Mônica Castello Branco de Oliveira
Going for the Jugular: Strategies of Resistance in the Fiction of Helena María Viramontes
Dissertação submetida à Pós- Graduação Stricto Sensu em Letras, área de concentração Mestrado em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa, da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, como requisito para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Letras.
Orientadora: Professora Dra Leila Assumpção Harris
Rio de Janeiro Fevereiro/2006
Mônica Castello Branco de Oliveira
Going for the Jugular: Strategies of Resistance in the Fiction of Helena María Viramontes
Esta dissertação foi julgada e aprovada, em sua forma final, pelo Programa de Pós-Graduação Stricto Sensu em Letras, área de concentração Mestrado em Literaturas de Língua Inglesa, para a obtenção do grau de mestre em Letras, pela seguinte Banca Examinadora:
______Profª Drª Leila Assumpção Harris (orientadora – UERJ )
______Prof Dr Eduardo de Faria Coutinho ( titular – UFRJ )
______Profª Drª Peonia Viana Guedes ( titular – UERJ )
______Profª Drª Diana Cristina Damasceno Lima Silva ( suplente – FERLAGOS )
______Prof Dr Victor Hugo Adler Pereira (suplente – UERJ)
To Helena María Viramontes, who has become an important part of my life, with her brilliant, challenging work, her political commitment, her struggles for social justice, and her ability to “read” the other.
For her friendship.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In “Nopalitos”, Helena María Viramontes states that time is a problem for those who want to write, especially for women, who usually have to face the challenge of doing many things simultaneously. “Fortunately”, she concludes, “we mujeres are an inventive people”. I share Viramontes’s opinion. Nevertheless, however inventive I may be, I would not be able to write this dissertation without the support of some very special people. My sincere thanks to Leila Assumpção Harris, my dear advisor and friend, for her dedication, her knowledge, her professional capacity; My professors at UERJ, especially Peonia Viana Guedes, whose true friendship, knowledge and enthusiasm have kept me going; Bruno Ferrari, more than a friend, an accomplice in all moments; My colleagues at UERJ, especially Ariel, for his constant help and our precious talks; Ferlagos, the institution which has been my second home; Luiz Manoel, a special friend, for having encouraged me from the very beginning with his intellectual and affectional support; Carlos Ildefonso and Eraldo Maia, for their encouragement and dedication; Fábio André and Ione, for our friendship and mutual help during our Master course; Sérgio, for his affection, his support, and for making me believe I was great; Acácio and Mariza, for their true friendship and careful re-reading of many parts of my dissertation; Maria Luiza, Marilu, Vânia, Mônica and Walcy, for their understanding of my lack of time; Cristina Mara and Dagles, for their effective help; My students at Ferlagos, especially Wagner, Diana and Wanessa, for being always there whenever I needed them; My mother, Helena Maria, for having shared many moments with me and comforted me with her love;
My father, Marcello, for having taught me never to give up; My husband, Israel, for his love, his patience and constant support; My dear daughter, Joana, for her love, her belief in me, and for making me feel my work was important; My family, especially my sister Márcia and my nephew Gabriel, for their deep commitment; Edith and Mirta, for their friendship and precious help with the Spanish language; Gina, my sister by choice, for her wise words and emotional support in the most difficult moments; Maria José, my friend by choice, for running my house and encouraging me with her permanent enthusiasm.
Above all, I thank God for having given me strength and health to complete my project.
RESUMO
O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar contos selecionados e o romance Under the Feet of Jesus da escritora chicana Helena María Viramontes, enfocando a apropriação de mitos astecas e lendas mexicanas protagonizados por figuras femininas, históricas ou míticas, como La Manlinche, La Llorona e The Hungry Woman. Esta re- visão crítica do passado tem um papel vital para as chicanas, reais e ficcionais, ao enfrentarem o domínio patriarcal, colonial e neocolonial. Devido à complexidade gerada pela ausência de linearidade narrativa, tanto nos contos como no romance, tornou-se necessária uma breve análise das estratégias narrativas a fim de ilustrar como tais estratégias estão intrinsecamente ligadas à apresentação fragmentada da vida dos trabalhadores migrantes. Foi igualmente indispensável examinar as demais práticas narrativas da autora tais como focalização, desconstrução, simultaneidade e justaposição, assim como o elo, por ela proposto em Under the Feet of Jesus , entre leitura, identidade, e engajamento com o mundo para promover a transformação social.
Palavras-chave: literatura chicana ; pós-colonialismo; neocolonialismo; mitos; diásporas; identidade.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this dissertation is to analyze selected short stories and the novel Under the Feet of Jesus by Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes, focusing on her appropriation of Aztec myths and Mexican legends whose protagonists are feminine figures, whether of historical or mythical origin, such as La Malinche, La Llorona and The Hungry Woman. This critical re-view of the past plays a vital role for real and fictional Chicanas when facing patriarchal, colonial and neocolonial domination. Due to the complexity brought by the lack of linearity in the narrative, both in the short stories and in the novel, a brief analysis of the narrative strategies became necessary to show how these strategies are intertwined with the fragmented presentation of the migrant workers’ lives. It became equally indispensable to examine other narrative practices adopted by the author, namely, focalization, deconstruction, simultaneity and juxtaposition, as well as the link she establishes in Under the Feet of Jesus between reading, identity and effective human agency in order to achieve social changes.
Key-words: Chicana literature, postcolonialism; neocolonialism; myths; diasporas; identity.
SINOPSE
Análise de contos selecionados e do romance Under the Feet of Jesus da escritora chicana Helena María Viramontes, enfocando estratégias de resistência ao domínio patriarcal, colonial e neocolonial, com destaque especial para a apropriação de lendas mexicanas e mitos astecas, protagonizados por figuras femininas, e para o uso de práticas narrativas, incluindo a fragmentação, focalização e desconstrução.
SYNOPSIS
Analysis of selected short stories and the novel Under the Feet of Jesus by Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes, focusing on strategies of resistance against patriarchal, colonial and neocolonial domination, highlighting the appropriation of Aztec myths and Mexican legends whose protagonists are feminine figures, and the use of narrative practices such as fragmentation, focalization, and deconstruction.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...... 01
CHAPTER 1 – La Gente Chicana : where to, where from ...... 09
CHAPTER 2 – Revisiting Myths and Reinventing Traditions...... 29
CHAPTER 3 – Malinches, Lloronas y Gritonas: mujeres en lucha ...... 53
CHAPTER 4 – Words as Tools: reading the world, reading the Other, reading the self ...... 79
CONCLUSION ...... 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 100
ANNEX 1...... 105
ANNEX 2...... 106
Fiction is my jugular. For me it is a great consolation to know that whatever miserable things happen in my lifetime, goodness will inevitably result because I will write about it. There is strength in this when none is left in the soul.
Helena María Viramontes
INTRODUCTION
It requires something more than personal experience to gain a philosophy or point of view from any specific event. It is the quality of our response to the event and our capacity to enter into the lives of others that help us to make their lives and experiences our own.
Emma Goldman, This Bridge Called My Back
In the essay “The Politics of Poetics: Or, What Am I, A Critic, Doing in This Text Anyhow?”, Tey Diana Rebolledo states that “it is very difficult to work on living authors: authors who read what you write and agree or don’t agree” (HERRERA- SOBEK & VIRAMONTES, 1996: 208). Although I do think she is absolutely right, I should say that, fortunately, this does not apply to Chicana writer Helena María Viramontes. After having been introduced to her collection The Moths and Other Stories (1985) by my advisor, Professor Leila Harris, and having fallen in love with Viramontes’s strong concern for women under the rigid rules of patriarchy and with her unusual narrative strategies, I decided to send her an e-mail saying that I was writing my Master dissertation on her work and asking her about her novel Their Dogs Came With Them , as I was not sure whether it had been published yet. I may confess that I was not expecting an answer. After all, I was trying to contact a famous writer with an obviously busy schedule. To my surprise the answer came on the same day (February 16 th , 2005) and that is why, for me, it has not been difficult to write about this “living author”. In her answer, Viramontes said: “I am deeply honored that you are writing a thesis on my work and I am more than happy to assist you wherever I can” 1. She went further in her generosity as to offer to send to me her unpublished novel, Their Dogs Came With Them , as she was still seeking a publisher for it. Since then, we have been exchanging e- mails and talking on the phone; she has been extremely friendly, generous and supportive. She has even agreed to give me an interview which appears in annex 2. As I have told her once, she makes me feel at home when we talk.
1 The e-mails are in annex 1. 2
Bearing in mind Rebolledo’s statement that if we become “overly enthusiastic” about something concerning a writer’s work, we may “confuse the authorial voice with that of the narrative or poetic voice” (HERRERA-SOBEK & VIRAMONTES, 1996:208-209), I feel compelled to say that, sometimes, the author and the speaker are intertwined in Viramontes’s works since, as a New Mestiza, Viramontes has embraced the “Theory in the Flesh” and portrayed her own childhood experiences in many of her texts. Viramontes’s testimonio “Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction”, written in 1989, attests to the fact that many of her experiences have been crucial to her writings. The essay was revised and expanded during the summer of 2005 and I have been lucky enough to receive a copy. I consider it a treasure. Its fourteen pages allow readers and critics to share the author’s intimacy and, thus, better understand her work. From its very beginning one observes, simultaneously, Viramontes’s powerful use of language, her commitment to writing, and the influence her life has had on her work. Postcolonial writer Stuart Hall argues that “We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history, and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‘in context’, positioned ” (HALL, 1990: 222). The “diaspora experience and its narrative of displacement” which inform Hall’s writings are also fundamental in the fiction of Helena María Viramontes. Viramontes’s parents were migrant Mexican workers who met while they labored in the fields of California picking cotton. Born in East L.A., Viramontes, one of eleven children, grew up in a crowded house as her mother, a very kind person, used to welcome whoever needed a shelter. That is why, since her early childhood, Viramontes was able to listen to all sorts of stories which, as she says, “offered me lessons in life”. In the section “On Speaking/Not Speaking Spanish”, Viramontes wonders about the loss of her mother tongue and its consequences in her life 1. As she puts it:
Somewhere along the educational system I lost it, and with it I lost a part of the most impactful years of my life. In the first five years of a child’s life, she begins to develop a vocabulary that makes sense and order of her
1 The expanded version of “Nopalitos” consists of five sections: On Stories; On Speaking/Not Speaking Spanish; On Literary Influences; On Mujeres Writing; On Choosing to Write.
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cultural world. In other words, I saw the world in Spanish, Spanish images, senses and emotional moods before I began to see them in English, and I would argue that my truthful vision, sense and order, radically changed when my language was taken away (VIRAMONTES, 1989: 36; personal correspondence).
She says that, although she can still communicate with what was left of her Chicana Spanish, it is totally impossible for her to feel it is her own language and, therefore, write in it. Acknowledging that English is also her language, she admits she does “not feel comfortable in either language”. To reflect her mixed feelings towards both languages, she cites Cuban American poet Gustavo Perez-Firmat who says that when he writes in English he feels he falsifies what he wants to say. Viramontes adds:
The notion of not feeling an ownership of either language is brutal; however, to write in English “falsifies” who I am so that I am often made to feel like a fraud, though “I belong nowhere else”. But isn’t that what writing is all about, the struggles with language? (VIRAMONTES, 1989: 37; personal correspondence).
The brutality of not having a language of one’s own has been addressed to by Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera, published in 1987. The chapter “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” opens with the following lines by Ray Gwyn Smith: “Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” (ANZALDÚA, 1999: 75). The sense of displacement of which Viramontes speaks together with the loss of one’s language is commonly experienced by diasporic populations. Since World War II, continuous, massive migrations – legal and illegal – to the U.S. and European countries, brought about mostly by economic and political reasons, have contributed to the creation of “ ‘third-world zones’ in supposed ‘First World’ nations” (BRAZIEL & MANNUR, 2003: 11). Among the ethnic groups living in the United States, Hispanics represent nowadays the largest minority group, a fact that Anzaldúa had foreseen in Borderlands/La Frontera 2. According to data released by the Census Bureau in January 2003, Hispanics constitute 14% of the population in the United States and, taking into consideration the country they have come from, Mexicans encompass 63% of this
2 In chapter I, I will discuss the use of the term “Hispanic”. As for “ethnic”, I use it for lack of a better term, aware that white people are “ethnic” too.
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Hispanic population ( The New York Times , January 23,2003; Newsweek , May 30, 2005). People of Mexican origin came to be known as Chicanos, once a derogatory term, which was reappropriated by the activists of the Chicano Movement (60s/70s) and has since then been employed with a political connotation. According to Paula Moya, when it comes to questions concerning Chicana women, there are some specificities which must be taken into consideration:
What distinguishes a Chicana from a Mexican-American, a Hispanic, or an American of Mexican descent is her political awareness; her recognition of her disadvantaged position in a hierarchically organized society arranged according to categories of class, race, gender and sexuality; and her propensity to engage in political struggle aimed at subverting and changing those structures (MOYA, 1997:139).
Keeping in mind historical specificities, I explore the connections between feminism and postcolonialism in order to provide a clear understanding of the plight of Chicana feminists in the U.S. According to Bill Ashcroft:
Feminism is of crucial interest to postcolonial discourse for two major reasons. Firstly, both patriarchy and imperialism can be seen to exert analogous forms of domination over those they render subordinate. Hence the experiences of women in patriarchy and those of colonized subjects can be paralleled in a number of respects and both feminist and postcolonial politics oppose such dominance. Secondly, there have been vigorous debates in a number of colonized societies over whether gender or colonial oppression is the more important political factor in women’s lives (ASHCROFT, 2002:101-102).
As we will see, Chicanas have been affected both by gender and (post) colonial oppression. In “ Postfeminisms: Feminisms, Cultural Theory, and Cultural Forms, Ann Brooks claims that “Feminist and post-colonialist theorists have recognized the potential of postmodernism to advance debates around identity, nationality and difference already articulated within these political and cultural movements” (BROOKS, 1997: 92). This advancement has been made possible because of postmodernism’s emphasis on difference, on multiplicity, on the voices of marginalized groups, on deconstruction, on the rethinking of the center and the borders, to name just a few of the aspects highlighted by this movement. As Linda Hutcheon stresses in The Politics of 5
Postmodernism , “Difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis” (HUTCHEON, 1995: 5). However, Paula Moya insightfully observes that postmodern theories have generated “an approach to difference that ironically erases the distinctiveness and relationality of difference itself”. Moya clarifies then the problem postmodernism has posed to women of color’s representation of identity. Postmodern theorists either see the individual “as fragmented and contradictory”, in which case the distinctions between the diverse kinds of human beings are not taken into consideration, or they “subvert difference by showing that difference is merely a discursive illusion”, in which case there is a disregard concerning the fact that “people experience themselves as different from each other”. Postmodernists have ended up universalizing “sameness” or in Moya’s words “we are all marginal now!” (MOYA, 1997: 125-26). This explains why many women of color and feminist theorists have been cautious towards the way postmodern theory treats “concepts like identity and difference” (MOYA, 1997: 126). Based on an essay by Satya Mohanty that addresses such issues, Moya has articulated a “realist theory of Chicana identity”, stressing the links “between social location, experience, epistemic privilege, and cultural identity”. Refusing to theorize Chicana identities according to the postmodern binary of a “completely fixed and unitary or unstable and fragmented” self, Moya’s “realist theory of identity” is intended to show that “social facts of race, class, gender, and sexuality” influence the cultural identity of an individual without necessarily determining it (MOYA, 1997: 136-137). Paula Moya’s “realist theory of identity” will be quite useful as, in the course of this dissertation, we will be focusing on the social facts that inform the life of a Chicana writer and her “practices of representation”. As Stuart Hall reminds us, looking at “practices of representation” involves looking at “the positions from which we speak or write – the positions of enunciation ” (HALL, 1990: 222). My aim in this dissertation is to analyze selected works of Helena María Viramontes, focusing on her appropriation of old Aztec myths and Mexican legends to subvert History and bring about social change. This committed Chicana writer, who has encouraged “Latinos in the United States to see one another in terms of equivalence and solidarity rather than antagonism whether they have emigrated from Mexico, Central America, or another part of Latin America” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 58), has shown a 6
true concern for groups outside the mainstream, especially women, silenced and ignored. In order to expose the plight of these marginalized and oppressed people, Viramontes has made use of postmodern decentering narrative practices, namely, fragmentation, juxtaposition, focalization, simultaneity and deconstruction, not to mention her untamed language. I have dedicated Chapter I to a brief summary of the history of Mexico after 1519, when it was invaded by Spanish conquerors. For three centuries it was known as New Spain. Hernán Cortés, the leader of the Spaniards, was helped by an Indian girl, Malintzin Tenepal, who became his translator and lover. Malintzin has turned into a myth for Chicana writers who have worked to subvert the negative portrayal patriarchal ideology has attributed to her. In 1821, Mexico won its independence; however, it did not have time to enjoy its freedom and rebuild its economy as it became a target of the U.S. expansionism (ACUÑA, 1988:1-2). The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848), which marked the end of the Mexican-American war, turned Mexicans into foreigners in their own country. Transnational migrations in the twentieth century largely increased the number of Mexicans in the U.S. The contributions of historians such as Rudolfo Acuña, George Tindall and David Shi, as well as the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, Ana Castillo, Norma Alarcón, Alvina Quintana and Cherríe Moraga, among others, were of fundamental importance for this chapter. In order to be able to survive in-between two cultures and two languages, Chicano/as have been forced to develop strategies of resistance against hegemonic oppression and dominance. One thing that cannot go unmentioned is that a woman, in a context of displacement, undergoes various exclusions, or, in Spivak’s words, “is even more deeply in shadow” (SPIVAK, 1997:28). That is why Chapter II is intended to revise History through myths and legends whose protagonists are feminine figures, whether of historical or mythical origin, such as La Malinche, La Llorona and The Hungry Woman. Anzaldúa explains that her people, “la gente Chicana”, has three mothers who are mediators: Guadalupe, Malinche and La Llorona and that their faith is strongly linked to Indians, images and myths, including that of Aztlán, the lost territory of Chicanos (ANZALDÚA, 1999:23/52). The re-visiting and reappropriation of such myths and legends have performed a vital role in the resistance developed by Chicanas against patriarchal, colonial and neocolonial domination. Such strategies are often 7
represented both in the theoretical and in the fictional texts produced by Chicana writers. The introduction to this chapter was based on the works of renowned scholars linked to the study of myths and legends, namely, Joseph Campbell, Claude Lévi- Strauss and Luís da Câmara Cascudo. Concerning the Aztec myths and Mexican legends, the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Norma Alarcón, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Lucha Corpi, Margarita Cota-Cárdenas and Sandra Cisneros, to name just a few, were decisive in the sense that their reappropriations of such myths and legends have rescued female figures who had been erased or denigrated by history. In chapter III, I offer critical readings of selected stories from Helena María Viramontes’s The Moths and Other Stories and Paris Rats in East L.A ., in which the problematic issues concerning Chicanas’ struggles against various forms of domination, especially patriarchy, are all intertwined and perfectly epitomized by the resemantization of myths and legends. In some of her short stories, Viramontes makes direct allusions to mythical figures. In others, her female characters’ attitudes remit readers to either La Malinche, La Llorona or The Hungry Woman as they behave as these mythical figures did, transgressing, resisting, refusing to be stopped. In either case, “silence” and “language” come across as feminine strategies of survival and resistance against multiple oppressions. Chapter IV focuses on Viramontes’s novel Under the Feet of Jesus , in which transnational diasporical dislocations are intertwined with various important concepts. As Paula Moya claims in Learning from Experience: minority identities, multicultural struggles , Viramontes has developed an “expanded notion of literacy” that establishes the link between reading, identity and agency (MOYA, 2002:175) Viramontes’s message is clear and touching. By learning to “read” in the sense of discerning things, not only distinguishing letters in a word or in a sentence, one becomes able to read the social world, the other, and the self. This understanding, crucial for effective human agency, is incorporated in this rite-of-passage narrative in which the protagonist progresses towards conscientización and empowerment. Viramontes’s fragmented narrative, which reflects the fragmentation of the migrant workers’ life, is presented to the reader through her use of variable character-bound focalization. By using four focalizing characters – Estrella, Petra, Perfecto, and Alejo –, who are marginalized, Viramontes avoids essentializing migrant workers, highlights individual perspectives, 8
and makes clear how social location and social ideologies have a strong influence on characters’ identities. In order to carry out my argumentation concerning Viramontes’s complex non-linear narrative and her female characters’ process of subjectification, I have used some ideas and concepts by well-known theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Paula Moya, Debra Castillo, Ellen McCracken, Yvonne Yarbo-Bejarano, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Homi Bhabha, María Antónia Oliver-Rotger, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Gérard Genette, among others of equal importance. It is my hope that the analysis carried out in this dissertation will show that Helena María Viramontes is an accomplished writer who strikes at our political consciousness and wakes us to the multiple oppressions affecting diasporic populations, especially women who find themselves constrained by patriarchal rules from their own culture and from the dominant culture. 9
CHAPTER 1
La Gente Chicana : where to, where from
They came in battle array, as conquerers, and the dust rose in whirlwinds on the roads. Their spears glinted in the sun, and their pennons fluttered like bats. They made a clamor as they marched, for their coats of mail and their weapons clashed and rattled. Some of them were dressed in glistening cast iron from head to foot; they terrified everyone who saw them. Their dogs came with them running ahead of the column. They raised their muzzles high; they lifted their muzzles to the wind. They raced on before with saliva dripping from their jaws.
The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. In: Their Dogs Came With Them – Helena María Viramontes, unpublished .1
In the beginning of the twentieth century, there were only 500,000 Latinos living in the United States. This number, however, has been increasing with an incredible speed, and nowadays the Latino population encompasses more than 40 million. These data have been presented by journalists Arian Campo-Flores and Howard Fineman who have also shown statistics which estimate that “by 2100, one in three Americans will be Latino” (Newsweek, May 30, 2005).Actually, a previous article written by Linette Clemetson published in The New York Times already mentioned this ongoing gain in Hispanic population. In fact, data released by the Census Bureau in January 2003 revealed that the Hispanic population had become the largest ethnic minority in the United States. (The New York Times, January 23, 2003). Both articles in Newsweek and in The New York Times confirm what Chicana writer Gloria Anzaldúa had foreseen in Borderlands/La Frontera :
By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will comprise the biggest minority group in the U.S., a country where students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is
1 This epigrah is from Their Dogs Came With Them, Viramontes’s unpublished novel, generously sent to me by her, with permission to use it freely in my dissertation. 10
considered more “cultured”. But for a language to remain alive it must be used (ANZALDÚA, 1999:81).
It goes without saying that this seemingly historical revenge sparks a rise in political power as many senators, mayors, governors and even former President Bill Clinton owe their elections, in great part, to the Latino vote. It is worth mentioning, however, that the Latino power surge is at its very beginning, as most Americans keep on looking down on Latinos in general as the “Other”, ignoring their national, cultural and racial differences and denying them a place in the mainstream culture. Nevertheless, the election of a Chicano, Antonio Villaraigosa, as mayor of Los Angeles, the nation’s second largest city, shows that the “Other” is making his mark on politics, as well as on other fields, as never before. As journalists Arian Campo-Flores and Howard Fineman explain, Villaraigosa is the first Latino to win the office in 133 years (Newsweek, May 30, 2005). Born in Los Angeles in 1953, this Chicano had a difficult childhood, which prompted him to struggle to acquire agency and voice, leaving behind his condition of postcolonial subaltern subject. It becomes of utmost importance here to explain that the use of the term postcolonial associated to Chicanos is due to their past history which includes conquest, colonization and annexation, and also to their present, which involves transnational migration. In Massacre of the Dreamers , Chicana writer Ana Castillo comments on the “continuous” neocolonialism affecting Mexican descendants:
While there is admittedly an ongoing growing population migrating from Mexico (as from other parts of the world today), a large percentage of Chicano/as are not immigrants. In fact, the ancestors of many are from the Southwest United States and were not solely Spanish or Mexican but also American. Furthermore, the changing border that divides the U.S. and Mexico (another important distinction between our status and those from other countries) has placed Mexicans in a continuous neocolonial state providing the U.S. with legislated surplus labor as needed (CASTILLO, 1995:2-3).
