We, the Poor, 1947). In Mexican film culture of this period, though, the figure of this “fallen” woman is ostracized and castigated, or death befalls her as a form of punishment for her sins of sexual bravado or the shame of having a child out of wedlock or becoming inebriated. Once again, this archetype resembles the image of the vendida/traidora, alluding to Malinche in colonial Mexican history, which critics like Alarcón and Moraga have theorized. See Alarcón’s “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism” (1994) and Moraga’s



Notes

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19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

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“A Long Line of Vendidas,” in Loving in the War Years (1983) for the treatment of betrayal to the community and the role of translator and traitor. If one looks at the central figure of Ultima in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), one can see a common archetype of the folk healer, usually an indigenous or native woman, who cures and rescues the protagonist, Antonio (or Tere in Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante 2001), in a moment of intense crisis. See Rubenstein (2001) for a vivid discussion of gender roles in Pedro Infante films and the reception among audiences, both men and women. Also, de la Mora (1998) elaborates on the role of gender in the construction of masculinity in Pedro Infante films. The archetypes of the grandmother, often portrayed by legendary Mexican actress Sara Garcia, the “fallen” woman or femme fatale, the good woman embodied by a virgin, and the religious woman are just a few examples of the females found playing opposite the character of Pedro Infante in his films. de la Mora (2006) and Delgadillo (2006) have made a passing reference to Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante in their respective works, but they analyze Pedro Infante and focus on his specific films. For this chapter, I probe into how Chávez engages with Golden Age Mexican cinema to delineate the effects on Chicana/o spectators. By examining the Pedro Infante fan club as a critical school of thought, Chávez refers to approximately twenty-six Pedro Infante Mexican films of the Golden Age period in her novel. One should note that this legendary actor not only held his reputation and popularity among the community of the U.S./Mexican borderlands for his physical appearance and working-class origins, but he also exhibited great versatility in the roles he undertook in the films. For example, he began to act as a charro/revolucionario (cowboy/revolutionary) in historical films such as Cuando lloran los valientes (When the Brave Cry, 1945), Dicen que soy mujeriego (They Say I Am a Womanizer, 1948), and Las mujeres de mi general (My General’s Women, 1950), and continued in La vida no vale nada (Life Is Not Worth Anything, 1954), but he also played an urban carpenter in the melodramatic trilogy Nosotros, los pobres (We, the Poor, 1947), Ustedes, los ricos (You, the Rich, 1948), and Pepe, el toro (Pepe, the Boxer, 1952); a nightclub performer in Angelitos negros (Little Black Angels, 1948); an orchestra conductor in Sobre las olas (Above the Waves, 1950); a police officer in A toda máquina (Full Speed Ahead, 1951), and its sequel, Qué te ha dado esa mujer? (What Has That Woman Done to You?, 1951); and finally, in his last role, a Oaxacan indigenous man in Tizoc (1957), for which Infante was posthumously awarded the International Berlin Bear Award for best actor. Other films that Chávez mentions in her novel include the technically experimental, Los tres huastecos (The Three Huastecos, 1948); La mujer que yo perdi (The Woman I Lost, 1949); Los Gavilanes (The Sparrowhawks, 1954); El enamorado (The Boyfriend/Lover, 1951); Gitana, tenías que ser (You Had To Be a Gypsy, 1953); Arriba las mujeres (Go Women, 1943): La oveja negra (The Black Sheep, 1949); No desearás la mujer de tu hijo (You Will Not Desire Your Son’s Wife, 1949); Los hijos de María Morales (The Sons of Maria Morales, 1952); Un rincón cerca del cielo (A Corner near Heaven, 1952); Ahora soy rico (I Am Rich Now, 1952); El inocente (The Innocent, 1955); Vuelven los Garcia (The Garcias Return, 1946); El Gavilán Pollero (The Rooster, 1950); and finally, Islas Marías (María Islands, 1950). In Chicano literature, we see the representation of the gay man, sexuality, and desire in the works of Arturo Islas, John Rechy, Richard Rodriguez, and Michael Nava, for example, but women-of-color feminists, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, also discuss, complicate, and elaborate the interstices of identity, race, gender, and sexual orientation in their groundbreaking collection, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981). Raúl Coronado and Michael Hames-García have discussed issues pertaining to gay identity and Chicano representation, both in Chicana/o culture and in the mainstream. In popular culture, we have seen how the friendship between a gay man and a straight woman has provided an alternative friendship in social relationships in the U.S. imagination, for example in the hit TV comedy, Will and Grace. See chapter two, on “buddy movies” in Cinemachismo (2006).



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24. For an understanding of the im/migrant experiences in Chicano/a fiction, consider Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995), Jiménez’s The Circuit (1999), and Castillo’s The Guardians (2007) as sample narratives. 25. See Fox’s last chapter in The Fence and the River (1999) where she discusses the role of a cultural ambassador in cautionary terms. 26. At this special milestone fiftieth anniversary, I met fans from all over the world, including Germany, Venezuela, the United States, and, of course, native Mexicans, some of whom played Pedro Infante songs and others dressed up as memorable characters from films such as Tizoc (1956) and A toda máquina (1952). 27. For a more contemporary understanding and reading of the impact of Pedro Infante, see historical film critic Gustavo García’s La época de oro (1997) and No me parezco a nadie (1994).

Two Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo (2002): Translating Gender and Genealogy Across the U.S./Mexico Borderlands 1. Cisneros’s poetry collections My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman (1994b) have also appealed to a wide audience. I first saw Cisneros read her poems, “You Bring Out the Mexican in Me” and “Black Lace Bra Kind of Woman,” from the unpublished Loose Woman at the 1992 Modern Language Association conference in New York City when she was presented by Héctor Calderón. She took a full house in the audience by storm, to say the least, as she performed her poetry with great enthusiasm and passion. I extend my deepest gratitude to Sandra Cisneros since then for always answering any questions I had regarding her works, whether in person, through telephone interviews or more recently, via e-mail. 2. By examining the migrations of Chicanos/as to Mexico in the first section of Woman Hollering Creek and the immigrants in selected stories of The House on Mango Street, one notices the genesis of a developing transnational discourse that affects Chicanos and Mexicans in Caramelo. Of noteworthy mention, Cisneros’s earlier works, The House on Mango Street and Women Hollering Creek, provided pioneer narrative models that made mainstream publishers and other U.S. Latino/a writers think more of a national public that eventually led to the U.S. Latina boom novels/narratives in the 1990s. In 2009, Cisneros embarks on a nationwide tour for the twenty-fifth anniversary of The House on Mango Street (see www. sandracisneros.com). 3. Cisneros also refers to different personalities of the Golden Age period in stories such as “Mexican Movies” and “Bien Pretty” in Woman Hollering Creek. 4. See Curiel (2003) for information regarding Cisneros’ childhood and strategies for teaching Woman Hollering Creek. For biographical information on Cisneros, also consider Cisneros (1985), Kevane and Heredia (2000), Saldívar-Hull (2000), Calderón (2004), McCracken (2004), and Heredia (2006). 5. During her first trip to Europe, Cisneros formed important female friendships such as Jana in Sarajevo for whom she would write a dedication in her poetry Loose Woman (1994b) before the Bosnian war began in the 1990s. Cisneros also visited key cities such as Venice and Trieste that would be mentioned in My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987). Her admiration for the Catalan writer, Mercé Rodoreda, for whom she wrote the foreword to the English translation of Camellia Street (1993), took her to Barcelona. She also completed The House on Mango Street on a Greek island. Her migrations within the United States and wider world travels have converted Cisneros into a global citizen with a keen eye for detail in portraying other cultures through a poetic, but critical, sensibility.



