Michigan Feminist Studies 1

Chinenye I. Okparanta Deconstructing Home: Chicana Women and the Quest for Fathers in Reyna Grande’s Across a Hundred Mountains

A major source of contention within the emergent Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s was the role of women. The irony of a movement that struggled against the marginalization of a racial and ethnic group, but inflicted the same practice of inequality on female Mexican- Americans was not lost on the women. Chicana feminists resisted the movement’s patriarchal bent and united under a feminist consciousness that called attention not only to the social inequalities that were the lot of Mexican-American women in the United States, but to the discrimination that women faced within Chicano culture. This emerging feminist consciousness was unique in that, where Anglo- was primarily concerned, at least initially, with liberating woman from the “home” (her gilded cage), a number of Chicana feminists still respected that traditional space, but wanted to redefine the woman’s role within it, as well as give her the option to leave it. This ideological division within the fostered a discussion of gender roles that sought to, at the very least, reexamine the rigid male-female gender assignations within Chicano culture, and ideally, initiate a project of reworking them. In a 1972 essay titled “Women of the Mexican American Movement,” Chicana activist Jennie Chavez writes: “Chicanas, traditionally, have been tortilla-makers, baby-producers, to be touched but not heard” (Chicana Feminist Thought 37). Chicana feminists were invested in destabilizing such social construc- tions of the Chicana female as cook, mother, and wife, or sexual plaything.

The deconstruction of inflexibly defined gender—and sexual—identities has largely become the project of Chicana feminist writers. Beginning in the 1980s a significant body of Chicana feminist writing has been produced that not only attempts to redefine the Chicana female as other 2 Deconstructing Home Michigan Feminist Studies 3 than wife and mother, but that also removes control of her sexuality from the Chicano male and gives it back to the female. This reassignment of control has been emphasized in the body of Chicana produced by writers such as , Gloria Anzaldúa, and Norma Cantú, to name a few. From these Chicana feminist writers and their texts has emerged a body of female protagonists who have asserted their prerogative to be sexual, strong, and independent of men. In a number of these novels, the homosocial relationship between female friends serves as the fulcrum upon which entire plots revolve. In Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986) and (1993), Lucha Corpi’s Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s Desert Blood (2005), and Laura del Fuego’s Maravilla (1989), to name some of the more prominent writers and texts to emerge out of the period, men are either rendered invisible or made so peripheral as to be almost absent from the narrative. This pattern in the corpus of Chicana feminist literature makes it especially striking to read Reyna Grande’s debut novel Across a Hundred Mountains (2006) as an attempt to reintroduce the male figure into the body of Chicana feminist literature. This essay will offer a reading of Grande’s novel as it fits into the existing body of Chicana literature; I discuss the ways in which the idea of home is constructed and deconstructed in Grande’s novel and how this is a significant re-visitation of the Mexican and even Mexican-American home and family. I also reflect on Grande’s characterization of the various women in the novel and how those repre- sentations align, or fail to, with the female characters of Grande’s Chicana literary predecessors. I consider the distinct message and voice that Grande brings to the very woman-identified corpus of Chicana feminist literature. And lastly, I offer a reading of madness/insanity within the novel, not as overt social protest, but as quiet resistance to the .

The home or the family house in literary texts has long been symbolically loaded. Grande’s meaningful re-visitation of this trope is especially salient within the context of Chicano culture, for which the home is very powerfully vested. In her essay, “La Chicana: Her Role in the Past and Her Search for a New Role in the Future,” Bernice Rincón provides a breakdown of how family roles are defined within the framework of the home: Michigan Feminist Studies 3

1. Paternal Role: The father wields almost unlimited power within the home. His world is usually law, and he is obeyed unquestion- ingly by his wife and children, especially the girls. Ordinarily, the girls may not leave the house without his express permission. If there is not father in the home, this role is usually assumed by the eldest son or male in the household.