Alicia Arrizón and Lilian Manzor clarify the repercussions of the process of colonization of Latinos and mention their present situation in transnational diasporical dislocations:
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After all, Latinos in the United States are both postcolonial and neocolonial subjects: post-Spanish colonialism and neo-U.S. colonialism. Thus Latina/o identity in the United States is the product of a creative process of understanding the self in relation to paradoxes and contradictions caused by conquest, annexation and migration (ARRIZÓN & MANZOR, 2000:12).
The election of a Chicano as mayor of a big American city becomes more significant if we examine the history of Mexico, a country twice colonized. In 1519 Spain invaded Mexico, which became a Spanish colony for three centuries. At that time, Mexico was inhabited by indigenous tribes, mainly the Aztecs. According to Ana Castillo, the Olmecs, Mexicans’ most ancient ancestors who lived in the Americas around 1000 B.C., had been able to foresee the Spanish conquest of Mexico. They had a mystical and powerful society in which the dreamers, that is, the ones who were able to prophesize about the future, were deeply respected. Castillo explains what happened to these dreamers after their prophecy:
Monteuczoma called upon the thousands of dreamers who were sharing the same premonition: the prophesied arrival of Cortés and the subsequent annihilation of the Empire. Monteuczoma’s order to have the dreamers murdered en masse did not stop the landing of those alien ships that were already on their way with those whose intentions were to take whatever riches found at any cost (CASTILLO, 1995:16).
After the dreamers were killed, Monteuczoma decided to consult his magicians and wizards so that he could learn from them how to prevent the fall of his empire. As they were unable to provide an answer, they were immediately imprisoned. However, since they were wizards, they escaped leaving no trace behind them but their families were the victims of Monteuczoma’s revenge. No effort, no magic, could possibly stop the Spanish attack. Castillo concludes: “This was the case of the ‘Massacre of the Dreamers’ in the Mexican Empire and is happening again throughout the globe” (CASTILLO, 1995:16). Rudolfo Acuña, a Mexican historian, gives in Occupied America a version of what happened in Mexico during its conquest, colonization and annexation from the perspective of the colonized. He describes how the indigenous population went through misery, disease and death during the colonial period. According to him, during 300 years, the Spanish exploited the labor of these indigenous tribes and of Black slaves, 12
which had been brought from Africa. That the Spanish colonization hindered the economic development of Mexico can be seen in these statistics: the pre-Columbian societies had a population of around 30 million while France, the largest contemporary nation, approached 20 million. Spain, however, numbered about 8 million people. Mexican cities were prospering and bigger than London and other European cities. Nevertheless, war, disease, poverty, exploitation of the native population, and drudgery led Mexico’s indigenous population to fall. Statistics show that 130 years after the Spanish invasion 90 percent of the indigenous tribes had been wiped out (ACUÑA, 1988:1). During the colonial period, there was cohabitation between the Spanish people, the indigenous tribes, and Black slaves. Referring to this mixture of races, Anzaldúa proclaims: “ En 1521 nació una nueva raza, el mestizo, el mexicano (people of mixed Indian and Spanish blood), a race that had never existed before. Chicanos, Mexican- Americans, are the offspring of those first matings” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:27). At the time the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico, the Aztecs were the largest and strongest Indian nation as they had managed to subjugate other tribes, such as the Mayans and Tabascans. In Loving in the War Years , Cherríe Moraga observes how these subjugated tribes helped the Spanish Conquest of Mexico:
As slaves and potential sacrificial victims to the Aztecs, then, many other Indian nations, after their own negotiations and sometimes bloody exchanges with the Spanish, were eager to join forces with the Spanish to overthrow the Aztec empire. The Aztecs, through their systematic subjugation of much of the Mexican Indian population, decreed their own self-destruction (MORAGA, 1983:92).
History, however, shows that the Spaniards had another great contribution: an Aztec girl, Malintzin Tenepal. Very little is known about her and even what historians have taken for granted is surrounded by doubts and ambiguity. The only written historical accounts about Malintzin that might be considered reliable come from the chronicles by conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Cortés’s companion, and Cortés’s own letters to the king of Spain, although Cortés mentions her only twice in all his letters (FITCH n/d). 13
The Indians used to give their women to the Spaniards as presents. Malintzin Tenepal was no exception. Moraga explains what happened to this Aztec girl who seemed to belong to a noble family:
In his writings, Bernal Díaz del Castillo notes that upon the death of Malinche’s father, the young Aztec princess was in line to inherit his estate. Malinche’s mother wanted her son from her second marriage to inherit the wealth instead. She therefore sold her own daughter into slavery (MORAGA, 1983:93).
Although Anzaldúa says there are writings in Mexico that refute this account (MORAGA, 1983:93), it was recorded that Malinztin was rejected and betrayed by her mother who sold her as a slave to the Xicalango tribe. She was sold again to the Tlaxalteca tribe, who, in turn, gave her to Cortés (FITCH n/d). Her destiny as a slave, moving from tribe to tribe, allowed her to get in touch with different dialects and cultures. That is why she became, at the age of fourteen, Cortés’s translator, interpreter and lover. The Spanish insisted that the Indian women be baptized and Malintzin received a Christian name: Doña Marina (FITCH n/d). It is clear that the strategy used to destroy the Aztec empire depended greatly on Cortés´s ability to communicate with his opponents. That is the reason why Doña Marina, known as “la lengua” among the Spanish soldiers, was of utmost importance for the success of the Spanish conquest. Doña Marina was more than a translator, though. She used to give Cortés and the indigenous tribes pieces of advice, helping the Spanish conquest and contributing to the formation of a new culture, one which blended Indian and Spanish characteristics. In his writings, Díaz del Castillo makes it clear that Doña Marina was extremely useful to the Spaniards and honors her with the same respect he accorded to Spanish women. In his view “Doña Marina was a person of great importance and was obeyed without question by all the Indians of New Spain” (FITCH n/d). According to Díaz del Castillo, “a brilliant chronicler of the Conquest with a great eye for detail” (ALARCÓN, 1994:185), Malintzin married Juan Jaramillo, one of Cortés’s men, during the Honduras expedition, just after the conquest of Tenochtitlán, and had a daughter with him, María (FITCH n/d). Based on Díaz del Castillo’s chronicles, Tey Diana Rebolledo explains, in Women Singing in the Snow , that 14
Malintzin married Jaramillo “when Cortés was ordered to bring his Spanish wife to the New World”, and that Martín, her son by Cortés, “was sent to Spain to be educated” (REBOLLEDO, 1995:62). Even her name, before her encounter with the Spaniards, is a mystery both in Spanish and Nahuatl (Mexica) accounts of her. According to Norma Alarcón, a group of linguists believe that her full name was Malintzin Tenepal and was given to her by her family (ALARCÓN, 1994:110-112). Other linguists, though, say that it is difficult to establish her name’s origin and explain that:
Malintzin was a reasonable Nahuatl pronunciation of Marina in that the Nahuatl speakers replaced the Spanish r with an l, so that Marina becomes Malina. The Nahuatl speakers then added to that name an ending which indicates respect: -tzin . This ending is similar to the Spanish Doña, which is also used for respect.Just as Bernal Díaz del Castillo called the translator Doña Marina, so Nahuatl speakers called her Malintzin. Similarly, the Spaniards had difficulty pronouncing the Nahuatl -tz , so changed it to -ch , at the same time that they dropped the silent n at the end of her name (FITCH n/d).
That is why this Amerindian woman who translated for Cortés, helped him conquer the Mexicas, more commonly known as the Aztecs, became his lover and had a son with him, is known as Malintzin, Doña Marina and Malinche at the same time. This is what Nancy Fitch, in “Malinche – Indian Princess or Slavish Whore?”, says in relation to Malintzin’s name:
There is little evidence that the Spaniards either knew or cared what name her parents had given her. Interestingly, she sometimes appears in Indian accounts as La Malinche, while Cortés was often called El Malinche after her (FITCH n/d).
La Malinche is seen as a traitor by the Mexican people. She is usually referred to as la Chingada – the fucked one (ANZALDÚA, 1999:44), the one who betrayed her people and sold them to the Spanish invaders. However, she has another, important, role. She is considered the symbolic mother of the Mexican people once her son with Cortés, Martín, was the first mestizo . A historical and mythical figure, La Malinche is portrayed by del Castillo as a princess, although she had been given to the Spaniards as a slave. In his words “she was a truly great princess, the daughter of Caciques and the mistress of vassals as was very 15
evident in her appearance” (FITCH n/d) 2. Díaz del Castillo reveals that, on the basis of letters from her children found in Spanish archives, it seems that Malintzin died between 1551 and 1552 (FITCH n/d). After around 300 years under the Spanish dominion, a great internal dissatisfaction was evident in Mexico, or in New Spain as it was called then. It is worth mentioning what Ana Castillo has written about the duration of empires throughout the world. She cites A Short History of the Arab Peoples , written by Sir John Glubb, who suggests the reviewing of the world history so that it can be seen that all great empires usually fall within two hundred to three hundred years, and they simply cease to exist (CASTILLO, 1995:30). This is exactly what happened in New Spain. Mexican people, tired of social, political and economic injustices, wanted to get free from the Spanish dominion. In 1810, as the situation got unbearable, Father Miguel Hidalgo, with another leader, Emiliano Zapata, began the Mexican Revolution with his famous Grito de Dolores . In 1821, after eleven years of war, Mexico won its independence and was no longer called New Spain (ACUÑA, 1988:1). The Spanish empire was losing its might. Mexico became a nation, but, unfortunately, it did not have time to enjoy its freedom, consolidate its population of around 6 million people, and build an infrastructure to unify the new country, which was formed by a racially heterogeneous society. Mexico did not have time as, by the mid-nineteenth century, it again became a victim, then of the American expansionism. Actually, since its independence in 1821, Mexico had been the target of both the United States’s and England’s ambitions (ACUÑA, 1988:2). It is worth mentioning that the United States did not need land, as vast portions of its own territory were still unpopulated. Anzaldúa chronicles the North American invasion of Texas:
In the 1800s, Anglos migrated illegally into Texas, which was then part of Mexico, in greater and greater numbers and gradually drove the tejanos (native Texans of Mexican descent) from their lands, committing all manner of atrocities against them (ANZALDÚA, 1999:28).
2 Cortés had another interpreter before Malíntzin, Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Spanish priest who had been living among Indians and could speak their language, Chontal Mayan (FITCH n/d). 16
According to Acuña, “in spite of the hostility, the Mexican government opened Texas, provided that settlers agreed to certain conditions” (ACUÑA, 1988:6). Settlers should be Catholics and promise to be faithful to Mexico. The flood of immigrants started increasing, which alarmed the Mexican authorities. In the beginning, they were farmers who had lost their lands in the depression of 1819. But soon afterwards, in the 1830s, the cheap land in Mexico started attracting entrepreneurs looking for profit. It was too late for the Mexican government to enforce the established agreements, and worse than that, “many settlers considered the native Mexicans to be the intruders” (ACUÑA, 1988:7). As Anzaldúa puts it, “Tejanos lost their land and, overnight, became the foreigners (ANZALDÚA, 1999:28). It was extremely difficult for Mexico to keep on holding control over Texas. As Acuña explains, “the number of Anglo-Americans settlers and the vastness of the territory made it an almost impossible task” (ACUÑA, 1988:7). Mexican authorities, then, decided to get military garrisons in readiness for any possible trouble, an act that was considered hostile by North Americans. Anzaldúa professes that “their illegal invasion forced Mexico to fight a war to keep its Texas territory” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:28). She goes on saying that the Battle of the Alamo, won by the Mexicans, turned out to be the excuse the North Americans needed to legitimize their “white imperialist takeover” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:28). In 1845, Texas was annexed to the United States, becoming a state. Acuña explains that “Mexico promptly broke off diplomatic relations with the United States” (ACUÑA, 1988:12). In order to justify the conquest and annexation of Texas, Anglo- Americans distorted events, once their goal was but one: profit. According to Acuña, “to Anglo-Americans, the Texas War was caused by a tyrannical or, at best, an incompetent Mexican government that was antithetical to the ideals of democracy and justice” (ACUÑA, 1988:6). It seems ironical to see their justification based on words such as democracy and justice, as it is well known that Mexico did not invade Texas; Texas belonged to Mexico. Influenced by the doctrine of Manifest Destiny 3, many Americans believed they had been chosen by God to control other peoples and countries to save them. Support for a war against Mexico was not unanimous, the United States
3 John O’ Sullivan coined the expression “Manifest Destiny” in 1839. He states: “America is destined for better deeds […] we are the nation of human progress, and who will, what can, set limits to our own onward march? Providence is with us, and no earthly power can” (O’ SULLIVAN, 1987: 9). 17
provoked it led by the belief in their superiority, and, of course, by greed for profit and wealth. George Tindall and David Shi, in America : A Narrative History, report that among those against the war was a congressman called Abraham Lincoln who, in 1847, introduced “spot resolutions”, as he wanted to know the specific spot where it was said American soldiers had been killed on their own soil. What Lincoln suspected was that the American troops were, in fact, in Mexican soil when they were fired at (TINDALL & SHI, 1999:345). However, voices against the war were few. In some areas, the war had become extremely popular, as can be seen in the words of American writer Herman Melville: “people here are all in a state of delirium ... A military ardor pervades all ranks” (TINDALL & SHI, 1999:345). Tindall and Shi add that both North Americans and Mexicans were not prepared for the war in the sense that their armies were small and composed of inexperienced men. The numerical advantage of the Mexican army – 32,000 soldiers against 7,000 Americans – did not represent a real threat once many Mexicans had been recruited from prisons. Besides, the American force grew increasingly fast and, during the war, counted 104,000 men, including 31,000 regular troops and marines (TINDALL & SHI, 1999:346). What American president Polk really aimed at – and achieved – was a small war which would not spoil the country’s reputation but would force a peace treaty (TINDALL & SHI, 1999:346). Defeated, Mexico had no other alternative but to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which ended the war, “accepting the Rio Grande as the Texas border and ceding the Southwest (which incorporated the present- day states of California, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and Utah) to the United States in return for $ 15 million” (ACUÑA, 1988:19). Anzaldúa explains the treaty’s consequences:
The border fence that divides the Mexican people was born on February 2, 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. It left 100,000 Mexican citizens on this side, annexed by conquest along with the land. The land established by the treaty as belonging to Mexicans was soon swindled away from its owners. The treaty was never honored and restitution, to this day, has never been made (ANZALDÚA, 1999:29).
While Acuña says that the war was quite profitable for the United States, which took over one million square miles from Mexico “at a relatively small cost in men and 18
money”, Tindall and Shi mention, among the war’s legacies, the casualties it brought to the United States: 1,721 killed; 4,102 wounded and 11,155 dead of disease, suggesting that the U.S. underwent a great loss (ACUÑA, 1988:13; TINDALL & SHI, 1999:351). While William H. Wharton writes in his poem “the wilderness of Texas has been redeemed by Anglo-American blood and enterprise” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:29), Castillo concludes that:
As with many of the treaties between native Americans and the U.S. government, ours, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo has been largely violated. This appropriation of territory came as a result of what is known on this side of the border as the Mexican-American war (1846-1848). In Mexico it is known as the North American Invasion. Again , we see that history depends on the view of the chronicler (CASTILLO, 1995:3, italics mine ).
After the treaty, a new frontier was demarcated. A new borderland, a new “zone of contact”. It is important to mention that the expression “zone of contact” was coined by the Canadian researcher Mary-Louise Pratt and it refers to social spaces where different cultures meet, clash and intertwine, often in extremely unequal relationships of domination and subordination (PRATT, 1999:27). The Texas War defined the U.S.-Mexican relations. In the U.S. there was a wave of patriotism and national pride. According to Walt Whitman, the victory over Mexico “must elevate the true self-respect of the American people” and even Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was against the war, ended up by accepting the annexations of new territory, saying that “most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means” (TINDALL & SHI, 1999:351). Meanwhile, the Mexican people were suffering persecution, and even the danger of being killed, as the political system allowed the Texas Rangers to murder Mexicans. According to Acuña, in the 1860s and 1870s, the structure of the labor market had changed due to the Civil War and the Black emancipation. The demand for Mexican workers increased. In the 1880s, the economy in southern Texas underwent a change, requiring more Mexican labor for the farms (ACUÑA, 1988:49). Summing up, economy in Texas was completely dominated by North Americans. One of the ways North Americans controlled the Mexican population was through “the machine politics”: while the Mexican upper and middle classes acted as 19
brokers, once they had influence over the poor, lower-class Mexicans either received protection from their bosses in exchange for their vote or were paid to cross the border and bring more Mexicans, who would also be paid, to vote on pre-established candidates. By the end of the nineteenth century some American reformers tried to end “the machine politics” and, as a result, Mexicans lost their right to vote (ACUÑA, 1988:49-50). Throughout the nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican relations were marked by resentment on the part of Mexican villagers and Pueblo Indians, which resulted in armed rebellion, active resistance and North American military occupation. It goes without saying that this active resistance came mainly from the poor as many of the Mexican upper and middle classes cooperated with North American elites in exchange for privileges. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, supposed to guarantee Mexican people individual and community grants, was totally ignored. The railroads accelerated the industrialization, provoking centralization of capital. As a consequence, the subsistence farmer and the communal property declined and land went to monopolists or the government. Some Mexicans tried to resist by joining trade unions and political parties or forming mutualistas (ACUÑA, 1988:77-78). These events are what Anzaldúa calls la crisis : “ Los gringos had not stopped at the border. By the end of the nineteenth century, powerful landowners in Mexico, in partnership with U.S. colonizing companies, had dispossessed millions of Indians of their lands” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:32). By the beginning of the twentieth century, Mexicans and poor North Americans were working in mines and commercial farms, especially in Arizona where copper had become a synonym for wealth. However, even the working class was divided by racism: North American miners not only refused to join strikes in which Mexicans took part but also tried to exclude Mexicans from the camps (ACUÑA), 1988:103). Mexicans kept on struggling for their rights, rejecting their subaltern position; they were excluded from almost all North American social and cultural institutions. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, there had been strikes, the most radical ones taking place in 1903 and 1906 (ACUÑA, 1988:103). Mexicans were also active in 1915 and 1917 strikes and Anzaldúa narrates the atrocities against Mexican Americans who participated in acts of resistance: 20
Anglo-vigilante groups began lynching Chicanos. Texas Rangers would take them into the brush and shoot them. One hundred Chicanos were killed in a matter of months, whole families lynched. Seven thousand fled to Mexico, leaving their small ranches and farms. The Anglos, afraid that the mexicanos would seek independence from the U.S., brought in 20,000 army troops to put an end to the social protest movement in South Texas. Race hatred had finally fomented into an all out war (ANZALDÚA, 1999:30).
By 1921, many of the miners involved in strikes went into cotton production, a symbol of change and restructuring of the industry. Farm production increased and in 1929, one in five workers was in agriculture. It is clear, though, that Mexicans did not work exclusively in agriculture. They were also in the cities, as the demand for labor kept on increasing. That was not the only reason for the constant migrancy of Mexicans. Some had political reasons – they were escaping from Mexican dictator Porfírio Díaz. Migrancy brought consequences to Mexicans who, vulnerable, were exposed to severe economic exploitation. In North American unplanned cities, for example, they were obliged to compete for space with other ethnic groups, and ended up in tenement-like shelters. Mexicans, thus, had to adopt new ways of life and gettoization became the rule for Mexicans living in the cities (ACUÑA, 1988:136). Anzaldúa explains how the story of Mexicans during the twentieth century is represented by their dependence and adaptation to the U.S.’s labor market needs:
One-fourth of all Mexicans work at maquiladoras ; most are young women. Next to oil, maquiladoras are Mexico’s second greatest source of U.S. dollars ... while the women are in the maquiladoras , the children are left on their own. Many roam the street, become part of cholo gangs. The infusion of the values of the white culture, coupled with the exploitation by that culture, is changing the Mexican way of life (ANZALDÚA, 1999:32).
Mexicans’ story in the twentieth century, however, goes beyond their adaptation to the American market. It chronicles the consequences of their exclusion from North American institutions which have deprived them of basic human rights. It is also the story of their struggle, activism and resistance to social, economic, political and cultural injustices. The nativism which prevailed in the first decades of the twentieth century was aggravated after the depression of 1929. Poor whites displaced Mexicans in 21
agriculture, and using the excuse of cost effectiveness, local authorities repatriated a half-million Mexicans (ACUÑA, 1988:137). In Alzaldúa’s words: “ No hay trabajo . Half of the people are unemployed” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:32). World War II revealed the contradictions of the so-called American democratic society and the role of Mexican-Americans in it. Thousands fought bravely in the war while the ones who stayed behind kept on facing racism and witnessing legitimized violence against them, especially against their youth. Among the consequences brought to Mexican Americans by the war were their industrialization and urbanization, and their deeper assimilation into the life of the country. With the Cold War, a new rise in nationalism and racial intolerance led Mexican-Americans to join organizations for protection. By the end of the 1950s, MAPA (Mexican American Political Association) was created in California (ACUÑA, 1988:137-138). Alvina Quintana shows how this rise of American patriotism in the 1950s was responsible for what happened in the 1960s:
Dialectical criticism enables us to chart the shifting nature of U.S. consciousness and to assess the ways in which the cold-war 1950s, characterized by a patriotic belief in the dominant system, represented the suppression of opposing interests. The 1960s, then, marked an attempt by groups outside the mainstream to end their orchestrated silence (QUINTANA, 1996:18).
The 1960s, a decade of immense and rapid changes, witnessed the struggle for civil rights. The government, the media and the people in general were forced to acknowledge there was poverty and social inequality in America. Black people’s living conditions could not be worse. Although they represented the largest ethnic minority in the United States, they had been strongly discriminated against even after their emancipation in the 19 th century. Disenfranchised, living on the margins of the white- dominated society, the Blacks started struggling against segregation in practically all sectors. Black versus white confrontations ended up by affecting other minorities in the country, especially Mexican-Americans. Activists of Mexican descent, born and/or raised in the United States, reappropriated the term Chicano, which had a negative connotation, and started the Chicano Nationalist Movement in the mid-sixties. Since then, the term Chicano/a has acquired a political significance. Chicanos are Mexican- 22
Americans who fight for social inclusion in order to invert their institutionalized negation. Joining Black people in their demand for civil rights, Chicanos, who were increasing in number, and who were concentrated in key states and cities (80%), saw potential for political power. As Acuña states “the success of the Víva Kennedy clubs… created the illusion that participation in the Democratic party would give Mexican- Americans easier access to elected and appointed offices” (ACUÑA, 1988:354:355). However, economic, social and political barriers did not allow Chicanos’ complete participation in American society. Institutional racism was the excuse for their exploitation, and, worse than that, Chicanos’ lack of education hindered them from having better paying jobs (ACUÑA, 1988:355). Although the Civil Rights Movement can be said to have brought changes within the American society, Chicanos kept on suffering great discrimination and poverty. Cherríe Moraga stresses how the Civil Rights Movement grew out of Black people’s experience and necessity and ended up by affecting other minorities:
The Civil Rights Movement is probably the best recent example in this country of a movement that was able to reach masses of people through its spiritually uplifting vision. The power of that vision, however, was based on the fact that in a very profound sense, it was deeply rooted in Black culture, and therefore, of necessity. Black spirituality. Religious fervor was not manufactured for the purposes of social or revolutionary change, but instead grew directly out of Black people’s experience, influencing all those who became a part of that movement (MORAGA, 1983: 121).