Notes

Notes

6. In the late 1990s, Cisneros had to defend her right to paint her home, the first house she ever owned, in the King William historic neighborhood in San Antonio. While the courts maintained that they did not allow the color, purple, Cisneros claimed that it was periwinkle, which is reminiscent of the colorful homes in the historical neighborhoods of Mexico City, such as Coyoacán where the vibrant, blue house of Frida Kahlo stands; Kahlo’s home is now a museum in Mexico City. See the Oscar-winning film, Frida (2002), directed by Julie Taymor and produced by Salma Hayek. Color is connected to Cisneros’s poetic sensibility in her writing, her use of specific and vibrant colors such as those in the story “Tepeyac” in Woman Hollering Creek and the chapter, “Cinderella/Cenicienta,” in Caramelo, captures the ambience of a specific time and place in Mexico City. The reader can imagine himself in this city as if he were living in the present moment, as opposed to the intended past. 7. In “An Offering of the Power of Language” in The Los Angeles Times (1997a), Cisneros discusses the importance of maintaining cultural traditions such as the Spanish language in spite of opposition and resistance from the dominant culture. She expresses these sentiments while her father is dying of cancer. 8. See the interview, “Junot Díaz” (2007), that award-winning Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat conducted with Pulitzer Prize–winning Dominican American author, Junot Díaz, where he discusses also using footnotes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) to contest the veracity of official historical discourse and credits Cisneros’s usage in Caramelo (Bomb, 92). 9. On the role of popular culture during Golden Age period in Caramelo, see Heredia (2007a) and Gutiérrez (2007). For popular culture in the U.S. context, see Herrera-Sobek (2007). 10. In the 2000 interview with Kevane and Heredia, Cisneros tells an interesting story about her encounters with Mexicans during visits to the capital of Mexico City. She says that they like to tell “a f lower of a story” to people, which for Americans could mean a “lie” because it is not based on an objective reality, but rather subjective perspective on a situation (Öztarhan 2004, 86–87). Cisneros is basically emphasizing different versions of stories that are interweaved as a narrative in Caramelo. At one point in the novel, the ghost of the grandmother, Soledad, comes alive and criticizes Lala for being a harsh storyteller/cuentista who does not give Soledad’s stories a fairy tale–like ending. Lala learns that she must negotiate a kind of realism with fantasy, to please the ghost of the grandmother, or subconscious of Lala. 11. See Bonfil Batalla (2004) to understand how the legacy of colonization and modernization has affected indigenous and mestizo communities in Mexico. 12. Calderón (2004) lists a host of Mexican authors who are in dialogue with Cisneros’s short fiction “Eyes of Zapata” in Woman Hollering Creek. For Caramelo, especially the second section entitled “When I Was Dirt,” I suggest that within that group Cisneros is in more direct dialogue with Mariano Azuela’s Los de abajo (1924), and Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo (1955), but especially Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesus mío (1969). Within the form of realism, these works critique the establishment and government who dismiss the provincial and urban working classes, with respect to issues of land and war similarly to Cisneros’s vision in Caramelo. Monsiváis (2007) also writes about the representation and role of women such as La Adelita in the Mexican Revolution. See films, Las Mujeres de Mi General (1950), La Cucaracha (1959) Como Agua para Chocolate (1993), and Frida (2002) to understand how directors also engage in a discussion of women’s activism, in spite of physical danger and obstacles set before them during the Mexican Revolution of 1910. 13. Curiel provides an excellent discussion of the feminist revision of the Mexican Revolution in Cisneros’s short fiction, “Eyes of Zapata,” in Women Hollering Creek (1991). See Curiel’s “The General’s Pants: A Chicana Feminist (Re)Vision of the Revolution in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Eyes of Zapata’ ” to understand how Cisneros reimagines history (often told/delivered by men) through the marginal character of one of his women, Inés Alfaro.



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14. See Binder (1985) who transcribes a narrative interview with Cisneros. 15. See México Profundo (2004) for the effects of implementing the casta system in the colonial period. Bonfil Batalla maintains that this hierarchy was more a social question rather than a biological one (78–79). 16. See Saldívar-Hull’s chapter four on Cisneros’s short fiction, “Woman Hollering Creek,” to see how she reconfigures the telenovela form. Also, consider the telenovela, Destilando amor (2007) as a representation of class, regional, and race conf licts in current Mexico. 17. See chapter two in García’s Mexicans in the Midwest (1996). 18. In Mexican Chicago (2008b), Arredondo argues that even among the national group of Mexicans who migrated to Chicago before World War II, great diversity existed based on class, language, generation, and gender norms, among other factors. Arredondo (2008a) focuses on how mass culture and consumerism inf luenced Mexican immigrant and Mexican American women like Zoila in Caramelo to afford them “new freedoms” in socializing, the work force and other areas of the public sphere. 19. See Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers (1994) where she traces the significance of Mexicans in the Midwest and their cultural connections with Mexico that do not conform to the assimilation model. 20. See García’s chapters three and four for questions regarding labor in Mexicans in the Midwest (1996). 21. This quote comes from the chapter “Someday My Prince Popocatépetl Will Come” in Caramelo. Cisneros read a version of this chapter before she participated in a lively televised interview with Dorothy Allison (1997b), in a program sponsored by the Lannan Foundation. Both, the literary passage and Cisneros’s performance of the reading before a public, demonstrate her firm commitment to voice the situation of immigrants in the United States. The film My Family (Mi familia, 1995), directed by Gregory Nava, has a very well-known scene of deportation of Mexican residents and Mexican American citizens. Similar to Caramelo, the film exposes the hypocrisy and racism by the U.S. government in scapegoating people of Mexican descent, a violation of their civic and legal rights in the United States. More recently in the mass media, the award-winning television program Ugly Betty (2007), produced by Salma Hayek, also critiques the United States for threatening people with deportation back to Mexico, especially in the character of the father, Ignacio Suárez. 22. See Yampolsky (1993, 1998) where she captures photographs of Mexican indigenous women wearing rebozos. 23. See Frida (2002). The pioneer bohemian Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo, wore many rebozos throughout her life because she wished to acknowledge the indigenous heritage on her Oaxacan mother’s side and did so on the day she married. She exchanged her traditional Western wear of a white bridal dress for an indigenous woman’s multicolored rebozo. Color has another significance for Cisneros as well as she uses the symbol of the multicolored rebozo (shawl) that the protagonist Lala wears proudly. Essentially, Cisneros is playing with the ideas of mestizaje—the blending of colors that alludes to the mixing of ethnicities and races. 24. In e-mail correspondence (2007), Cisneros shared pertinent information regarding Mexican culture and literature while writing Caramelo that have helped me enormously in researching collections such as The Traditional Architecture of Mexico (1993) and The Edge of Time: Photographs of Mexico (1998) by Mariana Yampolsky. One notices a cultural dialogue between Yampolsky’s visual representation of Mexican indigenous women in photography and Cisneros’s literary representation of indigenous and mestiza women in Caramelo. I would like to emphasize that I have only focused on one photographer and a few samples of her work, but there are more. The photography collections, Las Soldaderas: Women of the Mexican Revolution (1999) by Poniatowska and Compañeras de México: Women Photograph Women (1990) by Conger and Poniatowska, also resemble the Mexican Revolution that Cisneros represents in the second section of Caramelo. Cisneros and Poniatowska both



Notes

25.

26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

Notes

capture the emotions of this turbulent time through visual and literary representations that center on indigenous people from the provinces and the urban working class in Mexico City fighting for social justice, often unacknowledged in official history. In comparing these visual and literary texts, both authors form a transnational alliance in recuperating a subaltern subjectivity from the past. Interestingly, Cisneros and Poniatowska were photographed together on the U.S. side (Schuessler 2007, 245). See Castillo (1994) for a discussion of the cultural symbol of La Virgen de Guadalupe for Chicanas, a perspective that differs from Rodríguez’s conventional interpretation in Our Lady of Guadalupe (1994). Also, Cisneros (1996) comments on her hybrid spiritual identity as a Budalupista, merging an indigenous Virgen de Guadalupe with Eastern philosophy. She explains that she is not interested in “the Lupe of 1531,” but the one in the 1990s who has shaped Chicanas and mexicanas of today (46–51). Refer to “A Woman of No Consequence” in Living Chicana Theory (Cisneros 1997c). In e-mail correspondence (2007), Cisneros shared that she also read Mexican writer and critic Carlos Fuentes’s Buried Mirror: Ref lections on Spain and the New World (1999) while writing Caramelo. While Fuentes dedicates his work to the parallel history of Spain and the Americas, Cisneros focuses more on the U.S./Mexico borderlands with global allusions. Although Fuentes explores the historical relationship between Latin America and Spain since the colonial period, he does not shy away from critiquing U.S. globalization with respect to the immigration situation along the U.S./Mexico border in the last chapter “Hispanic USA” (342). Although Fuentes uses a historical discourse to account for the significance of Mexican labor in the United States and Cisneros writes a novel to unveil the unknown stories of immigrant workers and their families who come to the United States in the Reyes genealogy, both authors blur the boundaries between fiction and history. In terms of community collaboration and contribution, Cisneros is both a literary and social activist who is the founder of the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. See www.sandracisneros.com. In the Literary San Antonio section of the King William Historic District Web site, Cisneros is featured as “San Antonio’s most famous literary personality,” mentioning her story, “Bien Pretty,” from Woman Hollering Creek and a photograph of her house when it was periwinkle. See www.accd.edu/sac/english/mcquien/htmlfils/kingwill.htm. See Cisneros’s “The Genius of Creative Flexibility” (1998).

