sign in sign up
<<
Home , Chicano English, Nicholasa Mohr

T. C. İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Anabilim Dalı Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı

Doktora Tezi

Texts on the Borders: U.S. Latina Writing

İrfan Cenk YAY Öğrenci No: 2502030121

Tez Danışmanı Prof. Dr. Ayşe D. Erbora

İstanbul, 2009

Texts on the Borders: U.S. Latina Writing İRFAN CENK YAY

ÖZ

Bu çalışma Meksika ve diğer Latin Amerika kökenli kadın yazarların, Amerika Birleşik Devletleri sınırları içindeki ötekileştirilmiş özneler olarak içinde bulundukları toplumsal “aradakalmışlık” konumlarını sorgulamak ve aşmak amacıyla yazdıkları yapıtlar üzerine odaklanır. 1970’lerden bu yana varolan “Sınır Yazını” türüne ait olan bu yapıtlar, hem beyaz egemen kültürün ayırımcı politikalarına, hem de kendi erkek merkezli kültürlerine özgü cinsel baskılara karşı bir ifade biçimi olarak ortaya çıkmıştır. Amerika Birleşik Devletleri ve Meksika arasındaki coğrafi ve tarihi sınırın, başka pek çok bilişsel ayrımı simgelediği görüşünden yola çıkan bu kadın yazarlar, sınır ve sınır-ihlali kavramlarını etnisite/“ırk”, sınıf ve cinsiyet konumlarının kesiştiği çok katmanlı bir çelişkiler yumağı olarak ele alırlar. Gloria Anzaldúa’nın bu alandaki kuramsal yazılarının “Sınır Çalışmaları” disiplinine yaptığı katkılar, özellikle yazarın Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza isimli kitabı, diğer Latin Amerika kökenli kadın yazarlara önemli bir esin kaynağı olmuştur. Bu çalışmada Anzaldúa’nın Borderlands/La Frontera’sının yanı sıra ’un The House on Mango Street isimli romanı ve Julia Álvarez’in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents ve ¡Yo! isimli romanları tarihsel ve yazınsal bağlamları içerisinde incelenerek, Latin Amerika kökenli kadın yazarların yaşamda ve yazında sınır ve sınır-ihlali konularına yaklaşımları örneklenecektir.

ABSTRACT

The present study focuses on the writings of Mexican-American woman writers and other U.S. Latinas who have been struggling to surmount their liminal social positions as otherized subjects within the boundaries of the United States of America. Constituting part of what has become to be known as “Border Writing” since the mid-1970s, their writing emerged as a response to both the discriminatory policies of the Anglo-American establishment and the inherent forms of gender oppression endemic to their own male- centered culture. Taking its cue from the U.S.-Mexican border as a paradigmatic locus of multiple manifestations of conflict, U.S. Latina Border Writing expands the notions of border and border-crossing to encompass a wider spectrum of conflictual sites at the crossroads of ethnicity/“race,” class, gender, and sexuality, etc. Mexican-American women writers and critics, spearheaded by Gloria Anzaldúa, have broadened the scope of the theoretical framework provided by the new discipline of “Border Studies” with their creative-theoretical works concerning discrimination at the levels of race, class, and gender as crisscrossing vectors of subjugation. Inspired by Anzaldúa’s canonical study, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, other Latina writers, including the inter- nationally acclaimed Sandra Cisneros and Julia Álvarez, have contributed to the field with their works of fiction. Aside from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, in this study three exemplary literary works, Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Álvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and its sequel, ¡Yo!, are scrutinized within their literary and historical context to illustrate the ways in which U.S. Latina writing negotiates borders and border-crossings as they relate to both life and literature.

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The defects and shortcomings of this project are all mine; but whatever its merits, its indebtedness is a pleasure and a responsibility to enumerate, because in doing so I will ultimately be able to set down here the names of wise and generous friends at the Department of American Culture and Literature, Istanbul University, from whom I have learned much, or should have learned much more… My deepest gratitude is reserved to my chair, thesis advisor and surrogate mother, Prof. Dr. Ayşe Erbora, without whose intellectual and spiritual guidance the present project could not be completed. I am greatly indebted to her support all these years and for showing me by her own example that an academic career and a sanguine life may very well coexist harmoniously. I would also like to verbalize my accolades to another long-time mentor, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Türkân Araz, for our thought-provoking discussions on postcolonial theory and literature. It is impossible to forget her “razor-sharp” editorial eye and the languishing hours we spent in front of her 17-inch monitor to verify each and every word or phrase used in this study. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Özden Sözalan, who has provided me with an exceptionally insightful critical perspective and whose unwinding enthusiasm for literature and the study of literature will be an everlasting inspiration for the studies that I plan to pursue in the future. Thank you so much… A warm personal thank-you is due to Prof. Dr. Bedia Demiriş, an invaluable member of my thesis committees, for her soothing face and her comments on my drafts. I am also indebted to Assist. Prof. Dr. Hasine Şen Karadeniz, Dr. Serpil Tunçer, Burak Erbora, İnci Bilgin Tekin, Tuğba Hacaloğlu, Didem Kizen and Aşkın Çelikkol without whose unwavering support in accumulating books and articles from every accessible source I would have to spend six more years to finish this project. I would also like to thank Assist. Prof. Dr. Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu for kindly lending me her own This Bridge Called My Back. My personal gratitude is reserved for my colleagues, Assist. Prof. Dr. Nezir Yunusoğlu and Dr. Sinem Yazıcıoğlu, for being very good friends and covering my back, especially, during the toilsome final days of this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Ricardo Campos-Bloss from the neighboring department of and Literature, for accepting me in his Español classes and teaching the basic tenets of the Spanish language. Gültekin Koçer and Cihan Kara from “Gençlik Xerox Center” have always been assistive in the preparation of my books, articles, and course materials. I am indebted to those personal friends of mine. My family, Engin Yay, Melek Yay and Barış Yay, I love you dearly not only for tolerating my selfish absences even in the most dreadful, or happy, days of our lives, but helping me become who I am. Last, but certainly not least, my colleague and my beloved wife, Özge; no words of mine — written or spoken — could express my appreciation of your worth.

iv CONTENTS

Öz /Abstract ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Contents ...... v

Introduction ...... 1

1. A Critical and Ideological Overview of Literature ...... 15

1.1. Early Chicano Letters: From Oral Resistance to Written Contestation ...... 17

1.2. The : Cultural Nationalism, Ideology, and Literature ...... 41

2. Xicanisma: Theorizing Feminism(s) from the Borderlands ...... 63

2.1. The Birth of Frontera Feminism ...... 65

2.2. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza ...... 84

3. Writing the Self Beyond the Borders ...... 123

3.1. Sandra Cisneros: A Long Way from the Barrio to the “Other Side” ...... 124

3.2. The House on Mango Street ...... 132

4. Recovering From the Silence of Exile ...... 176

4.1. Julia Álvarez: Re-membering the Past, Re-membering the Self ...... 178

4.2. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo! ...... 185

Conclusion ...... 227

Bibliography ...... 240

Özgeçmiş / Vita ...... 257

v

In the loving memory of my father, Engin YAY (1950-2004), whose untimely and solitary demise – ¡en exilio en su propio país! – has become an indelible impetus.

vi INTRODUCTION

Whenever or wherever two or more cultures meet—peacefully or violently— there is a border experience. … Today, if there is a dominant culture, it is border culture. And those who still haven’t crossed a border will do it very soon. All Americans (from the vast continent of America) were, are or will be border crossers. … As you read this text, you are crossing a border yourself.

— Guillermo Gómez-Peña, “The Multicultural Paradigm” (1989)

In the aftermath of the wind of change that swept the entire globe from the revolutionary 1960s to the surge of Global Capitalism by the early 1990s, the concept of la frontera [border] and the phenomenon of atravesando-fronteras [border-crossings] have garnered immense critical attention in theorizing decentered, dislocated, liminal and hybrid subjectivities. These two heuristic tropes have been currently in vogue, especially, for those skeptical scholars who have spotlit the “Universal” understanding of “Western” culture and identity no longer as innate, unitary, and hermetically sealed sites, but rather as dynamic, relational and contrapuntal ensembles. Creating a matrix of dissenting histories, competing voices, disparate languages, clashing subjectivities and discrete cultures, the meaning of “culture” and “identity” have now extended to encompass an ongoing process of amalgamation to defy the EITHER/OR syndrome ruggedly engrafted in Western culture, philosophy and realpolitik. On the other hand, and far from conceptual and discursive abstractions, the international political border with its tangible ramifications deeply rooted in the material world marks the jurisdictional fringes of the “nation-state,” while it defines the “national-subject” through its own organizing symbols and holistic rubrics such as a common national history, mythos, culture, language, lineage, literature, religion, map, flag, anthem, to name the most obvious. Inevitably, this palpable border itself has become the locus of an essentializing mindset which monolithically puts forth, at its best, an equivocal “including-while-excluding” stance towards the subjects of other(ized) ethnicities who reside within the penetralia of the nation-state, and yet, whose ethnic markers and idiosyncratic cultural codes do not immediately correspond to the national (or nationalistic) project; hence, drawing cognitive fronteras which cannot readily be traced on a topographical map.

1 Nevertheless, the current theoretical purview avers that with the ex-colonial masses of the so-called “Third World”—ranging from a noted Harvard professor to a nameless undocumented laborer—having pullulated into the “First World” metropolis, the phenomenon of “border-crossing” is now endemic to any Western locality where subordinated masses of poor, immigrant, ethnic, queer, or disabled groups collide with the hegemonic core culture, which has hitherto been understood to comprise white, heterosexual, bourgeois, and mentally/physically healthy citizen-subjects. Thus, such migratory movements, either literally or figuratively, have paved the way, in Fredric Jameson’s words, for “the emergence of an internal Third World and of internal Third World voices,” which has further perplexed the very concept of frontera and anything germane to the “national” proper. (“Modernism and Imperialism” 49) In the case of the United States of America, the presence of the “internal third world voices” becomes even more problematic when viewed from such a pluralist or multiculturalist perspective, which readily fancies the Cha-cha, Salsa, tortillas, or Salma Hayek, but never allows Spanish for bilingual education. Given the history of discriminatory and expansionist policies inherent in the foundational principles of the “American nation,” for Mexican-Americans (alternately called Chicanos1) of the U.S.- southwestern states, the concept of the border has been politically charged with a nasty history of uneven power relations since the Treaty Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848).2 The history of the U.S.-Mexican border (unlike( its northern counterpart, the U.S.-Canadian border, much of it drawn on water!) is, after all, an ongoing history of de facto and/or

11.. There are several theories concerning the etymology of the term ‘Chicano,’ or Xicano. The most consented version relates it to Méshica – a word in Náhuatl [the Uto-Aztecan language] with the first dropped and the ‘sh’ pronounced /či/. Mexica, or Méshica, was the name of the Nahua people in Mesoamerica before the Spanish conquest of the 1520s; yet, from 19th-century onward Euro-American anthropologists and archeologists have opted for the term ‘Aztecs’ due to the Aztec primordial homeland known as Aztlán. Whatever its origin, the politically charged term ‘Chicano’ had been in widespread use by the 1950s and gained its utmost currency during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the mid-1960s. Yet, since not all members of the Mexican-descent people of the U.S. feel associated to that obsolete political era any longer, the term “Mexican-American” is still in use interchangeably with “Chicano,” as it is likewise employed in this study. See Cordelia Candelaria, : A Critical Introduction (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), xv. In order to avoid loss-of-focus and the problematic of nomenclature by the awkward usage of the masculine and feminine forms of the term (/as) wherever it appears within this study, the masculine ‘Chicano’ is used attuned to its original Spanish usage in a gender inclusive manner to denote all U.S. subjects of Mexican descent. On the other hand, the feminine “Chicana” is opted for whenever the stress should specifically be laid on a woman of Mexican origin born in the U.S., or raised there since infancy, who exhibits a firm socio-political awareness of her ethnic status. 2. See Richard Griswold del Castillo, TThehe TTreatyreaty ooff GGuadalupeuadalupe HHidalgo:idalgo: A LLegacyegacy ooff CConflictonflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).