Moraga believes that activism and political movements can be both inspired and made effective by spirituality (MORAGA, 1983:120). This may be the case of the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA), founded by César Chávez who emerged “not only as a union and civil rights leader but as a symbol for the Chicano Movement” (ACUÑA, 1988:355). Anzaldúa explains the importance of Chávez for Chicanos:
Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965 when César Chávez and the farmworkers united and I Am Joaquín was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul – we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together – who we were, 23
what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become (ANZALDÚA, 1999:85).
According to Acunã, César Chávez succeeded in getting a salary raise for Chicanos who, “relegated to the low paying urban positions, still worked in agriculture”. At the time, California was the center for this farmwork activity. In the mid-1960s, the American government started limiting the number of Mexicans entering the United States, which proved to be an ineffective measure “since political realities and the need for Mexican labor neutralized the political solutions” (ACUÑA, 1988:355). Actually, it is clear that American immigration policy has always been ambiguous: undocumented workers were allowed to enter the country when North Americans needed extra Mexican labor, especially during harvest time. As soon as harvest was over, these workers were sent back to Mexico. It is worth remembering that all threats to “close the borders” never came true (TORRES, 1993:4). Recent proposals to build a massive wall between the two countries will likely be forgot and Mexican labor in the U.S. will continue to be courted or rejected, depending on the political climate and the economic needs of the host country. In the second half of the 1960s, the Chicano Movement targeted education as issue number one in their agenda. Education committees were created in the Southwest and Midwest to combat the “poor quality of education, the high dropout rate, the absence of relevant curricula, and the lack of Mexican American teachers and counselors” (ACUÑA, 1988:356). Chicano’s political consciousness was also raised by factors such as the U.S. invasion of Santo Domingo, the expansion of the war in Southeast Asia together with the anti-Vietnam marches, the cult of Che Guevara, and diverse anticolonial struggles (ACUÑA, 1988:355-356). In 1965, AMEA was created in Los Angeles while in California Chicano students organized UMAS, and tejanos , MAYO. After 1967, new Chicano leaders were engaged in representing and helping the farmworkers and the urban Chicanos. The year 1968, considered by Chicanos the year of the heroes, was agitated by more revolts among youth who looked up to leaders such as César Chávez, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles, José Angel Gutierrez and Reies López Tijerina. These men “expressed the community’s frustrations over inadequate education, police brutality, the Vietnam War, and dislocation from their land” (ACUÑA, 1988:356). 24
Nevertheless, “after the smoke cleared”, as Acuña puts it, “in spite of real change for most North Americans, very little progress had been made by Chicanos” (ACUÑA, 1988:356). In the 1970s the activists and the grass-roots organizations were in decline and the middle class was, again, in control of the situation. Acuña states that the poor and the minorities suffered “a severe backlash” against them and that President Nixon started a policy of getting closer to the Mexican-American middle class in order to initiate a change from the designation “Chicano” to “Hispanic” (ACUÑA, 1988:402). Ana Castillo clearly opposes the label Hispanic and explains that Americans’ decision to adopt it suggests their attempt to Europeanize immigrants (CASTILLO, 1995:28). According to her:
Hispanic gives us all one ultimate paternal culture progenitor: Spain. The diverse cultures already on the American shores when the Europeans arrived as well as those introduced because of the African slave trade, are completely obliterated by the term. Hispanic is nothing more than a concession made by the U.S. legislature when they saw they couldn’t get rid of us. If we won’t go away, why not at least Europeanize us, make us presentable guests at the dinner table, take away our feathers and rattles and civilize us once and for all (CASTILLO, 1995:28).
Furthermore, Castillo argues that “the term Hispanic is a misnomer because one- fifth of South America – Brazil – does not speak Spanish” and adds that “a large population of Guatemala speaks indigenous dialects as a first language” (CASTILLO, 1995:27). Castillo is not alone in her opposition to the term “Hispanic”. Alvina Quintana in her recent book Reading U.S. Latina Writers; Remapping American Literature remarks that “Hispanic” is a “label signifying a European language rather than an ethnic or national point of origin”. She expresses her preference for the term Latino because it “allows for a recognition of the cultural hybridization created by the European fusion with Indigenous, African or Asian peoples” (QUINTANA, 2005:3-4). Although Acuña states that after the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s Chicanos’ progress slowed down and Ana Castillo shows the rapid fall of the Chicano Movement, as it lasted less than two decades, she attributes to El Movimiento Chicano the fact that the government was forced to reckon its Latino population. She explains that:
Because of its force there is today a visible sector of Latinos who are college degreed, who have mortgages on decent houses and who are 25
articulate in English (In Spanish, when a person has facility in a language to get by, we say we can “defend” ourselves; we now have a substantial number of Latinos who are defending themselves against anglophile culture) (CASTILLO, 1995:31).
In fact, more than the recognition of the Latino population, pointed out by Castillo, the Chicano Movement of the 1960s promoted, as María Antónia Oliver- Rotger explains in Battlegrounds and Crossroads: Social and Imaginary Space in Writing by Chicanas (2003), “a revision of American history in relation to the history of its others” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:96). Women, prior to the Feminist Movement, were included in this category. According to Chandra Mohanty, a feminist re-vision of history involves “a process that is significant not merely as a corrective to the gaps, erasures, and misunderstandings of hegemonic masculinist history but because the very practice of remembering and rewriting leads to the formation of politicized consciousness and self-identity” (MOHANTY, 2004: 78). Women belonging to ethnic minorities found themselves in a double bind when they tried to take part in the processes of revising history and developing a political consciousness: nationalist movements were built upon a patriarchal foundation whereas the Women’s Movement avoided racial issues. It was in this context that coalitions of “women of color” started being formed. In Sula (1973), Toni Morrison pointed out that women of color needed to understand that they were “neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them”, so “they had to set about creating something else to be” (DAVIDSON & WAGNER-MARTIN, 1995: 880-881). In 1981 Chicana writers and activists published This Bridge Called My Back , a groundbreaking anthology containing essays, letters, poems, short stories and journal entries written by women of color who, in spite of their awareness of the differences separating them, decided to work together “out of political necessity” and face “the simultaneity of oppressions” that informed their daily lives. As Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa remarked, “the works combined reflect a diversity of perspectives, linguistic styles and cultural tongues” (MORAGA & ANZALDÚA, 1983: XXIV). Their search for a theory which could align various social movements across differences of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation resulted in the “Theory in the Flesh” elaborated by Cherríe Moraga :
26
A theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives - our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings - all fuse to create a politic born out of necessity. Here, we attempt to bridge the contradictions in our experience (MORAGA & ANZALDÚA, 1983:23).
In Home Girls : chicana literary voices , Alvina Quintana establishes a connection between “a more comprehensive theorizing about cultures and individuals” and alternative modes of articulation which steer away from abstract theorization (QUINTANA, 1996: 32-33). In Feminism Without Borders, Chandra Mohanty refers to the “falsely universalizing methodologies that serve the narrow self-interest of Western feminism”, a colonizing feminism (MOHANTY, 2003: 222-223). The privileging of conventional academic discourse in detriment to alternative discourses is one of the issues in the political agenda of women of color. Echoing the idea of “political necessity” defended by Moraga in the Preface to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back , Mohanty underscores that
[…] The term “women of color” (a term often used interchangeably with “Third World Women”)… designates a political constituency, not a biological or even sociological one. …Similarly, it is Third World women’s oppositional political relation to sexist, racist and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality (MOHANTY, 2003: 49).
The existence of “third world zones” in the U.S, as has been mentioned earlier, makes for various “zones of contact” throughout the country, often with the potential for explosive situations 4. The need to revise the image of the U.S as a single imagined community is another issue uniting women of color. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson explains the two elements in the phrase he uses to define a nation:
It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nations will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. … It is imagined as a community , because, regardless of the actual inequality
4 Paul Haggis’s recent film “Crash” (U.S./Germany, 2005), set in Los Angeles, illustrates this potential quite dramatically. It explores varied conflicts among people from different cultures and social classes, sharing the same social space. Exposing the fallacy of the so-called melting pot, the film portrays the difficulty – often impossibility – of negotiating between cultures. Solidarity is rare and temporary at best. Loneliness pervades the characters’ lives and, as the black detective points out, people are so lonely in Los Angeles that they bump into others in the streets in order to have the sensation of being touched. 27
and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship (ANDERSON, 2000: 6-7).
Oliver-Rotger affirms that “an official view of the United States as ‘imagined community’ … was partially possible thanks to the racialization of Mexican Americans and other immigrants and their exclusion from active participation in the national ethos” and adds that “The Civil Rights movement challenged the view of America as one people and broke up the apparent consensus of American society” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 94-95). Ana Castillo is among those who have questioned the idea of the American melting pot. She states that assimilation may have happened concerning white people, “but people of color in the U.S. have not successfully blended into the infamous melting pot (CASTILLO, 1995:2). The expression “melting pot”, used to define American society and identity, was taken from the title of Israel Zangwill’s play (1909) and, as Oliver-Rotger explains, “the image suggested the dissolution or melting of different pasts and origins into a new sense of Americanness” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:94-95). She argues that “different but related representations of the United States” such as the idea of “pluralism” and “the metaphor of the kaleidoscope” reflect in one way or another Benedict Anderson’s definition of “imagined community”, since “they all evoke horizontal relations between citizens, the linear historical development of the nation, and the presence of cultural emblems that repeat themselves consistently in the uniform American imagination” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:95). In Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha remarks that there is a tension between the pedagogical narrative of a nation and the narrative(s) people produce daily as citizens (BHABHA, 1990:296). According to him, there is a gap “between the rule and the representation of the rule”. He adds:
Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries (both actual and conceptual) disturb those ideological maneuvers through which “imagined communities” are given essentialist identities (BHABHA, 1990:299).
It may be concluded, thus, that counter-narratives not only destabilize the concept of the United States as a single imagined community but also point to a broader idea, the one of the United States made up of several imagined communities. 28
Concerning Chicanas, the focus of my work, it seems appropriate to cite Laura Pérez’s premise in “El Desorden, Nationalism and Chicana/o Aesthetics”. According to Pérez, artistic imagination enables Chicana feminists to destabilize “social and cultural, spatial and ideological topographies of the ‘proper’ in the United States”(PÉREZ, 1999: 19). Keeping pace with Pérez’s rationale, we find Chicana writers revisiting Aztlán, their indigenous territory lost to the Spaniards, as their “imagined community”. The appropriation of the myth of Aztlán and other Aztec myths and Mexican legends involving female figures have become crucial in Chicana writers’ counterdiscourse, as will be shown in the following chapter. 29
CHAPTER 2
Revisiting Myths and Reinventing Traditions
Imagination, a function of the soul, has the capacity to extend us beyond the confines of our skin, situation, and condition so we can choose our responses. It enables us to reimagine our lives, rewrite the self, and create guiding myths for our times.
Gloria Anzaldúa , this bridge we call home.
In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell states that, on comparing the mythologies of the world, he came to see the “cultural history of mankind as a unit” (CAMPBELL, 1959: V). According to him, “such themes as the firetheft, deluge, land of the dead, virgin birth, and resurrected hero” have appeared throughout the world “interpreted by seers, poets, theologians, or philosophers; presented in art; magnified in song; and ecstatically experienced in life-empowering visions” (CAMPBELL, 1959:3). Luís da Câmada Cascudo, the most important Brazilian writer dealing with the study of myths and legends, and author of Lendas Brasileiras , is in accordance with Campbell when he says:
In all countries of the world there are legends, apologues, customs, superstitions, everything linked to popular tradition, making up the soul and the essence of a people, the principle of their aspirations, the 1 foundation of their literature (CASCUDO, 2000: 7, my translation ) .
Campbell wonders why “ whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives”, their option has not been the facts, but “the myths of an immemorial imagination” (CAMPBELL, 1959:4). He predicts there is no doubt that, in the future, the same old motifs or themes will also be present “in new relationships indeed” as “man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth”. The force myths have is unquestionable. According to Campbell:
1 Em todos os países do mundo há lendas, apólogos, costumes, supertições, tudo unido à tradição popular, fazendo parte da alma e da essência de um povo, princípio de suas aspirações, base de sua literatura (CASCUDO, 2000: 7). 30
[...] it is a fact that the myths of our several cultures work upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, as energy-releasing, life- motivating and directing agents; so that even though our rational minds may be in agreement, the myths by which we are living – or by which our fathers lived – can be driving us, at that very moment, diametrically apart (CAMPBELL, 1959:4).
Once the importance of myths in man’s life is acknowleged, a major problem is posed: are myths the fruit of “primitive ignorance (superstitions)” or, exactly the opposite, “transcendent symbols”? If so, how can it be explained that, as products of the psyche, they have appeared throughout the world? (CAMPBELL, 1959:15). Campbell explains that few people in the nineteenth century were able to address these questions without prejudice. Jean Martin Charcot and his pupils Sigmund Freud and Carl G. Jung opened new horizons for the study of the dark sides of the psyche. Other important names are associated with the search for answers concerning myths and the human psyche, such as Thomas Mann, Schopenhauer, Ibsen and Nietzsche. For Thomas Mann, “the myth is the foundation of life, the timeless schema , the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious” (CAMPBELL, 1959:18). According to Campbell, “mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood” (CAMPBELL, 1959:42). Speculating about the origin of myths and their subsequent shaping, Campbell refers to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in which James Joyce provides a wonderful principle for the study of mythology. Joyce considers the material of tragedy as “whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings” and Campbell concludes that is exactly from the “grave and constant” that myths are derived. Therefore it can be said that what is “grave and constant in human sufferings” leaves imprints on the human psyche, providing the material for myths to come to being (CAMPBELL, 1959:50). Campbell makes it very clear that each imprint on the human psyche, or “the elementary idea,” is never directly portrayed in mythology, “but always rendered by way of local ethnic ideas or forms” (CAMPBELL, 1959:130). He states that myths have two aspects: – the first is psychological or metaphysical and aims at the discovery of what is “permanent or universal in human nature”; – the second is ethnological or 31
historical and aims at “the function of the local scene, the landscape, the history, and the sociology of the folk concerned” (CAMPBELL, 1959:461). Since elementary ideas are experienced indirectly, as the imprints on the human psyche are locally conditioned, they “may reflect attitudes either of resistance or of assimilation”. Campbell clarifies this reasoning:
The imagery of myth, therefore, can never be a direct presentation of the total secret of the human species, but only the function of an attitude, the reflex of a stance, a life pose, a way of playing the game. And where the rules or forms of such play are abandoned, mythology dissolves – and, with mythology, life (CAMPBELL, 1959:131).
Although I do not intend here to carry out an extensive analysis covering all the aspects, functions, and meanings within the scope of myths, it is fundamental to cite Claude Lévi-Strauss, the renowned French anthropologist, who wrote, among other books, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture , published in 1978. In the Foreword of the 1995 edition, Wendy Doniger, professor of The History of Religions at the University of Chicago, comments on the various books and lectures by Lévi-Strauss and says that, according to the famous anthropologist, mythology is the attempt man makes to understand the chaos provided by nature, and that, in this attempt, man, invariably, has his imagination trapped by dualisms. The French anthropologist spent his life affirming that human beings tend to split everything into twos:
We are split creatures literally by nature, and we organize data like a simple digital machine. Our common sense is binary; the simplest and most efficient way to process experience seems to be by dividing it in half, and then to divide the halves in half, reformulating every question so that there are only two possible answers to it, yes or no (LÉVI- STRAUSS, 1995:VIII-IX).
Many critics think that Lévi-Strauss has reduced myths to logical oppositions, but Doniger’s opinion is that he has illuminated human ambivalences. Cristicism apart, one thing can be taken for granted as explained by Doniger: “Indeed, he is the one who taught us that every myth is driven by the obsessive need to solve a paradox that cannot be solved” (LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1995:X). Both Lévi-Strauss and Joseph Campbell point out two fundamental aspects of myths: the psychological or metaphysical and the ethnological or historical. Lévi- 32
Strauss makes clear the tension between particularity and universalism when he mentions that his work is only about groups geographically and culturally linked (Indian tribes of South America) but, at the same time, he shapes theories that imply universalist claims about all human beings, not simply about those South American tribes (LÉVI- STRAUSS, 1995:XI). His position reinforces what Campbell has stated that the imprints on the human mind are locally or ethnically mediated, or in other words, myths aim at the discovery of the universal and the permanent in human nature, but this discovery is portrayed according to local ethnic ideas. Among the various imprints on man’s mind, one is of particular interest for my work as I will be dealing specifically with literature produced by women who fight for self-assertion and voice in a male-controlled world. As Campbell reports, one of the most profound imprints on the human mind is related to:
[…] the mysterious (one might even say, magical) functioning of the female body in its menstrual cycle, in the ceasing of the cycle during the period of gestation, and in the agony of birth – and the appearance, then, of the new being (CAMPBELL, 1959:59).
These phenomena were responsible for others such as fear of menstrual blood, women’s isolation during their periods, rites of fecundity and rites of birth. Campbell points out that this fear of woman and of all the mystery involving her have become “impressive imprinting forces” for man, as strong as the fears of the mysteries of nature. Man has, then, “these two alien yet intimately constraining forces: woman and the world” (CAMPBELL, 1959:60). Another imprinting force, deeply related to the one mentioned above, is the supposed envy women bear because they have been “castrated” while men are constantly afraid of castration. Campbell explains that women forget all about this envy as soon as they give birth to a son. However, the male imaginary has “the woman as a potential spiritual, if not physical, castrator”. This fact explains “the imagery of the mother associated almost equally with beatitude and danger, birth and death, the inexhaustible nourishing breast and the tearing claws of the ogress” in mythology and rites (CAMPBELL, 1959:71). Gloria Anzaldúa reinforces what Campbell has stated by showing the way culture determines our beliefs:
33
Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us). Culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces. The female, by virtue of creating entities of flesh and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die), by virtue of being in tune with nature’s cycles, is feared. Because, according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other. She is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and fear (ANZALDÚA, 1999:39).
Therefore, it seems plausible enough to state that those imprints on man’s mind, which give origin to myths, explain men’s behavior towards women, and the subsequent patriarchal societies spread throughout the world. Afraid of women’s power and mystery, men end up by controlling their behavior. This reasoning finds echo in many of the myths. Among them, a myth told in New Mexico by Jicarilla Apache Indians is worth being narrated not only because it illustrates men’s necessity to “domesticate” women and control their sexuality but also because it sheds light on the focus of this work. Campbell tells us there was a murderous monster named Kicking Monster. He had four daughters known as “vagina girls” because they were the only women in the world to have vaginas. Although they lived in a house full of vaginas, the four girls were the only vaginas in the form of women. News being spread about the vagina girls brought many men to their house. However, Kicking Monster, their father, used to kick them into the house and nobody saw them again. It was then that a courageous boy hero known as Killer-of-Enemies decided to do something to solve the problem. He entered their house and was, soon, approached by the four girls who were anxious for intercourse. He first asked them about the men who had disappeared, and the girls immediately replied that they had eaten the men up simply because they enjoyed doing that. The girls tried hard to embrace the boy hero who shouted at them: “Keep away! That is no way to use the vagina. First I must give you some medicine, which you have never tasted before, medicine made of sour berries; and then I’ll do what you ask”. He gave them sour berries of four kinds while he said: “the vagina is always sweet when you do like this.” The girls ate a great deal of sour berries and got happy as though they were having intercourse with the Killer-of-Enemies. Actually, they were experiencing 34
moments of ecstasy provoked by the medicine. Their teeth were destroyed as a consequence of the power of the sour berries, preventing them from eating any other men. That is how the boy hero domesticated the toothed vagina girls (CAMPBELL, 1959:74-75). Thus, the disempowerment of women and the consequent empowerment of men have been perpetuated since pre-historical times. My aim here, after having presented a brief commentary on myths, is to show how Chicana writers have looked back on old Aztec myths and Mexican legends as strategies of resistance against multiple forms of oppression, subverting the condition of subalternity imposed upon them. According to Anzaldúa, it is through myths that many Chicana writers have become “expert[s] at the Balancing Act” (MORAGA & ANZALDÚA, 1983:209), confirming Campbell’s reasoning that myths are structuring agents whose function is to place the human order in accordance with the universal order. In his words:
The myths and rites constitute a mesocosm – a mediating, middle cosmos, through which the microcosm of the individual is brought into relation to the macrocosm of the all. And this mesocosm is the entire context of the body social (CAMPBELL, 1959:150).
This “mediating middle cosmos”, referred to by Campbell, has enabled Chicanas to negotiate between their Mexican past and their American future; the revisiting of old Aztec myths and Mexican legends has given Chicanas the necessary strength to engage in a more active struggle to guarantee their present reality. According to Bakhtin, when separated from the past and future, “the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration” (BAKHTIN apud QUINTANA, 1996:21-22). In fact, not only mediation and revision but also negotiation and transformation have been imperative for those who live in zones of contact, suffering oppression, torn between two worlds and two cultures, and facing the second-class status of a hyphenated citizen (Mexican-American). Chicano/a’s situation can be clearly understood through Rosaura Sánchez’s explanation of their process of acculturation:
If we consider acculturation at both ideological and material levels, ethnic groups in this country can be seen to suffer both inclusion and exclusion. Ideologically, thanks to the media and to our education 35
system, these groups will probably have swallowed the same myths and yet, materially, be excluded from the lifestyle, goods and services that characterize the life of middle classes in the U.S. (SÁNCHEZ, 1990:295).
It is, thus, no coincidence that Chicana writers, who find themselves living in liminality, have decided to revisit their indigenous past in order to build up an identity of their own and to foster a sense of national identity. They have thus reappropriated the Aztec myth of Aztlán, which was the land of indigenous peoples in America. In Anzaldúa’s words:
The Aztecas del norte , ... compose the largest single tribe or nation of Anishinabeg (Indians) found in the United States today ... some call themselves Chicanos and see themselves as people whose true homeland is Aztlán (the U.S. Southwest) (ANZALDÚA, 1999:23).
Chicana writers have also appropriated the Nahuatl term nepantla to represent their personal and collective experiences in-between two cultures and two worlds. Oliver-Rotger says that the word nepantla , according to historian Miguel Léon-Portilla, “describes a sense of placelessness and uprootedness, the impending tragedy of loss of culture and a belief-system, made increasingly evident in a reluctance to take sides” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:15). Although the term implies death and pessimism due to a cultural clash, as pointed out by philosopher Francisco Fernández Buey when he states: “ La relación entre sentimiento de muerte y nepantlismo […] parece haber sido una constante en América” , opposite reactions have also been brought by the sense of nepantlismo , as, for instance, resistance, assimilation, mestizaje or complementation. To reinforce his reasoning, Fernández Buey refers to the “resistance to Hispanic acculturation on behalf of the acknowledged superiority of indigenous deities to the Christian deity”, among indigenous tribes in America (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:15- 16). The feeling of nepantlismo or liminality was reinforced during the Chicano Movement, which can be said to have marked the beginning of a new era for Chicanas, once it promoted “the revision of American history in relation to the history of its others”, as already mentioned (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:96). The revision for Chicanas was broader once they suffered oppression due to their postcolonial situation and to 36
their condition as diasporical women “caught between two patriarchies” (CLIFFORD, 1994: 314). Chicana writers have constantly expressed their sense of nepantlismo and their writings, according to Oliver-Rotger, “are reflections upon a complicated cultural, political and socio-economic reality and of its psychological import upon the female subject” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:16). Pat Mora’s Nepantla (1993) provides the actual sense of liminality Chicanas have been through:
The land in the middle. “I am the middle woman, /not my mother, not my daughter.” I had at times considered nepantla , which means “place in the middle” in Nahuatl […] as a possible title for a poetry collection. […] Tonight I write these words from the middle of the United States, but I am a child of the border, the land corridor bordered by the two countries that have most influenced my perception of reality (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:15).