Three Marta Moreno Vega’s When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio (2004): The Diasporic Formation of an Afro-Latina Identity 1. As far as Puerto Rican literature in English is concerned, very few novels, if any, discuss the impact of black culture and gender as a result of transnational migrations in the hybrid identity of Puerto Ricans in the United States. See Sánchez for a discussion of how Piri Thomas’s classic novel Down These Mean Streets (1967) does address some aspect of black Puerto Rican identity from a masculine perspective. Also, see Luis (1997) for an earlier analysis of Thomas’s work. Sánchez González positions Down These Mean Streets and Mohr’s Nilda (1973) as new Nuyorican narratives of the civil rights movement. Mohr’s Nilda and the later El Bronx Remembered (1975) introduce gender concerns in connection to class, but these narratives do not delve into black woman’s identity. Sánchez González also traces a literary history of Boricua letters of working-class background from activist Luisa Capetillo, to Afro-Puerto Rican Arturo Schomburg, and the first Afro-Puerto Rican female writer



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2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

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and librarian, Pura Teresa Belpré, who mainly wrote children’s literature. The term Boricua refers to the indigenous taíno name given to the island of Puerto Rico, Borinquen. Boricua is also a term of identity and pride used by both Puerto Rican islanders and mainlanders (i.e., Chicano for Mexican Americans or politically conscious and progressive Mexicans who ally themselves with the history and politics of the Chicano movement). More recently, Ernesto Quiñónez’s Chango’s Fire (2004) addresses Santería to some extent through a somewhat “eccentric” Afro-Cuban character, Papelito. The Puerto Rican parents in this novel, for example, are Pentecostal and are not inf luenced by other religions until the end of the novel when they accept Papelito for rescuing them from a fire. The mother at first perceives Papito as the embodiment of the devil in her Pentecostal religion. In Nuyorican poetry, however, Hernández Cruz’s Tropicalizations (1976), Esteves’ Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (1990), and Laviera’s AmeRican (2003) and Mixturao (2008) exemplify representations of the African heritage as an integral component of Puerto Rican identity in the United States. Of a similar generation, the activists, the Young Lords, took some of their ideas for social change and justice from the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to express my gratitude to Marta Moreno Vega for allowing me to view the documentary Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo/When the Spirits Dance Mambo at the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City and granting me an informative and lively interview in July 2007. See The Altar of My Soul (2000) for further understanding of Vega’s spiritual journey in becoming a priestess and learning about African-based religions, La Regla de Ocha. Regarding her own grandmother’s inf luence, Vega (2000) states that “Although my grandmother shared little information regarding her sacred beliefs, rituals, and ceremonies, she did inspire my search for a religion that touched my soul” (35). Also, in the documentary, Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo, Vega points out that Fidel Castro did believe in the power of the orishas, even though he prohibited any kind of organized religion after he took control of the government in Cuba. Many political differences emerged under Castro and his revolution of 1959 that ref lected contradictions for black identity and culture in Cuba. Also, see Falola and Childs (2004) regarding the inf luence of Yoruba culture in different parts of the Caribbean and the United States. See Pérez y González’s Puerto Ricans in the United States (2000) and Negrón-Muntaner’s introduction to None of the Above (2007). See Aparicio (1998) and Flores (2000) for further discussion on musical genres, bomba and plena, especially as it relates to the African heritage in Puerto Rico and the mainland United States. See Fernández (2003, 2006) for the evolution of Latin Jazz. See Flores (2000) and Rivera (2004) for the emergence of hip-hop in Afro-Puerto Rican culture in New York City. The term, Afro-Latina or, specifically, Afro-Puerto Rican, refers to people of African and Latin American (Puerto Rican) descent who are born, raised, or reside in the U.S. mainland. In addition to Latino/a and Latin American culture, they also identify with an African heritage. Sánchez González, Laó-Montes (2007, 2008), and Torres-Saillant (2007a) have used this term in similar cultural and social contexts. See Negrón-Muntaner’s chapter on West Side Story in Boricua Pop (2004) for a full discussion on various female images constructed, fabricated, and staged by Hollywood. Afro-Cuban Salsa singer Celia Cruz also invokes African-based words in songs like “Changó.” See Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990) for references to the Palladium as a cultural dance and entertainment center for Latinos who, dreaming of becoming musicians, first arrived in New York City after World War II. See Vega’s The Altar of My Soul (2000) and Wedel’s Santería Healing (2004) for an understanding of the role of La Regla de Ocha/Santería in cultural and psychological well-being. See Hernández Hiraldo’s Black Puerto Rican Identity and Religious Experience (2006) for a historical and social context of Loíza Aldea (2–3, 46–49, 99–101). Originally a Taíno Arawak Indian settlement, this town bordering on the Atlantic coast soon became a labor center



Notes

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Notes

for slaves originating from the west coast of Africa, the Yorubas, the Congos, and the Angolos, among other African ethnic groups. Fugitive black slaves from different parts of the Caribbean, such as Haiti, settled in Loíza as well after the revolution of independence in 1804 in the early nineteenth century. Known today for its tourism, Loíza Aldea also emphasizes its “uniquely African traditions.” According to Hernández Hiraldo (2006), the U.S. colonization of Puerto Rico in 1898 affected religious practices in profound ways that differ from most of the Hispanic Caribbean and Latin American nations. He says, “The implementation of the U.S. political system and the principle of separation of state and church, highly inf luenced by an existing atmosphere of Euro-American liberal ideas (which in Spain prompted the creation in 1868 of a decree that allowed freedom of worship), caused the Catholic Church to lose its political privileges, its control over education, and many of its physical properties . . . All of this benefited the evangelizing interests of the North American Protestants, who were a majority in the United States” (75). See Quiñónez’s Chango’s Fire (2004) and note 1 for parents’ practice of Pentecostalism. See Duany’s “Neither White, Nor Black: The Representations of Racial Identity among Puerto Ricans on the Island and in the U.S. Mainland” (2005). It was ironic that the directors of West Side Story (1960) hired Natalie Wood, an American descendent of a European ethnic group, to portray the Latina protagonist of the film, rather than the supporting actress, Puerto Rican Rita Moreno, who was the first Latina Oscarsupporting actress in 1961. In July 2007, Vega mentioned to me that Dunham was a powerful inf luence on her as a person because she was able to do what she pleased, a role model. Dandridge’s importance is also revealed through the portrayal by African American actress Halle Berry, the first Oscar-winning African American actress. In For Love or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story (2000), the character of Dizzy Gillespie reveals to the Arturo Sandoval character the significance of African-based musical instruments for the slaves in Cuba during the colonial period. Unlike other nations of the Americas, the slaves in Cuba were the only ones who were able to keep their drums that allowed them to practice their spirituality and hence, music. See Fernández’s Latin Jazz (2003) and From Afro-Cuban Rhythms to Latin Jazz (2006) for a historical background on the emergence of the musical genre Latin jazz from different national inf luences through the common denominator of its African heritage. For a shorter synthesis, see Heredia (2005) on Latin jazz. According to Aparicio, “Celia Cruz’s musical repertoire is indeed an expression of afrocubanismo. Afro-Cuban vernacular poetics, including popular religious beliefs such as Santería, popular oral traditions such as pregones and street slang, are the stylistic and discursive substance of many of Celia’s songs” (1999, 363). See also Aparicio (2002). In Calle 54 (2000), legendary Puerto Rican Tito Puente illustrates in a memorable scene a historical mural that pays tribute to the pioneers of the Afro-Cuban and Latin jazz movements across the U.S./Caribbean borderlands, including Chano Pozo, Mario Bauzá, Dizzy Gillespie; however, Puente does not show any female singers or musicians as contributing artists and voices to these musical movements. Gender inequality prevails in the entertainment business as well. Much like the Castillo brothers in Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1990). In the film version, the character of Cruz portrays a Santería priestess who calls on the God of Fire, Changó, and the Goddess of the Sea, Yemayá, two forces that complement one another in the spiritual healing of one of the Castillo brothers. In her own life, Cruz also followed a transmigratory trajectory of musicians who wished to perform to receive as much exposure as possible. The poem “Píntame angelitos negros” has been translated into the title of a film, Angelitos Negros (1948), starring legendary Mexican actor, Pedro Infante. See chapter one of this book



146

23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

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for discussion of the Chicana response in Denise Chávez’s Loving Pedro Infante (2001). Also, see Delgadillo (2006) for the evolution of this poem into African American music as a form of empowerment, as sung by Eartha Kitt. Afro-Latino musicians were often segregated according to their race. They worked with African Americans (i.e., Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington), usually in Harlem, or mainstream American musicians (i.e., Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman), usually in midtown or downtown, New York City. Rosie Pérez first received recognition as an actress in a supporting role in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989). Often considered African American, Pérez is actually Puerto Rican, born in Brooklyn, New York City. During her travels, Vega noticed that in some societies that practiced La Regla de Ocha, such as Brazil, women were allowed to be priestesses, but not so in Cuba, where gender social codes were strictly enforced when it came to religious authority and dissemination of knowledge. See The Altar of My Soul (2000) for more elaboration. In July 2007 Vega explained how Music and Art High School was the most transformative experience in her life. In the 1950s in the United States, television media in English expands during this period with programs, such as I Love Lucy (1951–1960), that celebrate the romantic bolero and fast-paced mambo performed by its Cuban protagonist, Ricky Ricardo, but the medium of radio exposes listeners to a wider spectrum of Afro-Caribbean talents. In the film, El Cantante (2007), starring Puerto Ricans Jennifer López and Marc Anthony, Salsa pioneer Héctor Lavoe turns to Santería for a moment in his life to find spiritual comfort and solace and pays tribute by invoking the orishas in his music, as well.