2. Maternal Role: Traditionally, the role of the Mexican woman is one of subordination. “She is expected to be submissive, faithful, devoted, and respectful to her husband and to take the major respon- sibility for rearing the children.” A good wife is not expected to find fault with her husband or to be curious or jealous of what he does outside the home, nor is she supposed to share in his political, economic or social activities unless they are centered around the home (Chicana Feminist Thought 25). The house and the home become an extension of the male and female identities within the Chicano culture. The woman has not been allowed to leave home, and the man has been expected to. This pattern is evident in Castillo’s So Far From God, just to highlight one example, in which Sofi, the mother figure, is abandoned for years by her husband, Domingo. Even upon his eventual return to the home, Domingo’s figure is cast as a shadow, absorbed in television and only marginally involved in his family’s well-being. He steals and spends Sofi’s money, loses her savings, and is responsible for the eventual loss of her house. In an attempt to prove his worth, Domingo promises to build a house for his daughter, Caridad. “In six months the project would be done and having shown his true mettle, Domingo would ask her this time—not la Silly Sofi, but la Mayor Sofia of Tome—if he could come back home,” he promises (149). Domingo never completes the project of building the home for his daughter, and in fact, he ultimately brings about the loss of his wife’s home. That the male is absent from the home, or only marginally visible within it, offers a crucial state- ment about the perception of the male figure in Chicano culture; that in Castillo’s novel the male is responsible for the loss of home and the inability to rebuild a home—a space for family—is a conspicuously loaded com- mentary on the male figure in the Chicano home and in Chicana feminist literature. 4 Deconstructing Home Michigan Feminist Studies 5

In Grande’s novel the physical structure of the house itself becomes a fitting metonym for the condition of the family. The reader is introduced to the Garcia family as a river floods the area and threatens to wash away their home: “Thunder shook the walls, making the bamboo sticks rattle like wet bones” (Across a Hundred Mountains 6). As the flood waters rise, the family’s shack fills up with water; Amá and Juana climb onto the table, which is the only dry space left in the house, but the shack continues to fill up with water. Amá, Juana and baby Anita look toward the door, hoping that at any moment Apá (the father) will come home and take them some- where safer. The fact that natural elements so easily threaten the stability of the house underscores the foundational unfixedness of the home space. While the home should be a place of rootedness and stability, it becomes for the Garcia family one of displacement and uncertainty. The political and economic reality of Mexican men leaving the home space and travel- ing to “el Otro Lado” (the Other Side) or the United States to find work is also highlighted in Grande’s novel. While So Far From God stresses the male figure’s vagabonding nature and lack of concern for his family, Across a Hundred Mountains seems particularly invested in redeeming the Chicano male and showing the economic concerns that precipitate his departure from the home. When compared to the Chicana feminist texts in which the absence of the father is neither marked nor mourned, Grande’s text appears particularly committed to showing the male as a caring, family-oriented, economically responsible figure. Grande’s text goes to great lengths to emphasize the closeness and affection that exists not only between Amá and Apá, the mother and the father, but that also exists between Apá and Juana, the daughter. So on the one hand the pos- sibilities of a united, loving Chicano family are hinted at, but the realities of economic conditions that force the male to leave are also laid bare. The novel becomes a quest, in many ways, to bring back the father and husband to the home, and to account for his absence in the first place. Juana, the daughter, leaves home on a journey to find this missing man and the novel takes on a mythical symbolism in stressing the protagonist’s determination to cross a hundred mountains, if necessary, to find one man. Juana says, “And I’ll bring my father back to her. Even if it’s the last thing I do. I will bring him home to her” (92) and by so doing stresses the Michigan Feminist Studies 5 importance of bringing the father back within the family space. The novel is engaged in a project of redeeming the male figure, or at least creating a nuanced male identity – one that is comprised of more than just the stereotypical bad, unemployed, criminal Chicano images that seemed to pervade North American society in the early days of the Chicano Move- ment. Nevertheless, the novel threads a careful line between over-sancti- fying these male figures and realistically portraying them; in addition to the positive depiction of men like Miguel and Don Ernesto, there is that of men like Don Elías.