2 de jure violent encounters. As such, this paradigmatic experience of border phenomenon has come to combine the very materiality of historical, geographical, economic, and coercive configurations with their residual socio-cultural and psychological effects for more than sixteen decades. On the uniqueness of this border, the noted Mexican author Carlos Fuentes claims: “It’s the only border between the industrialized world and the emerging, developing, nonindustrialized world. […] We’re conscious in , that Latin America begins with the border—not only Mexico, but the whole of Latin America” (A World of Ideas 506). It is from this tangible border of cement, barbed-wires and chain-link fences, constantly policed and monitored with high-tech “alien” detection gadgets, border- patrols and civilian vigilantes that a novel legitimate field of scholarly discipline called the Border Studies emerged in the late-1970s. The major impetus for the new discipline came from the “boom” in Latin American literature that has become “the principal player on the scene of world culture, and has had an unavoidable and inescapable influence, not merely on other Third World cultures as such, but on First World literature and culture as well” (Jameson, loc. cit. 48-9). Eventually, for over the last four decades the field of Border Studies, with its own recognizable canon of writers and a panoply of organizational categories and interpretative frameworks, has extended the concept of la frontera and the phenomenon of atravesando-fronteras to a variety of identity paradigms such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, and political/regional/religious allegiances – each intricately remapped as a symbolic border(ed)land which some people adhere to, or are forced to adhere to, and others cross over as a recurrent reality of their most mundane affairs. Incorporated with poststructural, postmodern, and postcolonial approaches to diasporic, dislocated, nomadic, or hybrid subjectivities, Border Studies is mainly directed to uncover those complicated crossroads where the paradigms of ethnicity/“race,” class, gender, and sexuality of the subaltern groups crisscross, ultimately de-centering not only the hegemonic master narratives imposed from above by the dominant “System,” but also those essentializing doctrines endemic to their own micro communities. As such, this new critical framework evaluates border(land) identities and experiential realities as enmeshed in “multiple” forms of systematic subjugations along “multiple” axes of power relations currently at play – and not solely on a

3 sterile politics of exclusion which mandates binary impasses such as the West vs. the rest, White vs. black, Colonizer vs. colonized, Male vs. female, Material vs. spiritual, Straight vs. queer, and the like. Taking their primal cue from the nether region of the U.S.-Mexican border as a paradigmatic border phenomenon, then, Border Studies scholars have retrospectively as well as prospectively dealt with the issues of displacement, (cultural) hybridity and liminality in an effort to shed light on a broader range of issues pertinent to the concept of border. Thus situated, beyond its literal meaning which involves a single dimensional cartographical “line” drawn at will to divide an otherwise naturally seamless territory into two nation states, the U.S.-Mexican border acquires a multi-dimensional character. It functions as a complex metaphor for a meeting ground of cultural syncretism, dismantling arbitrary barriers hitherto ossified to polarize nations, cultures, religions, histories and languages, etc. It is at this locality that the border concurrently displays the characteristics of a final “byproduct” of a far-reaching historical series of violent encounters, and also of the ongoing “producer” of various praxes of adaptability or creativity whereby almost all marginal(ized) subject(ivitie)s insure their existence and find various means of expression. The U.S.-Mexican border thus becomes a synecdoche for “thresholds,” “interstices,” or “liminal zones,” to adopt Homi Bhabha’s lexicon. As Bhabha asserts: “These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood […] that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself” (The Location of Culture 1-2). Nevertheless, the porosity of the border takes on a different meaning for Chicanos as verbalized by Inocencio Manslavo, a character in Fuentes’ The Old Gringo (1985), when Inocencio says: “They’re right when they say this isn’t a border. It’s a scar” (185). Gloria Anzaldúa further elaborates on this insight, famously claiming in her Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), that the U.S.-Mexican border is “una herida abierta,” an open wound, “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture” (25). In Anzaldúa’s view, the lifeblood of Chicanos which flows to beget “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (ibid.), is also the ever-

4 evolving “byproduct” and the prolific “producer” of a hybrid subjectivity and a hybrid consciousness as defined by the notion of mestizaje.3 The present study evaluates mestizaje not only as a traumatic vision of “genetic” alloy (locked( up within the particular confines of history),) but also as a dynamic stimulus for alternative cultural, moral, political, and artistic praxes vis-à-vis “Institutionalized” structures immersed in hegemonic discourses. At the most basic level, such a tactical adoption of mestizaje occurs through the fluid juxtaposition of the socio-cultural structures of the dominant American culture with the idiosyncratic traits of Chicano culture to promote what might be called a dialectical Américano ethos. This mundane strategy of cultural hybridity within an oppressive milieu, in turn, brings forth a subversive border-blurring, or border-crossing, sensibility called the rasquache (with( its praxis, ) in surpassing cultural, institutional, and other symbolic borders.4 Literally translated as creating something new from the readily available material, the rasquache aesthetic in life is both a new amalgam of human expression, which promotes “new forms of knowledge, new modes of differentiation, new sites of power,” and an everyday praxis which contests “the logical order of the discourse of authority” (Bhabha, loc. cit. 119; 120). Cultural mestizaje as such is the “new site of power,” as Bhabha would call it, hosting subject(ivitie)s silenced by dominant paradigms, and stimulating them to talk-back, or move-against, through the

33.. The concept of mestizaje has at least a half-millennium history in the continental Américas. Referring most literally to the genetic mixture of the Mexic-Amerindian peoples (the Aztec and the Maya) and the Spanish conquistadors of the New World, the term attained linguistic vogue in the 19th-century with the onset of the indigenous Creole independence movements to depose the Spanish colonial rule. See Joefina Saldaña-Portillo’s “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and from the Lacandón,” The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, ed. by Ileana Rodríguez, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 402-23. From this point onward, the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and mestizaje as theories on miscegenation are used interchangeably; for, mestizaje (like ‘creolization’) typifies a particular form of hybridity. 44.. Initially defined in the late 1980s by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as “the aesthetic sensibility of los de abajo, of the underdog,” and a “visceral response to lived reality” (“Rasquachismo” 156), the improvisational and bicultural “rasquachismo” has first denoted the rich, inventive, and colorful practice of juxtaposing U.S. mainstream items, or images, with traditional Chicano iconography in plastic and folk arts. For instance, the cluttered pastiches in the exaggerated decoration of car interiors, tattoos, or home altars and front-yard shrines in urban Latino ghettos are fine instances of rasquachismo. In turn, the rasquache sensibility has been extended to encompass a wider range of sociocultural, lingual, artistic, and other mundane practices. In brief, the resistant and resilient rasquachismo inclines to provide a sense of dignity by subverting “ruling paradigms upside down” (155), and hybridizing them with the fabric of ‘Chicano’ lived reality as a bicultural, bilingual, working-class, and anti-assimilatory phenomenon. In Ybarra-Frausto’s words, “Rasquachismo is brash and hybrid, sending shudders through the ranks of the elite who seek solace in less exuberant, more muted, and purer traditions. [...] To be rasquache is to be down, but not out” (156).

5 pores within the borderlines between polarized cultures. claims that “exile, immigration and the crossing of boundaries are experiences that can provide us with new narrative forms or […] with other ways of telling” (“Representing the Colonized” 225). The other ways of telling that disrupt the established notion of the border which Said refers to are arguably manifested in the recent phenomenon of Border Writing, or Border Literature. Within an American context, border writing encompasses those texts attesting to the experiences of forced exile or willful immigration of people(s) from various Latin American countries whose identities are constantly shaped by the linkages between external and/or internal journeys through metaphorical and literal terrains across geographical spaces and different sets of cultural codes within an intricate matrix of Latin American, WASP, and indigenous traditions.5 Although the material specificity of U.S. Latino border writing finds its taproot in the topographical realm, namely the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, its mental frame can be extended to encompass a wider variety of social, psychological, cultural, political, and economic realms. However, because the early in the mid-1960s was mainly a reaction to the “internal colonization” of Chicanos, its main concerns were limited to issues of ethnic/“racial” identity and economic exploitation to the detriment of other vectors of subjectivity such as gender and sexuality.6 It was the border writing by Chicanas that emerged in the early 1980s that broadened the scope of contemporary border culture, border consciousness, and border literature as well as providing a new understanding of “Americanness” and the “American” literary canon. The creative and critical-theoretical works produced by Chicanas and other U.S. Latinas have been particularly preoccupied with the hierarchical differences not only between the

5. For an extensive background, see Emily D. Hicks, BBorderorder WWriting:riting: TThehe MMultidimensionalultidimensional TTextext, (Minneapolis: University of Press, 1991), xxiii-xxxi. 6. This rigorous stance is clearly put forth in the two prefatory articles to the 6th and 7 th issues of the journal CCulturalultural CCritiqueritique (1987), both co-authored by Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. For instance, in their introduction to the 7th issue, the critics define “minority discourse” as “the product of damage, of damage more or less systematically inflicted on cultures produced as minorities by the dominant culture” (“Minority Discourse” 7). JanMohamed and Lloyd go on to claim that

[…] the collective nature of all minority discourse necessarily derives from the fact that minority individuals are always treated and forced to experience themselves generically. Coerced into a negative, generic subject position, the oppressed individual responds by transforming that position into a positive, collective one. (ibid. 10)

The critics conclude their assessment that “[t]he minority’s attempt to negate the prior hegemonic negation of itself is one of its most fundamental forms of affirmation” (ibid.).

6 dominant culture and its others, but also those that are endemic to their own patriarchal communities. By refusing to distinguish between various forms of oppression, border writing by U.S. Latinas provides fruitful examples of alternative modes of existence marked by the crisscrossing identity paradigms of ethnicity/“race,” nationality, class, gender, sexuality, language and religion, to name the most obvious. It is a stark reality that these women of mettlesome spirit have historically been triple-burdened under (1) the ruthless competitiveness of the capitalist System,

(2) the objectifying gaze of the logocentric Euro-American culture with its intellectual circles preaching from the ivory towers of the “Academia,” and (3) the surveillance of their own phallocentric communities, afflicted historically with an acute disorder of insecurity. It is on this conjunctural grounds that Chicana historian Emma Pérez’s insight on the “diasporic subjectivity,” particularly, of Latinas is of vital significance to the present study in that Pérez offers diasporic subjectivity as an “oppositional and transformative identity that allowed these women to weave through the power of cultures, to infuse, and be infused, to create and re-create newness” (Decolonial Imaginary 81). Hence, the correlation between the polymorphous Latina subjectivity and its historical marginalization in multiple grounds is, in effect, what has forged U.S. Latina border writing into a prolific textual site that resists the hegemonic discourses “from within but against the grain” (Spivak, “Subaltern Studies” 205).7 This long-term exertion with multiple barriers has also catered Latinas the re-cognition of the arbitrary nature of categorical binaries, thus, the necessity to theorize their own “Janus-faced” paradigms. Chicana critics have variously termed this pluralistic awareness new mestiza consciousness (Anzaldúa 1987), multiple voicings (Alarcón 1990a), differential consciousness (Sandoval 1991), conscientización (Castillo 1994), and decolonial imaginary (Pérez 1999). The common denominator

77.. The complexity of the correlation between the multifaceted elements of Chicana “diasporic” identity and its components (i.e., the matrix of “race”/ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, etc.) might further be expounded by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s “rhizome” trope. Taking their cue from the world of botany, Deleuze and Guattari claim that rather than establishing a fixed, or unitary, order such as the radicular root-system of a potato, rhizomic roots consist of points which “can be connected to anything other” (A Thousand Plateaus 7), spreading irregularly to interweave and crisscross any other seemingly disparate elements. Offering new matrices for intersubjective relations, then, the “rhizomatic identity” as such defies the hegemonic binaries that have long haunted the traditional “Western” logic. Furthermore, Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the “nomad” as the one who “brings a furor to bear against sovereignty, a celerity against gravity, secrecy against the public, a power (puissance) against sovereignty, a machine against the apparatus” (ibid. 352), is illuminative with regard to Latina “nomadic” subjectivity.

7 behind these deconstructive neologies, hence, evokes an astute aptitude—girdled with the tactical masquerades of a nomadic-trickster prevalent in almost all cultures—to occupy multiple locations and subjectivities in constant flux, while simultaneously maintaining a “tangible” core around which orbits a constellation of power structures in the realm of real life contexts.8 The Chicana neologies mentioned above thus provide a chameleonic skill, or the power of diasporic mobility, to foster “a new subjectivity, a political revision that denies any one ideology as the final answer” (Sandoval, 14). That is the very reason that the critical, artistic, and theoretical methodologies of these “world-travellers”9 across different wor(l)ds of meaning have been instrumental in the breaking of conventional boundaries.