Four Angie Cruz’s Let It Rain Coffee (2005): A Diasporic Response to Multiracial Dominican Migrations 1. According to Milagros Ricourt, “Dominican Americans are a group of individuals that are becoming aware that they are a permanent community in New York City. Dominican Americans are second-generation Dominicans, naturalized individuals, and adults who migrated to the United States as children who feel they belong in New York City. They do have an identity of being Dominican but more commonly-and accurately-of being Dominican-Americans. Not all Dominicans, however, share this identity. Many Dominicans are ‘new immigrants,’ Dominicans who have less than five years of residency in the United States. New immigrants usually have more loyalties to the Dominican Republic than the United States, and they still dream of returning to their homeland. Other immigrants are those who have more than five years of residency in the Untied States, yet aspire to maintain a dual identity, with loyalties to both the Dominican Republic and the United States” (2002, 6). 2. I would like to thank Angie Cruz for meeting with me in July 2007 to discuss her novels, travels, and the Dominican Republic in Washington Heights, New York City. Other Dominican American/Dominican diasporic writers include Nelly Rosario (Song of the Water Saints 2003) and Loida Maritza Pérez (Geographies of Home 1999). What distinguishes Angie Cruz and her contemporaries from Julia Alvarez is that they take race and gender matters into consideration in the construction of a Dominican diasporic identity from a personal, as well as a literary, perspective in their novels. According to Coonrod Martínez, this group of Dominican American authors can be identified as a new generation. She explains, “Their works inaugurate a generation that is neither Dominican nor American, forging a sort of Dominican-New York identity, akin to the Nuyorican. The majority of



Notes

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes

Dominican immigrants are working-class people; they cluster in the lowest tiers of the labor market and rank among the lowest-paid groups of the U.S.” (in “Between the Island and the Tenements,” 2007, 109). See also Josefina Báez’s Dominicanish (2000). Cruz explains how reading Malcolm X and slave narratives in college transformed her social consciousness with respect to people of African descent in the United States, especially Dominican Americans whose island relatives have a long history of cultural denial when it comes to race issues (Torres-Saillant 2000). Her affiliations with Caribbean writers, be it on the islands or in the diaspora, result from the historical process of what Paul Gilroy has termed the “Black Atlantic.” While Afro-Caribbean writers may identify as descendants of black slaves, the difference with the Dominican context is that the colonial heritage stems from Haiti and Spain rather than England. Among several issues, Cruz discussed the gentrification of her neighborhood, Washington Heights. In fact, the community had to protest vigorously the conversion of the historical Audubon Ballroom building, where Malcolm X was assassinated, into another shopping mall. It holds a mural in honor of his accomplishments (Cruz 2007a). See LaTorre’s “Shifting Borders: An Interview with Angie Cruz” in Latino Studies (2007b). See Sagás’s Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic (2000) that traces the origins of antihaitianismo from the colonial period through Balaguer’s presidency. See Candelario’s chapter on beauty salons and the politics of hair care in Black Behind the Ears (2007a). See Ana Aparicio’s chapter on racial discourse in Dominican Americans and the Politics of Empowerment (2006). In 1999, the president of the Dominican Republic organized buses along the Dominican/Haitian border to return Haitians and their children to Haiti to “clean up” the Dominican Republic of any Haitian inf luence. In the introduction of Black Behind the Ears (2007a), Candelario explains the strategic use of terms indio and anti-haitiano in identifying the self in Dominican national discourse. She says, “Thus, rather than use the discourses of negritude to understand and represent themselves, Dominicans use language that affirms their ‘Indian’ heritage—Indio, Indio oscuro, Indio claro, trigueno—and signals their resistance to foreign authority, whether Spanish or Haitian, and their autochthonous claims to sovereignty while accounting for the preponderance of medium to dark skin tones and complexions in the populations” (5). See Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1999), Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and Rosario’s Song for the Water Saints (2003) as examples of other writers of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora who provide an alternative historical discourse to the Trujillo dictatorship and its effects in the 1937 massacre on Haitians and Dominicans living at the border. See Fuentes’s The Buried Mirror (1999, 326) that explains the nature of the United States’s relationship with the Dominican Republic during the Good Neighbor Policy period that coincided with Trujillo’s presidency. Roosevelt supported Trujillo because he brought stability to the island, even if it was through military force. See Roorda’s (1998) as well. In the 1980s, Spanish translations of popular U.S. nighttime soap operas, such as the hit, Dallas, began to reach every household in Latin America with a television. The United States was not only responsible for providing entertainment, but also for inf luencing and deluding the masses on the representation of the American Dream. Moya Pons (1995) details the events leading up to the U.S. invasion in the Dominican Republic in 1916 that also coincide with World War I and the role that Germany had in the Caribbean, especially in terms of trading. The United States feared Germany’s inf luence and possible occupation of the Dominican Republic so they decided to take matters into their own hands. Critics have commented on Haitian/Dominican race relations and the consequences for African descent people on both sides of the national border in the massacre of 1937.



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15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

149

For further critical commentary, see Moya Pons (1995), Roorda (1998), Suárez (2006), and Torres-Saillant (2000, 2006). See Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo (1969) for a literary representation of the Haitian revolution and independence in 1804. Carpentier also supported the ideals of the Cuban Revolution and socialism. See Sang (2004) on the presence and migration of the Chinese to the Dominican Republic to understand the heritage of Don Chan in Let It Rain Coffee (2005). When slavery of African descent people ended, elite Dominican businessmen took it upon themselves to make other ethnic groups serve them, such as the Chinese. See Moya Pons (1995) and Torres-Saillant (2000, 2006) for further elaboration on the history of slavery in the Dominican Republic. See Gilroy’s chapter one in The Black Atlantic to understand the involuntary transnational voyages of African slaves. For more information on the impact of tourism and prostitution in the Dominican Republic, see Moya Pons (1995) and Cabezas (2005) for the impact on women. In Cruz’s first novel, Soledad (2001), the character of the mother engages in prostitution, which eventually leads to her immigration to the United States after 1965. See Torres-Saillant’s (2000). He ascribes Hispaniola as the first Spanish settlement by Christopher Columbus in the New World. Interestingly enough, Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) alludes to Columbus as responsible for bringing a curse unto the island of Hispaniola at the beginning of his novel, thereby critiquing European conquest and its negative effects (i.e., diseases, decimations, and labor exploitation) on the native people of the island. See Sang (2004) on the presence and migration of the Chinese into the Dominican Republic. See the second part of chapter three in The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (2007). In Duany’s Quisqueya on the Hudson (1994), he focuses specifically on the community of Washington Heights as a transnational one, as well as the inaugural volume of the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute’s series entitled Dominican Research Monographs. See also TorresSaillant and Hernández (1998). See Ana Aparicio (2006) and Ricourt (2002) for their close examinations and different views on the causes of poverty for Dominican communities in the United States, especially in New York City and other nearby cities where Dominican immigrants reside. See Ana Aparicio (2006) and the film Manito (2002) for the role of the legal system in scapegoating Latino youth. See Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) where the protagonist Oscar Wao, a nerdy teenager dominicano, unfortunately dies as a tragic hero at the hands of criminals. In July 2007, Cruz comments on the dangers of consumer culture in the United States and how that is packaged to less empowered countries such as the Dominican Republic, especially to a public that may depend on television as the only form of entertainment and, at times, news and education. See Ana Aparicio (2006) for further discussion on the politics of police brutality based on race and institutional discrimination in Washington Heights, New York City. She basically argues that this system contributes to the criminalization of youth of color like Dominican Americans. For visual representations of the unjust treatment of youth by the legal system in film, see the classic Zoot Suit (1981) based on the play by Chicano playwright Luis Valdez and more recently, Manito (2002). In the more current film, the brother is on his way to college and serves as a role model in the Dominican community in New York City, but ends up with a tragic end. The legal system condones, rather than sympathizes with, the innocent Dominican adolescent who used a weapon to defend himself and helpless girlfriend against gang members. The American legal system, however, does not recognize his defensive efforts and prefers to lock him up as if he were a longtime criminal. Raising Victor Vargas



Notes

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

Notes

(2004) and Washington Heights (2002) are other films that portray the younger generation of Dominican Americans in New York City in the post-1990s decade in a much lighter and more positive tone. These films belong more to the coming-of-age genre. In chapter five of Black Behind the Ears (2007a), Candelario elaborates on the politics of hair and racial identity. See also Candelario (2007b). See chapter seven in From Bomba to Hip-Hop (2000) where Flores discusses how a diversity of Latino groups contributes to the idea of a “New Nueva York,” especially Dominican and Dominican Americans. This leads to the development of a Pan-Latino identity and community. As youngsters, Hush and Dallas playfully kissed one another, an experience that made Dallas ref lect closely on their friendship and perhaps unresolved lesbian tendencies. Similar to the Soledad-Caramel friendship in Soledad (2001), Cruz does not shy away from voicing the sexual desires and awakening of young girls who need to explore their choices. See Dalleo and Machado Sáez’s chapter three in The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of PostSixties Literature (2007) where they mention brief ly the scene in Let It Rain Coffee that refers to Miraluz’s activism on the island and how she motivates other women to take control of their lives, rather than obey a tyrannical boss. See Cruz’s note before the novel Let It Rain Coffee begins where she acknowledges inspiration from Juan Luis Guerra’s song, “Ojalá que llueva café.” The Mexican rock en español group Café Tacuba also performs a version of this song.