The distinction that begs to be made between Grande’s text and those of a majority of Chicana Feminists is that while both are ostensibly woman- centered narratives, Grande inverts this pattern by having her plot revolve, not around her female protagonist, but around the male figure that she is engaged in a search for. Instead of emerging as strong and independent of a male figure, Juana’s identity seems so intertwined with her father-quest that she does not stand out in the same vein that earlier female protagonists in the Chicana literary corpus have. One example of a strong female type that recurs in Chicana feminist novels is the protagonist in Emma Perez’s Gulf Dreams. Perez’s plot is driven by the return of the main character to the family home in the small town of El Pueblo from which she fled in order to escape the close-mindedness of the town’s inhabitants. The narrator’s return to the small town is disturbed by her recollections of childhood sexual victimization at the hands of some male family members and friends. “I denied what I already judged. Boys, cousins, uncles had pawed me. No one suspected. I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t. I let her talk to me about how she anesthetized herself for years while I invented another childhood for myself with silence,” the narrator offers (61). The novel is both about the protagonist’s quest as an adult to assert her sexuality in the town that censured her and frowned upon it, and about her insistence on not being forced into normative expectations of acceptable sexuality and proper romantic relationships. That the character is a lesbian is arguably the most evident rejection of the Chicano community’s expectations governing female identity and sexuality. While it is perhaps problematic to read lesbi- anism as a trope within the Chicana feminist narrative framework, I am 6 Deconstructing Home Michigan Feminist Studies 7 inclined to do so because it emerges as a symbolic and significant state- ment against social expectations that attempt to regulate female identity and sexuality. That a Chicana can love a woman instead of a man, that she can reject the inequality of the sexes inherent in a traditional Chicano heterosexual relationship, that she can begin to reimagine a family unit that does not fit easily into the traditional mold, speaks to the sort of progress envisioned by Chicana feminists, and all of these hoped-for advancements are evidenced in readings of the lesbian female protagonists in Chicana feminist novels.

But if one reads the lesbian figures of certain Chicana feminist novels in this symbolic light, then does any novel that fails to serve up a lesbian protagonist not belong under the umbrella of Chicana feminist literature? This question has been at the heart of ongoing discussion among Chicana feminist literary scholars. In “Memories of Girlhood: Chicana Lesbian Fictions,” Catrióna Rueda Esquibel seeks to define what makes a text distinctively “lesbian.” She suggests that a text does not necessarily need to portray a lesbian character in order to be able to offer a compelling reading as a lesbian text. Richard T. Rodriguez rearticulates this claim in the essay “Imagine a Brown Queer: Inscribing Sexuality in Chicano/a- Latino/a Literary and Cultural Studies” when he writes, “Esquibel understands that to locate Chicana lesbian sexuality one cannot simply turn to texts distinctly marked as lesbian. In fact, the ‘fictions’ she requires for ‘reading Chicana lesbians’ span three categories identified as ‘nonlesbian,’ ‘lesbianfriendly,’ and ‘lesbian’” (494). Given that broad spectrum, can Grande’s text then be read as lesbian fiction? And perhaps more importantly, what would be the benefit of doing so? Grande’s novel is unique, as I have argued earlier, in that it reintroduces the male figure into the Chicana narrative framework by making his presence important and his absence pronounced. Grande’s investment is in the re-creation of the traditional family unit, and not, like her predecessors, in the disruption of a hetero- normative family structure. In fact, the entire novel is based on a journey to reunify the Garcia family. I would further argue that although within the narrative there are sections that suggest a concern with female identity and female safety, they are not introduced with the intent to revolutionize Michigan Feminist Studies 7 those female identities. Therefore, a reading of the text within a lesbian fiction framework would somehow be missing the mark, and would not necessarily be adding a critical perspective to an analysis of Grande’s novel. That the novel does not fit into a lesbian fiction framework is not problem- atic in itself, but what is is that the novel seems to place a premium on the lives of father and sons – Lupe becomes an alcoholic and spirals into a deep depression only after she loses her baby boy, although one could argue that it is the culmination of all her losses that triggers this emotional collapse; Diana, Adelina’s patient at the shelter, tries to kill herself after the accidental death of her son; Juana is immersed in a lifelong search for her father and ultimately her brother – while devaluing that of women and daughters. That Juana can adopt Adelina’s identity without any difficulty – no attempts by family members are made to find or reclaim Adelina, but Miguel’s departure and absence is loudly noted – is a troubling state- ment about how ethnic female identities are portrayed and accepted as collapsible and unworthy of being marked.