Gloria Anzaldúa also expresses her nepantla state in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza . For Oliver-Rotger, the term “borderlands” is “a contemporary version of nepantla to provide us with a critical lens in an exploration of the representation of social and imaginary space” in Chicanas’ writings (OLIVER- ROTGER, 2003:16). The new mestiza, of whom Anzaldúa speaks, has a life committed to social issues, and to reach her goal she must fight against oppressive traditions, reinterpreting History, in order to bring back ancient myths of strong women who were erased or considered traitors within a patriarchal ideology. “Part of the work of that mestiza consciousness is to break down dualities that serve to imprison women”, explains Sonia Saldívar-Hull in the Introduction to the Second Edition of Borderlands/La Frontera (1999) . She adds that Anzaldúa’s testimonio shows her “rebellious resistance” against restrictions “placed on many subaltern women under the rule of fathers and male- identified mothers” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:4). Anzaldúa’s resistance resulted in the image of the “Shadow-Beast” which, in her own words, is “a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:38). The Shadow-Beast, Saldívar- Hull states, “emerges as the part of women that frightens men and causes them to try to control and devalue female culture” and subversion of these man-made rules is only possible by “feminist logic” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:4). 37
Making reference to her people, Anzaldúa says: “Our faith is rooted in indigenous attributes, images, symbols, magic and myth”, and adds:
La gente Chicana tiene tres madres . All three are mediators: Guadalupe , the virgin mother who has not abandoned us, la Chingada (Malinche) , the raped mother whom we have abandoned, and la Llorona , the mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the other two (ANZALDÚA, 1999:52).
Anzaldúa states that most Chicanos pratice a different Catholicism as it is blended with pagan elements: “ La Vírgen de Guadalupe ’s Indian name is Coatlalopeuh . She is the central deity connecting us to our Indian ancestry” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:49). Anzaldúa goes on explaining that Coatlalopeuh descends from Earth goddesses, being Coatlicue , or “Serpent Skirt”, the earliest of these goddesses. Mother of all celestial deities, this creator goddess is described as having “a human skull or serpent for a head, a necklace of human hearts, a skirt of twisted serpents and taloned feet” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:49). Coatlicue has another aspect, Tonantsi , the goddess who preferred the sacrifice of small animals to human ones. According to Anzaldúa, the Azteca-Mexican culture was male-centered and not only substituted the female deities by male gods but also discredited them by “giving them monstrous attributes” and splitting them. In Anzaldúa’s words:
They divided her who had been complete, who possessed both upper (light) and underworld (dark) aspects. Coatlicue , the serpent goddess, and her more sinister aspects, Tlazolteotl and Cihuacoatl , were “darkened” and disempowered much in the same manner as the Indian Kali (ANZALDÚA, 1999:49).
Tonantsi , thus, became the good mother once she was separated from her dark aspects, Coatlicue, Tlazolteotl and Cihuacoatl. She became the goddess of agriculture, protector of the crops and of people’s health. After the conquest, Tonantsi became Guadalupe . Anzaldúa explains that:
[…] the Spaniards and their Church continued to split Tonantsi/ Guadalupe. They desexed Guadalupe , taking Coatlalopeuh , the serpent/sexuality out of her. They completed the split begun by the Nahuas by making la Vírgen de Guadalupe/Vírgen María into chaste 38
virgins and Tlazolteotl/Coatlicue/la Chingada into putas (ANZALDÚA, 1999:49-50).
The Catholic Church and patriarchal society in general encouraged the cult of la Vírgen de Guadalupe also as a symbol of purity, docility, self-sacrifice – a role model for Mexicanas . But Guadalupe became the patron saint of Mexicanos , a role normally assigned to male gods. When Mexico was trying to get free from the Spanish dominion, that is to say, during the Mexican Revolution, Anzaldúa points out that “Emiliano Zapata and Miguel Hidalgo used her image to move el pueblo mexicano toward freedom”. She also narrates that Guadalupe’s image “on banners heralded and united the farmworkers” during the 1965 grape strike in many parts of the United States. Anzaldúa adds that “Today, in Texas and Mexico she is more venerated than Jesus or God the Father” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:51). Gradually transformed from a symbol of acceptance into one of resistance, La Vírgen de Guadalupe has become a symbol of mediation for Chicano/as once she synthesizes, in their psyche, the cultural values of both the conquered and the conqueror. As Anzaldúa puts it: “She is the symbol of the mestizo true to his or her Indian values. La cultura chicana identifies with the mother (Indian) rather than with the father (Spanish)” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:52). Most importantly, Guadalupe has become the symbol of resistance and rebellion of Mexicans “on both sides of the border”, against the subaltern position both poor and indigenous people are submitted to (ANZALDÚA, 1999:52). It can, thus, be concluded that Guadalupe is of extreme importance to Mexicans and Chicanos, being, simultaneously, the symbol of mediation, of resistance and rebellion, of union among races, religions, languages, and in Anzaldúa’s words: “the symbol of ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity that Chicano-mexicanos , people of mixed race, people who have Indian blood, people who cross cultures, by necessity possess” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:52). Anzaldúa points out that Chicano/as’ three mothers, Guadalupe, Malinche and La Llorona have had their true identity distorted by the Church and patriarchy: “Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-suffering people” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:53). Aware that the identity of the three Chicano/as’ mothers has been subverted, the new mestiza “embarks on her life of action” (ANZALDÚA, 1999:10) to unmake this male 39
interpretation of her culture. Actually, it is of utmost importance to mention that before the Aztecs got consolidated as a nation, women used to have an important role, “although the high posts were occupied by men”. Anzaldúa broadens this piece of information:
Matrilineal descent characterized the Toltecs and perhaps early Aztec society. Women possessed property, and were curers as well as priestesses. According to the codices, women in the former times had the supreme power in Tula, and in the beginning of the Aztec dynasty, the royal blood ran through the female line (ANZALDÚA, 1999:55).
Based on this balance between women’s and men’s power which prevailed in ancient tribes, the new mestiza wants to put “history through a sieve”, and in order to do this, “her first step is to take inventory”. Anzaldúa observes that:
This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths (ANZALDÚA, 1999:104).
Three old myths reshaped and revisited by Chicana writers are at the core of my work: La Malinche, La Llorona and the Hungry Woman. They represent women who, transgressing the ethos of their culture, fight for self-assertion; they cannot be silenced or contained. La Malinche has become a myth in the Mexican imaginary, a historical character seen as paradoxical once she is considered the symbolic mother of the Mexican people (her son with Cortés was the first mestizo ) and, at the same time, a traitor, the mother who sold her children to a foreign people. Malintzin, an icon, a symbol, the myth, has been directly portrayed in literature – by Lucha Corpi, Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, to name just a few, or indirectly – by Sandra Cisneros and Helena María Viramontes, among others, through characters who carry Malintzin’s traits and characteristics, such as her transgression, her resistance, her mediation between two worlds and two cultures. Re-visions of this iconical figure also appear in essays and chronicles by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Norma Alarcón and Tey Diana Rebolledo, for example. 40
In “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object”, Norma Alarcón says that the masculine interpretation of Malintzin’s myth sees “betrayal first of all in her very sexuality”, leading to the belief that the vagina is “the supreme site of evil” and that women’s sexuality condemns them to enslavement, and consequently to self-hatred (MORAGA & ANZALDÚA, 1983:183). On the other hand, Chicana writers have revisited the myth of La Malinche and subverted its traditional male interpretation, the one of La Malinche as La Chingada , a traitor. In Women Singing in the Snow , Tey Diana Rebolledo affirms that, for Chicana writers, Malintzin is not a victim, seduced and raped by the invader, but a woman who made her choice 2. Having language as a tool and political knowledge as well, Malintzin was able to understand the only way to help her race to survive:
It was often because of her diplomacy and intelligence that a more total annihilation of the Indian tribes of Mexico did not occur. It is in this capacity as intercessor (translator) and helper that La Malinche takes on the attributes of the Virgin of Guadalupe (REBOLLEDO, 1995:64-65).
Conversely, for Alarcón, it was impossible for a woman to make a choice in times when men established the rules. In her essay entitled “Traddutora, Traditora: a Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism”, Alarcón counters Chicana writer Adelaida R. del Castillo’s convictions that Malintzin exercised her free will:
Actually, the whole notion of choice, an existentialist notion of twentieth-century Anglo-European philosophy, needs to be problematized in order to understand the constraints under which women of other cultures, times, and places live. In trying to make Malintzin a motivated “producer of history”, del Castillo is not so much reconstructing Malintzin’s own historical moment as she is using her both to counter contemporary masculine discourse and to project a newer sense of a female self, a speaking subject with a thoroughly modern view of historical consciousness (ALARCÓN, 1994:121).
There is no doubt that Malintzin’s dual role as translator, helping Cortés in the Spanish conquest of Mexico, and as mother of Cortés’s son, starting a new race, inscribed Malintzin forever in History as “traddutora/traditora”. According to Alarcón, the one who translates is the one who betrays, and in Malintzin’s case, it was a double
2 Otavio Paz is the first male to see Malinche in a favourable light. In his essay “Los Hijos de La Malinche” (1959), he subverts the traditional Mit. Of La Malinche, showing that she was not a traitor. 41
betrayal: she sold her people to the conqueror and had a son with him, giving birth to a cursed people, marked by treachery. Alarcón proceeds to explain how the concepts of translator and traitor are blended in Malintzin’s character:
Malintzin elicits a fascination entangled with loathing, suspicion and sorrow. As translator she mediates between antagonistic cultural and historical domains. If we assume that language is always in some sense metaphoric, then any discourse, oral or written, is liable to be implicated in treachery when perceived to be going beyond repetition of what the community perceives as the “true” and/or “authentic” concept, image, or narrative. The act of translating, which often introduces different concepts and perceptions, displaces and may even do violence to local knowledge (ALARCÓN, 1994:113).
For Alarcón, Malintzin is also a traitor because she acts independently from her role of mother in a time when women could only articulate their needs and desires for their children’s sake and never for their own sake. She, thus, betrayed women’s primary function – maternity (ALARCÓN, 1994:113). Many women who took part in the Chicano Movement were called malinches or vendidas as their husbands and Chicanos in general thought they should be either fighting for La Raza or at home taking care of their children. According to the masculinist point of view, Chicanos and Chicanas suffered the same kind of oppression. For Chicanas, however, oppression came not only from the hegemonic culture but also from their own. Caught between patriarchies, Chicana writers have become fascinated by the myth of a woman who transgressed the norms of her culture and have decided to revisit the myth in order to avenge Malinche. In Rebolledo’s words:
Women’s lives are particularly circumscribed by cultural values and norms that try to dictate how women should behave and who their role model should be. If, however, the existing mythology (as defined by patriarchy) is unable to fulfill the increasing demand for women as active, energetic, and positive figures, then women writers may choose myths and archetypes, historical and cultural heroines, that are different from the traditional ones. They may create new role models for themselves or choose existing models but imbue them with different (sometimes radically different) traits and characteristics (REBOLLEDO, 1995:49, italics mine ).
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However, it is an extremely difficult task to establish any dialogue “with myth and history” (REBOLLEDO, 1995:76), although Chicana writers have been trying hard to do so. In Loving in the War Years , Moraga chronicles Chicanas’ struggle towards this goal:
Coming from such a complex and contradictory history of sexual exploitation by white men and from within our own race, it is nearly earth-shaking to begin to try and separate the myths told about us from the truths; and to examine to what extent we have internalized what, in fact, is not true (MORAGA, 1983:109).
Moraga goes on explaining that the Chicano/ Mexicano culture connects sex with whatever is dirty, and this is, partly, a legacy from the myth of La Chingada (Malinche). Chicanos think Malinche was not a victim, “but la culpable ”. She must, then, “pay for the pleasure our culture imagined she enjoyed” (MORAGA, 1983:109). Chicana writer Lucha Corpi identifies personally with La Malinche. According to her, they had very similar experiences: they were probably from the same town and had to face the same situation concerning their sons. In Corpi’s words:
With my divorce there was the question of whether my son would live with my ex-husband or with me. For the first time I was confronted with the possibility of my son growing up away from me … Martín Cortés, Marina’s son by Hernán Cortés, was taken from her as a baby and raised in Spain. When he came back she wasn’t his mother, she was the Indian woman his father had raped (REBOLLEDO, 1995:65).
Rebolledo offers further reasons for the identification between Chicana writers and La Malinche:
Because Chicana writers identify with the act of interpretation as they consciously shift from one language and culture to another, and because in the power structure they always have to consider their relation to the dominant culture, it is not surprising that many feel closely aligned with the figure of La Malinche. This ability to translate is seen also as the ability to move easily between multiple cultures as well as languages (REBOLLEDO, 1995:64).
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Poets Carmen Tafolla and Lydia Camarillo, among others, have re-visited the myth of La Malinche. In “Mi Reflejo”, Camarillo gives voice to Malinche, who takes Cortés to task:
Conquistaste y colonizaste mi gente. You alienated me from my people. Me hiciste la “Vendida”. Ya no te acuerdas de me? I am Malinche (QUINTANA, 1996: 52).
Tafolla’s Malinche not only defends herself but also embodies the figure of defender of her race:
But Chingada I was not. Not tricked, not screwed, not traitor. For I was not traitor to myself – I saw a dream And I reached it. Another world ….. la raza. La raaaaa-zaaaaa… ( TAFOLLA, 1978) 3.
As mentioned before, the women who took part in the Chicano Movement were called malinches . Lesbian Chicana writers have also been portrayed as malinches once they have betrayed their traditional role as mothers. Cherríe Moraga thinks that the “sexual legacy” of the myth of Malintzin limits Chicanas’ autonomy. Rebolledo explains that this is due to the fact that “Malinche was also used as an object of sexual desire. Thus she is often portrayed as a whore, standing for the stereotyping of a ‘lower’ culture’s sexuality”. Therefore, any Chicana who fights to subvert tradition (specially sexual tradition) is considered a traitor or a lesbian (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 64). By revising Malintzin’s role in History, Chicana poet Margarita Cota-Cárdenas aims at promoting a discussion about the way old myths and values may malign women who fight for self-assertion and voice. In “Malinche’s Discourse”, she tells us of a university teacher whose name, Miss Lencha, reminds us of La Malinche’s, and whose lesson is about Chicano ideology. Using the stream-of-consciousness technique, Cota- Cárdenas shows the anxiety and ambiguity Chicanos feel towards La Malinche. Miss
3 Source on line: http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/171.html. 44
Lencha’s lesson targets the need to rethink the myth of La Malinche and the role of the conquerors, “linking them to anyone who imposes an ideology on other”. By doing so, Cota-Cárdenas criticizes Mexican Americans who try to control Chicano/as “through cultural stigma” and “brings the question of the merchandising of ideology to the forefront from the beginning, as La Malinche seeks to distinguish how labels begin”. Rebolledo presents an extract from “Malinche’s Discourse”:
Are you Malinche a malinche? Who are you (who am I malinche)? seller or buyer? sold or bought and at what price? What is to be what so many shout say sold-out malinchi who is who are/are we what? at what price without having been there naming putting labels tags what who have bought sold malinchismo what other-ismos invented shouted with hate reacting striking like vipers like snakes THEIR EYES like snakes what who what (REBOLLEDO,1995: 71-72).
As can be seen, “Malinche’s Discourse” reflects Cota-Cárdenas’s and many Chicana writers’ thought that La Malinche is torn between two cultures (Indian/Spanish) and suffers an identity crisis. Cota-Cárdenas explains that, in the beginning, the crisis is related to the Aztec prophecies that the god Quetzalcoatl would appear and the indigenous tribes believed that Cortés was the announced god. Following this crisis, there came the one about native religions and Christianity. This crisis of identity has never, thus, left Chicanos and Chicanas:
The Chicano is also caught between two cultural systems, and the Chicana is then caught between those two and additionally, between gender differences in Chicano culture. Thus La Malinche becomes the formative symbol for all Chicanas caught “between two systems in a conflictive state” (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 72).
Anzaldúa portrays the “conflictive state” mentioned by Cota-Cárdenas as “intimate terrorism” and shows its consequences on the lives of Chicanas:
Alienated from her mother culture, “alien” in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her self. Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios , the spaces between the different worlds she inhabits (ANZALDÚA, 1999: 42).
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In revising the myth to vindicate Malinche, Cota-Cárdenas brings many messages along with her “Malinche’s Discourse”. Women are restricted in their social and intellectual activities, have their behaviors labelled in a negative way and, therefore, “must take great care in accepting passively all that is told by the culture”. Miss Lencha, “the personal vindication of Malinche’s version”, promotes a “dialogue with the patriarchal version of history and myth”, and the subliminal messages are rejection of labels, of tradition, and resistance. It is interesting to note that, because she is a teacher, Miss Lencha symbolizes the continuation of this dialogue in the future (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 73). Chicana writers, as well as Chicanas in general, suffer from the consequences of previously accepted cultural norms. After centuries of oppression, of silence, of lack of freedom to show what to be a woman is, of the imposition of the virgin as the model of goodness, Chicana writers have shown resistance and courage to critically revisit, revise and subvert the traditional norms. In the final part of “Malinche’s Discourse”, Miss Lencha is clearly seen as “Profe Malinchi” by her students who keep on asking her questions such as: “Can people really change?” She answers people can change unless they are dead. One more message by Cota-Cárdenas as explained by Rebolledo:
Those who are still seers, in all the symbolic meanings of that term, those who are still visionaries believe that the world may still change. Once again La Malinche reaches out from the past to instruct the young and to revitalize her image (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 74).
At the end of “Malinche’s Discourse”, Cota-Cárdenas establishes a relationship between La Malinche and La Llorona as a “comadre” (co-mother): “Well, my comadre La Llorona is calling me I still have to teach her to not put up with shit to open her eyes because there’s something really good” (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 75). Actually, in many legends the myth of La Malinche blurs into the myth of La Llorona, the weeping woman. La Malinche, then, becomes La Llorona who cries for Cortés, her children and her nation lost to the Spaniards. Rebolledo details the blending of these mythical figures:
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In folklore, the images and mythology about La Llorona and La Malinche merge until in many areas they are transformed into a unitary figure. The image is a negative one, tied up in some vague way with sexuality and the death or loss of children: the negative mother image. As La Malinche, she is connected to Cortés and is believed to have somehow favored him and betrayed her people. As La Llorona, she is known to appear to young men who roam about at night. They believe she is a young girl or beautiful young woman, but when they approach her (with sexual intent in mind), she shows herself to be a hag or a terrible image of death personified (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 63).
The legend of La Llorona has also become an important cultural icon and a site of resistance for Chicana writers. According to Rebolledo, this mythical figure incorporates elements of Indian and Spanish legends as both cultures present portrayals of women who have abandoned or killed their own children, or women who have had their children killed. These women can find no rest and their spirits roam on deserted roads, in deep anguish, and crying out loud during the night. Rebolledo adds that:
La Llorona was a syncretic image connected both to Spanish medieval notions of animas en pena , spirits in purgatory expiating their sins, and to the Medea myth. She was also closely identified with pre-Columbian Aztec cultural heroes such as Mocihuaquetzque , valiant women who died in childbirth (and who were the only Aztec women to achieve afterlife in the place of the warriors). These women were held sacred by Aztec warriors (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 63).
After having achieved afterlife, they received the name of Cihuapipiltin , night ghosts, who roamed on the roads to do harm to children and men. Sometimes, they were also linked to Coatlicue (REBOLLEDO, 1995:63). Anzaldúa narrates that she heard about the legend of La Llorona when she was very young. Being raised “ en el Valle del Río Grande in South Texas”, she says that she lived in a house near a deserted church out of which, so goes the legend, a woman wearing a white dress used to come in order to follow people who had done something wrong. Some called her la Jila , others La Llorona. In Anzaldúa’s opinion:
She was, I think, Cihuacoatl , Serpent Woman, ancient Aztec goddess of the earth, of war and birth, patron of midwives, and antecedent of La Llorona. Covered with chalk, Cihuacoatl wears a white dress with a decoration half red and half black. Her hair forms two little horns (which the Aztecs depicted as knives) crossed on her forehead. The lower part of 47
her face is a bare jawbone, signifying death. On her she carries a cradle, the knife of sacrifice swaddled as if it were her papoose, her child. Like La Llorona, Cihuacoatl howls and weeps in the night, screams as if demented. She brings mental depression and sorrow. Long before it takes place, she is the first to predict something is to happen (ANZALDÚA, 1999: 57-58).
In “La Llorona, The Third Legend of Greater Mexico”, José Limón reiterates Anzaldúa’s position linking La Llorona to Cihuacoatl. He elucidates:
What the Europeans seem to add are the motifs of (1) a woman with children (2) betrayed by an adulterous lover, their father, followed by (3) insane revenge infanticide in which she is typically the killer, concluding with her anguished repentance during which she cries for her children … The indigenous peoples seem to add (1) an Indian woman sometimes in a flowing white dress, (2) crying in the night, (3) near a body of water (an important element in Aztec mythology) and (4) meeting people, mostly men who are shocked when they see her (LIMÓN apud SALDÍVAR- HULL, 2000: 119).
Asserting that legends are “ego-suppoting devices”, Américo Paredes wrote “Mexican Legendry and the Rise of the Mestizo” in which he shows the legend of La Llorona, a story of miscigenation, located, according to him, in the period of the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés:
The literary legend of La Llorona struck deep roots in Mexican tradition because it was grafted on an Indian legend cycle about the supernatural woman who seduces men when they are out alone on the roads or working in the fields. At times she destroys her lovers after giving herself to them, but often she is helpful as well as passionate and may make a man’s fortune or help him raise a fine crop of corn. She is matlacihua or Woman of the Nets among the Nahuatl speakers, and other language groups such as the Mexes and the Popolucas know her by other names. As la segua , she has been reported as far north as Texas, and she is also known as far south as Panama (PAREDES apud SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 118).
Although Chicana critics and writers generally portray La Malinche and La Llorona separately as different figures, two different identities, in Mexican folklore they are one. Saldívar-Hull justifies this blurring:
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[…] The woman popularly known as Malinche, Malintzin Tenepal, has been blamed for the Spaniards’ conquest of Mexico. To be a malinchista is to be a traitor to Mexico or to Mexican customs. La Llorona murdered her children because she was betrayed by a Spanish “gentleman”; La Malinche symbolically murdered her “children”, the Indian tribes that Cortés and the Spanish conquistadores massacred (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 120).
Since La Llorona is a descendant of the goddess Cihuacoatl , as pointed out by Anzaldúa and José Limón, she also encompasses death and creation. Rebolledo reiterates this reasoning: “She approximates in popular folklore all those ancient Nahuatl deities who had life-giving and -destroying abilities” (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 76). This ambiguous and paradoxical aspect of La Llorona is also chronicled by Ana Maria Carbonell in her critical essay “From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros”. According to Carbonell, although La Llorona is more frequently portrayed as a destructive figure, she has become a symbol of maternal betrayal as well as maternal resistance. This portrayal of La Llorona as a symbol of maternal resistance comes from the time the Spanish invaded Mexico. Carbonell includes an account of a woman born in San Antonio, which shows the total disenfranchisement of Indian mothers in colonial Mexico:
When the Spanish arrived in Mexico, they were impressed by the beauty of the Indian children. The Spanish took the children (the most beautiful) and gave them to their wives. Some of the Indian women killed their children in order to keep the Spaniards from taking them. La Llorona is one such woman. She now is searching constantly for her children, whose faces she sees in all children. She kills the children to be united with her own again (CARBONELL, 1999).
It is exactly the figure of the resistant mother who fights against hostile forces and ends by murdering her own children that has impressed Chicana writers. As Saldívar-Hull explains:
As I read more on the history of the conquest, I realized that the story I heard as a child was a version of the enslavement of the indigenous Mexicans; the infanticide is what I now recognize as a political act of resistance by mestiza indigenous women (SADÍVAR-HULL, 2000:120).