While celebrating their hybridity—as well as establishing an identity beyond 10 the prescribed dictates of the “Hispanic” moniker —with their adoption of the self- reflexive appellation “Mestiza,” Chicanas have also embraced the panethnic coinage “Latina,” in an effort to share a multiplicity of experiences from the Latin-Caribbean countries. From the early 1980s onward, they have adopted the generic term “woman of color” in forming a sisterhood with U.S.-ethnic women from other fronts against what Spivak calls “hegemonic feminist theory” (“Rani” 147). As such Chicanas have forged joint-alliances with other women of color such as , Audre

88.. In his “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity” (1993), Satya P. Mohanty offers an innovative approach to theorizing ‘cultural identity’ which is attuned to the way U.S. Latinas have theorized their own subjectivity. Mohanty’s method of assessing the concept of identity defies the two “accepted” approaches to identity from either the essentialist lens, which reflects “the identity common to members of a social group” as “stable and more or less unchanging, since it is based on the experiences they share” (42); or the postmodern lens, which considers identities as “constructed rather than self-evidently deduced from experience, since […] experience cannot be a source of objective knowledge” (ibid.). On the other hand, the “realist,” or “cognitivist,” method which Mohanty offers focuses on “the relationship among personal experience, social meanings, and cultural identities” (ibid.). Mohanty asserts that such a newly articulated “cultural and political identity is ‘real’” (70) in that identity categories such as ethnicity/“race”, class, gender, and sexuality function “individually” without confining the speaker to only one of these identity paradigms. 99.. As Argentinian feminist-philosopher María C. Lugones puts it, “travelling to someone’s ‘world’ is a way of identifying with them because [it is] by travelling to their world [that] we can understand what it is to be them and what it is to be ourselves in their eyes. Only when we have travelled to each other’s ‘worlds’ are we fully subjects to each other. Knowing other […] ‘worlds’ is a part of knowing them, and knowing them is a part of loving them” (“Playfulness” 17). 110.0. During the Nixon presidency, the Census Bureau invented the descriptive appellation “Hispanic” (literally Spanish) to encompass a kaleidoscope of U.S.-born/-residing citizens whose filial or cultural roots lie in such Central and South American countries as Puerto Rico, Perú, Nicaragua, Columbia, Chile, Salvador, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Cuba, Costa Rica, and Mexico. Yet, these heterogeneous groups do adopt the panethnic moniker “Latinos” in an effort to verbalize their own diverse cultural and ethnic markers that must be respected. See Juan Flores and George Yúdice, “Living Borders/Buscando America,” Social Text 8.2 (1990): 57-84.

8 Lorde and Alice Walker from the African American front; Leslie M. Silko, Linda H. Hogan and from the Native American front; Maxine Hong Kingston, Mitsuye Yamada, Amy Tan and Hisaye Yamamoto from the Asian American front; Cristina García, Judith Ortiz Cofer and Julia Álvarez from the Latin American front, to name a few, who represent only a sample of a much larger group of writers. From the mid-1980s onward, yet another moniker, “U.S. third world feminist,” has also been ascribed by Chicanas in a twofold effort to stress the remarkable differences among U.S.-ethnic women, avoiding the tokenization of the “woman-of-color” moniker and also to situate themselves in a global context. Therefore, due to their triple-burdened status within their own culture along with the white dominant culture looming as a backdrop to their lives, the “feminine” form of writing that Chicanas embrace does not and cannot spotlight one type of oppression and downplay another.11 Nor does it opt for theory in an effort to shun political praxis, or vice versa. As Anzaldúa incisively exerts: “The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of the self, which we women of color have come to think of as ‘other’ – the dark, the feminine. Didn’t we start writing to reconcile this other within us?” (“Speaking in Tongues” 187). Anzaldúa’s insight is also of particular pertinence to the interdisciplinary trajectory of this study: Firstly, to situate Chicanas within their ethnocentric and masculine- inscribed literary heritage and political history in several areas of convergence; secondly, to trace their common maneuvers of divergence from that robust legacy; and finally to illustrate the extent to which their effort in creating a unique artistic theoretical, and historical agency has profoundly informed the diasporic writings of other U.S. Latinas whose cultural, filial or national origins rest in such Latin American countries as Puerto Rico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic. Consequently, the chapters that follow seek answers to a series of thorny questions: For one, how do the issues raised in the germinal phase of a phallocentric

111.1. Here, the concept of feminine writing is drawn upon Hélène Cixous’s famous idea of the speaking woman who “physically materializes what she’s thinking; she signifies it with her body” in an effort to “kill the false woman who is preventing the live one from breathing.” For Cixous, “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” (“Medusa” 881; 880; 879). The texts by such women, in Toril Moi’s words, “strive in the direction of difference, struggle to undermine the dominant phallogocentric logic, split open the closure of binary opposition and revel in the pleasures of open-ended textuality” (Sexual/Textual Politics 106).

9 Chicano lore and written literature reveal themselves in recent Chicana border writing? Following from that, how do contemporary Chicana authors write themselves out against the hegemony of the militant posture dictated by the supremacist formations of the MeXicanoX 12 identity? And finally, how does the corpus of Chicana writing serve as a creative and theoretical source of inspiration for other U.S. Latinas in their endeavor to write against the grain of His(s)tory? Polarizing though they may appear, the above queries do not propose an a priori demarcation between the literatures produced by Chicanos and Chicanas/Latinas; for, akin to a castaway’s gaze fastened upon the horizon, Chicanas have constantly scanned their own history and mythology. Hence their critical perspectives by no means entail a rigorous denial of a series of ethnocentric binaries that have all the way glorified “Latino” heritage and political legitimacy over an “Anglo” ethos. Conversely, as historical pariahs Chicanas have striven to re-navigate through the tough tempest of history, not only as a stimulus to their creativity, or simply a mnemonic affair, but also as a potentially transformative act.13 In offering alternative aesthetic visions towards far-reaching horizons, the corpus of Chicana border writing, hence, debunks the subordinate positions imposed on them both by the exclusionary strategies of the white System and the supremacist dictates of a distinctively “MeXicano”X identity. Thus, against the “divide-and-rule” strategies of the dominant white culture, the goal of U.S. Latina border writing (as( a counter-discursive locus of battle, waged against the coalition forces of white supremacy, capitalism and patriarchy) has indeed been to establish a mutual contact zone for all U.S. Latinos. After all, as the present project shall explore, the alternative narrative strategies, thematic concerns and critical stances of Latinas are intrinsically rooted in the very primordial nature of Latino “racial” fiber (or( mestizaje) itself, which has all the way been epitomized by

112.2. The coinage MeXicanoX has been adopted from Rosa Fregoso’s book meXicana Encounters (2003) where it is employed to stress the “historical, material, and discursive effects of contact zones and exchanges among various communities on the Mexico-U.S. border […] ‘meXicana’ references processes of transculturation, hybridity, and cultural exchanges” (xiv). Since Chicano culture in the U.S. is a socio-historical derivation, or extension, of Mexican culture, the term MeXicanoX has been occasionally used in this study in an inclusive manner to highlight the analogues and unbroken cohesiveness between “Mexican” and “Chicano” cultures in socio-political and cultural realms. 113.3. As Ramón Saldívar, in his Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990), claims:

[…] for Chicano narrative, history is the subtext that we must recover because history itself is the subtext of discourse. History cannot be conceived as mere “background” or “context” for this literature; rather, history turns out to be the decisive determinant of the form and content of the literature. (5).

10 hybrid subjectivities, liminal socio-cultural locations, polyglot perspectives, and a dynamic interplay of polyphonic narratives. Therefore, by employing such dialogic sensibilities as their textual stratagems, “U.S. Latina Writing” has signaled a cordial move toward mestizaje on a cross-cultural/racial/ethnic/national level which has originally spawned, invigorated and defined all Mexican-Americans as well as other U.S. Latinos not iconographically “slashed” as Latinos/as, but re-configured them as 14 “Latin@s” en masse. With all that in mind, the present study opens with an introductory chapter, titled “A Critical and Ideological Overview of Chicano Letters,”s which has a twofold organizational goal: For one, to provide a broad-based preamble to and analysis of the oral and literary traditions produced by Mexican-Americans from the 1848 Treaty 15 of Guadalupe-Hidalgo to the end of the Civil Rights Movement (ca. 1975). Secondly, but more crucially, Chapter One lays the essential grounds for a comparative view for the following three chapters on U.S. Latina writing, which partakes, and then subverts, certain themes, motifs and images prevalent in the works of their male predecessors. Hence, Chapter One is divided into two major subsections so as to glance over how the thematic, stylistic and critical concerns of the proto-Chicano letters had evolved at the turn of the 19th century, and came through a shift by the last quarter of the 20th century. The first subsection of Chapter One, titled ‘Early Chicano Letters: From Oral Resistance to Textual Contestation’, thus analyses the birth of a “resistive” Chicano tenor with the advent of the corrido [heroic-border-ballad] tradition. The second subsection, titled ‘The Chicano Movement: Cultural Nationalism, Ideology and Literature,’ then, shifts the focus to the turbulent decade of the Chicano youth uprisings in social, cultural, educational, political and artistic spheres within the larger U.S. anti-establishment movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The leading proponents

114.4. See June Carolyn Erlick, “Why Latin@s?@ A Note from the Editor,” DRCLAS News (Spring 2000): 4. 115.5. Aside side from various myths and folk legends which have been transmitted orally across generations, the eclectic array of written works analyzed in the first subsection of Chapter One includes the anonymous 19th-century border ballad, “El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez,” Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village (1945), the stories “El Hoyo” and “Señor Garza” (1947) by Mario Suárez, José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), and Tomás Rivera’s … And the Earth Did Not P art (1971). In the second subsection of Chapter One the main “literary” selection to conclude such an overview encompasses the quasi-epic poem, I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín (1967) by Rodolfo Gonzales, and ’s novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972) both of which might be claimed to resume the zeitgeist of the ‘Chicano Renaissance’ of the 1960s in its fullest, albeit complementing it from two different generic, philosophical, and ideological positions.

11 and intellectual predilection of the “Chicano Movement” writings and politics, which were voiced in this era of intense political activism through a hyper-masculine and collective-based tenor, shall be scrutinized from an ideological perspective. While Chapter One concludes with an outline of the Chicano Movement’s achievements and weaknesses, which have—together with the conjunctures of a rapidly changing world—led to its inevitable decline, Chapter Two, titled “Xicanisma: Theorizing Feminism(s) from the Borderlands,”s sets off from this resolution to provide a critical inquiry into the theoretical concepts produced by Chicana feminists from the early 1970s to the present. The first subsection of Chapter Two, “The Birth of Frontera Feminism,” offers an account of the parallel development of early Chicana feminist ideology and critical writings during the ethnocentric decade of the 1970s. The main theoretical debate centers around the double-marginalization of Chicanas by mainstream Women’s Movement (particularly, the “Second Wave”) and the male- dominated ethnoracial ideologies of Chicano political and intellectual leaders.16 The second subsection of Chapter Two is devoted in its entirety to a close reading of what is regarded as the ur-text of recent . Gloria Anzaldúa’s ubiquitous Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is a multilingual, polyphonic, and genre-defying collection of theory and poetry. Anzaldúa’s work is of great cruciality for Border Studies and Border Feminism as it transcends the spatial and physical

116.6. During the early 1980s, one of the earliest accounts of the multi-marginalization of Chicanas was uttered in Twice a Minority (1980), a collection of seventeen essays edited by Margarita Melville, which evaluated the gender-race dyad as the basis of Chicana subordination. Respectively, Cherríe Moraga’s Loving in the War Years (1983), seems to be influenced by Twice a Minority, albeit with Moraga’s intense focus on sexuality, in particular, Chicana lesbian subjectivity as a legitimate site at the crossroads of social praxis and theory. Next, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) by Gloria Anzaldúa has sustained Melville and Moraga’s analyses by reevaluating the primordial legends and myths of the Aztec, Mexican, and by extension, Chicano cultures. Moreover, the bulk of critical and creative writings in the given “partial” list of multidisciplinary compendiums are of substantial value in this vein: This Bridge Called My Back (1981) edited by Moraga and Anzaldúa  The Sexuality of Latinas (1989) edited by Norma Alarcón et al.  Breaking Boundaries (1989) edited by Asunción Horno-Delgado et. al  Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990) edited by Anzaldúa  Chicana Lesbians (1991) edited by Carla Trujillo  Chicana Critical Issuese (1993) edited by Alarcón et al.  Infinite Divisions (1993) edited by Tey D. Rebolledo and Elina S. Rivero  Chicana Creativity and Criticism (1996) edited by María Herrera-Sobek and Helena M. Viramontes  Chicana Feminist Thought (1997) edited by Alma M. García  This Bridge We Call Home (2002) edited by Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating. The overall insight of these collections, among other books, including Maria Herrera-Sobek’s The Mexican Corrido (1990)  ’s Massacre of the Dreamers (1994)  Rebolledo’s Women Singing in the Snow (1995)  Alvina Quintana’s Home Girls (1996)  Emma Pérez’s The Decolonial Imaginary (1999)  Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border (2000), and numerous articles featured in various “marginal” periodicals, have greatly helped establish the theoretical backdrop of Chapter Two of the present study.