Below, I consider two sections within the novel that are woman-centered and could very easily be (mis)read as identifying with a Chicana feminist consciousness. When Juana leaves on the journey to find her father, she is jailed along the way and while in jail meets a young Chicana, Adelina, who becomes a close friend. Adelina shares with Juana the story of how she ended up in Mexico working as a prostitute. “‘I fell in love,’ Adelina said. ‘But he was much older than me, and my father threatened to send me to live with my grandparents if I didn’t leave him. So we ran away, here, to Tijuana’” (Across a Hundred Mountains 175). Adelina later confesses to Juana that her boyfriend had paved the way for her to enter into prostitution by first selling her out to his friends. This female friendship, which should be the basis by which the girls begin to define themselves as women and not subject to the demands – sexual and otherwise – of men, instead becomes a trap for Juana as she too becomes a prostitute. Rather than re-imagining the female figure, Grande allows her to lapse back into the role of sexual plaything. There is neither a questioning of these assumed roles, as Juana quickly resigns herself to prostitution and the belief that she has no other alternative, but must like her mother do “what needed to be done” (179). 8 Deconstructing Home Michigan Feminist Studies 9

Neither is there the self-reflexivity in Juana’s character that shows a concern with or opposition to the role she is forced to perform. The only real moment of “internal dialoguing” occurs as Juana tries to decide if she should let herself fall in love with Dr. Sebastian Luna. Such undisruptive renderings of female characters do not suggest a particularly feminist consciousness in Grande’s text. In another instance Adelina (Juana) stumbles upon a homeless woman and invites her to a shelter that is said to provide safety and services for women, although it is never made clear whether it is a shelter for homeless women, abused women, or something else. “Adelina turned around and saw a woman sitting on the ground, leaning against a wall. She picked up the bag and slowly walked toward the woman who was dressed in rags, and was holding an empty beer bottle,” the passage reads (126). That woman, who is later identified as Diana, attempts suicide as a result of the guilt she feels from having caused the death of her son during an automobile accident. Diana serves as one more addition to Grande’s collection of victimized and suffering women; Adelina suffers abuse and exploitation at the hands of her boyfriend; Juana is raped by Adelina’s boyfriend and exploited by her male clients; Diana suffers under her burden of guilt; Lupe, Juana’s mother, grieves the departure of her husband and her subsequent violation at the hands of Don Elías. And as the women are emotionally damaged by or because of men, they offer no revolutionary hope of rebuilding their bruised and battered identities. They are all left in varying stages of resignation: Diana in the hospital, Juana having taken Adelina’s identity and engaged in an ongoing search for her father that leaves her unable to emotionally connect with people, Adelina dead, and Lupe locked away in prison for the murder of Don Elías.