Five Marie Arana’s American Chica (2001): Circular Voyages in the U.S./Peruvian Archipelago 1. I would like to extend my gratitude to Marie Arana not only for granting me a conversation in July 2007, at the Washington Post, but also for answering and clarifying any questions I had over e-mail regarding her works and other Peruvian matters. I first met Arana at an engaging and lively reading she delivered at A Clean Well-Lighted Place bookstore in San Francisco in June 2003. 2. See Bella Stander (February/March 2007) where Arana discusses her family’s initial negative reaction to American Chica for revealing “family secrets,” which she also emphasized with me again in 2007. 3. See Oboler’s “South Americans” (2005b, 147) in reference to Chilean and Peruvian immigrants during the Gold Rush period in northern California. See Falconi and Mazzotti (2008, 2–3) who discuss the increase in Peruvian immigration to places such as Paterson, New Jersey, which has become a “thriving community.” See Espitia (2004, 264–269) for patterns of South American immigration since 1960. See also Vélez-Ibañez and Sampaio (2002). 4. See Soy Andina (2005) as a young Peruvian American woman from Queens, New York, travels to Peru to reclaim her Andean heritage through dance and music. 5. See the introduction and Zevallos-Aguilar’s chapter in Falconi and Mazzotti’s The Other Latinos: Central and South Americans in the United States (2008). For another perspective on the origins through a chronology of South American and Central American literary contributions, see Torres-Saillant (2007b). 6. See Arana’s essay “Daniel Alarcón: Writing North, Pointing South” (2006b). She explains the intermediary position that writers like Daniel Alarcón (and herself, I would add) hold because they write about Peru in English from the position of the north. 7. Arana is evidently in cultural and literary dialogue with Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays on Peru (1971), Matto de Turner’s Birds without a Nest (1996), and Palma’s Tradiciones



150

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

151

peruanas (1975) because all are preoccupied with race and social issues as represented in Peruvian society; however, Arana extends the transnational literary conversation to the United States with respect to her first work, American Chica. If one looks at the nation-building period of different South American republics in the nineteenth century, the ethnic/racial makeup of each nation is distinctive. For example, Argentine president Sarmiento sent orders to exterminate the native indigenous populations of la pampa in the River Plate region, mainly Argentina, because he wished to build a citizenry and nation mainly made up of European immigrants, those of Spanish and Italian backgrounds, to move Argentina toward modernization and progress, similar to the United States’s Manifest Destiny. Anibal Quijano (2000) explains, After independence, the dominants in the countries of the Southern Cone, as was the case in the United States, considered the conquest of the territories that the indigenous peoples populated, as well as the extermination of these inhabitants, necessary as an expeditious form of homogenizing the national population and facilitating the process of constituting a modern nation-state “a la europea.” (562) On the other hand, a nation like Peru has a completely different history, one of mestizaje, somewhat similar to Mexico, in which indigenous communities existed and, until the present, form part of the national imaginary and political consciousness that defines Peru. After the Spanish Conquest, the Spaniards mixed racially with the indigenous, though not always having legitimate children, to form mestizos, the first well-known author of the period being, El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. This is not to say that racism and hatred toward the indigenous have been completely eliminated in Peru; however, an ethnic/racial genocide did not occur as it did in Argentina. Furthermore, mestizos mixed further with African descent and Asian descent citizens of Peru as Arana illustrates in American Chica. See Quijano’s essay “Coloniality of Power,” where he develops a theory arguing that globalization and neocolonialism are extensions of the Spanish Conquest, considering that questions of power are intrinsically tied to economic dependency and social hierarchies, especially with reference to Peru’s marginal groups, blacks, mestizos, and the indigenous. He also points to a fundamental paradox in the formation of modern nation-states in Latin America: independent states of colonial societies. (565) These ideas resonate with Frantz Fanon’s call for liberation from precolonial nations in Africa in The Wretched of the Earth. See Klein and Vinson III (2007, 23–28, 136–137) to trace the origins of African slavery in Peru. When Afro-Peruvians and other ethnic groups had children, they could be considered mulattos or sambos. In American Chica Arana also sheds light on the Peruvian government’s role in importing Barbadian laborers who worked like slaves from the Caribbean to manage the indigenous labor in the Putumayo region (at the border between Peru and Colombia) during the rubber boom. It is ironic that a Barbadian slave must be punished for refusing to whip a helpless, indigenous woman worker who devoted her attention to feeding her baby before work. Since the Barbadian refused to whip this woman, the mestizos punished him physically while the woman witnessed the murder of her baby at the hands of the Peruvian overseer. Arana critiques the hierarchy of labor exploitation of black Caribbeans and indigenous people in the Amazon, regardless of whether they are mother and child. This social injustice does not differ too greatly from that of the Incas during the Spanish Conquest (2001, 47). See Oboler’s Ethnic Labels, Latino Lives (1995), where she problematizes the homogenizing term “Hispanic.” See Mariátegui’s chapter in indigenismo in Seven Interpretative Essays, where he posits a socialist model for the liberation of the indigenous natives of Peru, but then contradicts himself when he subjugates and exoticizes other ethnic and racial groups, African and Asian descent Peruvians. Oboler (2005a) also takes up the race question in more contemporary Peruvian society as she takes a survey via interviews with a cross-spectrum of people. See Espitia (2004) for the “Brain Drain” generation of immigrants (257–280).



Notes

Notes

14. See Paerregaard (2005) on the role of religion in preserving Peruvian cultural practices such as El Señor de los Milagros processions, celebrated by Peruvian migrants in U.S. cities with sizeable Peruvians populations, a transnational phenomenon. 15. According to historian Higgins (2005), “In 1870, the gulley leading down to the beach [in Barranco] was turned into an attractive promenade, the Bajada de los Baños, and a few years later, a wooden bridge, the Puente de los Suspiros (Bridge of Sighs) was erected over it. At the end of the bridge, in the little square in front of the Ermita, stands a bust of singer and songwriter Chabuca Granda, who celebrated the bridge in one of her compositions” (203–204). He also adds that “Since the 1980s Barranco has been transformed into Lima’s bohemian quarter and much of the older housing has been refurbished and turned into public establishments such as art galleries, cafés, bars, and clubs. It has become a place where young writers and artists congregate and take part in cultural activities like experimental theatre and literary recitals” (205). In American Chica, Arana certainly captures the romance of this bridge in Barranco, past and present. 16. In Arguedas’s Deep Rivers (translated from Los ríos profundos), the protagonist, a young male Ernesto, is raised and inf luenced by Andean culture through language, music, and spirituality. While both, Ernesto and Marisi, belong to a Western culture and are racially European descent Peruvians, it is telling that they are affected by the cultural memory of Andean spirituality and storytelling. 17. See chapter three in Van Vleet’s Narrative, Gender, and the Intimacies of Power in the Andes (2008) where she defines Pachamama as the mother of fertility. Arana also refers to the apus as a powerful force that may guide her as she undertakes an adventurous endeavor in exploring the Andes by plane like a condor (2007d). This animal is also a symbol of the sky and highly revered in Incan civilization. 18. See Paerregaard (2005). 19. See Arana’s “The Stones She Carries” (2007c). Arana still believes in the power of nature and thus has developed a hobby in collecting rocks wherever she may be traveling in the United States or abroad. 20. In “Winging It in the Andes” (2007d), Arana explains her adventures and explorations of the Andes from the sky, another perspective she had never experienced until 2006.



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From Caramelo. Copyright©2002 by Sandra Cisneros. Published by Vintage Books in paperback in 2003 and originally in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved. Copyright©2000 by Sandra Cisneros. First published in LATINA SELF-PORTRAITS, edited by Bridget Kevane and Juanita Heredia, published by University of New Mexico Press in 2002. Reprinted by permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Services, New York and Lamy, NM. All rights reserved.



PE R M IS SION S/C R E DI T S




abuelita (grandmother), 124–25, 127–28 African diaspora, 5, 8–10, 27, 62, 76, 81, 84–87, 106 “Afro Latina” or “Afro Puerto Rican,” use of the terms, 145n6 Alarcón, Daniel, 112, 150n6 Alarcón, Norma, 6, 17, 135n4, 139n17 Aldama, Frederick, 136n5, 138n4 Alexander, Jacqui, 6, 135n4 Alfaro Olympia (Omí Sanyá), 76 Alfaro, Xiomara, 75–76 Allison, Dorothy, 143n21 Alvarez, Julia, 85, 91, 109, 135n3, 136n5–6, 147n2 Anaya, Rudolfo, 13–14, 140n18 Anders, Gigi, 111 Angelitos Negros (film), 24, 27–28, 31 Anthony, Marc, 147n28 antihaitianismo (anti-Haitianism), 88, 148n6 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 17, 107, 138n7, 140n21 Aparicio, Ana, 148n8, 149n22–23, 149n26 Aparicio, Frances, 62, 75–76, 136n7, 137n16, 139n14, 145n5, 146n19 apus (a strong force from nature), 123, 152n17 Arana, Jorge (father of Marie), 110, 118–19, 124–26 Arana, Julio César (great-grandfather of Marie Arana), 110, 114–15

Arana, Marie (Marie Arana’s mother), 111, 116–28 Arana, Marie (Marisi), 2–4, 6, 9–12, 131 abuelita (grandmother) of, 124–25, 127–28 in Asia, 110 author’s meeting with, 137n18 birthplace of, 109 book editor at Washington Post, 110–11 Cellophane, 109, 112 childhood of, 109, 116–19 in Lima, 109, 120, 124, 129 Lima Nights, 109, 112 marriages of, 122 in New Jersey, 109, 128–29 in New York, 128 at Northwestern University, 109 as a señorita de Lima, 124, 127 at University of Hong Kong, 110 visit to United States, 116–17, 127 in Washington, D. C., 129 Arana, Marie: American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood: politics of gender and race in, 120–24 Santa Rosa de Lima in, 120 El Señor de los Milagros in, 120, 152n14 skin color in, 117–18 slavery critiqued in, 151n10 transnational migrations in, 111