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José Limón shares Saldívar-Hull’s position concerning La Llorona and the tragic act of infanticide, which, for him, is understandable once it is well known that Mexican women are victims of the contradictory rules of patriarchy (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 122). He adds that, by murdering her children, La Llorona “symbolically destroys the familial basis for patriarchy” (LIMÓN apud SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 120-121). However, La Llorona returns to the lake where her children were drowned, looking desperately for them. Limón, thus, drawing from Freud’s idea that water is linked to birth and rebirth, stresses the paradoxical element contained in the myth of La Llorona: the destruction of the nuclear family is connected with the potential restoration – through water – of maternal bonds and maternal agency (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 121). Many Chicana writers have drawn from this specific aspect brought by La Llorona: the possibility of destroying patriarchy, the possibility of a world without aggressive men imposing their rules, the possibility of a reaction against male sexual aggression. These Chicana writers, however, have chosen to resort to the Aztec goddesses in order to interpret the symbolic water usually associated with La Llorona. Saldívar-Hull elucidates this option:
[…] water is a common mythological residence of female spirits and a place of power and transformation. Instead of using the traditional (male) Freudian equation of water with birth and rebirth (actually birth of men by men), it seems more appropriate to turn to a female source: the Aztec goddesses associated with water. What we find transforms the water motif into a site where women can find refuge from the forces of hegemony. Llorona’s act of infanticide in the traditional legend, then, can be read as an extreme act of resistance in face of the barbarity of “el desastre” (the disaster), the conquest of Mexico and the ensuing rape and murder of indigenous people … the infanticide is not an act by an “insane” or “insanely jealous” woman; rather, it is a rational, political act of opposition against the Spanish colonizers (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 121).
It becomes easily understandable why La Llorona, for Chicana writers, has become the symbol of “betrayal, silencing, and socio-cultural displacement many Mexican American women continue to suffer” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:120). As the legend of La Llorona is told by mothers to their children, it can be said that women are responsible for these variants of the legend, which are open “to constant redefinition”. 50
That is why many Chicana writers such as Helena María Viramontes, Cherríe Moraga and Sandra Cisneros have appropriated the legend and its fluidity to produce “contemporary versions that are resisting accounts of Chicanas’ postmodern predicament”. Oliver-Rotger broadens her position:
[…] Chicana writers have appropriated it precisely in order to illustrate that women who are wives and mothers are still trapped in contradictory patriarchal discourses that do not allow them to speak for themselves as subjects despite their wish to do so …Hence, this story has allowed Chicana writers to explore the discrepancy between mythical representation of women and the hostile social reality they have to confront (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 121-123).
An example of a short story that incorporates the legend of La Llorona is Sandra Cisneros’s “Woman Hollering Creek”, in which Cleófilas, pregnant with a second child, decides to leave her husband after years of repeated beatings and psychological violence. The town in which she lives is by a creek people call the “hollering creek” because is it there, according to the legend, that La Llorona dwells. Cleófilas looks for help in a health clinic where she is treated by two women, Graciela and Felice, who decide to help her to go back to Mexico. Cleófilas, who has been accustomed to the idea that women should be submissive to men, is surprised by their independent ways and supportive behavior. She is even more surprised when Felice, who is driving her out of town in her own pickup, starts yelling as they cross the river. She explains to Cleófilas she loves the creek’s name because it makes people holler like Tarzan. It is clear in the story that Felice’s hollering is a strategy of resistance against male domination. Cleófilas does not holler, but her cry of freedom is yet to come. Her courage to leave her husband resisting patriarchy and the admiration she feels for Felice’s way of life, with no husband at all, imply she has also been influenced by La Gritona (CISNEROS, 1991: 43-46). The resistance to patriarchy, according to Carbonell, transforms women from Llorona into Gritona. She explains that women “reclaim their voice by transforming themselves from Llorona figures who wail at their loss into Gritonas who holler at their oppressors” (CARBONELL, 1999). It is fundamental to mention that, according to Anzaldúa, the resistance shown by Chicanas, their refusal to be victims, their courage to 51
fight and holler against hostile forces, and thus, subvert the male versions of history, come from what she has named “Coatlicue State”. (ANZALDÚA, 1999: 46). The Aztec myth of the Hungry Woman has also worked as a space of resistance for Chicana writers. According to the myth, there existed a woman, who was always in need of food as she had mouths throughout her body. She lived in a place where there were only spirits and they realized she could not remain with them once they had no food for her. At that time the world had not been created and the spirits were surrounded only by air. However, they could see something below them that seemed water and decided to put her there. As soon as she started floating, the spirits Quetzalcoatl and Texcatlipoca transformed themselves into snakes and began pulling her hard in different directions. The hungry woman was, then, cut in half at the waist. Frightened and not knowing what to do, the two spirits carried the bottom half of the woman’s body to the place where they lived. The other spirits did not approve of what Quetzalcoatl and Texcatlipoca had done and decided to use this part of the woman’s body to make the sky. The other parts gave origin to the grass, the flowers, the forests, the mountains and valleys, and also the springs and pools. All the spirits thought she would be finally satisfied. To their surprise, her mouths reappeared and she continued crying for food. At night, so goes the myth, when the wind blows, it brings the sound of her lament (SWYT,1998). The Hungry Woman, a figure from Aztec mythology that can be found in Chicana folklore, represents the one which cannot be satisfied, silenced or contained. Chicana writers, especially Helena María Viramontes, have drawn from this mythological figure to portray women who display strategies of resistance, agency and transformation, as explained by Wendy Swyt in an essay entitled “Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena María Viramontes”. According to Swyt, the Hungry Woman is a metaphor, “for this third country will not be silenced or contained” (SWYT, 1998). In one of her poems, Cherríe Moraga presents a lyrical “I” who identifies with this mythological figure and, after having had a recurring dream that her mouth was “too big to close”, she shows how women, who have been silenced for so long, will not be satisfied, silenced or contained:
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My mouth cannot be controlled. It will flap in the wind like legs in sex, not driven by the mind. It’s as if la boca had lodged itself en el centro del corazón , not in the head at all. The same place where the vagina beats.
And there is a woman coming out of her mouth.
Hay una mujer saliendo de la boca (MORAGA, 1983:133).
As Rebolledo claims, Chicanas in general, writers or not, “feel alienated and fragmented in today’s society”. She emphasizes that, among other things, “a close connection with one’s culture provides a sense of rootedness, unity, and power” (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 93). That is why Chicanas’ contact with their indigenous past and a critical re-vision of old Aztec myths and Mexican legends have become crucial for them. As has been pointed out earlier, myths work as symbols which give order to life and mediate people’s behavior. For Chicana writers, myths have become a source for female unity, providing them with different strategies of survival and resistance. In the following chapters, I intend to show how Helena María Viramontes makes use of myths and legends in her fiction, empowering her female characters to fight against social injustices and patriarchal oppression. 53
CHAPTER 3
Malinches, Lloronas y Gritonas: mujeres en lucha
El otro, la mudez que pide voz al que tiene la voz y reclama el oído del que escucha.
(The other, muteness that begs a voice from the one who speaks and demands the ear of the one who listens.)
Rosario Catellanos, “Poesía no eres tu”
“Nopalitos”, mentioned in the Introduction, is also a rich source for readers and critics concerning Viramontes’s literary influences. She starts this section of the essay by saying that, in her case, William Faulkner was right; she became a short story writer because she was not a good poet. Viramontes divides the authors who have influenced her according to form, subject matter, and place. Among those who thrilled her with “their experimentation with form and voice” are Latin American writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Rulfo and Augustin Yañez. In fact, as she told me in one of our conversations, she made up her mind to become a writer after having read Pedro Páramo by Mexican writer Juan Rulfo. Considered one of the first postmodern novels of the twentieth century by Viramontes, Pedro Páramo attracted her attention because of Rulfo’s experimentation with time and memory and she said to herself that that was the way she wanted to write. Concerning subject matter, Black women writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Toni Cade-Bambara, and their womanism, became, in Viramontes’s opinion, “the best in recent fiction that I had seen in a long time”. Viramontes adds that “Southern writers also became influential for their regional depiction”:
William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Carson Mc Cullers were writers I grew to love and respect. I lived in their worlds. And who could forget Harper Lee and Truman Capote? From their perspectives, I began to realize the significance of place and space and how it effects characterization (VIRAMONTES, 1989: 37; personal correspondence). 54
Besides these three groups of literary influence, Viramontes mentions the importance of “the socialist writers of the 30’s”, such as John Steinbeck and Upton Sinclair, who believed, as she does, that fiction has the power to bring about social change. This section ends in a very poetic manner, typical of Viramontes’s style: “Subject matter and form and place. They met, often quarreled, but nonetheless, Helena María Viramontes was born” (VIRAMONTES, 1989: 37; personal correspondence). Presently working at Cornell University as an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, Viramontes combines her academic work with that of essayist, editor and writer. She has written two novels: Under the Feet of Jesus , published in 1995, and Their Dogs Came With Them , which is going to be out by Simon and Schuster in 2006. However, it can be said that Viramontes’s most common literary practice is the short story, following the tradition of other Chicano/a writers such as Tomás Rivera and Rolando Hinojosa, who have seen in the short story a strong potential “to render orality and communal identity” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 173). Mary- Louise Pratt has established a connection between the short story and the representation of minority groups:
The tradition of orality in short story has special significance in cultures where literacy is not the norm, or where the standard literary language is that of an oppressor. […] Orality can also be counted as one of the important flourishing aspects of the short story in the modern literatures of many Third World nations and peoples, where, not incidentally, it is taken much more seriously as an art form than it is elsewhere (PRATT apud OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 172).
Oliver-Rotger contends that Viramontes, by dealing with “peripheral themes and peripheral people”, namely, “women, old people, the poor, the outcast, and the displaced”, reinforces Pratt’s argument about the marginality of the short story. Moreover, by being aware that ideology exerts a strong influence on “the constitution of subjectivity” and that power relations interfere with the social relationships between people, Viramontes has managed, as other Chicana writers, to produce a “literature that combines the social and the poetic” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 173). Commenting on the ending of “Tears on My Pillow”, a short story that will be discussed later, Sonia Saldívar-Hull makes an assessment of Viramontes’s social and ideological commitment: 55
Irresolution, or the refusal of closure in Viramontes’s political text, signals a complex project currently being undertaken by Chicana feminist writers, critics, and cultural workers. Together they are working to undercut old stereotypes and open up new possibilities for empowerment by forging a self-representation of Chicanas by Chicanas, women who insist on a self-identifier that marks their political subjectivity as feminist as well as their working-class identification (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 159).
Before I proceed any further, I would like to observe that both Oliver-Rotger and Saldívar-Hull have used the term subjectivity when referring to the inner aspects of a person or a group (Chicanas’ subjectivity, for example). However, throughout my work, I have used the term identity following many Chicana critics and postcolonial authors who, due to their focus on political changes and action, have chosen identity instead of subjectivity. I should argue that, although these terms have been used interchangeably, the best option would be the concept of identities as proposed by Stuart Hall in A Identidade Cultural na Pós-Modernidade :
The subject assumes different identities at different times, identities which are not unified around a coherent ‘self’. Within us are contradictory identities, pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continuously being shifted about. If we feel we have a unified identity from birth to death, it is only because we construct a comforting story or ‘narrative of the self ‘about ourselves. The fully unified, completed, secure and coherent identity is a fantasy (HALL, 1992: 277)
The notion of an ever-changing identity has been illuminating for Chicana writers since it reflects all the obstacles and paradoxes they have faced: their life between two languages and two cultures, their silencing within a traditional male context, their struggle to find language, voice and agency in order to become the subjects of their own discourse, leaving behind their position of objects or “commodities”, as Luce Iragaray puts it. For Iragaray, social order determines sexual order and, in patriarchal societies, the males are “producer subjects and agents of exchange” while the females are “commodities” (IRIGARAY, 1985: 192). However, Chicanas’ search for identity has been especially complex not only due to the fact that their discourse was doubly subordinated but also because: 56
The very notion of identity requires individual demarcation or, as Elizabeth Meese says, “the setting apart of an individual” (160). Yet Chicanas were focused on community and relationships. Thus emphasis was placed on the communal, not the individual. While these interconnections were not antithetical, they made the search for identity within the socio-political context very complex (REBOLLEDO, 1995: 97).
Chicana writers, then, have had to face the fact that their experience as women cannot be separated from their experiences as “member[s] of an oppressed working- class racial minority and a culture which is not the dominant culture” (REBOLLEDO, 1995:214). This notion, which came out in the Chicano Movement of the 60s and 70s, reinforced Gloria Anzaldúa’s position that Chicanas belong to different nations and have multiple identities. While such conclusion has to do with the idea of the postmodern subject, it is important to observe Chicana critic Paula Moya’s conception that “experience as well as “identity” are “primary organizing principles around which women of color theorize and mobilize”. Moya cites Cherríe Moraga who envisions “identities as relational and grounded in the historically produced social facts which constitute social locations” (MOYA, 1997: 127). Because Chicana writers focus on both the individual self and the communal self, their works, according to Ellen McCracken, present “identity multidimensionally: to varying degrees, issues of gender, ethnicity, race, class, and sexual orientation… structure their narrative” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 65). McCracken describes “three varieties of narrative hamony and dissonance” resulting from the way these writers deal with the different issues just mentioned. In certain texts, the issues and the aesthetic are integrated “as elements of a continuum”. In other texts, one issue is emphasized, “without excluding or overpowering the others”. A third variety of texts focuses on one issue “in unidimensional terms” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 65; 200). If we followed McCracken’s rationale, we would consider most of the stories of the collection The Moths and Other Stories as belonging to the third group of texts, because, as she says, by emphasizing one issue to the detriment of others, Viramontes creates “the type of narrative violence that Butler-Evans has attributed to a writer’s preoccupation with a single totalizing issue”. Although Viramontes herself has acknowledged that, in her earlier stories, she “screamed” and “shouted” against the 57
oppression endured by ordinary Chicana women (McCRACKEN, 1999: 186), I do not see either “narrative violence” or a single preoccupation on the author’s part. In the Introduction to The Moths and Other Stories, Yvonne Yarbo-Bejarano states that “Viramontes focuses her narrative lens on the struggles of women within the Chicano family and culture, although larger social and economic conflicts often form a backdrop or frame for the main action” (VIRAMONTES, 1985: 10). Keeping pace with Bejarano’s opinion I would add that, by having “shouted” and “screamed” in those stories, Viramontes has put into practice the “Theory in the Flesh” advocated by Cherríe Moraga in This Bridge Called My Back : the experiences of Viramontes’s female characters are firmly based on the “physical realities” of their lives. Yarbo-Bejarano stresses that these characters are not idealized feminists making use of force to achieve power. Rather, they are ‘real people’, with “strengths and weaknesses”, “conscious that something is wrong with their lives, and that what is wrong is linked to the rigid gender roles imposed on them by their men and their culture, often with the aid of the Church” (VIRAMONTES, 1985: 10). The reappropriation of myths has proved to be an affirmative tool for women who decide to confront patriarchal ideology because mythical and legendary female figures such as La Malinche, La Llorona and The Hungry Woman, resemantized by Chicana writers, show women who transgress and cannot be silenced or contained. In Viramontes’s fiction, myths and legends are used in two different ways: – directly, with clear allusions to those mythical female figures; – indirectly, through Viramontes’s female characters whose behaviors remind us of the ones displayed by the legendary women. In either case, we witness characters who display strategies of resistance such as “silence” and “language”, as will be shown in due time. It is also important to mention that, aiming at portraying, among other issues, the shifting and multiple identities human beings experience, and the consequent indeterminacy of the self, Viramontes has used postmodern, decentering narrative practices such as fragmentation, simultaneity, focalization and juxtaposition, techniques that, according to Oliver-Rotger, “manifest sensitivity to difference and multiplicity” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 221). In “The Moths”, the first story of Viramontes’s collections, oppression comes from a domineering father who does not accept his daughter’s rejection of the Church: 58
That was one of Apá’s biggest complaints. He would pound his hands on the table, rocking the sugar dish or spilling a cup of coffee and scream that if I didn’t go to mass every Sunday to save my goddam sinning soul, then I had no reason to go out of the house, period. Punto final. He would grab my arm and dig his nails into me to make sure I understood the importance of catechism. Did he make himself clear? (29) 1
The narrator, whose name is not revealed, is not capable of performing feminine activities as her sisters do. She is, thus, discriminated by her family for deviating from the male-established rules. Her feeling of being different is accentuated by her discomfort concerning her hands:
I wasn’t even pretty or nice like my older sisters and I just couldn’t do the girl things they could do. My hands were too big to handle the fineries of crocheting or embroidery and I always pricked my fingers or knotted my colored threads time and time again while my sisters laughed and called me bull hands with their cute waterlike voices (27).
The girl’s resistance to “the cult of domesticity” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 133) is accompanied by guilt and insecurity, once she defies very powerful male traditions. According to Oliver-Rotger, the girl’s “phsychological awkwardness” is represented through Viramontes’s magical-realist portrayal of the girls’ huge hands, which “grow like a liar’s nose until they hung by my side like low weights” (27). According to Oliver-Rotger:
The malformation of the girl’s hands is a hyberbolic representation of her inner state of feeling, as well as the sign of the presence of an alternative reality and silent language expressed through magical or marvelous realism (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 187-188).
The girl’s “alternative reality” proves to be her abuelita’ s house. Viramontes’s use of the word abuelita instead of grandmother is significant as, for Chicanas, it is a cultural marker: it symbolizes the matriarchal knowledge and the perpetuation of Mexican traditions. While in many instances perpetuation of traditions involves the reinforcement of patriarchal values, in this particular case, the emphasis is on
1 VIRAMONTES, Helena María. The Moths and Other Stories. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1985. All further references to Viramontes’s short stories will appear in the text by page number only.
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matriarchal knowledge. To help her granddaughter, “Abuelita made a balm out of dried moth wings and Vicks and rubbed my hands, shaping them back to size” (27). After being obliged by her father to go to mass, the girl goes to her grandmother’s house. She uses silence as a strategy of resistance as she does not argue with her father, and silently does what she wants:
So I would wash my feet and stuff them in my black Easter shoes that shone with Vaseline, grab a missal and veil, and wave goodbye to Amá. I would walk slowly down Lorena to First to Evergreen, counting the cracks on the cement. On Evergreen I would turn left and walk to abuelita’s (29).
Theorist Trinh T. Minh-Ha holds that the silence of women has various implications and different significations:
Within the context of women’s speech, silence has many faces. Like the veiling of women, silence can only be subversive when it frees itself from the male-defined context of absence, lack, and fear as feminine territories. On the one hand, we face the danger of inscribing femininity as absence, as lack and as blank in rejecting the importance of the act of enunciation. On the other hand, we understand the necessity of placing women on the negativity and of working in undertones, for example, in our attempts at undermining patriarchal systems of values. Silence is so commonly set in opposition with speech: silence as a will not to say or a will to unsay and as a language of its own has barely been explored. (MINH-HA, 1997: 416).
In “The Moths”, the protagonist knows that if she expresses opposition to – if she “unsays” – her father’s order, she will be punished. The silence which he interprets as assent is in fact a covert strategy of dissent. In the story, silence also has other “faces”. Besides implying resistance, silence can also signify lack of communication, which can be seen in the relationship between mother and daughter. They hardly speak to each other and feelings are repressed: “I never kissed her” (30). The young narrator and her sisters also have a relationship marked by this kind of silence implying lack of communication. When they speak to each other is to fight. Her sisters laugh at her, calling her “bull hands”, and the girl’s response is to hit them with “a piece of jagged brick”. She is thus beaten for this (27). 60
A third connotation of silence in “The Moths” has to do with submission. As Oliver-Rotger observes, “The women in the story are mostly silent. Whenever they speak, it is only to express compliance with the patriarchal system”, which can be seen in the mother’s behavior – she is a transmitter of patriarchal ideology – and in the sisters’ attitudes. Both the mother and the sisters are male-identified women:
They speak as what Susan Rubin-Suleiman calls future “patriarchal mothers” or what Kristeva, after Lacan, calls “phallic mothers”; that is, as women who reproduce an established role that has been previously decided for them within the symbolic system; women who control the family and perpetuate the dynamics of socialization according to pre- established gender roles (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 185-186).
In “The Moths”, Viramontes presents a “counterhegemonic strategy” based on “woman-to-woman bonds established in a separate female sphere” (SALDÍVAR- HULL, 2000: 132). It is important to emphasize that real bonds between women only happen when they escape the patriarchal space. The abuelita ’s house is such a space and even more: for the girl, her grandmother’s house substitutes the Church. Using Spivak’s terms, the abuela’ s house is a place that has “no established agency of traffic with the culture of imperialism” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 134). In working with her grandmother in the garden, planting, having contact with the earth, the girl begins a process of maturation, her rite of passage:
Quietly, Abuelita makes the girl her apprentice, teaching her the value of what she can do well. The grandmother’s ties to an indigenous culture no longer valued in an urban setting are represented by images of the women planting herbs, flowers, and vegetables. What the Abuelita passes on to the girl is the appreciation of a heritage in which the earth itself is a source of spirituality as well as a counterhegemonic reclamation of a discarded indigenous culture (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 134).
By establishing the bond between women, Viramontes does more than rework the cult of domesticity and the concept of family unity. She subverts the religious tradition, once “The grandmother’s indigenous knowledge heals her granddaughter with a power once reserved for a male deity” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 134). Here it becomes important to observe that, in bringing indigenous traditions back and empowering the grandmother as in antique matriarchal societies, Viramontes reinforces 61
the importance of the Aztec culture and other previous ones. Myths in this story are treated indirectly, through the characters’ behaviors. The last, and perhaps the most beautiful message in “The Moths” is silence as understanding, which characterizes the girl’s relationship with her grandmother. They work together in the abuela’ s garden in perfect, silent harmony:
Abuelita would wait for me at the top step of her porch holding a hammer and nail and empty coffee cans. And although we hardly spoke, hardly looked at each other as we worked over root transplants, I always felt her gray eye on me. It made me feel, in a strange sort of way, safe and guarded. Like God was supposed to make you feel (28, italics mine).
When the grandmother gets sick the girl spends even more time with her. The girl thinks it is fair to help abuelita , who has also taken care of her when she had scarlet fever and has helped her after “several whippings” (27). The girl helps her abuelita’ s passage to death. She spends hours with the only woman who has been able to understand, teach and heal her. The moment she discovers abuelita is dead is described in graphic yet poignant words:
The room smelled of Pine Sol and vomit, and Abuelita had defecated the remains of her cancerous stomach. She had turned to the window and tried to speak but her mouth remained open and speechless. I heard you, Abuelita, I said, stroking her cheek, I heard you (31).
This sentence “I heard you”, said to her dead grandmother, reinforces their understanding through silence. The girl means she has learnt the abuela’ s lessons well. Abuelita has defied conventions and traditions and her example provides the girl’s empowerment. The ritual of bathing her grandmother’s body, involved in silent understanding, is accompanied by small grey moths:
Then the moths came. Small grey ones that came from her soul and out through her mouth fluttering to light, circling the single dull light bulb of the bathroom. Dying is lonely and I wanted to go to where the moths were, stay with her and plant chayotes whose vines would crawl up her fingers and into the clouds; I wanted to rest my head on her chest with her stroking my hair, telling me about the moths that lay within the soul and slowly eat the spirit up (32).
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For Oliver-Rotger, the moths are the symbol of: “… an unfulfilled desire for a place where connection and unity are possible, but they cannot ultimately heal the restlessness and sense of deprivation of the girl” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 190). The image of the moths has provided different interpretations on the part of Chicana critics. In fact, it has been challenging critics and readers as well. Like the image of the girl’s bull hands, the moths are associated with magic realism:
The moths emerging from the grandmother’s mouth may indeed be magical – more to the point, however, these moths are also agents of reality for women in the traditional patriarchal Chicano family. Unlike the magical butterflies deployed by Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude or the rose petals imagined by Laura Esquivel in Like Water for Chocolate , Viramontes’s gray moths circling a dull light bulb evoke working-class subjects in U.S. barrios (SALDÍVAR- HULL, 2000: 137).