12 confines of the concept of “border” to transpose it into a wider spectrum of cognitive fronteras questioning the essentializing logic of binarisms pertinent to ethnicity/“race,” class, gender and sexuality. The critical paradigm Anzaldúa elicits with what she calls “the new mestiza consciousness” serves both as an analytical framework and a critical paradigm to scrutinize two U.S. Latina writers in the chapters that follow. Chapter Three, titled “Writing the Self Beyond Borders,”s begins with a terse literary-biographical account of Sandra Cisneros, illustrating the internationally acclaimed author’s major thematic concerns and alternative narrative strategies, and her contribution to the phenomenon of Border Literature proper. Following from that, the second subsection of Chapter Two focuses on Cisneros’ first and most renowned novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), throughout which the reader is presented with the coming-of-age story of a Mexican-American girl in a fictive barrio called Mango St. in the late 1960s. The House on Mango Street is illustrative with its focus on its young Chicana protagonist whose gradual realization that she is meant to be a writer is what would eventually help her discover an autonomous identity and rebuild a genuine connection to her own culture as she intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and sexually matures. However, this is not simply a “racially” informed female rite-of-passage story, but rather an intricate narrative which reveal the complex relationship between ethnicity, class and gender in an American context. Due to the fact that the hybrid narrative style of this novel(la) of initiation blurs the boundaries between the established genres of prose and poetry along with its alternative thematic concerns and subversive narrative techniques—especially,— subverting the Bildungsroman proper—the— text can be claimed to be the premier for other contemporary U.S. Latina writers. Commencing with a literary-biography of the Dominican-American author Julia Álvarez, the final chapter of the present study analyzes Álvarez’s two loosely autobiographical novels, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and, its sequel, ¡Yo! (1997), both of which attempt to textually reanimate the grimness of and the survival strategies of the diasporic García family in their conundrum of pursuing an exilic life in the U.S. with the nostalgic pull of their natal culture in their Caribbean country of the Dominican Republic. Focusing on the power of the act narration in surmounting the protagonist’s, Yolanda García’s, ambiguous state of liminality mired

13 between her natal culture and her adopted American home, between her past and her future, between her Spanish and English, etc., Álvarez’s preoccupation with the issues of assimilation/alienation through lingual hybridity; fragmented identity crises through cultural hybridity; racial/sexual/social apartheid in a patriarchal society; and in return, recreating a personal/communal/national history through a female point of view can be readily traced in her How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Yet, the deeply ambiguous stance that the protagonist displays toward her cultural liminality at the thematic ending of the novel needs to be reconciled once and for all. Taking off from this ambiguous resolution, ¡Yo! offers how Yo(landa) finally comes to terms with her liminality through the creative act of story telling/writing. After all, ¡Yo! opens with the clues on how the protagonist has become a popular “U.S. Latina” author. Yet, because Yolanda has “apprehended” the lives of her family and her life-long acquaintances as raw material for her first novel, she was repelled for revealing their most intimate secrets. To fill the void and emancipate herself from the feeling of guilt Yolanda feels obliged to give them their own voices in an attempt to obtain amnesty, but more significantly, confirmation and acceptance by all those people who, in one way or another, have been involved in her life. In the end, Yolanda is ultimately granted a blessing and authorized by her father to be the messenger of their family, hence, to transmit their story far into the future which would otherwise sink into oblivion. The “exilic absence” of the immigrant-self is now transformed into a state of “liminal presence” with Yolanda’s self-exculpation and her familial/communal reunion through the creative act of writing.

14 CHAPTER ONE

A CRITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL OVERVIEW OF CHICANO LITERATURE

Presenting each and every component of the whole corpus of Chicano letters with all its intricacies and complexities is a rigorous project. Such an effort would require voluminous discussion extrinsic to the scope of this chapter-long-designated overview. Hence, a broad definition of what is deemed the “Chicano Literature” proper is necessary before proceeding further ahead. Luis Leal, the dean of Chicano critics, supplied the broadest account in 1973, claiming that it has “its origin when the Southwest was settled by the inhabitants of Mexico during colonial times and continues uninterrupted to the present” (“Mexican American Literature” 22). In order to push the literary calendar anterior to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Leal fractions Chicano literary heritage into five eras: Hispanic (1519-1821), Mexican (1821-1848), Transition (1848-1910), Interaction (1910-1942), and Chicano (1943-1973). However, in their introduction to a recent foundational reader, Criticism in the Borderlands (1991), the editors Héctor Calderón and José Saldívar claim that it is the literature written by “Mexican-Americans” who write about the “Mexican-American” experience since the 1848 Anglo-American annexation. For the scope and goals of the present chapter it would be more suitable to opt for the latter definition, yet adopt Leal’s schema by narrowing it down to a triad of defining historical moments: 1) The pre-Columbian “Mexic-Amerindian,” or the Aztec period to the 1519 Spanish Conquest; 2) the “Hispanic-Mexican” period from 1519 to 1848; and 3) the “Chicano” era from the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo to the present. These periods have consecutively and collectively catered an oral and written plethora of myth, folklore, legend, history, prose, poetry and performative arts from which recent Chicano and Chicana writers have often drawn their inspiration. Therefore, Calderón and Saldívar’s, and many others’ narrower, albeit more widely reckoned sentiment amongst Chicano intellectual circles, which inclines to punctuate the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo as the guidepost for the beginning of a

15 new literary tradition, is imperative to name “Chicano Literature” as a so-called “minor(ity) literature.” Because it is subsequent to the year 1848 that Chicano writing and criticism began to attest to a widespread condemnation that “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” have been bestowed neither to the first generation U.S. citizens of Mexican descent nor to the successive generations of American born Chicanos. On the other hand, for various compelling sociological reasons, it is not surprising that Chicano experience, scholarly activities, and particularly written literature were not received blithely by mainstream presses and, more crucially, by national university curricula prior to the Chicano Movement era (ca. 1965-1975).1 An important reason for this exclusion is the unique (literary) language of Chicanos which has “sprang out of the Chicanos’ need to identify [themselves] as a distinct people” against what Anzaldúa terms the “Linguistic Terrorism” of Anglo- American cultural hegemony (Borderlands 100). Chicano language has historically evolved into the code-switching “Chicano-Spanish,” or alternatively called ,

Tex-Mex, or the caló [barrio slang]. According to Chicano critics such as the noted Juan Bruce-Novoa, the practice of interlingualism in Chicano-Spanish by no means entails bilingualism in that the interlingual speech patterns and lexicon of Chicanos have expanded “both the connotative and the denotative range of words in both

[Spanish and English], creating not a binary phenomenon, but a new phenomenon 2 unfamiliar to the bilingual” (Chicano Authors 29). As Anzaldúa astutely claims:

“Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (loc. cit 81). Such a lingual amour propre as uttered by Anzaldúa might serve as a springboard to have an appreciation of how Chicano culture and literature have emerged, evolved and survived into the 21st century as a resistive measure against Anglo-American cultural imperialism. Accordingly, a cursory glimpse to the era prior to and between the years 1848 and 1965 shall be pertinent at this juncture to draw a sound “ideological” analysis in the second subsection of the present chapter.

11.. In his Youth, Identity, Power (1989) Chicano historian Carlos Muñoz, Jr. states that the G.I. Bill of 1947, which enabled the first generation working-class Chicanos to enter universities, and later the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s are the two crucial milestones in the transformation of the educational climate to include Chicanos in major institutions of higher education. (127) 22.. See Roasura Sánchez, Chicano Discourse: Socio-Historic Perspectives (Rowley: Newsbury, 1983); and Carmen Fought, Chicano English in Context (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2003).

16 1.1. Early Chicano Letters: From Oral Resistance to Written Contestation

When historical visibility has faded, when the present tense of testimony loses its power to arrest, then the displacements of memory and the indirections of art offer us the image of our psychic survival. To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity.

— Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)

Since the 1848 Anglo-American annexation of their patrimonial lands Mexican-descent people of the U.S. have been entrapped between two sets of cultural paradigms. Devising an ambivalent attitude that was to influence their intellectual orientation, the once-Mexican-subjects of the now-U.S.-Southwest had to decide if they were to remain loyal to their natal country by all means, hence, fight for their rights at all costs, or to comply with the newly rising circumstances. As a result, like most Mexican-Americans ostensibly did, artists and intellectuals of Mexican lineage, too, opted for the more “reasonable” choice for survival; that is, adapting into, and yet reflecting the abrupt changes occurring around them. Part of their adaptation was a vigorous struggle to present a positive but also a critical delineation of their bilingual and bicultural experience as a counter-hegemonic measure against the cultural and economic domination of the U.S. (Calderón & Saldívar, loc. cit. 4) In the main, this struggle for social equity included resisting assimilation into the foreign Anglo lifestyles, insisting on the oral and literary uses of Spanish, seeking economic and social alliances with Native Americans, and adapting U.S. democratic values into their life. (Candelaria, Chicano Poetry 5) In such a cultural mayhem, early writers of Mexican descent launched their harsh critiques initially against the national rhetoric of the “American Dream” which rendered (and still renders) the U.S. as the golden land of opportunity. These men-of-letters mainly voiced their arguments in numberless personal narratives, essays and then in poems, short stories, and much later in the novel form which collectively denounced the injustices of the dominant legal, economic, social and educational structures against all non-white groups. Throughout that intellectual resistance, writers of Mexican descent mainly tried to express their aspirations as a people by capturing the vernacular forms of expression on the written page; for, that robust oral legacy supplied them with the

17 literary élan vital. Some of these symbolic cultural forms and practices, which were embedded in the age-old Mexic-Amerindian lore, included such vernacular forms as leyendas [legends] or cuentos [stories] about curanderas [folk-healers] and their antitype brujas [witches], dichos [sayings], refines [proverbs], chistes [jokes], adivinanzas [riddles], alabados [hymns], pastorales [Christmas (shepherd) plays], and most crucially corridos [border-ballads]. Compared to longer belletristic forms, shorter forms such as stories or poetry that were later featured in journals and local newspapers would grant a wider commodity to the publishers as well as an easier access for the readers. These early publications have always provided an important outlet for the artist of Mexican descent, and contemporary Chicano prose and poetry are influenced by those written, and especially the orally transmitted folkloric progenitors. For instance, among myriad others one of the most proverbial legends in both Mexico and the U.S. Southwest is the tale of la llorona [the wailing bogey-woman of rivers/lagoons] which dates back far into the pre-Columbian pantheon of the Mexic-

Amerindian lore. Like most mythistory [sic] this legend has many variants; among more than a hundred others one popular variant extends llorona back to a murky time: The Aztecs believed that the spirits of women who died during their first accouchement were transformed into reverent, albeit vixenish night-wraiths called cihuapipiltin. These awed specters were also presumed to be the only women who could achieve an Elysian life with the male warriors, so their graves were hidden to prevent bruja raids. Another variant tells that she is a young, unwed, Indian peasant who, in a moment of amok, butchers her illegitimate children from a Spanish aristocrat when he abandons them to marry some other lady of his own status. In one other variant she again kills her own kids, this time, by drowning them in a nearby river to elope with another man. Almost all variants of these two versions conclude in the sequent suicide of the mother who is then eternally cursed to seek her lost kids. Still today, the restless llorona—dressed in a shroud-like white gown—is believed to stalk by the woods, deserted crossroads, or riverbanks as the personification of sheer terror with her cries into the night; and to appear before men in these spots as an attractive lady only later to scare them to death. Having merged elements from European and Aztec lores, the ghastly image of this demented infanticide is also redolent of the Greek myth of Medea, or the Christian notion of atoning souls in purgatory. Like the

18 Lilith figure of the Semitic lore, she is also blamed for the unfortunate deaths of little kids, especially those who have drowned.3 Even more, llorona has been erroneously conflated with an actual figure from the history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. Both history and legend testify against a Nahua girl named Malintzín Tenépal (derogatorily known as la malinche) who translated the language and customs of the

Aztecs for Hernán Cortés, the Conquistador, accompanied him during his campaign, and bore him a child – Martín, the first mestizo. Malintzín, as Norma Alarcón notes, “comes to be known as la lengua, literally meaning the tongue” (“Traddutora” 59). In that way, she has in many accounts gained infamy, becoming the scapegoat for the fall of the Aztecs, and metaphorically the primeval mother of a bastardized mestizo nation. Thus, she has ambiguously assumed the role of the Eve of Mexicans as well as the figure of la chingada – loosely translated (in printable English) as ‘the-screwed-one’

(see Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude 75-77). As such, this bête noire has been codified as the quintessential trope for treason and genocide, for the children of her great- grandchildren are still facing the threat of assimilation thus culturcide. On the other hand, Indohispano folklore and ecclesiastical system impose one other legendary woman as the antonym to the dyadic llorona-malinche archetype.

Legend has it that La Virgen de Guadalupe is the brown-colored incarnate of

Virgin Mary who providentially appeared on December 9, 1531, at Mount Tepeyác in the outskirts of what is now the capital of Mexico. Apart from Her divine apparition and power of healing, the brown Virgin (alias, the patron saint of Mexico) is the “master symbol” upon whom Mexican-Catholicism was founded. (Wolf, “Virgin” 34) Often eclipsing Jesus Christ, She is thus immensely venerated not only in Mexico but in the entire Latin America as the “Queen of Hispanidad.” (Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl 230) In addition to Her consecrated dimension, Lady Guadalupe also operates on a more “worldly” level in that she is the epitome of almost all the feminine virtues that are extolled by the normative Latino cultures – including spiritual and physical purity, self-negation for the good of domestic and communal spheres, consolation to the downtrodden, commitment to children, and most crucially, subservience to patriarchy. Reinforcing a feminine ethos of humility, submission and devotion, these assets of

33.. See Domino Renee Perez, There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (Austin, TX: University of Press, 2008).