Two contestably revolutionary acts do occur within the novel; the most obviously impassioned is when Lupe kills her rapist, Don Elías. The second less overtly rebellious act occurs when Lupe shatters the dishes that are her wedding gift from the government and are supposed to be her legacy to her daughter, Juana. Lupe’s violence and subsequent madness function as protests against a patriarchal culture. Following the theft of her baby boy, Lupe’s already initiated descent into depression and dementia is accelerated. She goes to Don Elías’s house and attempts to steal her son Michigan Feminist Studies 9 back. When that fails, she kills Don Elías. The passage reads: “‘They didn’t hear my prayers, Juana,’ Amá said as the police officers dragged her along. ‘I begged him to give me back my son. He hit me and tried to throw me out.’ The judiciales tried to push Amá into the car and slammed the door shut” (140). Amá’s act is significant in that it is the first time that she refuses to allow a desperate situation to paralyze her. Earlier in the novel, when she agrees to trade her body as repayment for Don Elías’s loan, she explains her decision by saying “I do not know why our prayers have not been answered. It is as if La Virgencita cannot hear us anymore. She’s deaf to our pleas. And now it has come to this. I know the decision I have made will condemn me, yet I do not see another way” (68). Lack of any alterna- tive is what propels Amá to that decision, but by murdering Don Elías she demonstrates her resistance, not only to him as a representative of that patriarchal Mexican society, but to the women, like Dona Martina, who quietly assent to the system, and the corrupt judiciales who are also players in the patriarchy’s game. What makes Lupe even more of a compelling figure is that Grande’s novel, as I have argued earlier, does little to revo- lutionize the female identity. And even in Lupe’s character, one sees the tension between two opposing inclinations: on one hand to uphold the female identity of faithful mother, wife and submissive woman, and on the other hand to offer up an archetypal rebellious woman who challenges her prescribed role. This tension is especially pronounced as we witness Lupe, even after acting out her discontent against the men who represent the patriarchy, still pining away for her husband, Miguel, and struggling to hold onto her identity as his wife.

The second act that speaks loudly within the text occurs with Amá destroy- ing the plates that were given to her by the government as a wedding gift. She tells Juana the history of the plates: Amá said that she and Apá fell in love at first sight. They wanted to marry but they couldn’t afford to pay for the ceremony. One day, Governor Ruben Figueroa said that anyone who wanted to get married could go to the ayuntamiento and marry for free, and they would receive a set of plates as a wedding gift (42). 10 Deconstructing Home Michigan Feminist Studies 11

The plates are treasured by Lupe as the symbol of her and Miguel’s love. But after she is sexually violated by Don Elías, Lupe throws all the plates against rocks; only one plate is saved by Juana and this is to be her inheri- tance. The breaking of the plates is an eloquent protest on Lupe’s part against the corrupt government, and against the restrictions of marriage –which keep her in the home waiting for her husband to return and with no alternative but to barter her body. In refusing to pass down this inheri- tance to her daughter, Lupe also seems to be agitating against the possibility that her daughter’s life would mirror her own and follow the same pattern of helplessness and desperation. It is perhaps ironic that while the book is in many respects an attempt to re-present the hetero-normative family, it is at the same time poking many holes in the possibility of such a family structure functioning if prescribed family roles are continually performed without any struggle to re-define them or challenge the social expectations that govern those “home-space” identities. Lupe is the figure in the novel that forces the reader to re-examine what the novel’s underlying message is about the home and the identities of the individuals who inhabit that home space.

Lupe is a character that should be read multi-dimensionally. Although it is compelling to read her as a submissive female figure, especially initially within the framework of the home, her final position in the prison hospital functions to disrupt this reading. The actions mentioned above – murder of Don Elías, breaking of the plates – point to Lupe’s rejection of her role as sexual plaything and pawn in the patriarchal system. Those acts are patently resistive; but what can be read even more strongly as a rejection of the status quo is Lupe’s madness. While it cannot be read in the same vein as the more volitional acts of opposition, Lupe’s madness speaks volumes about the social and psychological environment in which she, as a woman, wife and mother, finds herself. In “Woman and Madness: The Critical Phallacy,” Shoshana Felman writes: . . . [M]adness is the impasse confronting those whom cultural conditioning has deprived of the very means of protest or self- affirmation. Far from being a form of contestation, “mental Michigan Feminist Studies 11