Saldívar-Hull states that the moths have a dual role. Besides the one cited above, the moths symbolize the lesson the grandmother has taught the girl, that is to say, Viramontes uses the magical realist image of the moths as a harbinger of a feminist message: “While moths may have eaten the grandmother’s youth, her ability to retain a measure of independence in her old age and final illness allows the abuela to communicate alternate possibilities to her granddaughter” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 137). As the girl bathes her grandmother’s body, slowly, as if in a ritual, she sees the scars on her back and realizes how little she knows about her story. The discovery leads to the girl’s further empowerment, or, as Saldívar-Hull explains: “The old woman’s body maps new cartographies for the young Chicana narrator”. Saldívar-Hull speculates about the significance of the scars:
Reading the hieroglyphics of her back – the wrinkles, the scars, the mapped birthmark – we attempt to decipher her life. We wonder if her husband beat the abuela, and if so, if this is the reason for the narrator’s mother’s fear of her own husband. Is this why the abuela tried to save her nieta, why she offered sanctuary for this granddaughter with bull hands? (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 136).
According to Oliver-Rotger, due to the discovery of these signs and the cleansing ritual of her grandmother’s body, the young protagonist manages to enter the 63
lives of others. She identifies with the pain of others. Water and physical contact promote an “emotional rebirth”:
[…] the final ritual, a meaningmaking process in which touching, naming, and cleaning are interrelated, provides the links between the dead and the yet unborn, where the suffering and loneliness of Abuela are regenerated and transformed into empathy and understanding in the granddaughter (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 189).
It becomes clear that the girl is mourning not only her grandmother but also her mother, who has always been very distant or absent whenever the girl has needed her: “I wanted Amá”(32). Having used silence as a strategy of resistance to subvert patriarchy, the girl, when dealing with her mother, uses an opposite strategy – language:
Abuelita fell off the bed twice yesterday, I said, knowing that I shouldn’t have said it and wondering why I wanted to say it because it only made Amá cry harder. I guess I became angry and just so tired of the quarrels and beatings and unanswered prayers and my hands just there hanging helplessly by my side (30).
The girl’s attitude towards her mother reminds us of the myth of The Hungry Woman, as the girl’s “sense of deprivation” becomes anger and, thus, it is impossible for her to be silenced or contained. While in “The Moths” silence is the main strategy of resistance, in “The Long Reconciliation” language is dominant. The two protagonists, the young adolescent and Amanda have in common their distrust of institutionalized religion, of a God that seems remote, uncaring. For the girl, tired of “unanswered prayers” (30), the Church has no meaning; it is a place full of “vastness”, “coolness”, and “frozen statues” (29). Conversely, the abuelita’ s house gives her a strong sense of peace. For Amanda, God does not take care of the disenfranchised and dispossessed: “But father, wasn’t He supposed to take care of us, His poor?” (89). Amanda’s thoughts are transgressive. She addresses God in a defiant manner, showing neither fear nor submission:
Sex is the only free pleasure we have… You, God, eating and drinking as you like, you, there, not feeling the sweat or the pests that feed on the skin, you sitting with a kingly lust for comfort, tell us that we will be paid later on in death (89-90).
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It is worth mentioning that, due to their extreme poverty, Chato is disillusioned with God, as the female characters in Viramontes’s stories usually are: “He had finally saved enough to pay down on a piece of land … because he did not believe in talk, or the revolution, or for that matter, God” (92-93). Amanda is married to Chato but decides to abort their child because “it would have been unbearable to watch a child slowly rot” (84). It is worth saying that, although the central theme turns around women under patriarchy, the story will be better understood if social and economic problems, such as poverty and the exploitation of Mexican people, are taken into consideration. Amanda’s language and behavior are doubly transgressive: not only does she abort the baby her husband wants so much but she also engages in adultery with Don Joaquín, the landowner who has sold Chato a barren piece of land. When Chato discovers Amanda’s affair, he kills D. Joaquín. The dialogue that takes place between Amanda and Chato about her killing their baby and his killing her lover shows Amanda’s strategy of resistance and empowerment through language. When Chato tells her that he has killed for honor, she replies:
[...] I killed for life... which is worse? You killed because something said, “you must kill to remain a man”. - …For me, things are as different as our bodies… But you couldn’t understand that because something said, “you must have sons to remain a man” (84).
As McCracken points out, Amanda defends her choice for abortion “by counterposing two contradictory moral orders”. She claims that Amanda “highlights the opposing moral orders by which they lead their lives precisely by showing the parallels between the two orders. Their actions are both “the same thing” and entirely opposed to one another” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 177-178). Amanda’s and Chato’s conceptions of family are totally distinct. Amanda links children to pain. When she is in the confessional, she says to the priest: “But this is pain, Father, to sprout a child that we can’t feed or care for” (89). For Chato, however, the land and the children represent the ideal patriarchal family. Oliver-Rotger shows how this link works in Chato’s mind: “His discourse identifies the fertility of the land and that of his woman; both woman and land become a representation of his power” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 196). 65
In fact, this association becomes clear when Chato, on their wedding night, claims Amanda’s “undiscovered land” (88) as his own. Although Amanda gets married too early – she is fourteen – and discovers the pleasure sex may bring, she is not in accordance with Chato’s patriarchal ideology of her body’s ownership. It seems that Amanda regards motherhood in the context she lives in – misery and exploitation – as something absurd or even fatal, while abortion turns out to be a sign of love. In her transgressive, seemingly contradictory behavior, Amanda reminds us of the mythical figures of La Malinche and La Llorona. Oliver-Rotger also points a similarity between Amanda and Malinche: “Amanda’s self-assertive voice in “Reconciliacion” is also that of a vendida . Her denial of her maternal function involves a personal choice independent from convention, a choice that emasculates her husband” (OLIVER- ROTGER, 2003: 196). As has been said previously, in most of Viramontes’s stories, women pay a high price for fighting against the dominant male ideology and for exploring their sexuality. Because of her abortion, Amanda is rejected by her husband. Her affair with Don Joaquín does not bring her happiness. Much to the contrary, she feels sad and guilty as she is still in love with her husband, who has decided to leave her. Many years later, as Chato is dying in a hospital, Amanda visits him and they start “The Long Reconciliation”. Chato explains to her that forgiveness was for him like a huge mountain, and regrets he has waited fifty-eight years to see that the mountain was just a stone. He recognizes his dreams were nothing but dreams, represented by the carousel he has given to Amanda, and concludes: “Maybe we were all born cheated” (95). In Debra Castillo’s words:
“The Long Reconciliation” documents Chato and Amanda’s brief marriage and fifty-eight-year separation, a marriage conditioned by mutual incomprehension and lack of communication. The only point of contact between them is a toy carousel that each endows with a quite different symbolic burden related to his/her own distinct obsessions, a metaphorical legacy revealed in parallel monologues, overheard by no one but the reader (CASTILLO, 1992: 78).
Castillo sustains that the juxtaposed discourses of Amanda and Chato take place in their respective minds as “they never meet again in life after that definitive departure during the Mexican Revolution” (CASTILLO, 1992: 78). Whether these dialogues are 66
really unheard monologues or not, what matters is that they meet Viramontes’s aim at portraying the difficulties women undergo when they decide to contest the traditional conceptions of domesticity, motherhood, and femininity. In The Second Sex - Facts and Myths (1949), Simone de Beauvoir explains why this is so. According to her, the problem lies in the fact that man is always viewed as the subject, whereas woman is the eternal Other. Man’s experience is thus central and absolute, while woman’s is seen as inessential, alien and negative. That is why, in patriarchal societies, woman cannot reach complete selfhood and is, then, alienated from her own subjectivity. What is worse, adds Beauvoir, is that the imbalance between sexes tends to be eternalized once women keep on accepting men’s view of them as Other, instead of also addressing men as alien, as Other. Beauvoir elucidates that this happens for three reasons. First, women are not a consolidated body, they do not say “we”, due to their alienated position in the patriarchal culture. Second, they think that the imbalance between sexes is unchangeable, something already consolidated by tradition. Third, accepting the role of the Other is easier than breaking taboos and transgressing against their culture (BEAUVOIR, 1949: 12-17). Amanda does both, and as we have seen, she pays dearly for her defiance and transgressions. “The Cariboo Cafe” differs from the other short stories in The Moths and Other Stories as it reveals Viramontes’s internationalist concern. According to Saldívar-Hull, it is “a complex story that propels feminism on the border into its transnational trajectory by showing the emergence of Los Angeles as a U.S. Third World city” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 127). In the opening lines of “The Cariboo Cafe”, Viramontes refers to displaced people who arrive “in the secrecy of night” in foreign hostile places looking for safety and a better life, “stopping over for a week, a month, eventually staying a lifetime” (65). The reader is immediately put in contact with the sad reality of diasporical characters. “The Cariboo Cafe” is also different from “The Moths” and “The Long Reconciliation” concerning Viramontes’s way of presenting myths. Here La Llorona is directly portrayed. Representations of La Malinche and The Hungry Woman also play a prominent role in the story. “The Cariboo Cafe” is divided into three parts which coalesce in the end in a tragic way. Part I features a Mexican family facing the fears and difficulties that plague displaced people. Soon after their arrival, Sonya and Macky get lost after Sonya loses 67
the key – “a guardian saint” – to their apartment and gets her directions mixed up. As the children wander through the streets, the reader is introduced to the fractured narrative structure of the story. Viramontes’s technique of fragmenting her text reflects the equally fragmented lives of her characters. The complexity of this non-linear narrative bewilders the reader who has to overcome its puzzle-like structure in order to be able to understand Viramontes’s political concerns. As Saldívar-Hull explains:
The reader enters the text as an alien to this refugee culture; Viramontes crafts a fractured narrative to reflect the disorientation that the immigrant workers feel when they are subjected to life in a country that controls their labor but does not value their existence as human beings (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 144).
As a result, the reader becomes as disoriented as Sonya and Macky; in other words, Viramontes makes the reader feel in his/her flesh what displaced people often feel. Part I ends with Sonya and her brother Macky running when La Migra arrives. They enter “a maze of alleys and dead ends” (67), and are involved in darkness. Sonya concludes that the shadows will disappear at the zero-zero place. Part II consists of a long interior monologue by the owner of the Cariboo Cafe (the zero-zero place), who gets started by asking not to be blamed for its name: “Don’t look at me. I didn’t give it the name. It was passed on” (68). In spite of the owner’s unhurried musings, the meaning of the cafe’s name is left open to the readers’ interpretation. Originally the Cariboo Cafe, the place becomes the Double Zero Cafe as the paint has peeled off and only the two O’s remain. The sign now reads OO Cafe. It is hard not to think of the possible meanings of the expression double O and in the deconstructing strategy of the author, once the name goes from Cariboo to Zero Zero. At this point it becomes necessary to refer to Jacques Derrida and his widespread philosophical movement known as “deconstruction”. According to him, deconstruction aims at examining the unexplored margins or borders of “traditional systems of thought”, exposing thus ideas such as truth and origin among others, present in “centred discourses”. Derrida holds that, although deconstruction advocates no limits to interpretation and semantic play, this does not mean “free” or “subjective” interpretation:
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Derrida argues, rather, that the possibility of signification in general depends upon an irreducible effect of dissémination , on the fact that the wandering of meaning is the insurmountable condition of the production of meaning ( MAKARYK, 1994: 25).
To begin with, according to Derrida’s definition, I would argue that at least four meanings can be inferred from the deconstruction of the word Cariboo. The cafe becomes a strong metaphor for the kind of acceptance that downtrodden people can expect to find, but in this case the hospitality is strongly slanted towards commercial interest. People go there for survival and they guarantee the survival of the owner: “Like I gotta pay my bills, too. I gotta eat. So like I serve anybody whose got the greens” (69- 70). Other people are introduced and scrutinized in the stream of thinking of this character. In the English language, the expression double O is used as a slang meaning careful scrutiny or close inspection (after the two O’s in once-over). It is in the Double Zero Cafe that the reader is told about Jojo, Paulie, Delia and Nell. Their personalities and behaviors are detailed and justified. Nell, the cafe owner’s ex-wife, would know what to do in any situation, but she was a pain in the ass. Jojo, the cafe owner’s son, who had died in Vietnam. Paulie, who seems to be Jojo’s age if he were alive. Delia, who is often with Paulie. The cafe owner goes on to an expansive, painstakingly, detailed explanation about his relationship with the cafe, his customers, the illegal workers and the cops. In addition to all that, the circumstances, under which the sudden speculation about the name of the cafe on the part of its owner are embedded in ambiguous and ironic implications, report us to other levels of meanings: “Didn’t even know what it meant until I looked it up in some library dictionary. But I kinda liked the name” (68). Thus, keeping in mind the Derridean principles of deconstruction, dissemination and deferral of meaning, the word “Cariboo” is originally the name of a mountainous place in British Columbia, Canada, an attractive countryside spot for families to spend vacations or newly-married couples to enjoy their honeymoon. Nevertheless, on account of being so close both in spelling and pronunciation to “Caribou”, a deerlike animal typical of North America, an easy prey for bigger animals and hunters, we may come across another set of meanings, showing more appropriacy if we take into consideration the very situation of the Latinos who frequent the Cariboo Cafe. In a word, if the cafe’s name originally suggested a bucolic and romantic place – a refuge from the tensions and 69
nuisances of urban life – we are suddenly confronted with a tremendously ironic insight. For the Latinos, the cafe is exactly the site of death, annihilation and despair. It is there that they become “caribous”, an easy prey for “La Migra”. Therefore, it is very emblematic to see the metaphorical effect caused by the effacing of the letters of the word Cariboo in the cafe’s name: from a romantic site to a zero zero place, a site where illegal workers must endure the bitter consequences of their condition. In Talking Back , Debra Castillo, commenting on the remaining O’s of the cafe’s name, remarks that the missing part “Carib” is the name of one of the first Indian tribes conquered by Europeans, implying then, the annihilation of these Indians (CASTILLO, 1992: 81). Following this rationale, the cafe is also seen as a place of annihilation, leading us again to the previously mentioned idea of caribou, the deerlike animal, an easy prey for hunters, running the risk of being annihilated. This is exactly the risk the washerwoman takes once she frequents the cafe. Part III starts with yet another fragmentation of the narrative line. Upon seeing Macky, Sonya’s brother, the washerwoman mistakes him for her lost son. Through a narrative in which time and space are compressed, the reader discovers that the woman’s son Geraldo had been arrested by soldiers in their home country. Although he was only five years old, he was taken as a criminal and probably killed to pay for his supposed activities as a spy. In this part of the narrative, there is a clear reference to La Llorona. The washerwoman is one among many mothers, desperate with the arrest, disappearance and probable death of their children:
The darkness becomes a serpent’s tongue, swallowing us whole. It is the night of La Llorona. The women come up from the depths of sorrow to search for their children. I join them, frantic, desperate, and our eyes become scrutinizers, our bodies opiated with the scent of their smiles. Descending from door to door, the wind whips our faces. I hear the wailing of the women and know it to be my own. Geraldo is nowhere to be found (72).
Firmly convinced that Macky is her lost son, Geraldo, the washerwoman takes care of both children, who have lost their way home, and goes to the Cariboo Cafe with them twice. The reader learns through the fragmented narrative what happens between the two visits: the cafe owner watches a report of missing children and recognizes Sonya and Macky; Paulie od’s in the cafe, and the cafe owner tells on three illegal 70
workers who try to hide from the police. This last incident works as a foreshadowing of what will happen to the washerwoman. When she goes there for the second time, the cops appear and she realizes she has been betrayed by the cafe owner. Oliver-Rotger comments on the cafe owner’s behavior:
A distorted version of the unscrupulous businessman, this wretched character is simultaneously a victim and an agent of racial discrimination, as well as a fierce defender of traditional familial values. The story reaches its highest ironic peak, when he, in the name of those values, betrays the heartbroken washerwoman (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 238).
It seems evident why Oliver-Rotger finds the cafe owner’s betrayal ironic once “the child is the link between the respective stories of the woman and the bartender”. Like her, he has also lost his son Jojo. Instead of understanding the washerwoman’s plight, he sees her as “the scapegoat” of his “own frustrated aspirations” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 238). The cafe owner seems mentally deranged because his ties to the past are fierce. The loss of his son has wounded him deeply. This is not the only short story in which Viramontes portrays the impact of the loss of a child in a man’s life. In “Neighbors”, Fierro is an old man battered by the suffering of having lost his son Chuy. Both men in the respective short stories are tied to their memories. Jojo, the cafe owner’s son died fighting in Vietnam and Chuy, trying to protect his father Fierro. Here, it becomes worth mentioning that Viramontes does something extraordinary and new: she transfers the sufferings of La Llorona to both the cook and Fierro. They become the male version of La Llorona: El Lloron. In a lecture delivered at the 2001 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Norma Helsper alludes to Viramontes’s cinematographic technique. Referring to Under the Feet of Jesus , she affirms that “The handling of space and simultaneity often owes a debt to film, with the equivalent of wide-angle camera sweeps from one scene to another” (HELSPER, 2001). As I have mentioned before, Viramontes’s fiction, including “The Cariboo Cafe”, demands that the reader reconstructs the sequence of events once there is no linear development of actions. The reader gets involved in a web as the narrative perspective varies, shifting from one character to another. That is why critics consider it 71
a “polyphonic text” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 146) or a “multiply voiced” one (CASTILLO, 1992: 79). We must not forget, however, that silence plays an important role in the story. Rule number one observed by illegal workers is “never talk to strangers, not even the neighbor” (65). The cafe owner denounces the illegal workers without saying a word, just by pointing his finger towards their hiding place. In the climatic final scene, however, silence breaks into hellish sounds. The washerwoman
begins screaming … screaming so that the walls shake, screaming enough for all the women of murdered children, screaming, pleading for help from the people outside, and pushes an open hand against an officer’s nose, because no one will stop them and he pushes the gun barrel to her face (78).
The washerwoman fights for her “son”, shouting, crying and screaming, joining La Llorona and other desperate women who have had their children murdered or taken away. Giving voice to the washerwoman, Viramontes portrays her as one who transgresses the rules, displays strategies of resistance and cannot be silenced. In other words, the washerwoman, trying to save her son and facing the dominant order, embodies the myths of La Malinche – the symbol of transgression, La Llorona – the symbol of maternal resistance, and the Hungry Woman – the one who cannot be contained, satisfied or silenced. As Saldívar-Hull points out, for the desperate washerwoman, the American cops who enter the Cariboo Cafe are not different from the ones in her home country; she knows they will take her “son” again:
Her confrontation with the police in the United States appears to her a continuation of her struggles with the police who detained and murdered Geraldo. She resists arrest and throws boiling coffee at the man pointing “the steel erection” of a gun at her forehead (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 151).
The washerwoman’s behavior remits us to La Llorona’s version of colonial Mexico, the one who represents maternal resistance, and her resistance, to Carbonell’s, concept of Gritona, the one who hollers at her oppressor (CARBONELL, 1999). The Gritona washerwoman does exactly this: hollers at the cops, challenges them, and holds 72
Macky until she is shot. She is killed, washed in blood, but motherhood is regained: “We are going home. My son and I” (75). Carbonell argues that:
The description of the washerwoman’s death in liquid terms – as she is shot, she is “blinded by liquid darkness” – again connects her to La Llorona. Because she finds union with her son in the afterlife – she is going “home” – water becomes the medium through which she can actively transform her dismembered self into a unified maternal figure (CARBONELL, 1999).
“Tears on My Pillow” and “Miss Clairol” belong to Viramontes’s collection Paris Rats in East L. A.: A Novel in Short Stories , which has not yet been published in a single volume. This book has come to be known as the “Arlene series” (OLIVER- ROTGER, 2003: 207), because the characters are the same in all stories: Arlene – the mother; Ofelia (also known as Champ) – the daughter; and Gregorio (also known as Spider) – the son. “Tears on My Pillow” and “The Cariboo Cafe” bear similarities in two points. Both stories deal with losses. In “The Cariboo Cafe”, the story of losses is quite striking. Simply put: the cafe sign has lost almost all its letters; Sonya has lost her “guardian saint” – the key to her house – and her way home; the washerwoman has lost her son Geraldo; the owner of the cafe has lost his wife Nell and his son Jojo; the washerwoman, faced with the contingency of losing a ‘son’ for the second time, fights and ends up losing her life. In “Tears on My Pillow”, there is loss through disappearance – mama María, tío Benny, Gregorio –, even if it is just a temporary absence as narrated by Champ: “see what I mean? They just never say hello and never say goodbye. They just disappear, leaving you all alone all scared with your burns and La Llorona hungry for you” (115) 2. In addition to this, there is loss through death – La Llorona’s kids, Grandpa Ham, Lil Mary G. Another linking point between “Tears on My Pillow” and “The Cariboo Cafe” is that they both present modern variants of the mythical figure of La Llorona, not only portraying how women are submitted to drudgery in patriarchal societies but mainly denouncing how repressive governments act towards people who are defenseless. We have presented enough evidence of the
2 VIRAMONTES, Helena María. “Tears on My Pillow”. New Chicano Writing. Ed. Charles M. Tatum. Tucson and London: U. of Arizona, 1992. All further references to this short story will appear in the text by page number only.
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washerwoman’s resistance to oppression. “Tears on My Pillow” starts with a contemporary rendition of La Llorona legend. To calm Ofelia’s fears about the crying she hears every night, mama María tells her a story:
She told me La Lauren’s [Llorona’s] this mama, see, who killed her kids. Something like there’s this girl and some soldiers take her husband away and she goes to the jail to look for him, asses why these soldiers took him. And she gots I don’t remember how many kids all crying cause their daddy’s gone, you know. And the soldier being mean and stupid and the devil inside him ..., he points a gun to her head and says, “I gonna kill you”. But she looks at him and says, “Do me the favor”. That’s like something Arlene would say, you know. But the girl, she don’t know when to stop. “You kill everything so go ahead and kill me”, she tells the soldier, “but first kill my kids cause I don’t want’em hungry and sick and lone without no ’ama or ’apa or TV”. So the devil says “okay”, and shoots all the kids, bang, bang, bang. But you know what ? He don’t kill her. Cold shot, huh ? She goes coocoo and escapes from the nut house ... And to this day, the girl all dressed up in black like Mama María cause she killed her kids and she walks up and down City Terrace with no feet, crying and crying and looking for her kids. For reallies, late in the dark night only (110).
It is worth mentioning Viramontes’s use of punctuation to convey her political message. When mama María is telling her contemporary version of La Llorona to Ofelia, Viramontes uses the reticences twice, exactly when there are references to the soldier, his wickedness, his act of killing people. Sadívar-Hull elucidates:
Then there is a break in the narrative that mimics the slippage in the historical memory of a people who disremember the violence of the conquest. It was not a traitorous Malintzin Tenepal or a hysterical Llorona bent on insane revenge who kills her hijos, who commits infanticide, but the occupying soldados intent on complete conquest and the submission of the indigenous people (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000:158).
These contemporary urban versions of La Llorona establish a parallel between the sufferings of the mythical figure and of people like Arlene, Ofelia, Veronica, and all those who live in urban ghettos. Like La Llorona, they are all “condemned to wander in perpetual loneliness, silence, and alienation. […] While La Llorona is the figurative representation of what [Ofelia] fears, Veronica the girl’s neighbor, is a real embodiment of ugliness and disgrace” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003: 237): 74
La Llorona only comes at night. When it’s day, Veronica will always stay. That’s what I say. I don’t like Veronica. Not cause her skin was all scaly and yellow and pusy ’round the elbows and neck and behind her knees. Not even cause she’s been hold back a few grades and just gets taller, or the way spit always dried at the corners of her mouth and turned white. I’m ascared of her cause her mama died a few months back [...] And every time I seen her, I remember if it’s possible for my mama to die too. And my stomach burns bad to see her, tall and ugly and bad luck stuck to her like dried pus (111).