19 the brown Madonna have been prerequisite for the femininity par excellence in the polarized world of Latin America. Yet, such a Manichaean exegesis of this rara avis as the paragon of Chicana/Latina womanhood, hence, the negative portraits of her “monstrous double” (llorona-malinche dyad) as a vendida [traitress] figure in both oral and written MeXicano literary traditions shall be a springboard for the chapters that follow. Because, the androgenic tendency to present llorona-malinche as a trope of treason, menace and cultural erasure, which ostracizes her potential for alternative horizons, has been challenged by Chicana intellectuals and artists through coherent refutations of both the Judeo-Christian and Meso-Amerindian biases since the 1970s. Aside from the legends of llorona-malinche or the Virgin of Guadalupe, by far the most well-grounded source for the impact of the above-mentioned “resistant” oral folklore on recent Chicano literature is particularly the numberless corridos – composed in the mid-19th century on both sides of the border by the denizens of the region, and later by the immigrants as they moved across the border and settled for varying lengths of time in the U.S. In his oft-quoted article “The Evolution of Chicano Literature” (1978), Raymund A. Paredes draws an analogy between legend and corrido by defining the corrido as “a legend set in music” (73). Hence, nowhere is this argument for “literary origins” more ostensible than in the vernacular tradition of the corrido which has long been eulogized as the ur-text of Chicano letters.

The rebellious nature of that bulk of oral lore—which would be revitalized by the poet/activist/critic in the welter of the revolutionary 1960s—has been utilized in the phenomenon of what Barbara Harlow coins in her 1987 book with the same title: “Resistance Literature.” Taking her model from the various third-world liberatory movements around the traumatic sites of the world, Harlow explains the intimate reciprocity between those armed resistance actions and literature as a means to “revolutionary transformation of existing social structures” (Resistance Literature 11). She goes on to explain,

Resistance literature calls attention to itself, and to literature in general, as a political and politicized activity. The literature of resistance sees itself furthermore as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural production […] The resistance writer, like the guerrilla of the armed liberation struggle, is actively engaged in an urgent historical confrontation. The questions raised by the resistance leaders are the questions faced by the writers as well. (ibid. 28-9; 100)

20 The sort of writing explicated above, which is directly involved in the epic assertions for human rights, and territorial and political claims, is visibly represented in the corrido. Prompted by Américo Paredes (1915-1999)—a Tejano son of a revolutionary father; himself a poet, author, folklorist, composer of corridos, later a noted professor emeritus of anthropology and English, and the founder of Mexican American Studies

Center at the University of Texas—the myriad of Chicano scholars have devised their own frameworks of Chicano literary history as well as various models of critical analysis to scrutinize Chicano letters through the lens of the corrido.4 For instance, when the acclaimed Tomás Rivera asks in 1971, “What have been the vehicles through which Chicano literature has been expressing itself?” (“Into the Labyrinth” 325), José Saldívar would seem to reply Rivera in asserting that the “study of Chicano literature must […] begin with an attempt to define at least one of the cultural paradigms which emerge from the historical experience of the Chicano Border frontier life […] [T]he corrido is the central sociopoetic Chicano paradigm” (“Chicano Poetics” 13). Following Américo Paredes’s ubiquitous study, “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958) [abbr. WHP], then, it would be beneficial at this juncture to present a concise analysis of the heroic border-corrido to pursue a closer look on the subsequent development of a hyper- masculine and supremacist (or cultural-nationalist) tenor in Chicano letters that flourished by the mid-20th century, reached its pinnacle during the turbulent 1960s, and became passé by the mid-1980s. Etymologically speaking, as a derivative of the Spanish verb correr [to run or to flow] the corrido has its roots in an age-old, robust balladry tradition of “Hispanic” legacy. On the other hand, Américo Paredes claims that the violent socio-historical milieu of the aftermath of the 1836 “incident” at Alamo, the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846, and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo successively provided the grounds

44.. See Raymund A. Paredes, “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” MELUS 5.2 (1978): 71-100; Cordelia C. Candelaria, Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport: Greenwood, 1986); Ramón Saldívar, Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (Madison: University of Press, 1990); María Herrera-Sobek, The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990); José D. Saldívar, “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, ed. by Héctor Calderón & José David Saldívar (Durham: Duke UP, 1991), 167-80; José E. Limón, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (Berkeley: University of Press, 1992); Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995).

21 for the rise of “the corrido of border conflict” (WHP 147) in the border zone, straddling between Mexico and the U.S. along the Río Grande (from Matamoros/Brownsville to Reynosa/McAllen). Paredes elsewhere has diagnosed the social and historical origins of the corrido genre simply by calling this clash as “the conflict of cultures” (“Folk Base of Chicano Literature” 13). In its original form the corrido mainly served to inform people about anti- Yankee deeds, heroic incidents of rebellion, catastrophes, wars or everyday events, whilst entertaining them at home or around a campfire to the accompaniment of the guitar. Yet, the corrido has always been a “deadly-serious” (WHP 33) and communicative genre of “cultural performance which acts dialectically within the larger social drama” (McKenna, “On Chicano Poetry” 187). As such, the corrido performance vis-à-vis the corridista [the male balladeer, and the narrator of the ballad] and his audience have acted historically as an empowering bulk of social-art and counter-memory as well as a sound source of community kinship.

In his Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems (1992) Chicano anthropologist José Eduardo Limón, provides an innovative reading of WHP, and indicates that among various others one corrido theme seems to have struck a singular resonance; that is, the rampant confrontation between individual men who often represent larger social causes but just as often are concerned with their personal honor. (16) For Américo Paredes, amongst a breadth of others a single ballad known as El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, which “powerfully dominates and conditions the later written poetry” (Limón, ibid. 2), epitomizes the corrido genre at its best; for its form is distinguished from other forms of Spanish “romantic” balladry while its content portrays Gregorio Cortez—a decent citizen and a skilled vaquero [wrangler] of the county of El Carmen—as the paragon of the border hero. Both legend and official accounts have it that on a June day in 1901 the twenty-six-year-old Cortez shoots in self-defense and kills the Karnes County sheriff who has allegedly indicted him and his brother of horse thievery due to a translation fallacy. From there on Cortez has to take a vain flight southward, albeit in lionized proportions, to evade certain injustice and probably lynching by a bloodthirsty posse on his tail over Texas State. Ten days later, Cortez is captured and imprisoned for life, yet granted a gubernatorial pardon after twelve years of internment. Cortez dies

22 equivocally soon after his release, but “whatever his fate,” Paredes concludes, “he has stood up for his rights;” he is “a victor even in defeat” (WHP 149; 124). Following Gregorio Cortez’s exemplar, the trope of the local hero, pursuing a front-line resistance and ultimately fighting for his rights and honor against the encroachment of an external adversary (that is, the terrorizing Texas rural police known as the Texas “Lone” Rangers), became a central theme of the corrido proper. Taking his cue from this heroic figure, then, the ensuing corrido hero, fictional protagonist, the actual Chicano subject, and the productive artist/scholar have all been expected to stand up for their rights. For instance, in their respective writings Jose Saldívar and Jose Limón both praise Paredes’ pioneering book for supplying “an alternative model to the linear, hierarchical discourse in the service of advanced capitalism” (Limón, loc. cit. 76); further arguing that With His Pistol stands out as “the first sophisticated Chicano narrative to begin to overturn established authority [sustained from the 1930s onward by the horde of Anglo-centric and racist scholars] in Texas and the Southwest” (Saldívar, “Border Narratives” 173). In an effort to refute the “official” written-accounts on Mexicans, and by extension Mexican-Americans, Américo Paredes salutes the orally-transmitted ballad of Gregorio Cortez. The abridged and translated version of the anonymous ballad, with which Paredes commences his acclaimed monograph, runs as follows:

In the country of El Carmen And in the country of Kiansis A great misfortune befell; They cornered him after all; The Major Sheriff is dead; Though they were more than three Who killed him no one can tell. hundred He leaped out of their corral. At two in the afternoon, In half an hour or less, Then the Major Sheriff said, They knew that the man who As if he was going to cry, killed him “Cortez, hand over your weapons; Had been Gregorio Cortez. We want to take you alive.”

They let loose the bloodhound Then said Gregorio Cortez, dogs; And his voice was like a bell, They followed him from afar. “You will never get my weapons But trying to catch Cortez Till you put me in a cell.” Was like following a star. Then said Gregorio Cortez, All the rangers in the country With his pistol in his hand, Were flying, they rode so hard; “Ah, so many mounted Rangers What they wanted was to get Just to take one Mexican!” The thousand-dollar reward.

23 In the entire “Gregorio Cortez” corrido, but especially in the fifth and sixth stanzas, the disparity of the number of the Rangers (“more than three hundred”) against a solitary Mexican; the social confrontation of a Mexican macho-mannerism (related to “guns”) with an effeminized Anglo pose (associated with “crying”); and also the materialist intention of the posse (“the thousand-dollar reward”) versus Cortez’s honorable will to exoneration and survival strike the reader at once. As a counter repository of historical data lodged against what Paredes deems the “documented old men’s tales called histories” (WHP intro.), the ballad of Gregorio Cortez reforges him as the antonym to the decadent Mexican burlesque (i.e., a fumbling shooter hence a sinister backstabber), for Cortez has in effect proved to be such a virtuoso at firearms and horseback riding that trying to hunt him down is “like following a star” over the Lone-Star State. Among eleven other variants, in one Spanish version of the original corrido that Paredes subsequently presents, the violent bursts of bravado and the exaggerated machismo of the border hero are more discernible:

Venían los americanos The Americans were coming, más blancos que una paloma, They were whiter than a dove, de miedo que le tenían From the fear that they had a Cortez y a su pistola Of Cortez and his pistol […] […] Cuando les brincó el corral, When he jumped out of their corral, según lo que aquí se dice, According to what we hear, se agarraron a balazos They got into a gunfight, y les mató otro cherife. And he killed them another sheriff.

Decía Gregorio Cortez Then said Gregorio Cortez, con su pistola en la mano: With his pistol in his hand, —No corran, rinches cobardes, “Don’t run, you cowardly rangers,

con un solo Mexicano. From just one Mexican.” (ibid. 155-56)

The symbolic pistol in such variants is reserved, in Frantz Fanon’s words, for the very moment of “murderous and decisive struggle” for a colonized group, who “pass from the atmosphere of violence to violence in action,” in which “the lid blow[s] off […] the guns go off by themselves” (Wretched 37; 71). It is such virile moments, which portray an intrepid image of the border hero claiming his rights with his pistol in his hand even if he is cognizant of his losing cause, that marks the corrido as a socio- literary subversive genre and “a master poem of social struggle” (Limón, loc. cit. 30). By the same token, in order to “show how the corrido has served as much to incite

24 narratives differing from its ideological base as it has informed narratives conforming to its world view,” Ramon Saldívar claims that the political content of the corrido has “self-consciously created acts of social resistance” (Chicano Narrative 47-8; 42). On the one hand, such earlier corridos were Mexican, thus originally in the Spanish language, so they connected the newly-created “Mexican-Americans” to their natal country through certain mutual cultural codes. On the other hand, it is a bare fact that “the corrido had a very limited influence on writers in Mexico […], it exerted a far more creative influence on Mexican-American writers” (Limón, loc. cit. 8-9). After the turn of the nineteenth-century, though, it becomes apparent that not all events of major significance to Mexican-Americans arose either on the U.S.-Mexican border or in the U.S. interior. The response of a horde of Méjicanos [Mexicans] to the myth of the “American Dream” were increasingly determined by the influx of a huge mass of immigrants, many of whom were political refugees dislocated from their homes in Mexico as a result of the Revolution (initiated( in 1910 by Emiliano Zapata in southern Mexico and Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the north against the corrupted Porfirio Díaz régime),) whilst other noncombatant émigrés were simply job seeking menial workers called the peón [man-on-foot]. As Bruce-Novoa suggests, it was at the time of that first encounter between Mexican-Americans residing in the U.S. since 1848 and their newly exiled brethren due to the Revolution in the early 1900s, that the archetype pocho (or pochi) became a trope for the degradation of the former group in the scornful eyes of the latter.5 The early decades of the 20th century witnessed this internal bias against cultural and lexical interactions, pochismos [“Americanisms” in speech traits or manners], that were willingly adopted by Chicanos. (Bruce-Novoa, “Spanish Language” 46-7). Apart from pocho, one other important archetype that flourished at the time, from which contemporary Chicano literature has also drawn its inspiration, is the rural (migrant) campesino [farm worker]. Campesinos have come to stand for the exploited labor force who are brutally utilized by the dominant society to maintain a high standard of

55.. In the past, though, the situation was just the opposite: The elite and well-established Mexican families of the U.S.-Southwest had distanced themselves from the newly arriving lower-class Mexican immigrants/exiles—pejoratively branded as [‘half-breeds’]—after Mexico won her independence from the Spanish empire in 1821. (see Suzanne Oboler, “, So Close to the United States: The Roots of Hispanic Homogenization.” 1995)