I N DE X

Index

Argentina, 139n12, 151n8 Argueda, José María, 152n16 Arnaz, Desi, 19, 127n27 arrabales (working-class neighborhoods), 19 Arredondo, Gabriela, 47, 143n18 Arriba las Mujeres (film), 26 Azuela, Mariano, 142n12 Báez, Josefina, 148n2 Balaguer, Joaquín, 85, 92, 94–95, 148n6 Basch, Linda, 4, 136n9 Batista, Fulgencio, 94 Bauzá, Mario, 146n20 Belpré, Pura Teresa, 145n1 Benitez, Rafael, 76 Benmayor, Rina, 49 Bergholz, Susan, 135n3 Berry, Halle, 146n16 Bhabha, Homi, 129 Binder, Wolfgang, 143n14 Blanc, Cristina Szanton, 136n9 Blanco, Andrés Eloy, 76–77 Bonfil Batalla, Guillermo, 42, 45, 142n11, 143n15 Border Book Festival, 34 border feminism, transnational, 16–18, 20, 24, 27–33 “Boricua,” use of the term, 145n1 Bost, Suzanne, 8 Brady, Mary Pat, 136n5, 138n5 Cabezas, Amalia Lucía, 149n17 Calderón, Héctor, 33, 38, 45, 136n5, 136n11, 137n12, 141n1, 141n4, 142n12 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta, 136n5 Campbell, Marie. See Arana, Marie Campbell Canclini, Néstor García, 21 Candelario, Ginetta E. B., 148n6, 148n9, 150n28 El Cantante (film), 147n28 Cantinf las (Mario Moreno), 32 Cantú, Norma, 137n1

Capetillo, Luisa, 144n1 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 139n12 Caribbean Cultural Center (New York), 64, 84, 145n2 Carpentier, Alejo, 149n14 castas (social caste system), 40, 143n15 Castellanos, Rosario, 19 Castillo, Ana, 47, 135n3, 136n5, 141n24, 143n19, 144n25 Castro, Fidel, 75, 145n3 Catholicism, 24, 29, 31, 42, 53, 56–57, 68–69, 73, 83, 88–89, 119, 123, 125, 146n12 Chabram-Dernersesian, Angie, 136n9 Chávez, Denise, 2–4, 6, 9–10, 35, 41, 64, 70, 99, 109, 131 author’s meeting with, 34 awards for, 14 The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico, 15 as director of Border Book Festival, 34 drama training of, 14 education of, 13–14 Face of An Angel, 13, 23, 29, 135n3 on humor, 14–15 Las Cruces, New Mexico (birthplace), 13, 15–16, 34 Last of the Menu Girls, The, 14, 23 on Pedro Infante’s films, 18 meets Rudolfo Anaya, 13–14 mother of, 14, 137–8n3 terms “Chicana/Chicano” and “Mexicana/Mexicano” used by, 26, 41 transnational border feminism of, 10, 16–18, 20, 24, 27–33 Chávez, Denise: Loving Pedro Infante: as bridging Chicano and Mexican cultural discourses, 10, 24, 33 fan club in, 18, 20–24, 27–28, 30, 34, 140n20 humor in, 138n4 Infante as cultural icon in, 17–18, 22, 24, 28



168

Infante’s f laws in, 28 masculinity in, 28–30 Mexican culture in, 31–32 politics of gender in, 10, 21–24, 26–28, 30–31, 57 Rio Grande in, 32 role of film in, 5, 10, 18–21, 24–27, 99 social consciousness in, 25–26 spirituality in, 22–24 Chávez, John, 137n13 Chicago: history of Mexicans in, 10, 47–52, 143n18 as setting in Caramelo (Cisneros), 39, 46–49, 51, 55–56 Childs, Matt D., 145n3 Cisneros, Sandra, 2–4, 6, 9–11, 17, 64, 71, 109, 120, 129, 131–32 as activist, 144n28 in Chicago, 36, 38 childhood of, 36, 38–39 compared with Chávez, 35, 57 in Europe, 36, 141n5 as a global citizen, 141n5 on global connections and perspectives, 37, 137n15 home of, 60, 142n6 The House on Mango Street, 35–36, 141n2, 141n5 at Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 36 as keynote speaker at the Tenth Annual Latina Letters conference, 59–60 literary director of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center, 36–37 migrations and travels of, 36–40 NEA fellowship recipient, 36 parents of, 36 poetry of, 141n1, 141n5 in San Antonio, 36–37 summer visits to Mexico City, 36, 38–39, 41 as transnational ambassador, 35, 37

169

Cisneros, Sandra: Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento: Chicago as setting in, 39, 46–49, 51, 55–56 colonial legacy in, 40–47 footnotes used in, 38, 142n8 historical discourse critiqued in, 38–39 imaginary Mexico in, 39–41 mestizaje (mixed race) in, 41–42 Mexico City as setting in, 39, 41, 43–50, 55–57, 120, 142n6, 144n24 migration in, 47–52 as mimicry of telenovelas, 37 politics of gender and race in, 35, 37–46, 50, 52–59 rebozo in, 46, 48, 53, 57, 59, 143n23 reviews of, 37–38 skin color in, 41, 46, 48 storytelling in, 142n10 truth in, 38–39 Cisneros, Sandra: Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, 35, 135n3, 141n2, 141n4, 143n16 “Bien Pretty,” 137n1, 141n3, 144n29 “Eyes of Zapata,” 43, 55, 142n12–13 “Mericans,” 45, 50 “Mexican Movies,” 137n1, 141n3 “Never Marry a Mexican,” 45 “Tepeyac,” 142n6 colonialism, 3, 6–8, 11, 131–32 in Cuba, 146n17 in Dominican Republic, 87–88, 148n3 in Mexico, 15, 17, 49, 42, 45, 52–54, 139n17, 143n14 in Peru, 114–16, 126 in Puerto Rico, 78 slavery and, 68 Spanish, 3, 64, 83, 87–88, 113–14, 151n9 U. S., 78, 83 Columbus, Christopher, 88, 95, 149n18 Conger, Amy, 143n24 consumerism, 97, 99, 143n18, 149n25



Index

Index

Coonrod Martínez, Elizabeth, 147n2 Coronado, Raúl, 140n21 Cosby, Bill, 86 Cruz, Angie, 2–4, 6, 9–11, 129, 131 author’s meeting with, 108 birthplace of, 85 on consumerism, 149n25 at the Fashion Institute of Technology, 86 founder of WILL (Women in Literature and Letters), 87 inf luence of Bill Cosby, 86 at New York University, 87 Soledad, 11, 85, 89, 101 at SUNY, Binghamton, 86–87 Cruz, Angie: Let It Rain Coffee, 5, 11 consumer culture in, 97, 99 Cruz on, 90 politics of gender and race in, 100–104 social alienation in, 98 transnational genealogy in, 93 transnational migration in, 105–108 Washington Heights in, 85–87, 89, 91–92, 97–102, 105, 108 Cruz, Celia, 75–76, 82, 84 Cuban Revolution, 88, 92, 96, 149n14 cuentista (storyteller), 38, 44, 142n10 cuentos (fictional stories), 17, 38 Curiel, Barbara, 55, 141n4, 142n13 Dallas (television series), 92, 96, 99, 148n12 Dalleo, Raphael, 136n5, 136n11, 150n31 Dandridge, Dorothy, 74, 146n16 Danticat, Edwidge, 87, 142n8, 148n10 Davis, Mike, 129 de Barrios, Domitila, 17 de la Mora, Sergio, 30, 138n8, 140n19–20 de la Renta, Oscar, 86 del Rio, Dolores, 32 Delgadillo, Theresa, 140n20, 147n22 deportation, 51, 143n21

Dever, Susan, 138n11 Di Iorio Sandín, Lyn, 136n5 El Día de los Muertos (the day of the dead), 83 diasporas, 52, 135n2, 136n10–11, 137n17 African, 5, 8–10, 27, 62, 76, 81, 84–87, 106 Dominican, 11, 85, 87–89, 94, 100–104, 107 Peruvian, 125, 127–30 Puerto Rican, 11, 64, 72 Díaz, Junot, 85, 142n8, 148n10, 149n18, 149n24 Dominican diaspora, 11, 85, 87–89, 94, 100–104, 107 Dominican Republic: Chinese immigration to, 93, 107, 149n15, 149n19 diaspora, 11, 85, 87–89, 94, 100–104, 107 history of, 86–93 migratory experience of, 85 slavery in, 86, 93, 137n17, 148n3, 149n16 U. S. invasion of, 8, 148n13 Douglass, Frederick, 86 Duany, Jorge, 63, 146n14, 149n21 Dunham, Katherine, 74, 76, 146n16 Eidse, Faith, 112–13 El Barrio (Spanish Harlem), 3, 5, 11, 62–65, 67–68, 72, 78–79 Ellington, Duke, 147n23 Espitia, Marilyn, 151n13 Esteves, Sandra María, 145n1 Falconi, José Luis, 150n3, 150n5 Falola, Toyin, 145n3 fanfarrón (a show-off ), 49 Fanon, Frantz, 151n9 Fein, Seth, 139n12 Felix, Maria, 32 feminism, transnational border, 16–18, 20, 24, 27–33