The death of Veronica’s mother, Lil Mary G., is a central event in the short story. Constantly beaten by her man, she ends up being murdered by him. Arlene does not allow Ofelia to stay at the window but even so the girl can see Lil Mary G’s body involved in bloodstained sheets. Arlene knows that the cries Ofelia used to hear every night were Lil Mary G’s and not La Llorona’s. At this point, it becomes clear why Saldívar-Hull has stated that Viramontes goes further in the resemantization of La Llorona in “Tears on My Pillow”:
Viramontes demolishes the popular narrative of La Llorona when the City Terrace women’s identities emerge as single parents, all with different ways and with different levels of success in raising children, not drowning them (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000:159).
It becomes clear that Ofelia resents her mother’s alienated behavior, although she loves her and fears her death. Ofelia’s tears on her pillow are caused by fear of violence, materialized in the cries she hears during the night and in the wrapped corpse of Lil Mary G. The death of Veronica’s mother leads Ofelia to fear that the same will happen to her mother. The emotional distance there exists between Ofelia and Arlene is another likely cause for the child’s insecurity. The connection between mother and daughter comes across as very remote:
“Turn off the TV”, she always says before hello. “Get me some aspirins”. And I does both. I know it takes a long time for the buzzing of the machines in your head to stop. I know it after last week. Arlene kicks off her tennis, goes straight for the couch […] And in a snap of a minute, she’s asleep (114).
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As we have witnessed in other stories by Viramontes the silence which results from lack of communication brings about serious consequences to her characters. In “Tears on My Pillow”, Ofelia is not able to understand the deep silence that surrounds her:
Just they never say hello and they never say good-bye. Mama María never said good-bye, she just left and that’s that and nobody to tell me why Tío Benny don’t live with Tía Olivia any more or when is Gregorio gonna come home or if Arlene is fixed up to go dancing at the Paladium tonight. No one to say nuthin’ (115).
Veronica’s silence is also linked to lack of communication:
Veronica don’t talk to no one, and purty soon no one talk to her. She just wants to be left alone till everybody forgets she’s around. I think that’s what it is. Then she can disappear like Lil Mary G. Without no one paying attention. You don’t need bras or nuthin’ when you just air (113).
Even more poignant is Ofelia’s screaming – suppressed from the narrative – when she fears that Arlene has disappeared. In this particular occasion, Arlene does nothing to comfort her daughter. In “Tears on My Pillow”, Ofelia is the central character. Arlene comes across as distant, only occasionally protective of her daughter. A single mother who works in a noisy, stifling sweatshop, Arlene seems to spend most of her time at home either asleep or getting ready for dates, oblivious to Ofelia. In “Miss Clairol”, Arlene, not Ofelia, is the focus of the story. Herrera-Sobek comments on Viramontes’s choice of a factory worker as a fictional character:
I foresee the factory worker as a protagonist in Chicano/a literature becoming more and more prominent, since a great number of Mexican American women belong to this sector of American workers. The Chicana protagonist working in factories may be as important a character in future Chicano literary works as the migrant worker has been in the theater and the novel (HERRERA-SOBEK & VIRAMONTES, 1996:2).
Debra Castillo places Arlene, this Chicana factory worker worried about her appearance and her nights out with different men, among the acculturated Chicanas who are “neither that familiar figure of the Madre Santa nor the Chicana Socialist Feminist who is an Honor to Her Raza”: 76
[…] Arlene points to the necessity for a more nuanced reading of femininity that requires a reexamination of social intersections, a reexploration of Chicana sexuality, and a revised theory of representation (CASTILLO, 2002:152-153).
Viramontes begins “Miss Clairol” with Arlene, accompanied by Ofelia/Champ, looking for a new hair color at the local K-Mart. Viramontes deftly centers her narrative on Arlene to contest the force and influence of “mainstream Mexican and American codes of female beauty and romance upon the working-class and middle-class Chicana” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:203). Arlene’s internalization and appropriation of “a beauty system”, which supposedly will guarantee her love and romance, bring weird aesthetic results: she constantly changes hair colors, is always excessively made up, her toes are dotted with nail polish, not to mention that she wears clothes too small for her size. In short, she becomes a grotesque caricature of the sensual woman she would like to be. In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and the Body , Susan Bordo discusses women who become their “own worst enemy” following the “tyrannies of fashion”, enduring “whatever physical inconvenience is entailed”. According to Bordo, feminism has transformed the metaphor of the Body Politic into a new metaphor – the politics of the body – which refers to the body as “a site of individual self-determination”. The problem lies in the extremes women have gone to follow the dictates of fashion, with the firm belief that it is their choice, and not something imposed on them (BORDO, 1993: 21-22). Concerning Viramontes’s decentering narrative practices, it may be said that, although “Miss Clairol” is a fragmented doubly-voiced narrative, the impression it causes on readers is not so striking as the one provoked by “The Cariboo Cafe”, “The Moths”, and “The Long Reconciliation”. It seems to me that there is a subliminal connection between Viramontes’s narrative practice in “Miss Clairol” and the Chicanas she wants to portray – the acculturated Chicanas of the 1960s. Herrera-Sobek dwells on Viramontes’s use of dialect and limited code-switching in her characterization of Arlene:
A working-class dialect sprinkled with profanities here and there skillfully delineate the protagonist’s social position. The code-switching practiced by the two bilingual characters place the protagonists within a 77
Chicano cultural context. It also connotes the almost complete extinction of the Spanish language, for the code-switching consists mainly of an “amá”, “m’ija” and a “tú sabes”. The loss of language provides an important clue as to the degree of assimilation of the two women (HERRERA-SOBEK & VIRAMONTES, 1996: 34).
Arlene suits perfectly Rosaura Sánchez’s description of the liminality of Chicano/as living in the United States. In chapter II, I have pointed out Sánchez’s considerations on Chicano/as’ process of acculturation. As she says, Chicano/as are swallowed by the American Dream but they cannot keep up with its demands. As Sánchez stresses, “being affected, influenced, and exploited by a culture is one thing, and sharing fully in that culture is another (SÁNCHEZ, 1990: 295). Saldívar-Hull points out yet another way the media may influence consumers, leading them “to believe that having access to products like Pepsi and Colgate undoes the underlying material inequities” (SALDÍVAR-HULL, 2000: 102). Debra Castillo points out that one of the projects undertaken by committed Chicana writers is exactly the one that reclaims all Chicana’s multiple voices and identities, “including the homely voices of the women like Arlene” (CASTILLO, 2002:153). In her essay “En Rapport”, Gloria Anzaldúa defines acculturated Chicanas, women like Arlene:
Nothing is more difficult than identifying emotionally with a cultural alterity... Nothing scares the Chicana more than a quasi Chicana; nothing disturbs a Mexican more than a Latina who lumps her with the norte- americanas . It is easier to retreat to the safety of difference behind racial, cultural, and class borders (MORAGA & ANZALDÚA, 1983: 145).
Most Chicana writers and theorists do not mention Arlene’s generation, yet Viramontes does not hesitate to portray, through Arlene, an acculturated Chicana who transgresses the traditional values of domesticity, motherhood and fidelity. Arlene pays little or no attention to housekeeping, most of the time she neglects her daughter, and she sees nothing wrong in having different partners. “Miss Clairol” is one among Viramontes’s stories which does not make direct allusions to myths. However, it is undeniable that Arlene’s transgressions against Mexican traditional ideology towards women remind us of La Malinche. 78
Viramontes’s short stories are real testimonios of women under multiple oppressions. She gives voice to these women in her fragmented narratives and manages to subvert History. Directly or indirectly, her characters are the embodiment of mythical or historical female figures who transgressed, who resisted, who could not be stopped or silenced. Her stories confirm her conviction that “we must strongly challenge those beliefs that oppress us within our family and in our own culture, in addition to those in the dominant culture” (VIRAMONTES, 1989: 35; personal correspondence). 79
CHAPTER 4
Words as Tools: reading the world, reading the Other, reading the self
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for paradoxes.
Maxine Hong Kingston, This Bridge Called My Back
Under the Feet of Jesus is a rite-of-passage narrative as its Chicana protagonist, Estrella, reaches maturity. The beautiful and fertile landscape of California’s fields contrasts with the miserable lifestyle of migrant workers – poverty, disease, poor house conditions, low wages, pesticide contamination, and lack of appropriate health care. There can be no denying that Viramontes has received a great deal of influence from ... y no se lo tragó la tierra (...And the Earth Did Not Devour Him) , written in 1970, by Chicano writer Tomás Rivera. In Learning from Experience: minority identities, multicultural struggles , Paula Moya points several similarities between the two novels:
Both novels focalize the social world from the perspectives of Mexican- origin farmworkers. Both novels center around a young person who models the process of coming to a more adequate understanding of the world he or she lives in. Both juxtapose, in achronological narratives, a variety of farmworkers’ subjective experiences that a careful reader must order and synthesize before they can be understood as an intelligible whole. And finally, both posit the activity of interpretation as a necessary precondition to effective agency (MOYA, 2002: 207).
Both novels can also be seen as Bildungsroman , with the difference that an unnamed boy is the protagonist in Rivera’s novel and the thirteen-year-old Estrella is Viramontes’s heroine. Viramontes, just like Sandra Cisneros did in The House on Mango Street , focuses on a female character who refuses to be contained by prescribed gender roles. Estrella’s process of empowerment involves the subversion of social and cultural codes. This disruptive female behavior has been gradually accepted by contemporary criticism as explained by Peonia Guedes:
Feminist critics have shown that the structure of the Bildungsroman presupposes a range of options which are offered only to men, and that in the patriarchal society women rarely make their way toward self- 80
discovery. In fact the heroine of the Bildungsroman of the 18 th and 19 th centuries is usually obliged to accept her socially assigned role – marriage and motherhood –, or to refuse these roles and pay the price for her defiance – physical or spiritual death. Writers of the 20 th century have tried to change the endings of the novels – usually marriage or death – by building narratives which offer a series of different options to the heroine, thus questioning the traditional images of female socialization. Recent multidisciplinary feminist research so suggests that women’s lives do not follow the male paradigms of identity, experience and development and, thus, need to be re-examined separately from men’s lives (GUEDES, 1997: 18, my translation. ).
In her gendered version of the plight of Mexican American farmworkers, Viramontes endows Estrella with a mark of difference. A thirteen-year-old girl who labors with her farmwork family in the fields of California, Estrella undergoes a process of transformation, of interpretation of the world and, consequently, acquires voice and agency to resist totality, inferiority and subalternity. The mark of difference Estrella carries with her begins with her name itself. She is really a star, the one who will guide her family, will shine by empowering herself, and who, significantly, in the end of the novel, is at the top of the barn, close to the sky, “as an angel standing on the verge of faith” (176) 1. Viramontes’s choice of names for her focalizing characters is also significant. Alejo has come from Texas and after being sprayed by pesticide, has to be taken to hospital and remains far from everybody (alejo, in Spanish, means someone or something that is distant). Petra, Estrella’s mother, is turned into a stone due to a life of misery. Hopeless, her suffering is evident, but she keeps on, automatically, working in the fields, taking care of her children and her shack. Mother of five children and abandoned by her husband, she lives with Perfecto, a man who is thirty-seven years her senior. Although Perfecto is a man with memory lapses and a cloudy history, it becomes clear that he yearns for his home in his idealized Mexico, especially when he perceives Petra is pregnant. A decent, responsible, helpful man, Perfecto differs from most of Viramontes’s male characters. Concerning Viramontes’s title – Under the Feet of Jesus – it may be said that it is up to the reader to interpret its connection with God. Petra keeps the family’s birth certificates under the statue of Jesus, probably because, being so religious as she is
1 VIRAMONTES, Helena Maria. Under the Feet of Jesus. New York: Plume Books, 1995. All further references to the novel will appear in the text by page number only.
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(every time they move, the first thing Perfecto does is to find a place in their bungalow for Petra’s altar), she believes her family is under protection. However, considering their substandard way of living, their daily struggle to survive, the social injustices they go through, and their political disenfranchisement, a question must of needs be posed: is the ‘under’ in the title “indicative of protection… or is it suggestive of yet another form of oppression?” (HARRIS, 2005: 59). To denounce multiple oppressions and the lack of concern for the Other is, clearly, one of the goals in Under the Feet of Jesus. The sad condition of the postcolonial subaltern subject is painstakingly depicted in Retrato do Colonizado Precedido pelo Retrato do Colonizador , written in 1965 by Albert Memmi, one of the first theorists – together with Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire – of postcolonial discourse. Their works are considered the seed of postcolonial studies. According to Memmi, the colonizer portrays himself as a man of action, while the colonized is always associated to laziness. This is, clearly, the excuse used for extremely low wages, which are linked to racism and capitalist exploitation. Memmi affirms that immigrants are not seen as human beings but as arms. It is a custom to hire four pairs of arms for the price of one. He adds that, to make things worse, the colonized does not exist as an individual. When referring to the colonized, the common pronoun is “they” (they are lazy, we cannot count on them). Deprived of freedom, access to education, health care, adequate housing, and even food and water, the colonized is quickly transformed into an object. Unfortunately, the colonized ends up by accepting this position and thus reinforcing the portrait imposed upon him (MEMMI, 1989:78-83). In Under the Feet of Jesus everybody in the family works: “Estrella was not more than four when she first accompanied the mother to the fields” (51), and Petra, even pregnant, was able to haul “pounds and pounds of cotton by the pull of her back” (51). As pointed out by Memmi, colonized people in general accept their plight – backbreaking work, lack of money, of health care, of education, extreme humiliation – as something normal, as part of their condition. Solidarity comes across as the only way to undermine their sufferings, reflected in Petra’s words: “If we don’t take care of each other, who would take care of us?” (96). When close to the end of the novel Estrella takes action, Alejo, who accepts his condition of subalternity, is more worried about the nurse than about himself. He does not see himself as someone worth fighting for. 82
Under the Feet of Jesus should be seen as a work by a Chicana writer which goes beyond the common issues usually addressed to by Chicanas, namely, the acquisition of voice, the postcolonial condition, the patriarchal oppression, and the breaking of boundaries between the public and the private. Paula Moya highlights that, while these themes have been extremely important in Chicanas’ literature of resistance, Viramontes’s novel is challenging as it gives critics the possibility “to expand the range of interpretative concerns usually brought to bear on literature written by Chicana”. According to Moya, although the novel addresses some of these issues, Viramontes transcends them by presenting a theory that intertwines identity, interpretation and agency:
On the metaphorical level, Viramontes analogizes words to tools to figure the act of interpretation as a materialist engagement with the world. On a structural level, she employs the narrative strategy of focalization to emphasize the epistemic status of identity. Finally, on a thematic level, the novel documents Estrella’s transformation of consciousness and her personal empowerment by tracing the process through which she becomes a better reader of her social world (MOYA, 2002:177).
Commenting on the structure of the novel, Moya states that Viramontes made an option in this novel for the use of variable character-bound focalization. More specifically, she chose four characters, Estrella, Petra, Perfecto, and Alejo in order to make explicit how individual perspectives are partial and how social location and social ideologies influence characters’ identities and their reading of the world. The New Mestiza consciousness is present here once Viramontes privileges social issues in her life. The term focalization was initially used in 1972 by Gérard Genette, in order to establish the distinction between narrative perspective and point of view. Focalization involves a mediation “between the focalizer, the point from which the elements are viewed, and the focalized object(s), or the element(s) viewed”. If the focalizer is a character, there is internal focalization, but if the focalizer is an agent outside the story, then, there is external focalization. Moreover, the focalizer and the narrator can be the same, although it is also possible to have a third-person narrator that presents the perspectives of the characters (MOYA, 2002: 185-186). 83
It is also possible for the narrator and the focalizer to converge. The case of the so-called “omniscient narrator” is an example of external focalization in which the narrator and the focalizer are one and the same; both are located outside the story (MOYA, 2002:186).
Viramontes’s choice of variable character-bound focalization allows the reader a comprehensive, all-inclusive vision of events. Referring to “a multiple vantage point”, Norma Helsper explains: “This is how it looks from here where person X is standing, while this is how it looks from this other angle where Y is” (HELSPER, 2001). Exactly because the reader is put in such a privileged position, he/she is able to understand that the way a character interprets his/her reality depends on his/her social location (race, class, gender, and sexuality) and also on his/her understanding of the place he/she occupies in society. In short, the way a character interprets the world is directly linked to his/her identity. The scene in which the family arrives at their new shack provides a good example of the partiality of individual perspective:
Where Perfecto sees utility, and Petra sees danger, Estrella, younger and less jaded than both, sees adventure and possibility. The “furniture” of the world they occupy and perceive simultaneously thus changes according to who is doing the perceiving: Perfecto looks at crates and sees an altar for Petra’s religious statues; Petra looks at her children’s bare feet and sees the threat of scorpions; Estrella looks at a row of eucalyptus trees and sees dancing girls fanning their feathers (8-9) (MOYA, 2002:187).
Another example is pointed out by Moya. When the door of the old barn is opened, it makes a strange noise. Estrella, who is there, thinks that the door “squeaks worse than the brakes of Perfecto’s wagon (10). Alejo and Gumecindo, who are distant from the barn, have different opinions concerning the noise. Alejo thinks it is the sound of “cats fighting” (10), while Gumecindo states that it is La Llorona’s crying (10) (MOYA, 202:188). The absence of an external narrator focalizer leads the readers into a more active role. Having to rely solely on variable character-bound focalization, the reader is challenged “to become a better, more sensitive, interpreter of the social world represented in the text” (MOYA, 2002: 191). Perhaps, most important of all is the fact that the four focalizers are humble people of Mexican origin. Mieke Bal highlights the 84
fact that a character allowed to focalize a narrative gains the “advantage as a party in [a] conflict. [Focalization] can give the reader insight into feelings and thoughts, while the other character cannot communicate anything” (MOYA, 2002: 190). By using marginalized, unprivileged people as focalizers, Viramontes not only gives them the visibility and voice they lack in their lives but also gives the reader a chance to learn about the other. By using four characters instead of one, she stays clear from an essentialization of the migrant worker 2. Viramontes has been faithful to postmodern decentering narratives from her very first story, as they are effective tools to subvert History. In Under the Feet of Jesus , the decentering of the narrative is achieved through variable character-bound focalization and through the use of flashbacks and flashforwards. I would like to stress the complexity of this narrative practice making use of Chatman’s comments on French literary critic Gérard Genette’s ideas concerning the chronological sequence of narrative events:
Genette distinguishes between normal sequence, where the story and discourse have the same order (1 2 3 4), and ‘anachronous’ sequences. And anachrony can be of two sorts: flashback (analepse), where the discourse breaks the story-flow to recall earlier events (2 1 3 4), and flashforward (prolepse), where the discourse leaps ahead, to events subsequent to intermediate events (CHATMAN, 1978:64).
Following Genette’s considerations, I would say that in Under the Feet of Jesus there is an alternating use of analepse and prolepse , the former being more recurrent. The first example takes place in the very beginning of the story when the reader learns a little about Estrella and her father: “What Estrella remembered most of her real father was an orange. He had peeled a huge orange for her in an orchard where they stopped to pee” (12). The readers thus get in touch with the protagonist’s reality as a whole and may follow her process of empowerment, aware of the specific psychological and physical circumstances surrounding her. The fragmentation of the narrative resulting from the use of strategies just discussed reflects the migrant workers’ fragmented life. The lack of narrative linearity reflects the diasporas to which the postcolonial subject is
2 The importance of Viramontes’s use of marginalized characters as focalizers has been pointed out to me by my advisor.
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submitted, and the reader, consequently, is led to zig-zag through the narrative; his/her discomfort places him/her closer to the anxieties lived by the characters. In other words, the lack of linearity in the events presented by Viramontes evolves side by side with the depiction of the extremely fragmented lives of her characters as if the narrative fragmentation were functioning as a mirror for us, readers, to see the colonized subaltern subject’s fragmented life, a result of the diasporas and of the capitalist exploitation of the poor. In using this narrative practice, Viramontes manages to involve her readers in the same anxiety her characters feel, awake her readers’ consciousness to social injustices, besides calling our attention to the postmodern condition itself through a number of concepts of high concern in contemporary literature such as identity/subjectivity, decentering, indeterminacy, gender, alterity, uncertainty, deconstruction, difference, among others. In The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Culture Criticism, Joseph Childers elucidates the connection between fragmentation and other postmodern issues:
The concept itself is opposed to that of TOTALITY – whether as a description of the self or SUBJECT, the system of values we inhabit, or the material experiences of everyday life. Fragmentation is often linked to the conditions of a POSTMODERN, postindustrial world. For many, especially those invested in particular forms of ESSENTIALISM, or belief in transcendent forms of aesthetics, morals or political action, fragmentation is much lamented. For other, especially those who espouse notions of DECENTERING or INDETERMINACY – that is, for those who perceive all meaning to be contingently produced and without any absolute foundation – fragmentation is seen as the inevitable consequence of capitalism and the proliferation of technology. For this latter group, fragmentation is not necessarily in and of itself a deleterious state of affairs and can even be celebrated (CHILDERS, 1995:117).
I would argue that Viramontes, besides using fragmentation linked to those issues mentioned by Childers, aims at showing that fragmentation has multiple aspects and uses. It becomes clear that, on portraying the fragmented lives of the immigrants, she denounces that fragmentation can be used to manipulate people and institutions by the ones in power, those who aim at oppressing the disenfranchised. Viramontes’s message is clear – the colonized subaltern subjects are continuously subjected to psychological, emotional, social, and cultural fragmentation. However, Viramontes does not limit herself to exposing oppression and disenfranchisement. She promotes instead 86
the possibility of a reversal in the situation through transforming human agency. As Moya has argued, both on the metaphorical and thematic levels, the novel traces Estrella’s path towards conscientización – a key word for Chicana writers – and empowerment.
Although young, Estrella has learned a lot with the poor living conditions her family and other migrant workers go through, but it is Perfecto who provides her actual empowerment. This is what McCracken examines when she says:
[…] he teaches Estrella to use his tools; like language, they empower Estrella, as Perfecto changes them for her from empty signifiers (“as foreign and meaningless to her as chalky lines on the blackboard” /25/) to the vehicles of pride in one’s ability to “build, tear down, rearrange and repair” (26) (McCRACKEN, 1999: 184).
With tools and language – she also learns to read, – Estrella develops a double strategy of female empowerment. Here it becomes necessary to emphasize the importance of language in postcolonial discourse. In “ Can the subaltern speak? : vozes femininas contemporâneas da África Ocidental”, Peonia Guedes alludes to it:
It is an accepted notion that to name the world is to understand it, to know it and to have control over it. That is why the issue of “language” is central to the discussion of postcolonialism since language is the most powerful instrument of cultural control (GUEDES, 2002: 75).