25 living for the Anglo-American mid-class; yet, who also display the motive of leaving Mexico and altering their old, pastoral way of life for better standards in the U.S. (Bruce-Novoa, “Hispanic Literatures” 30-1) For many of these first generation refugees, the belief in the “American Dream” was so low that they barely considered staying, but instead planned for an affluent repatriation to Mexico. Prompted by such a newly evolved social endeavor, the ensuant popular type of corrido repeatedly describes the desperate political and economic circumstances that drove patriotic Méjicanos northward, and their “unwelcome” status in the U.S. The lines from the corrido “An Emigrant’s Farewell” express such a point of view:

Goodbye, my beloved country, / Now I am going to away; / I go to the United States, / Where I intend to work. / […] I go sad and heavy-hearted / to suffer and endure; / my Mother Guadalupe, / grant my safe return. / […] For I am not to blame / that I leave my country thus; / the fault is that of property, / which keeps us all in want. (qtd. in Raymund Paredes, “Mexican American Authors” 73)

Such socio-economically oriented and ideologically charged materials present the view that the odyssey to the U.S., however arduous it might get, was of great value since menial labor is better than hunger or even obliteration for political reasons. Yet, it is also a fact that these ballads provide little indication that Mexican-Americans were actually climbing the social ladder toward the desired status. According to Américo Paredes, by the 1930s “when Mexico’s Tin Pan Alley [music industry] took over the corrido, its decay was inevitable” (“The Mexican Corrido” 102). Paredes goes on to explain that the revolutionary nature of the original corridos was “thinned” when the radios and movies boosted the consumption of the southern folk culture by overexposure, commercialism and irresistible cultural changes. (ibid.) As a result, the epic corrido waned from the 1930s to the 1960s. Nevertheless, in the process of creating the “Chicano” history and the formation of a distinctively Chicano literary canon, the “corrido issue” has always been a subject of much debate on account of the exclusionary tendency, based on whether or not a text should include the theme of “social conflict” between the Anglos and MeXicanos.X Due to the fact that many contemporary scholars have constructed their own genealogies, based somewhat on Américo Paredes’s argument, they postulate that the main concern for Chicano letters should be the evaluation and the reflection of the

26 social resentment between MeXicanoX and Anglo cultures which is situated on the corrido proper as a paradigm of resistance, or more specifically, of social and political critique. For instance, Raymund Paredes seems compelled to revise his above-quoted article, adding this sentiment in 1982: “The corridos have provided the Chicano writer not only with themes and stories but also with a narrative and cultural stance, a way of transcending the prevailing gloom of American minority experience”

(Three American Literatures 45). On the contrary, Juan Bruce-Novoa, in his noted essay “Canonical and Non-Canonical Texts” (1986), reproaches such an “incestual focus” on social conflict or ethnic content in Chicano letters which “excludes” those writers who do not meet the prescribed dictates of such an ideological perspective rooted in the corrido paradigm. (144) As such, a unique definition of, yet also a debate on the nascent Chicano canon that repudiates a bulk of material by a certain cohort of Mexican-Americans, or “Hispanic” elites if you will, is what came to identify the ethnocentric and masculine tenor of Chicano letters prior to the early 1980s. As a consequence of the fact that the corrido has always been a masculine realm—mostly, in its content and its proto-nationalist tenor—the early accounts of some writers, especially the woman writers, who do not embrace the male-centered standards of the corrido proper are simply belabored. For instance, Raymund Paredes accuses such earlier “Hispanic” woman writers as María Cristina Chambers and Nina Otero-Warren of being “obsequious,” “effete,” “subdued” and “pathetically unreal” (loc. cit.). Such exclusionary tendency, which assumes the corrido as the élan vital of Chicano letters, has inescapably reinforced the construction of a certain literary canon which stresses the holistic portrayal of an oppositional “Chicano” experience and an ethnocentric identity.6 Yet, as a response to the monolithic bent that lambastes those alternative voices, as Raymund Paredes heavy-handedly did, alternative readings of narratives by contemporary Chicanas shall be another springboard for the

66.. The issue of the evaluation of Chicano letters, and its analysis from formalist, culturalist, and socio-historical approaches are discussed in Joseph Sommers, “From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Applications to a Chicano Literary Text” [1977], and Luis Leal, “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective” [1973], in Modern Chicano Writers, eds. J. Sommers & Tomás Ybarra-Frausto (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979), 18-30; 31-40. For other approaches to Chicano letters see Raymund Paredes, “The Evolution of Chicano Literature,” MELUS 5.2 (1978): 71-100, Ramón Saldívar, “A Dialectic of Difference: Towards a Theory of Chicano Novel,” MELUS 6.3 (1979): 73-92, and Juan Bruce-Novoa, “Canonical and Non- Canonical Texts” [1986], in Retrospace (Houston: Arte Público, 1990), 132-45.

27 following chapters; for, as Chicana feminist-critic Tey Rebolledo justifiably iterates, the granddaughters of those excludees [sic.] do utilize skillful “narrative strategies of resistance,” debunking both the “official text” and the monolithic idea(l) of a patriarchal Chicano identity (Women Singing in the Snow 31). The corridos scrutinized above were all composed in Spanish, for no significant sum of Mexican-American writing appeared in English in the early twentieth-century. All in all, the rudimentary works written in English manifest a somehow divergent sensibility and perspective than those rooted in the orally transmitted corridos. These early American authors of “Hispanic” descent who wrote in English frequently sought to depict their community to an Anglo readership and found themselves obliged—presumably, under the influence of the popular vogue—to deploy a set of stereotypes rather than contemplate about more “serious” social issues. From this perspective, Genaro M. Padilla, in his article on the autobiography tradition and folklore in the state of , claims that the hegemonic Anglo culture has made “the subject culture forget the details of its domination” (“Imprisoned Narrative” 44). It is also Padilla’s contention that many Hispanic writers were profoundly influenced by those Anglo intellectuals who came to New Mexico in the early twentieth-century and introduced an aesthetic discourse of myth and romance to the popular consciousness of Mexican-Americans. In this vein, Raymond Paredes condemns those Anglo-influenced writers as having such a deep- seated “plantation mentality” that they ignored social concerns, and in turn their works lacked seriousness due to their sappiness and genteelness (loc. cit. 88). These submissive, in R. Paredes’s view “obsequious,” or romantic escapists if you will, had an oddly retrospective vision instead of a future, or even a present oriented one. In short, they deployed caricaturized Mexicans most favored by the Anglos: primitive, exotic, nostalgic, detached from worldly issues, and most importantly prosaic. Yet, compared to the Anglo-centric historian Prof. Walter Webb’s debased stereotypes7,

7. As leading proponents of the institutionalized racism and white supremacist scholarship of the 1930s, Prof. Webb and his followers devised the most vilifying Mexican stereotypes. In his TThehe TTexasexas RRangers:angers: A CCenturyentury ooff FFrontierrontier DDefenseefense (1935) Webb illustrates such an invidious orientation:

Without disparagement, it may be said that there is a cruel streak in the Mexican nature, or so the history of Texas would lead one to believe. This cruelty may be a heritage from the Spanish of the Inquisition; it may, and doubtless should, be attributed partly to the Indian blood … The Mexican warrior … was, on the whole, inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to the

Texan […] He won victories over the Texan by parley than by force of arms. (qtd. in WHP 17)

28 these narratives at least provoked no hostility from the Anglo culture. Nonetheless, the romantic style in “Hispanic” writing altered towards a more realistic and a positive turn in 1945 with the publication of Mexican Village by Josephina Niggli. With its focus on the rural life of a village in Nuevo León, Mexico, and with detailed renditions of the exotic ordeals of a gamut of individuals from all walks of life during the 1920s, this collection of ten entwined novelettes assumed a familiar trajectory on account of its regionalism and narcotic air on the surface. Indeed, Niggli can be grouped in part with those Hispanic authors who wrote about a Hispanic past in a “romanticized, mostly positive, idealized manner” just like those elided by Raymund Parades (Herrera-Sobek, “Introduction” Mexican Village xix). Yet, Mexican Village was one of the first texts that treated, in salient vividity, the relationship of Mexican-Americans with the Anglo culture, and the tensions of rural Mexican life with its Spanish “high” tastes as well as with the downtrodden Indians. On the one hand, in employing some unique hallmarks of Mexican folklore and creative linguistic calques8 not merely as quaint decorations for her text but also as integral parts of the structure of her stories, Niggli opposes Anglo biases towards

Mexicans by proffering her own quasi-ethnographic alternative. On the other hand, Niggli does focus on social issues about racial bigotry, class conflicts, the importance of cultural heritage, alienation due to mixed heritage, political defects of the revolutionary ideals, and especially the subaltern status of women within that rigidly patriarchal order. Thus situated, Niggli’s portrayal of a web of self-reliant and complex female figures such as María de las Garza, an outcast girl from the river bank, who defies and challenges the codes of conduct for village women, or Tía Magdalena, an uncanny witch-woman, who is awed for her magical powers, attests to the author’s concern for the dateless subjugation-resistance dyad of female reality. The central storyline of Niggli’s fictional chronicle unfolds in this order: The protagonist, Bob Webster, who was raised by his grandmother in San Antonio, Texas, is the bastard son of a blonde Anglo patrón and a Mexican-Indian maid. As a young man Bob decides to acquaint himself to his father but he is cruelly repudiated

88.. Calques are creative renditions of Spanish phrases translated literally or figuratively into English. For instance, the Spanish saying “Tener un dolor de cabeza” is translated as “I have an ache of head,” instead of the standard locution “I have an headache.” See Frances Aparicio, “On Sub-versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English,” American Literature 66.4 (1994): 795-801.

29 for his swarthiness: “You have the impudence to call yourself Bob Webster,” bursts his father, and dismisses Bob by adding: “Do you think I’d admit an Indian is a son of mine? Damn it, I’m a white man!” (40) Spiritually maimed, Bob gets to know at first hand that his own father’s bigotry in effect reflects the overall Anglo resentment for his Mexican lineage. In an effort to restore his shattered self-esteem, he departs from the U.S. to participate in World War I throughout Europe and then to vagabond in Africa. Eventually, Bob decides to travel to Hidalgo, the home village of his grandmother in central Mexico, which he merely knows from her stories. In the village of Hidalgo, he considers managing the local quarry to raise funds to head for Latin America. To the local denizens Bob is as a cryptic figure; for, he looks and sounds different from the previous quarry foremen. He is a brownish gringo with Indian features, yet bears the “most unpronounceable name” (1), and he speaks

English fluently which is an unprecedented combination for the locals. As Bob wanders around the tranquilizing lands surrounding that dreary village, the stories of his grandmother reverberate in his memory, eventually connecting him to the land and to those people. After a brief, albeit difficult period of adaptation Bob begins to feel at home in Hidalgo. In the end, he is incorporated into that community as a “true Mexican” (471) to the extent that he rebaptizes himself after his maternal lineage; in the end, Bob Webster becomes Roberto Ortega de Menéndez y Castillo.

What is worth mentioning about this frequently disregarded book—due to the aforementioned exclusionary bent in structuring a Chicano canon—is that once Bob comes to terms with his “Mexicanness,” he cannot entirely erase the cultural imprint of his Anglo background. He is still a restless figure, existentially believing in individualism and progress whilst his “skeptical mind” (24) disapproves the rigidly superstitious ways of the villagers. In the final analysis, Niggli’s portrayal of such a bilingual and bicultural protagonist, who is able to structure an identity, albeit distressingly by fusing two distinct cultures, is prototypical to the evolving Chicano letters. Hence, Niggli should be included amongst the earliest border-crossers. In a similar vein, various Mexican-American writers such as the Arizonian short story writer Mario Suárez expressed their aversion for Anglo mores, regarding work ethic and assimilation. An author of humor and irony, Suárez penned down the lives of Mexican-Americans in a barrio in Tucson, Arizona, during post-World War

30 II years. His characters become impressive insofar as they resisted the imperatives of Anglo materialism. From this position, perhaps, the most striking personage in one of Suárez’s two most frequently cited stories, or sketches, is Señor Garza, whose self- imposed doctrine that “a man should not work too hard” (“Señor Garza” 116), and whose strong will to triumph over rapacity ultimately usher him to shut down his lucratively profitable barbershop and head for Mexico. In this way, Suárez marks the limits of materialism for at least one Chicano, and exalts Garza with these closing words: “Garza, a philosopher. Owner of Garza’s Barber Shop. But the shop will never own Garza” (121). On the other hand, as the deary barber of the barrio, Garza’s profession has brought him into contact with all sorts of people, especially the urban – young Mexican-American males who are distinguished by their inter- lingual patois, “antic” demeanor, and outlandish attire which is composed of a high- waisted , a long gold chain, a rakish hat, pompadour and a thin mustache.

Source: Jules Aaron, “Review of Zoot Suit.” Theatre Journal, 31:2 (1979), 161+263-264.