170

Fernández, Raúl , 137n16, 145n5, 146n18 Flores, Juan, 72, 136n10, 137n16, 145n5, 150n29 Flores, William V., 49 folk healer, archetype of, 140n18 Fox, Claire, 138n6, 139n12, 141n25 Fregoso, Rosa Linda, 138n10 French Revolution, 88, 138n11 Frida (film), 142n6, 142n12, 143n22 Fuentes, Carlos, 19, 144n27, 148n11 García, Ana María, 78 García, Cristina, 93, 109, 135n3, 136n5–6 García, Gustavo, 141n27 García, Juan, 47, 143n17, 143n20 García, Sara, 140n19 gay identity, 30, 140n21 Gillespie, Dizzy, 146n17, 146n20, 147n23 Gilroy, Paul, 5, 136n10–11, 137n17, 148n3, 149n16 Gimbel, Wendy, 111 Glick Schiller, Nina, 4, 136n9 globalization, 35, 54, 107, 131, 144n27, 151n9 Golden Age Mexican cinema (1936–56), 10, 13, 16–22, 24–25, 28, 30, 32–34, 38, 138n7, 138n12, 139n13, 141n3 Goldring, Luin, 136n9 Gonzáles-Berry, Erlinda, 14–15, 136n9 González, Bill Johnson, 46 González y Reutilio, Celina, 75 Good Neighbor Policy, 139n12, 148n11 Goodman, Benny, 147n23 gossip, 138n5 Granda, Chabuca, 152n15 Grewal, Inderpal, 7, 135n4 Grillo, Graciela, 75, 77 Grosfoguel, Ramón, 136n11 Guarnizo, Luis Eduardo, 4 Guerra, Juan Luis, 106, 150n32 Guerrero, Elisabeth, 55 Gutiérrez, David, 142n9

171

hair and racial identity, 77, 88, 117, 148n7, 150n28 Haiti, 69, 85, 87–89, 91, 93, 95, 106, 146n11, 148n3, 148n8–10, 148–49n14 Haitian Revolution, 88, 149n14 Hall, Stuart, 136n10, 137n17 Hames-García, Michael, 140n21 Hansen, Miriam, 25, 138n10, 139n14 Hass, Robert, 130 Hayek, Salma, 142n6, 143n21 Hayworth, Rita, 32 Heredia, Juanita, 14, 18, 37–39, 56, 137n18, 141n4, 142n9, 142n10, 143n24, 146n18 Hernández Cruz, Victor, 145n1 Hernández Hiraldo, Samiri, 67, 145n11, 146n12 Herrera-Sobek, María, 142n9 Hershfield, Joanne, 19–20 Higgins, James, 152n15 Hijuelos, Oscar, 145n9, 146n21 “Hispanic,” use of the term, 116, 151n11 Hispaniola, 87–89, 149n18 Hollywood’s portrayal of Latin culture, 19, 32, 38, 139n12, 139n14 Hollywood’s portrayal of womanhood, 74–75, 145n7 Hull House (Chicago), 47 I Love Lucy (television series), 19, 147n27 im/migration: “American Dream” for, 39, 99, 149n13 Chinese, 93, 107, 149n15, 149n19 Dominican, 9, 11, 85, 87, 92, 96, 98, 104–108, 149n22 labor force, 10, 47–48 Mexican, 10, 15–16, 38–40, 47–52, 143n18 Peruvian, 109, 111–20, 150n3, 152n14 popular culture and, 73–79 Puerto Rican, 61–65, 68 See also transnational migration



Index

Index

Infante, Pedro: 24–27 Chávez on, 18 as culture icon, 17–18, 22, 24, 28, 33 death of, 17, 30, 33 films of, 24–28, 30–31, 139n17, 140n20, 141n26, 146n22 f laws of, 28 wives of, 21 See also Chávez, Denise: Loving Pedro Infante Islas, Arturo, 140n21 Jiménez, Francisco, 137n1, 141n24 Jones Act of 1917, 64 Kahlo, Frida, 142n6, 143n23 Kaplan, Caren, 6–7, 135n4 Kevane, Bridget, 14, 18, 37–39, 56, 136n5, 137n12, 141n4, 142n10 Kitt, Eartha, 147n22 Klein, Herbert S., 151n10 Laó-Montes, Agustín, 8, 145n6 Las Cruces, New Mexico, 13, 15–16, 34 Latin Jazz, 11, 62, 74–75, 77, 83, 145n5, 146n18, 146n20 “Latina/o,” use of the term, 135n1 Laviera, Tato, 145n1 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 112 López, Adriana, 38 López, Jennifer, 147n28 Louverture, Toussaint, 88 Luis, William, 144n1 Machado Sáez, Elena, 136n5, 136n11, 150n31 Machito, 75–77, 81–82 Maciel, David, 14–15, 19–20, 137n13, 139n16 Madsen, Deborah, 136n5, 137n12 Malcolm X, 86–87, 107, 148n3–4 Mambo, 11, 62, 66, 74–76, 81–82, 147n27 Manguel, Alberto, 111 Manito (film), 149n23, 149n27

Mariátegui, José Carlos, 137n18, 150n7, 151n12 mass media, 70, 92, 99, 138n6, 143n21 Mazella, David, 38 Mazzotti, José Antonio, 150n3, 150n5 McCracken, Ellen, 39, 135n2, 137n12, 141n4 Menchaca, Martha, 137n14 Menchú, Rigoberta, 17 mestiza consciousness, 138n7 mestizaje (mixed race), 8–9, 16, 32, 40–42, 52, 137n14, 143n23, 151n8 Mexican Revolution (1910), 8, 19, 26, 42–43, 49, 52, 53, 55, 142n12–13, 143n24 Mexico: colonialism in, 15, 17, 49, 42, 45, 52–54, 139n17, 143n14 culture of, 10, 13, 31–36, 40, 47, 49, 52–56, 137n3, 143n24 immigration from Chicago to, 10, 47–52, 143n18 slavery in, 40–41 See also Golden Age Mexican cinema (1936–56) Mexico’s Cinema, 19 Mexico City: arrabales (working-class neighborhoods) in, 19 author’s visit to, 32–33, 60 in Caramelo (Cisneros), 39, 41, 43–50, 55–57, 120, 142n6, 144n24 Cisneros in, 10, 36, 142n10 as a colonial city, 125 in Loving Pedro Infante (Chávez), 19–20, 26 painted homes in, 142n6 as a transcendental city, 57 Mignolo, Walter, 112, 136n8, 137n18 migration, transnational, 3–6, 8–9, 11, 39, 49, 52–53, 65, 89, 92–93, 96, 136n9, 143n18. See also im/migration Miller, Glenn, 147n23 Miranda, Carmen, 19, 75



172

Moallem, Minoo, 6, 135n4 Mohanty, Chandra, 7, 54 Mohr, Nicholasa, 61, 144n1 Monsiváis, Carlos, 19, 55, 139n12–13, 142n12 Moraga, Cherríe, 29, 107, 116, 139n17, 140n21 Morales, Iris, 78 Moreno, Mario (Cantinf las), 32 Moreno, Rita, 146n15 Moya, Paula, 136n5 Moya Pons, Frank, 148n13, 149n14, 149n16–17 Mujeres de Mi General, Las (film), 24, 26 mulattos, 27, 40, 88–89, 92, 151n10 Nava, Gregory, 143n21 Nava, Michael, 140n21 Negrón-Muntaner, Frances, 72, 145n4, 145n7 neocolonialism, 12, 114, 139n12, 151n9 New Mexico, 2, 13, 15–18, 22, 31, 33–34 Noriega, Chon, 20 Nosotros, Los Pobres (film), 31 Nueva España (present Mexico), 40, 53 Nuyorican identity, 61–62, 135n1, 147n2 Oboler, Suzanne, 51, 111, 124, 137n18, 150n3, 151n11–12 orishas (goddesses/gods of nature), 62, 69, 145n3, 147n28 Öztarhan, Esra Sahtiyanci, 142n10 Pachamama, 123–24 Paerregaard, Karsten, 152n14, 152n18 Palladium Ballroom, 66, 98, 145n9 Paredes, Américo, 4–5 Paz, Octavio, 19 Pérez, Loida Maritza, 147n2 Pérez, Richard, 136n5 Pérez, Rosie, 78–79, 147n24 Pérez y González, Maria E., 145n4 Pérez-Torres, Rafael, 8, 160

173

Peru: Bridge of Sighs (Puente de los Suspiros) in, 120, 152n15 history of mestizaje in, 151n8 im/migration, 109, 111–20, 150n3, 152n14 Marie Arana in Lima, 109, 120, 124, 129 Peruvian diaspora, 125, 127–30 Piazzolla, Astor, 59 pishtacos (indigenous ghosts), 122 Poniatowska, Elena, 54–55, 142n12, 143–44n24 popular culture, 2–4, 7, 10, 16, 19–20, 31–37, 73–79, 96, 136n7, 139n14, 140n22, 142n9 Pozo, Chano, 146n20 Prado, Pérez, 74–75 Presley, Elvis, 30 Puente, Tito, 75–76, 81–82, 84, 146n20 Puerto Rican diaspora, 11, 64, 72 Puerto Rico: colonialism in, 78 popular culture and, 73–79 race and religion in, 67–68 slavery in, 62, 69 Spanish Harlem and, 62–65, 67–68, 72, 78–79 U. S. occupation and colonization of (1898), 8, 146n12 puro cuento (pure truth), 38 qosqo (center), 123 Quiñónez, Ernesto, 145n1, 146n13 Quintana, Alvina, 136n5, 137n12 Quijano, Aníbal, 137n18, 151n8–9 Raising Victor Vargas (film), 149n27 Rebolledo, Tey Diana, 136n5, 138n3–4 rebozos (shawls), 46, 48, 52–53, 57, 59, 143n22–23 Rechy, John, 137n1, 140n21 La Regla de Ocha (the law of the orishas), 62, 67, 77, 83, 147n25. See also Santería (the Way of the Saints)