According to Paula Moya, “the link between tools and language is central to the expanded notion of literacy that (Viramontes) develops in the novel” (MOYA, 2002:178). Estrella acquires agency and voice after having understood the meaning of tools and words, after having learned to read. Importantly, learning to read in Under the Feet of Jesus is more than just learning to decipher the letters in a word. As Paula Moya explains, Viramontes develops a concept of expanded notion of literacy that transcends the mere act of reading and reaches the act of interpreting the world. She adds that Viramontes has evoked an older, and now forgotten, meaning of the Latin verb “legere” that gave “leer” in Spanish and “ler” in Portuguese, and which meant “to discern”. Walter Mignolo, a literary critic, points out that “...with the rise of alphabetic writing the meaning of the verb began to be applied more exclusively to the idea of discerning the letters of the alphabet in a text” (MIGNOLO apud MOYA, 2002:179). 87
It has already been mentioned here that, by revisiting their indigenous past, Chicana writers have built up an identity of their own. In rescuing this older meaning of the verb “legere”, that is to say, “to discern”, Viramontes is embracing her Amerindian ancestors, once, for them, “reading” would mean exactly to discern, to understand, to interpret. Walter Mignolo gives his contribution to a more clear understanding of this fact, when he explains that during the colonial period Spanish and Mexicans cohabited and had “not only different material ways of encoding and transmitting knowledge but also, as is natural – different concepts of the activities of reading and writing” (MIGNOLO apud MOYA, 2002: 180). Perfecto teaches Estrella how to use his tools, and they become meaningful, as do the words which before she was unable to understand. Then the association between tools and words establishes an evident theme, or trope, in the novel: language as tool, a tool that encompasses communication and the power to change social reality. Paula Moya explains what has just been pointed out: “Viramontes figures literacy as a skill involving a human agent’s total engagement with the world” (MOYA, 2002:179). Viramontes’s expanded notion of literacy, pointing to its possibility to change the social world, remits us, Brazilians, to Paulo Freire, the famous educator who developed a radical pedagogy in which learning to read and write provide a way for the poor to empower themselves. Through his experience of teaching illiterate people, Freire soon discovered a method of teaching in which he shows how quickly literacy can be achieved provided it is linked to local and social issues. Chicana writer Ana Castillo mentions Paulo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed in Massacre of the Dreamers :
Along with a formal education, he proposed a raising of political consciousness which would enable the Brazilian population, the majority of whom live in poverty, to become empowered by understanding their social conditions. He called this consciousness raising process, “conscientização”. Throughout the rest of Latin America it was translated to “conscientización”. There is no single world equivalent for this verb turned noun and in the United States it was translated to consciousness raising (CASTILLO, 1995:9).
It is worth mentioning that, although Estrella misses her father and resents the fact that Perfecto is not he, they work together using his tools in a very cooperative way. 88
They do not talk much. However silent Perfecto and Estrella may be, they manage to communicate in the sense that they are able to understand each other’s predicament. As
Paula Moya says:
In their exchanges with one another, Perfecto and Estrella each “read” the other – that is, they attempt to discern the concrete needs, desires and capabilities of the other in order to work out an acceptable and fair exchange. Each must recognize the particularity, the “otherness”, of the other, even as they view the other in relation to the self (MOYA, 2002: 184).
When the ability to “read the other” is put into practice, silence is much more meaningful than empty words. In the novel, there is a clear contrast between Perfecto whose words are matched by actions and characters whose words are of no consequence. Moya highlights Viramontes’s strong belief in the power of the written word and language to change social reality:
Under the Feet of Jesus figures words as more or less powerful to the extent that they refer outward, beyond language as such, to action or objects in the world. Where words lack a more or less determinate referent they are figured simply as noise (MOYA, 2002: 180).
As Moya comments, the words of Estrella’s father “fail to correspond to lived behavior”, and that is why he is depicted as a man whose “words clanked like loose empty cans in a bag” (16). Maxine, a girl whom Estrella meets in a migrant camp, “is another character in the novel who often uses words carelessly… ‘rattl[ing] on like a broken wheel on a shopping cart’ (24)” (MOYA, 2002: 181). An incident which takes place between Estrella and Maxine is worth recalling because it is connected to Estrella’s process of maturation. Despite Petra’s warning against the Devridges, another migrant family living in the camp, Maxine and Estrella become friends for a while. As Maxine is illiterate, Estrella reads comic books to her. One day, Maxine suggests to Estrella that Petra sleeps with Perfecto. Estrella reacts furiously and the two get in a fight. Ellen McCracken explains: “Although language has been Estrella’s strong suit in her relationship with this companion, to whom she reads comic books, on this occasion she resorts instead to physical violence” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 182). 89
Estrella’s reaction is not yet a strategy of resistance; her attitude, however, remits us to La Malinche, the mythic symbol of transgression and to the Aztec myth of The Hungry Woman, the one who cannot be silenced or contained. Estrella cannot be silenced because Maxine’s words, for the first time, are meaningful. As Paula Moya explains:
Maxine’s careless, but accurate, remarks about Petra and Perfecto have the effect of forcing Estrella to see her family from a different perspective. […] Maxine’s remarks compel Estrella to confront the truth of Petra’s sexuality […] Because Maxine’s words refer to a verifiable aspect of Estrella’s life […] They have the power to wound (MOYA, 2002: 181).
Besides teaching Estrella how to use tools, Perfect teaches her, by examples, a useful practice, that of bartering. When Alejo becomes seriously ill due to pesticide poisoning, Estrella wants to take him to hospital, as Petra’s traditional recipes are not working out. She, then, barters her labor in the barn for Perfecto’s promise to drive Alejo to the hospital. However, bartering works only when there is mutual understanding. When they get to the community clinic, an unfriendly nurse refuses to barter with them and charges the family’s last nine dollars just to confirm that Alejo is seriously ill and needs to be taken to hospital. They have no money for gas and become paralysed after Perfecto gives the nurse all the money he has. It is then that Estrella gets one of Perfecto’s tools, a crowbar, starts smashing objects in the trailer and demands that the nurse return their money. Combining words with actions, Estrella takes control of the situation and defends the interests of her family. According to McCracken, “she now uses words and controlled violence to achieve a small degree of social justice…” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 182). Her behavior frightens the nurse. She manages to get the money and take Alejo to hospital, where she is forced to leave him alone, once the family is aware they all may be arrested for what has happened in the clinic trailer. The nurse’s refusal to hear her and “read” the Other prompts her decision to act. However, it becomes clear that, first, Estrella “reads” the situation they are exposed to:
Estrella thought for a moment as the heat condensed into sweat which trickled between her breasts in the trailer room when the nurse clicked off the fan. She tried to make her mind work, tried to imagine them back 90
on the road with an empty gas tank and wallet and Alejo too sick to talk. She stared at Perfecto’s tired face. The wrinkles on his face etched deeper with the sweat and soil and jagged sun. Was this the same panic the mother went through? There was no bartering this time. If only the nurse would consent. Estrella knew she couldn’t get him home, but the hospital was only twenty miles away. A simple nod, a break. If only God could help. Estrella stared at her mother’s resentfullness, at whom, what, she didn’t know. They were not asking for charity, not begging for money. She stared at Alejo’s forehead. All that was left of his fall was a darkened scar. They would all work, including the boys if they had to, to pay for the visit, to pay for gas. Alejo was sick and the nine dollars was gas money (147 - 148).
Estrella’s reaction, her agency, voice and empowerment, not only remit us, once more, to La Malinche, here transgressing the law and to The Hungry Woman, the one who cannot be silenced or contained, but also to La Llorona, the symbol of resistance. It is exactly this maternal resistance that prompts Estrella to protect Alejo and her family as the washerwoman in “The Cariboo Cafe” does to save “her” son. According to McCracken, Estrella displays strategies of resistance, acting outsite the law, breaking rules and altering the established order: “In the same way she substitutes one moral for another, Estrella offers an alternate model of the ideal feminine to the nurse’s perfect makeup, perfume, patent-leather purse, and photos of her children on her desk” (McCRACKEN, 1999: 183). In a novel which has Jesus in the title – even if His role remains ambiguous – the value of institutionalized religion is downplayed. It is true that Petra sets up an altar wherever she moves, but as in many stories by Viramontes, God’s existence and His compassion are harshly questioned. In “The Moths”, the young protagonist does not find comfort in the Church. She goes to her grandmother’s house instead and it becomes clear that God’s power is substituted by her abuela ’s. In “The Long Reconciliation”, Amanda asks thought-provoking questions about the role of God concerning the poor. In Under the Feet of Jesus , when Estrella is trying to help Alejo walk to the community clinic, she feels she cannot count on God as He is not generous at all:
She felt like crying, an ache in her chest, just as she had felt a while back when she tried paving the rocks so carefully, worked so hard. But the tire resisted, Alejo’s body resisted, and she did not want to think what she was thinking now: God was mean and did not care and she was alone to fend for herself (139, italics mine ). 91
Not surprisingly Estrella does not follow any Catholic icon as a role model. Instead she follows an “alternate model of the ideal feminine” referred to by McCracken (McCRACKEN, 1999: 183). Estrella embodies the mythical figures of La Malinche, La Llorona and The Hungry Woman and learns to “read” her social world, activating her Mestiza consciousness. In order to show that people can become better “readers” of their social world, Viramontes makes use of one more trope – “fuel and its origins”, considered “pivotal” by Moya because: “(1) introduces the principle of permutation (the process whereby one thing is changed into another), and (2) it provides a metaphor for the situation of migrant workers” (MOYA, 2002:195). I see the trope of the fuel as one of the most touching, most subtle and, thus, one of the most difficult to be understood in a first reading of the novel. In order to convey her message, Viramontes strategically positions the encounter of Petra and a rich man in a gas station. She associates the gas that keeps the cars moving to the work done by farmworkers – pick vegetables in the fields – that keeps our bodies moving. Viramontes’s intention is to show how important farmworkers’ labor is. She aims at touching her reader’s consciousness and heart so that he/she becomes a better “reader” of the farmworkers’ position in society. It is a fact that, when we sit to have a meal, we do not think about how the vegetables have arrived at our table. Viramontes is absolutely right: there is an urgent need for a reconsideration of the farmworkers’ place in our society. The touching scene of the gas station alludes, simultaneously, to the invisibility of farmworkers in our society and to unequal social relations. “The great secret is that class matters, very much, in this society dizzy with the illusion of classlessness. Writing about class is to write about power relations” (MARTÍN ESPADA apud MOYA, 2002:175). Firmly believing in the power of the written word, Viramontes describes what happens in the gas station in a way that she creates the right conditions to transform her readers’ consciousness. Petra, who has to go downtown with her five children to buy some food, is terrified with the idea of crossing the highway, something which is not part of her world. By allowing Petra to focalize this passage, Viramontes enables readers to feel how different a highway can be from the perspective of someone 92
who has to travel it on foot: “The tar, which provides a smooth surface for automobiles to travel on, is for Petra and her children a concentrator of solar heat and a source of unpleasant smells” (MOYA,2002:192). Petra sees a man who has stopped to fuel his car at the gas station. She looks “at the Bermuda’s plump seats” (105) and envies the man and the car, envisioning the man as someone who knows everything about schools and stores and always has his salary at the end of the week (105). Petra stops looking at the man as she is trying to make her children cross the road. Exhausted and scared, she screams with them:
The Bermuda man looked at her over the hood of his lime green car, and the sun reflected wavy green on his face. Petra wore mismatched clothes and had chosen the clothes for their blues because blue was a cool color agains the hot tempered sun and that was why she was dressed the way she was and she hoped he would stop staring. The man crumpled up the blue of his towel into a ball and tossed it on the ground and the twins watched it slowly unfold (106).
Moya’s considerations about this passage are extremely useful. She states that Petra’s envy of the man is linked to her attributing him the knowledge she does not have. It is clear that she feels embarrassed with his look as she knows she is not dressed according to the internalized middle-class patterns. However, Petra knows things the man does not, as for example, how it is to be a working-class woman alone with five children. It seems, though, that the man is totally unaware of such possibility. Although Viramontes does not allow the man to focalize the narrative, readers may get to this conclusion by the effect his stare has on Petra and also by the careless way he discards the paper tower:
The juxtaposition of Petra’s mismatched blue clothes […] with the blue paper towel that the Bermuda man uses and carelessly discards resonates with meaning. At a metaphorical level, this juxtaposition suggests that, from the Bermuda man’s perspective, Petra (like the towel) is to be used and then cast aside (MOYA, 2002: 194).
Moya makes it clear that she does not suggest that the Bermuda man is a bad person. In fact, it is likely that he is conscious that Petra belongs to a different social class. The problem lies in his disregard: “He no more cares who will pick up the towel than he knows who will pick the vegetables that he buys at the supermarket” (MOYA, 93
2002: 194). His failure to understand his connection with the Other, in this case an unkempt woman and her children, is common in societies where class asymmetry prevails. In the novel, the concepts of interconnectedness and permutation are introduced by Estrella’s friend, Alejo, who plans to study geology. In one of his conversations with Estrella, he explains to her how tar oil pits appeared on earth:
[…] Millions of years ago, the dead animals and plants fell to the bottom of the sea … Bones and rocks and leaves… the bones lay in the seabed for millions of years. That’s how it was. Makes sense don’t it, bones becoming tar oil? (87).
Estrella is shocked by the idea that people may get stuck in the tar oil pits and their bones may be turned into oil. This awareness makes it possible for her “to abstract from her own situation some general principles which will allow her to more adequately interpret the socioeconomic system in which she lives” (MOYA, 2002:201). In order to convey her message, Viramontes adds the episode of Alejo’s pesticide poisoning. The young boy imagines that the insecticide may turn him into bones which will disappear and become oil:
— Tar oil? You say tar oil, huh? — Once, when I picked peaches, I heard screams. It reminded me of the animals stuck in the tar pits. — Did people? Did people ever get stuck? — Only one, Alejo replied, in the La Brea tar pits, they found some human bones. A young girl (88).
Oliver-Rotger shares Moya’s opinion about Estrella’s transformation of consciousness after she learns about the link between bones and tar oil pits and becomes able to “read” and interpret the process of permutation as “the dynamics of exploitation” (MOYA, 2002:200). By associating this knowledge to the lack of health care and the nurse’s disregard for Alejo’s sickness, “Estrella finally realizes that she, her friend, and her family are part both of the cosmic life cycle as well as of the human capital and energy that produces growth, riches, and surplus value (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:311):
She remembered the tar pits. Energy money, the fossilized bones of energy matter. How bones made oil and made gasoline. The oil was made 94
from their bones, and it was their bones that kept the nurse’s car from not halting on some highway, kept her on her way to Daisy field to pick up her boys at six. It was their bones that kept the air conditioning in the cars humming, that kept them moving on the long dotted line of the map. Their bones. Why couldn’t the nurse see that? Estrella had figured it out: the nurse owed them as much as they owed her (148).
In the protagonist’s movement towards self-awareness, one thing cannot go unmentioned: the barn. It is there that Estrella finds refuge from her sad reality, a place which provides protection from sunstroke and peace for her encounters with the boy she loves, Alejo. According to McCracken:
The barn is a contested space, the site in which a deformed child appears (perhaps the result of his parents’ exposure to pesticide), an image later connected to Estrella’s incipient sexuality and the fear her mother tries to instill in her of a child born “sin labios” (69) because of female sexual transgression (McCRACKEN, 1999:183).
In order to control Estrella’s sexuality, Petra forbids her to go to the barn by convincing her of the danger of having children with “lips bitten just like the hare on the moon” (69). Viramontes’s connection between Petra’s attempt to control Estrella’s sexual desire with the punishment of having a harelip child seems, to me, to be based on a myth described by Claude Lévi-Strauss. According to him, among some Indian tribes in the northwest of the United States and Canada, there is a myth about two sisters who are travelling to meet their respective husbands. They are deceived by two Tricksters and conceive from them. After this episode, the elder sister decides to visit her grandmother, who, being a magician, sends a hare to welcome her granddaughter on the road. The smart hare hides under a log which has fallen on the road and, when the girl is obliged to lift her leg to jump over the log, the hare is able to see the girl’s genital parts. The girl becomes furious with the hare’s attitude and its subsequent jokes and strikes the animal with her cane. Lévi-Strauss concludes: “This is why the animals of the leporine family now have a split nose and upper lip, which we call a harelip in people precisely on account of this anatomical peculiarity in rabbits and hares” (LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1978:29). Oliver-Rotger explains that in the nineteenth century the barn was associated to American rural life, a sign of fertility of the land, of growth, of the yeoman’s labor. She 95
adds that Viramontes has appropriated the image of the barn and resemantized it by adding “different connotations in the context of postmodern industrialized agriculture and migrant Mexican labor” (OLIVER-ROTGER, 2003:313). After having left Alejo in the hospital, Estrella runs to the forbidden barn, gets to its top, and experiences freedom, pride and power. McCracken claims that “Estrella’s retaking of the barn at the end of the book concludes a quest begun with the first sentence of the novel” (McCRACKEN, 1999:183). In fact, the opening of the novel, “Had they been heading for the barn all along?” (3) presents a young naïve girl, relying on the religions traditions she has learnt. In the last scene, however, we have a different Estrella, an empowered, more mature girl: “Estrella remained as immobile as an angel standing on the verge of faith. Like the chiming bells of the great cathedrals, she believed her heart powerful enough to summon home all those who strayed” (176). Leila Harris stresses that “Estrella’s personification as an angel of Enunciation indicates an inversion of beliefs” (HARRIS, 2005: 59). In fact, while Estrella is at the top of the barn, her family stands below and Petra is holding the plastic statue of Jesus which has just broken. As a postmodern narrative, Under the Feet of Jesus has no closure. It is up to the reader to decide what happens to Alejo and if the family is arrested. What the reader does know is that the traditional ethnic strategies of resistance, such as the home remedies Petra uses to save Alejo and the prayers addressed to a God that seems not to hear them, are replaced by Estrella’s alternative strategies of resistance: language – the extended notion of literacy that allows Estrella to “read” her world – and the embodiment of mythical Mexican and Aztec female figures. Besides learning to read her world and the Other, Estrella learns to read her self. After she enters the barn, she hesitates before climbing to its top, as the barn is not only a forbidden place for her, but it is also poorly lit and full of owls and other birds. Their “fluttering wings and nervous chirping” frighten her (172). However, after her experiences that afternoon, Estrella has gained enough confidence to carry on her intent and she knows that: “Okay, she said to her other self” (172). She is aware that “this other self” is her insecure and passive side and that now she has matured, she may control it. Self-knowledge does not put an end to insecurities, but it becomes an affirmative tool.
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CONCLUSION
The U.S.: Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.
Gloria Anzaldúa , Borderlands/La Frontera
It is only after one gets to know the real history of the brutal invasion of Mexico by Spain in 1519, when thousands of Indian tribes were annihilated, and the strength of American expansionism, which led to the annexation of the northern half of the Mexican territory in the nineteenth century, that it becomes easier to understand the situation of Chicanos. Deprived of their homeland and culture, Chicanos have changed from a postcolonial condition to a neocolonial domination, marked by transnational dislocations, extreme poverty and social exclusion. Americans have looked down on Chicanos, and Latinos in general, as the Other, ignoring their national, cultural and racial differences and denying them a place in the mainstream. Fortunately, although not easy, since the infamous American melting pot is but a fake, it is now possible for Latinos to find their way through the intricate contact zones in which different cultures meet and clash but only seldom succeed in weaving hybrid relationships. The recent election of Antonio Villaraigosa as mayor of Los Angeles confirms the potential for Chicano political visibility and power in the United States. Actually, the presence of Latinos has been increasing very fast and the prevision is that by 2100 one in three Americans will be Latino. Because of this, the American social, economic, cultural, and political scenery has been changing steadily. Although the presence of Chicanas in the U.S. political arena is still a rare sight since they have to overcome patriarchal biases from both cultures, for several decades many have been engaged in active resistance against the multiple and simultaneous oppressions affecting them. Using a variety of subversive strategies, they have embraced Anzaldúa’s New Mestiza Consciousness. Based on this social theory of 97
consciousness-in opposition, Chicana writers have looked back on their indigenous past to recover and re-view, from a critical perspective, historical and mythical figures of strong women who had been erased or portrayed according to patriarchal ideologies. Divided between two worlds and cultures and facing the second-class status of hyphenated citizens, Chicana writers have invented new literary norms and strategies that reflect their experiences. Taking advantage of the emphasis on the local, on the margins and on difference brought by postmodernism, they have created their own space, which Ellen McCracken calls “the feminine space of postmodern ethnicity” in New Latina Narrative . Their narratives redefine the concepts of multiculturalism in the U.S. once they take part, simultaneously, in mainstream and in “borderland” writing. According to Ernesto Laclau, one of the most relevant and striking characteristics of multiculturalism is that of inclusion through difference: “the discourse of integration was founded on the articulation of an increasingly complex system of differences” (LACLAU, 1981:92). This is exactly Helena María Viramontes’s goal: to integrate minorities, give voice to those who have been silenced, make the Other with his/her differences part of the mainstream. In her collection The Moths and Other Stories , her female characters use silence, language and the appropriation of Aztec myths and Mexican legends to undermine the subalternity imposed by patriarchy. The main theme of the stories, the dilemma and suffering of women submitted to patriarchal assumptions about their roles, is better understood if the reader acknowledges that it is framed by broad social and economic issues. Viramontes’s resemantization of myths is more evident in “Tears on My Pillow”, in which a variant of La Llorona’s legend brings out the urban Llorona, the woman who undergoes oppression, cries, suffers, works, but does not kill her children. Viramontes uses variants of La Llorona aiming at denouncing women’s sufferings and, at the same time, criticizing repressive and totalizing governments. Viramontes’s short stories, whether from The Moths and Other Stories , or from Paris Rats in East.L.A, attest to her concern with minority groups, especially women. Influenced by Latin American writers, she has started making experiences with form and voice and has reached her own specific way of writing – a blend of untamed language, which includes codeswitching, and narrative strategies, namely, 98
fragmentation, juxtaposition, simultaneity, and focalization – to convey all the anxieties brought about by economic exploitation, social inequalities, and patriarchal biases. Her novel Under the Feet of Jesus represents a very special moment in her career as a writer, as Viramontes goes beyond the common tropes usually addressed by Chicana writers. Paula Moya emphasizes Viramontes’s enormous contribution to literature by comparing her novel to William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and to John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (MOYA, 2002:175). This does, by no means, imply that works by Chicana writers, including Viramontes’s previous short stories, are not meaningful contributions to the literary canon. Much to the contrary. Themes such as postcolonial oppression, women’s struggle against patriarchy, acquisition of voice and agency, breaking of sexual taboos, cultural battles against the dominant order, among others, have been crucial in the literature produced by Chicanas and other women of color in the last few decades. What makes Under the Feet of Jesus transgressively different is the bridge Viramontes establishes between reading, identity and effective agency. The young protagonist, Estrella, learns to read her world and, by interpreting it, she begins to understand the socioeconomic system she lives in. She also learns to read the Other and read her self. However, it seems evident that not all farmworkers will undergo the same transformation Estrella experiences, which indicates that ideology and social change are intrinsically linked to the issue of identity. As Paula Moya says: “the real lesson of this novel might be that enacting social change is a complex and multifaceted process that will involve, among other things, a great deal of what feminists have long called consciousness raising” (MOYA, 2002:213). Under the Feet of Jesus challenges readers, as it calls “for a theory of interpretation that foregrounds the material aspects of the interpretive process itself” (MOYA, 2002:177). Viramontes defies us to follow her narrative zig-zag and her characters’ partial perspectives, provoking in us a certain discomfort so that we may identify with the migrant workers’ predicaments. According to Moya, “to the extent that a reader of a social text can recognize distorting social narratives, then, she has a better chance of coming to a more objective understanding of her social world” (MOYA, 2002:196). 99
Viramontes does more than merely portraying the peripatetic lifestyle of farmworkers and their invisibility. By provoking an understanding of the mechanisms of exclusion and abuse in a capitalist and repressive system, she leads her readers to experience a transformation of consciousness similar to the one Estrella undergoes. Readers will hopefully identify with the farmworkers’ plight and end by acknowledging their importance in society. As a political activist and a committed feminist writer, Viramontes uses her work to fight for the marginalized, especially women, silenced and undervalued by patriarchy. Although at times, when observing the violence and the misery spread in the world she feels discouraged, she keeps on writing, as her belief in “the power of the written word” to promote social change remains strong: “ Our destiny, yours, mine, the starving and the marginalized, is not lodged in cement. We can determine its destination. Some use the soapbox; others use weapons. I choose to write” (VIRAMONTES, 1989: 38; personal correspondence).
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Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature , New Mexico: U of New Mexico P, 1996. 105 ANNEX 1 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 ANNEX 2 120 121