As Bruce-Novoa indicates, the archetype, or the zoot suiter, became nation-wide known in June, 1943 when U.S. navy men on shore-leave hysterically assailed them on the streets of in what are called the Zootsuit riots. In the literary space the pachuco gained the status of the proto “Chicano” who receded explicitly from both “Mexican” and “Anglicized” models, while revealing a potential for an intercultural synthesis that marks him as the herald of contemporary rasquache sensibility (see Bruce-Novoa “Hispanic Literatures” 30, “Charting the Space” 122).9

99.. Conversely, Octavio Paz’s noted El Laberinto de la Soledad (1950) opens with an essay titled “The Pachuco and Other Extremes” in which Paz recounts his sojourn in Los Angeles during the 1940s, and presents a rather abominable view of the pachucos. Paz’s overall observations attest to a loathsome portrayal of the pachuco as a tragicomic pariah riddled with many contradictions and quintessentially defined by an extreme inferiority complex (see Paz, The Labyrinth of Sol itude 9-28).

31 The older generation of Suárez’s barrio is, at other times, in anguish as their children grow to prefer English to Spanish and baseball to cockfighting, etc. Thus, Suárez’s fiction elicits major questions in the face of an impending Anglo-American assimilationist model with which all Mexican-Americans will inevitably face: What tenets of Anglo culture are to be adopted or repudiated, and what elements of Mexican culture to be preserved or elided? Apart from such a counter-stand against assimilation and coarse materialism, one distinctive feature of Suárez is that the earliest usage of the self-reflexive term “Chicano” in print appeared in his short story “El Hoyo” [literally, the hole or the tomb] which was originally released with “Señor Garza” and other interlinked sketches in the prestigious Arizona Quarterly in the summer of 1947, yet rewritten by Suárez himself in 1973. In delineating the denizens of El Hoyo, Suárez employs the term, in the original 1947 version, as follows:

Its inhabitants are chicanos who raise hell on Saturday night, listen to Padre Estanislao on Sunday morning, and then raise more hell on Sunday night. While the term chicano is the short way of saying Mexicano, it is the long way of referring to everybody. Pablo Gutierrez married the Chinese grocer’s daughter and acquired a store; his sons are chicanos. So are the sons of Killer Jones who threw a fight in Harlem and fled to El Hoyo to marry Cristina Mendez. And so are all of them—the assortment of harlequins, bandits, oppressors, oppressed, gentlemen, and bums who came from Old Mexico to work for the Southern Pacific, pick cotton, clerk, labor, sing, and go on relief. (112-13)

Suárez’s choice of the self-reflexive “Chicano” to refer to a kaleidoscope of people, who are specified neither in a hierarchy of racial nor class schisms, evidences that the term initially assumed an all-embracing experience for a multifarious group of people. Therefore, Suárez’s representation of a Chicano community defies and resists any form of totalization imposed by the Anglo-American melting-pot model. Later on, Suárez aggrandizes those inhabitants, in gastronomic terms, by comparing them to a common Mexican dish called capirotada [the leftovers from the night before]:

Its origin is uncertain. But it is made of old, new, stale, and hard bread. It is sprinkled with water and then it is cooked with raisins, olives, onions, tomatoes, peanuts, cheese, and general leftovers of that which is good and bad. It is seasoned with salt, sugar, pepper, and sometimes chili or tomato sauce. It is fired with tequila or sherry wine. It is served hot, cold, or just “on the weather” as they say in El Hoyo. The Garcias like it one way; the Quevedos another, the Trilos another, and the Ortegas still another. While in general appearance it does not differ much from one home to another it tastes different everywhere. Nevertheless, it is still capirotada. And so it is with El Hoyo’s chicanos. While many seem to the undiscerning eye to be alike it is only because collectively they are referred to as chicanos. But like capirotada, fixed in a thousand ways and served on a thousand tables, which can only be evaluated by individual taste, the chicanos must be so distinguished. (114-15)

32 Suárez’s Tucson barrio thus projects the (r)evolution of an all-encompassing identity unaffected by assimilation and melting pot ideologies, and proposes a synthesis of the assets of disparate cultures “as a renewed paradigmatic identity of difference and as a metaphor for a wider intersubjective community founded upon miscegenation and mutual participation” (Neate, “Unwelcome Remainders” 30). By offering a viable location for a harmonious existence, in other words, an alternative to the dialectic of “acculturation vs. segregation,” Suárez’s “El Hoyo” is particularly an eminent model, illustrating how Chicano literature does have the subversive potential to deconstruct the existing façade for the essentialist rhetoric of a unified “American” nationhood. As a key figure in the foundation of Chicano literature, and in his anti-essentialist fashion, Suárez might be claimed to set the preliminary stage for the efflorescence of Chicano letters from the 1960s to the present. Following Suárez, successive Chicano authors over the years have treated the theme of -gone-awry. America, for them, has been far from being the “Dream” come true. A seminal case is Pocho (1959), presumably the pioneering Chicano novel, by the renowned José Antonio Villarreal in which Villarreal portrays the dissolution of familial values in a typical first-wave Mexican immigrant family. Through its young protagonist, Richard Rubio, this semi-autobiographical novel of initiation exposes the inconsistency between the American Dream and the harsh reality of immigrant life as experienced by almost all Méjicanos who embarked on an odyssey to follow the call of the land of opportunity after the . Yet, Pocho opens with a quasi-documentary chapter which seems compelled to lecture on the social and historical context of a one-generation-earlier era in the city of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. With a detailed depiction of Juan Manuel Rubio, the patriarch of the Rubio family, who was once a colonel in Pancho Villa’s army and a distant cousin of Emiliano Zapata, the “neutral” reader (with no clue of meaning of the word pocho) assumes Juan Manuel to be the pivotal character. Juan’s narrative commences with the downfall of the revolutionary ideals in 1923 when Pancho Villa is assassinated, and the swirl of events urges the ultra-macho-patriot to head for the U.S. to evade his own doom. While his family matures in Santa Clara, California, the deracinated Juan reminisces about his glorious days when he rode recklessly with his comrades, and he clings on to his dream of repatriation: “Next year we will have

33 enough money and we will return to our country” (Pocho 31). Yet, the conjunctures of a new life in the Depression years have enchained thousands of Mexicans to their newly adopted country. In effect, “deep within he [Juan] knew he was one of the lost ones” (ibid.). Juan’s narrative thus epitomizes the fabulation of a past that has irrevocably been lost. Throughout the linear narrative thread the disintegration of the Rubio family occurs in direct proportion with their material gains which reaches its zenith with their purchase of a house in California. But what Juan pitifully fails to recognize is that for his whole family, and most mordantly for his wife and daughters, traditional Mexican values have already dwindled away in the face of the assimilationist incursions of the Anglo culture. In effect, the Rubios’ is a historic dilemma which has afflicted not only the first generation Mexican immigrants, but also other European (read ‘white) immigrants; that is, the desired status of assimilation into the Anglo society exacts a dear toll by disintegrating familial and/or communal values. As a result of the constant oscillation between the two irreconcilable cultures and the nostalgic pull of Mexico, Juan’s story, too, becomes the epitome of the theme of the ‘irreparable-disintegration-of-the-immigrant-family’ when Juan abandons his family for young girl who has recently emigrated from Mexico. Yet, the main thread of Pocho is by no means Juan’s shattered dreams. By the second chapter and with a sudden generational shift, Juan’s son, Richard, who becomes the spokesperson for the second generation Mexicans within the context of the Great Depression era, starts to dominate the narrative until its ending. It is also with this generational shift that Pocho undertakes the tone of a typical Bildungsroman albeit with its own peculiar sense of alienation. At nine years old, Richard encounters with the clashing world of bicultural and bilingual norms in familial, educational, social, sexual and religious contexts into which he cannot adapt throughout his adolescence either. As he matures, he becomes a restless moody figure, a solitary loner deprived of a proper mentor to depend on. Thus, he cynically vacillates between a series of cultural poles such as the concern for self-determination vs. communal responsibility, WASP ethos vs. traditional Mexican mores, his father’s materialistic aspirations vs. his religious mother’s overprotection, his childhood gang of Japanese, Anglo, and Italian sidekicks vs. the angry pachucos, the vs. Spanish, the free thought of Protestantism vs. Catholic dogmas, the will

34 to establish a smooth relation with the opposite sex and raise a family vs. the strong urge to continue his intensive readings for becoming an independent writer, and so on. Analogous though Richard’s case may seem with that of the typical

American Bildungsroman hero—who is also afflicted historically by a parental absence—it is this peculiar threshold experience of Richard’s that hinders his psychic balance for a harmonious existence neither in Anglo nor in Chicano cultures. Such an apocalyptic predicament is narrated in the following terms:

He was aware that the family was undergoing a strange metamorphosis. The heretofore gradual assimilation of this new culture was becoming more pronounced. Along with a new prosperity, the Rubio family was taking on the mores of the middle class, and he did not like it. It saddened him to see the Mexican tradition begin to disappear. And because human nature is such, he, too, succumbed, and unconsciously became an active leader in the change […] but it was too late. (132)

Here, it is nothing but the erosive impact of acculturation that has entrapped Richard between two cultures, two languages, and two value systems, ultimately converting him into a prototypical pocho. For Richard, then, reticence lingers; the synthesis lies one generation ahead: “What was done was beyond repair. To be just, no one could be blamed, for the transition from one culture of the old world to that of the new should never have been attempted in one generation” (135). The novel closes with Richard’s enlisting in the U.S. Navy a few months before the Pearl Harbor incident. It is a grave irony in the sense that he enlists in an effort to leave behind a spiritual battleground and to be able to write an authentic text of his own existence within a new historical context. Yet, Richard’s is now going to be a real battleground where his father’s belief in codes-of-honor, machismo, idealism, patriotism, action, and courage that Richard has formerly repudiated, must be sanctioned for survival. Richard’s perplexed query ends the novel:

Of what worth was it all? His father had won his battle, and for him life was worth while, but he had never been unaware of what his fight was. But what about me? Thought Richard. […] Because he did not know, he would strive to live. […] He thought of this and he remembered, and suddenly he knew that for him there would never be a coming back. (187)

Such a dark and ambiguous ending for Richard does not offer any sanguine resolution; and in fact, as Ramón Saldívar notes, “[t]he novel has always been somewhat of an embarrassment to Chicanos. [Because, most of Richard’s urges] are seen as

35 assimilationist tendencies” (“Dialectic of Difference” 76). Yet, Pocho precedes the advent of the revolutionary 1970s which would propose an outlet for Richard’s anguished question: “Of what worth is it all?” To conclude, the Rubios barely partake in the “Dream” – notwithstanding, other writers could not in the least represent even such a tenuous success, if it is genuinely a success at all.

In the introduction to his Chicano Authors, Inquiry by Interview (1980), Bruce- Novoa provides a synopsis of the social oppression endured by Chicanos in their dealings with the law, police and even organized religion. (24-27) The prolonged history of this socio-cultural apartheid, and the inconceivability of the articulation of the two opposing value systems might explain Chicano protagonists’ antipathy to social participation and their tendency to retreat to alternative sites. Thus situated, the leitmotif of repudiating an inherently repressive social context proves to be a widespread theme among the archetypical protagonists discussed thus far. Bob Webster, Señor Garza, and Richard Rubio collectively feel compelled to withdraw from an Anglo-oriented society so as to attain the integrity requisite for their metaphorical reincarnation within the revolutionary archetypes of the 1960s. Although written subsequent to the discussed works above, through its major themes, settings, and portrayals of the nomadic lives of southern Texas campesinos, Tomás Rivera’s only published novel . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971) criticizes the “Land of Opportunity” in like manner.10 Narrated through a combination of nameless migrant voices, which are assembled by and transmitted through an anonymous boy- protagonist’s omniscient vision, this collection of fourteen stories and thirteen vignettes builds a sound bridge between those earlier and recent Chicano writings. Through a cyclical, yet fragmented and disordered narrative sequence during the course of a single year, the novel(la) documents the collective misery of deterritorialized Mexican-American migrant families, who lead hardscrabble lives of penury in the 1950s without the slenderest hope of obtaining any material goal—let alone, the “American Dream” itself. For the most part these people travel seasonally from one southern state to another in shockingly bestial conditions only to find toilsome field-work under the (literally) killing sun; though without giving up their

110.0. The novel was twice translated as …And the Earth Did Not Part (1971) and …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1987). Here, references are from the 1987 edition.