Index

Index

Ricourt, Milagros, 147n1, 149n22 Rivera, Diego, 138n3 Rivera, Raquel, 145n5 Rodoreda, Mercé, 141n5 Rodríguez, Arsenio, 75 Rodriguez, Ismael, 33 Rodríguez, Ralph, 136n5 Rodríguez, Richard, 140n21 Rodríguez, Tito, 75, 81 Roorda, Eric Paul, 148n11, 149n14 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 94, 148n11 Rosario, Nelly, 147n2, 148n10 Rouse, Roger, 39–40 Rubenstein, Anne, 30, 33, 139n12, 140n19 Ruiz, Vicki, 138n10 Rulfo, Juan, 19 Rushdie, Salman, 39 Sagás, Ernesto, 148n6 Said, Edward, 39, 58–59, 139n14 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina, 12 Saldívar, José David, 20, 136n7, 136n11 Saldívar, Ramón, 4–6, 136n11 Saldívar-Hull, Sonia, 17, 136n5, 137n12, 141n4, 143n16 Salsa, 11, 75, 81, 137n16, 147n28 Sampaio, Anna, 150n3 Sánchez, Marta, 61, 144n1 Sánchez González, Lisa, 136n5, 137n12, 144n1, 145n6 Sang, Mu-Kien Adriana, 149n15, 149n19 Santa Rosa de Lima, 120 Santa Teresa de Avila, 23–24 Santería (the Way of the Saints), 62–64, 66, 68–69, 73, 76, 79, 145n1, 145n10, 146n19, 147n28. See also La Regla de Ocha (the law of the orisha) Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 151n8 Sayers, Valerie, 38

Schomburg, Arturo, 144n1 El Señor de los Milagros, 120, 152n14 September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of, 37, 51 Sharpe, Jenny, 83, 137n17 Shea, Renee H., 54 Shohat, Ella, 54, 135n4 Sichel, Nina, 112–13 slave narratives, 86, 148n3 slaves and slavery: assimilation of, 68–69 in Cuba, 63, 76, 79, 146n17 in the Dominican Republic, 86, 93, 137n17, 148n3, 149n16 in Haiti, 88, 146n11 Incan, 114–15 inf luence on music, 64, 83 in Mexico, 40–41 in Peru, 151n10 in Puerto Rico, 62, 69 Smith, Michael Peter, 4 soldadera (soldier woman), 26, 55 Spanish American War, 64 Spanish Conquest, 3, 11, 12, 45, 51, 114–15, 125, 151n8–10 Spanish Harlem (El Barrio), 3, 5, 11, 62–65, 67–68, 72, 78–79 spiritismo (spirits of the ancestors), 62, 64, 83 Stander, Bella, 150n2 Stewart, Jacqueline, 25, 138n9 Suárez, Lucía, 92, 149n14 Taymor, Julie, 142n6 telenovelas (Spanish soap operas), 33, 37, 46–47 Teresa de Avila, Saint. See Santa Teresa de Avila Thomas, Piri, 61, 144n1 A Toda Máquina (film), 24, 30 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 8, 86, 88, 92, 136n11, 137n17, 145n6, 148n3, 149n14, 149n16, 149n18, 149n21, 150n5



174

transnational ambassadors, 9, 14, 32, 35, 64, 83–84, 121, 132, 141n25 transnational border feminism, 16–20, 24, 27–33, 138n7 transnational migration, 3–6, 8–9, 11, 39, 52–53, 65, 89, 92–93, 96, 136n9 transnational studies, 4 transnationalism, definition of, 4 Treaty of Guadalupe (1848), 8, 15, 43, 94 Tres Huastecos, Los (film), 31 tropicalization, 19, 75, 139n14 Trujillo, Rafael, 88, 91–92, 94–96, 148n10–11 Ugly Betty (television series), 143n21 Valdez, Luis, 149n27 Valentino, Rudolfo, 32, 139n14 Van Vleet, Krista E., 152n17 Vasconcelos, José, 19 Vega, Marta Moreno, 2–4, 6, 9–11, 131 The Altar of My Soul; The Living Traditions of Santería, 62–63, 69, 83, 145n3, 145n10, 147n25 author’s meeting with, 84 birthplace of, 62 on Castro, 143n3 childhood of, 64 Cuando los espíritus bailan mambo (documentary), 63–64, 79, 83–84, 145n3 education of, 62 founder of the Caribbean Culture Center/African Diaspora Institute, 63 on her grandmother’s inf luence, 145n3 at Music and Art High School, 147n26 as priestess, 64, 79, 83–84, 145n3 on Santería, 62

175

Spanish Harlem and, 62–65, 67–68, 72, 78–79 as transnational ambassador, 64, 84–85 visit to Cuba, 63 Vega, Marta Moreno: When the Spirits Dance Mambo: Growing Up Nuyorican in El Barrio: Abuela Luisa, role of, 65–69, 72–74, 82–83 El Barrio (Spanish Harlem) in, 62–65, 67–68, 72, 78–79 Music and Art High School in, 79–83 politics of gender and race in, 69–73, 75 popular culture in, 73–79 power dynamics in, 70 Santería in, 62–64, 66–69, 73, 76–77, 79, 83 transnational migration in, 65 Vélez-Ibañez, Carlos G., 150n3 vendida/traidora, image of, 139n17 Villa, Raúl Homero, 51 Vinson III, Ben, 151n10 Viramontes, Helena Maria, 17, 136n5, 141n24 La Virgen de Guadalupe, 26, 56, 57, 60, 144n25 Viruell-Fuentes, Edna, 25–26 Washington Heights (film), 150n27 Washington Heights (New York City), 3, 11, 85–87, 89, 91–92, 97–102, 105, 108, 148n4, 149n21, 149n26 Wedel, Johan, 145n10 West Side Story, 65, 73–74, 145n7, 146n15 West, Cornel, 8 Wheatley, Phyllis, 86 women, representations of, 74–75, 139n17, 140n19, 145n7 Wood, Natalie, 146n15



Index

Index

World War I, 148n13 World War II, 8, 42, 48, 51, 61, 65, 110, 139n12

Yo Soy Boricua (documentary), 78–79 Young Lords activism, 65, 78, 145n1

Yampolsky, Mariana, 54–55, 143n22, 143n24 Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne, 136n5

Zevallos-Aguilar, Ulises J., 111–12, 150n5 Zoot Suit (film), 149n27



176

Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945

An Alliance Of Women: Immigration And The Politics Of Race (Immigration and the Politics of Race)

Gender, Politics and the State

Divine destiny: gender and race in nineteenth-century Protestantism

Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945 (Gender and American Culture)

Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

The Politics of Gender and Education

David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South

Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory

Gender and the politics of history

Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879

Politics, Feminism and the Reformation of Gender

Transnational peasants: migrations, networks, and ethnicity in Andean Ecuador

The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

The New Politics Of Race And Gender: The 1992 Yearbook Of The Politics Of Education Association (Education Policy Perspectives)

Gender, politics, and poetry in twentieth-century Argentina

The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music

Global Justice and Transnational Politics

Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches (The Politics of Race and Ethnicity)

The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America

Assessing Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Health

Race, Class, and Gender in ''Medieval'' Cinema

The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain

Race, Class, and Gender in ''Medieval'' Cinema

Transnational Latina Narratives in the Twenty-first Century: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Migrations

Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

Romantic Migrations: Local, National, and Transnational Dispositions

The Mulatta and the Politics of Race

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945

An Alliance Of Women: Immigration And The Politics Of Race (Immigration and the Politics of Race)

Gender, Politics and the State

Divine destiny: gender and race in nineteenth-century Protestantism

Affirmative Advocacy: Race, Class, and Gender in Interest Group Politics

Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender, Race, and the Politics of Memory, 1880-1945 (Gender and American Culture)

Race and the Politics of Welfare Reform

The Politics of Gender and Education

David Duke and the Politics of Race in the South

Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender, and Southern Memory

Gender and the politics of history

Justice, Gender, and the Politics of Multiculturalism

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879

Politics, Feminism and the Reformation of Gender

Transnational peasants: migrations, networks, and ethnicity in Andean Ecuador

The Sorcery of Color: Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil

Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self

The New Politics Of Race And Gender: The 1992 Yearbook Of The Politics Of Education Association (Education Policy Perspectives)

Gender, politics, and poetry in twentieth-century Argentina

The Conjectural Body: Gender, Race, and the Philosophy of Music

Global Justice and Transnational Politics

Politics in the Pews: The Political Mobilization of Black Churches (The Politics of Race and Ethnicity)

The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America

Assessing Race, Ethnicity and Gender in Health

Race, Class, and Gender in ''Medieval'' Cinema

The Politics of Multiculturalism: Race and Racism in Contemporary Britain

Race, Class, and Gender in ''Medieval'' Cinema

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