Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe Diane L

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Duquesne University: Digital Commons Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2004 Searching for Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe Diane L. Maldonado Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Maldonado, D. (2004). Searching for Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/858 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Searching For Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the English Department McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Diane L. Maldonado February 26, 2004 ii Name: Diane L. Maldonado Title: Searching for Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe Degree: Doctor of Philosophy in English Date: February 26, 2004 APPROVED ____________________________________________________________ Linda Arbaugh Kinnahan, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English APPROVED ___________________________________________________________ Bernard F. Beranek, Ph.D., Associate Professor of English APPROVED ____________________________________________________________ Mark Frisch, Ph.D, Associate Professor of Modern Languages and Literatures APPROVED ____________________________________________________________ Linda Arbaugh Kinnahan, Ph.D., Chair, English Department APPROVED ____________________________________________________________ Constance D. Ramirez, Ph.D., Dean McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts iii ii Acknowledgments Special thanks to Professor Kinnahan, Professor Beranek, and Professor Frisch for their beneficial comments and revision suggestions. Para todas las mujeres de mi familia: mis abuelitas, mi madre, and mis amigas queridas. iii Table of Contents Introduction: 1 Searching for Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe Chapter One: 33 The Silenced Mother of Mexico: Malinche as Masculinist Construction Chapter Two: 57 “Mother, Do I Hear You?”: Malinche’s Daughters and Ethnography Chapter Three: 97 The Construction of Mexico’s Spiritual Mother, La Virgen de Guadalupe Chapter Four: 139 The Mosaic Mother: Reconstructing the Spirituality of Guadalupe through Escritas Ceremonias Conclusion: 181 En Busca de Abuela: Chicana Matrilineal Gardens Works Cited 193 1 Introduction Searching for Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew Malinche and Guadalupe Thesis “Myths and fictions create reality, and these myths and fictions are used against women and against certain races to control, regulate, and manipulate us. I’m rewriting the myths, using the myths back against the oppressors” (Anzaldúa qtd. in Keating 219). “What’s got to happen now is not concentrating on that kind of victimhood but concentrating on how we’re liberating ourselves, how we’re emancipating ourselves, and how we’re empowering ourselves as Chicanas. by creating a new culture” (Anzaldúa qtd. Keating 221). Chicana feminist writer Gloria Anzaldúa’s mission of transforming culture is grounded in her belief that writing, in particular writing and rewriting of history and myth, makes cultural change possible. To Anzaldúa cultural change allows for identity change because the two are integrally related and inseparable. Postcolonial theory contributes greatly to her rethinking the abstract concept of culture. In particular, postcolonial theory challenges the conservative, traditional idea of culture as an essentialist, static center. To postcolonial theorists, the idea of culture as center no longer holds. Western imperialist ideology defines culture as a static center, or as Matthew Arnold defines it in Culture and Anarchy (1869) “harmonious perfection.” Traditionalists 2 like Arnold believed that culture was “an inward condition of the mind” not influenced by “outward sets of circumstances.” However, postmodern thinking dismisses this modernistic notion that culture is innate. Postmodern and postcolonial thought exposes that the center of civilization was not only Greek culture and subsequently European culture, but that “other” cultures on the supposed periphery were always already influencing the colonial idea of culture: “Partly because of Empire, all cultures are involved with one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic” (Said xxv). Therefore, postcolonialism challenges static, imperialistic notions by opening up a space for rethinking how the abstract notion of culture is greatly influenced by historical circumstance. By looking at the effects of colonization, in particular European territorial conquests, postcolonial theory reveals that culture cannot be a static, pure, unadulterated entity, but rather an ever-changing dialogic. Moreover, postcolonial reading strategies offer ways of reading and re-reading cultural texts that have influenced culture’s spokespeople: historians, fiction writers, theorists, and ethnographers. These strategies provide a means by which elitist notions of culture as a self-contained entity give way to a definition of culture as “contested terrain, a site of struggle and transformation” (Giroux 165). Literary critic and Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, Edward Said, calls these reading strategies “contrapuntal readings.” Contrapuntal reading “must take account of both processes, that of imperialism and that of resistance to it, which is done by extending our reading of texts to include what was once forcibly excluded” (66-7). In short, for postcolonialists culture is a diasporic, fluid, hybrid activity that reveals itself 3 not only in historical circumstance and social practice but in texts, in particular cultural stories and myths. Defining culture as “historically produced, ever changing, and always reactively and syncretistically formed (and reformed) in relation to other cultures” (Friedman 134) discloses that difference and intermingling are always a part of its definition. Specifically, Mexican-American culture has always been what many postcolonial critics and Chicano/a theorists call a “border culture”—a space whereby the arbitrariness of geospatial boundaries blur, and imperialistic, hierarchical binaries are exposed. Border, and borderlands, in Chicana studies is a metaphor for Chicanas living in multiple worlds, multiple cultures (Saldívar-Hull 67). These include geographical worlds of the borderlands of Mexico and the United States, but also include sociohistorical worlds where Spanish and English express cultural hybridity of religious practices and gender and sexuality issues, for example. Specifically, Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) thinks of border culture as a junction of cultures where hybridity and dialogism influence identity formation. For her the borderland is psychological, sexual and spiritual and is present “wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch . .” (v). Anzaldúa follows a core concept of identity that Edward Said discusses in Culture and Imperialism: . the old authority cannot simply be replaced by new authority, but that new alignments made across borders, types, nations, and essences are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new 4 alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism. (xxiv-xxv) The relationship between culture and identity, then, is not “pure” but fluid and relational. Ilan Stavans in The Hispanic Condition: Reflections on Culture and Identity in America (1995) explains that “[c]ulture and identity . are larger than life abstractions, less a shared set of beliefs and values than the collective strategies by which we organize and make sense of our experience a complex . construction in a state of perpetual flux” (21). For Anzaldúa and other Chicanas, writers make sense of their experiences through the act of writing; thus, stories become the site of cultural and personal revelation: “Culture is the ‘story’ of who we are and our ideas about reality. In other words, culture is an ideology—a series of images and representations that reflect the beliefs a people have about reality. Culture is rooted in the pattern of the past; thus culture is the last system to change and adapt” ( Anzaldúa qtd. in Keating 280). Chicana1 writers currently assume the role of border culturalists in order to present alternative views of female figures perpetuated by histories, chronicles, myths, and other narrations motivated by imperial ideology, patriarchy and most often written by men. Two such female figures in Mexican-American culture are La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche2, archetypes that emerged in Mexico during the Spanish conquest period and that traditionally became dichotomous constructions of virgin and whore, Virgin Mary and Eve, and protector and traitor,

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