illness” is a request for help, a manifestation both of cultural impotence and of political castration. This socially defined help-needing and help seeking behavior is itself part of female conditioning, ideologically inherent in the behavioral pattern and in the dependent and helpless role assigned to the woman as such (2-3). Felman’s definition of madness as a product of “female conditioning,” and characteristic of the “dependent and helpless role assigned to the woman as such” complicates the reading of Lupe’s madness as wholly oppositional to the patriarchal system. It relegates her to the enfeebled, helpless position that her previous two acts would distance her from. Nevertheless, Felman provides an interesting lens through which to consider Lupe’s character and the tensions, as previously mentioned, between her desire to rebel against her role and her desperate circumstances, and Grande’s uncertain investment in re-imagining the female identity which comes through clearly in her depiction of the novel’s female characters.

Where a reading of Lupe’s character falls short for not being a complete, willful act of contestation, other facets of her sickness and her incarceration function well in this capacity. The act of rejection or refusal is in itself symbolic, as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar attest to in “The Mad- woman in the Attic.” They write: “‘a woman’s only power is the power of refusal’” (Norton 2033). When Juana comes back to visit her mother in the prison hospital, she finds out that Lupe has been refusing to eat: “How long has she been doing this?” Adelina [Juana] asked as she opened her purse. She took out the white rosary and began to rub the beads with her fingers. “Almost three weeks.” Adelina shook her head. What was Amá trying to do? (227). Lupe’s refusal to eat serves as yet another act of dissent against the system that has reduced her to her present condition. Her rejection is not only of literal food, but of the symbolic mess that she has been forced to ingest by her society. Gilbert and Gubar further suggest that illness serves as a 12 Deconstructing Home Michigan Feminist Studies 13 significant trope in literature because it signifies a woman’s unease or “dis-ease” with the expectations, restrictions and impositions of her envi- ronment. This dis-ease begins in Lupe’s home, as she bears the loss of husband and son, and the rape by Don Elías, and persists as she is carried off to prison, where she continues to mourn for her husband, her son, and herself. That Lupe is exchanged from her home – which can and perhaps should be read in this narrative context as her prison – to an actual prison, is not without symbolic significance in the novel. While on one hand the novel seems to revalidate the hetero-normative family unit and the father figure within that structure, it simultaneously challenges the assumption that this family is a functioning, operative one. Through the character of Lupe, who is the most pronouncedly anti-patriarchal figure, the reader is forced to reconcile these drastically different interpretations offered by the novel of the female as quiescent and accepting, and the female as sub- versively angry and ready to enact violence against her figurative jailers. The conflicted nature of the text suggests a tentativeness on Grande’s part to fully flesh out a female voice that is in such glaring contradistinction to the traditional one usually expected of the Chicana woman or girl.

Across a Hundred Mountains reintroduces the male figure into the body of Chicana feminist literature and challenges the stereotypes that have abounded about the Mexican-American man and father. While Grande’s novel appears to have shied away from the major feminist and gender concerns of some Chicana writers, the tentativeness with which she does occasionally approach and address the issue of female identity faintly echoes the ideological division within the early Chicano Movement. It is elucidating to read the voice Grande lends to the Chicana literary corpus, not as flagrant disregard for the general concerns of Chicana feminist writers, but as a re-visitation of the rift that developed among Chicana women, some of whom refused to challenge their traditional roles as wives and mothers, and others who wanted women to be treated as the equals of their male counterparts within the Chicano Movement. In Grande’s novel, that anxiety over the woman’s “proper” role is revisited and is reflected in the contradic- tions evident in the characterization of the female protagonists that people the text. Michigan Feminist Studies 13

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