36 dignity. Throughout the fragmented narratives, or sketches, the reader witnesses lurid tragedies such as a boy (worker) is shot by an Anglo patrón just because the child wanted to drink water during the working hours (“The Children Couldn’t Wait”); or another boy is forced by the old couple he stays with to help them get rid of the body of a Mexican vagabond whom they killed for his money (“Hand in His Pocket”); or some other children are burnt alive in their shack while their parents were in the fields (“The Little Burnt Victims”); or a young man commits suicide at the power plant due to the unbearable paranoia of being betrayed by his temporarily separated girl- friend whose family migrated to some other state (“The Night the Lights Went Out”), and so on. In brief, what these nomadic people live is the “American Nightmare.” The novella begins with the framework story, “The Lost Year,” in which the boy-protagonist is out of “words” and out of place and time, trying to make sense of his disoriented existence within a dream-like setting. And that is precisely what the entire text is about, an account of such events in the life of a Chicano boy and of those around himself that must be remembered, contextualized and narrated. In one section, titled “It’s That It Hurts,” the boy-protagonist flees from school and takes refuge in a graveyard, for he has constantly felt the insecurity of being an outcast in the “white” System despite having a critical acumen that enables him to reject the superstitions of his devout family. Intensifying the boy’s confusion, his family has always ushered him towards the “Anglo” choice. Thus, anticipating to be unjustly expelled from school because of an altercation there, he laments the loss of the only chance to be a “telephone operator” (95) – a job, symbolizing steady income and escape from the torture of field labor. In the last story, “Under the House,” which involves another flight instance, the boy hides again; this time, in the crawl-space beneath a neighbor’s house. There, in the dark and isolated both from his family and the society at large as if he was in his own private sanctuary, the boy becomes able to contemplate about his life-long acquaintances and organize his one-year-long ordeals with the power of the creative/curative word. At long last, the boy is able to acquire a firm hold through negotiating the ambiguities of his amnesic state by (con)textualizing the fragments of his “lost year” which the reader has traced throughout the entire text. The closing statement of the novella is an indicator of his eventual achievement:

37 He immediately felt happy because, as he thought over what the woman had said [about his losing of his sanity], he realized that in reality he hadn’t lost anything. He had made a discovery. To discover and rediscover and piece things together. This to this, that to that, all with all. That was it. That was everything. He was thrilled. (152)

Once the reading process is over, the reader becomes aware that the entire narrative has been compiled by the narrator-protagonist sometime after the last story ends. Furthermore, when the titles of the first and last stories are juxtaposed, it becomes more evident that ‘the lost year’ has ultimately been restored ‘under the house;’ thereby, bringing the text into full circle. To conclude, what the reader has encountered from the outset to the ending is, in Bruce-Novoa’s words, “not the stream itself in its amorphous flow; the texture is not at all that of an interior monologue, but that of the written word, of the carefully structured written text” (Chicano Authors 138-39). Hence, it is through the very acts of discovering, synthesizing, constructing and narrating his “individual” story that the anonymous boy-protagonist finally frees himself from his former state of self-effacement, ultimately resolving the ambiguities that inform his life as well as those of his own community. Thus he becomes the spokesperson for his community’s voices that must not sink into oblivion. Notwithstanding the array of stylistic tendencies and thematic concerns in each work discussed thus far, Chicano letters—and any ethnic/minority writing, for that matter—seems to evidence a common motivation: The written work resists and responds to the cultural clash which is the product of an interstitial entrapment in- between the dominant ethos and one’s own ethnic/minority position. Hence, the written work itself does become an authentic testament to a will to (cultural) survival. Within this centripetal tendency there operates, in Ramón Saldívar’s terms, a “dialectics of difference.” Taking his cue from the poststructuralist vein of Jacques Derrida, Saldívar’s “dialectics of difference” postulates that Chicanos in literature and through literature prefer to achieve something beyond a display of a merely Anglo or a Mexican fabric in their lives. As such, they surmount the shattered dream of a total integration into the System (with a capital ‘S’) with all its negative psychological and material effects; but in the process of identity formation they do adopt a strictly non-Mexican identity as well. Thus, the text—and Chicano letters in general—becomes oppositional, yet dialectically bound to the history, culture, and

38 literature of Anglo-America. (Chicano Narrative 5-9) Such a synthesis is, then, both the élan vital and the by-product of an open-ended process of negotiation of categorical binaries pertinent to the two seemingly oppositional cultures. Thus, by means of proposing an “‘inner’ space for a new ethnic identity to exist,” the written word becomes not a prison-house of language—to adopt Jameson’s (in)famous phrase—but a psychic shield against the looming peril of a mental fragmentation. (Bruce-Novoa, “Hispanic Literatures” 31) Considered in these terms, Rivera’s crucial novella, with its writer-to-be protagonist at its center, is what distinguishes the book from the texts discussed above. Hence, in addition to the quintessential subjects of Chicano oral and literary traditions (i.e., llorona, malinche, Lady Guadalupe, curandera/bruja, pocho, vaquero, campesino/peón, border-hero/bandido, and pachuco), a new fictional figure comes to dominate the literary space; that is, the would-be-writer protagonist who rises from the state of victimization to self-affirmation through the creative act of writing.

In one way or another, the stock themes thus far analyzed (i.e., the exodus to the U.S., the theme of Americanization-gone-awry, the toilsome lives and exploitation of the campesinos, the culture and language of the barrio, the coming-of-age of a writer-protagonist, indigenous roots, assimilation, mixed heritage, and generational conflicts) reverberate in the majority of Chicano fiction from Pocho (1959) to the latter novels of the 1980s and beyond.11 Before proceeding to an intense analysis of the alternative voices in Chicana feminist writings in the chapters that follow, it is crucial at this juncture to focus on those terms essentializing “Chicano” ideology, from aspects of ethnic identity, intellectual orientation, politics, and literature which had arisen in the mid-1960s, and yet became passé by the early 1980s. This downfall might effectively be explained with Frederic Jameson’s diagnosis that declared Late Capitalism as the dominant “cultural logic” of Postmodernism proper, on account of which the latter had actually reduced both cultural and ideological trends to mere marketable commodities (see Jameson, Postmodernism ix-54).

111.1. For a wider bibliographic spectrum of the canon of Chicano literature see Juan Bruce-Novoa’s “Introduction” to Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 6-9; Febe Portillo Orozco, “A Bibliography of Hispanic Literature,” The English Journal 71.7 (1982): 58-62, and Marie Stewart Frankson, “Chicano Literature for Young Adults: An

Annotated Bibliography,” The English Journal 79.1 (1990): 30-8.

39 As Ellen McCracken also states, in her New Latina Narrative: The Feminine

Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999), the sudden shift in the marketing strategies of

U.S. mainstream publishers yielded—certainly, with the motive of profit-making—to the “commodofication” of certain Latina writers from the early 1980s onward. Since

“difference is more marketable than sameness” (13), McCracken claims, what these new narratives have depicted has gained “the status of desirable and profitable postmodern ethnic community” (4) – notwithstanding their firm function in creating and presenting disruptive discourses against the white status quo as well as against their own patriarchal communities. The next section thus scrutinizes the rapid and fruitful booming of the Chicano “militant” rhetoric of the 1960s until its consequent fall due to the socio-cultural and socio-economic changes delineated above.

40 1.2. The Chicano Movement: Cultural Nationalism, Ideology, and Literature

[Nation] is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign … It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members … yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. … The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them … has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. … It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic real. … It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

— Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (1981)

For almost one hundred years of silence “Mexican-Americans” seemed to be an innocuous minority; and, although there had been accounts of trivial social insurrections in labor strikes, or petty gang havocs, these have rarely been reckoned in American history at large. However, the multi-generational agitation wreaked by the perennial racial bigotry, economic exploitation, and social apartheid as well as an escalating awareness of cultural nationalism could no longer be restrained in the aftermath of the rise of various anti-colonial movements of post-World War II era. From this perspective, the tumultuous decade roughly stretching from the mid-1960s 12 to the mid-1970s was momentous, especially the year 1967 , in the (r)evolution of the culture, politics, literature, and corporate identity of Chicanos. For so long Chicanos, and legal and/or illegal Mexican immigrants (unlike the Irish, Italians, or Jews) have not only been discriminated against on the grounds of their natal language and religion, but also stigmatized due to their mestizaje – a

112.2. The year 1967 was a landmark on account of various seminal incidents such as the “Courthouse Raid” in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, on June 5th that attracted the attention of national media. Led by Reies López Tijerina this paramilitary action aimed to seize the County Courthouse so as to voice the broken land treaties since 1848. The year 1967 also marked the foundation and the pursuits of the youth organization called the ‘’ in L.A. The Mexican American Youth Organization, MAYO, was also founded in 1967 by José Angel Gutiérrez to deal with the material terms of oppression rather than the terms of cultural identity. Ultimately, MAYO became instrumental in the founding of ‘ Unida Party’ in Texas in 1970 which would become the most significant force in Chicano politics on a national level. For fundamental background on this particular epoch see Rodolfo F. Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos [1972] (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), Carlos Muñoz, Jr., Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement (London: Verso, 1989), Juan Gómez-Quiñones, Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940-1990 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), David Montejano (ed). Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), Ernesto Chávez, ¡Mi Raza Primero! Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

41 common rhetoric in the unilateral ideology of Manifest Destiny which was later given “scientific” respectability in popular Social Darwinism from the 1880s onward. Due to the fact that tenacious claims of cultural determinism in the U.S. have always been attuned to the loutish view that accommodation is the sole means to upward social mobility, the apparent impossibility of total assimilation led American scholars of Mexican descent to convey that they must be considered an “internal colony.” In this fashion, Rodolfo F. Acuña’s historical account, aptly titled Occupied America (1972), which is considered—along with Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand (1958)—as the Bible of Chicano Studies, is by far the most striking example of the anti-melting-pot model of assimilation. As such, Acuña prefaces his monograph by delineating what he regards as the initial difference amongst the Mexican-descent subjects of the U.S. by drawing an acute contrast between the self-reflexives “Mexican-American” and

“Chicano” – the former, an Anglo coinage, proclaims assimilation whereas the latter signals an espousal of their indigenous (Aztec) heritage and working-class origins. Thus, for any educational course concerned with the Chicano reality, Acuña’s ubiquitous study was and is still taken as a standard text to be referred to almost in all scholarly activity, as it has also shed light intensely on the present study.

In like manner, Alurista—the Chicano poet laureate of the 1960s—posited a plan of action in an effort to resist against what he, too, diagnoses as the “internal colonization” of Chicanos whom he considered to be demeaningly subjugated to “economic dependence on the cultural, political, and military paternalism of the Yankee Empire.” In his “The Chicano Cultural Revolution” (1973), Alurista devises his own schema:

Internal revolution is inevitable and imperative. But … where do we begin? … with the rifle or the pen? With the armed revolt for the popular take-over of the Yankee state or with the cultural revolution for the organization of the popular revolutionary conscience of the Chicano peoples north of Mexico. The first alternative is heroic suicide. The second is protracted (long-range) insurrection, the aim of which, must be fourfold: 1) the organization of Chicano peoples, 2) The liberation of land north of Mexico, 3) the unification of the mestizo nations of Amerindia, and 4) The humanization of the socio-economic order of the earth. This cultural revolution against kolonization [sic] combats repression with reflection and dedicated study, combats suppression with the expression and communication of knowledge and social conscience. And, finally, overcomes oppression with the liberation of people and land occupied and dominated by Yankee Empire in Amerindia. (23-33)

Alurista’s militant rhetoric as evinced in the lengthy excerpt above—he neither explicitly demands nor does he hesitate to voice the pistol in hand option—and his

42 understanding of social resistance with all available means, frame up the major characteristics of the decade’s political, intellectual and artistic orientation. Another eminent figure is the anthropologist Octavio I. Romano-V. who co- founded the literary journal El Grito [The Cry] in 1967 at the University of California, Berkeley. Until it ceased publication in 1974, El Grito became the first national Chicano literary magazine and its popularity enabled Romano to establish the Quinto Sol Press and organize a literary award, the Premio Quinto Sol, which focused on such men as Tomás Rivera, Rudolfo Anaya, and Rolando Hinojosa – the triumvirate known as the “Big Three.” These author(itie)s would set the standards for Chicano letters in the immediate decade. Following El Grito, another landmark journal, entitled Aztlán, was founded in UCLA in 1970. The prominence of these two journals, among various others, and the success of Quinto Sol Press is that they rapidly encapsulated, in Carlos Muñoz, Jr.’s terms, the “quest for paradigm” among the Chicano intelligentsia with regard to how their ethnic experience and issues of cultural identity should be pursued in the educational arena, and as such represented in the literature of the decade (see Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power 141-9). Influenced mostly by the Black Power Movement and partly by the general heightened awareness of a Latin American political revival that stemmed from the revolutionary figures in Cuba such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Chicanos came to assert their Mexican-Hispanic-Indian origins in an uncompromising way, and drew insight from their own unique cultural traditions. Moreover, the pervasiveness of the Spanish language and the indigenous Mexic-Amerindian culture in the U.S. Southwest, and the constant transborder passages from Mexico had catered Chicano intellectuals linguistic and proto-nationalist overtones shared by no other U.S. . In addition, allied with other protest factions within the context of social revolt effectuated by the war in Vietnam (including anti-war crusaders, advocates for the rights of racially and sexually oppressed minorities) the uproar of Chicanos can therefore be conceived as part of the wider revolt of the 1960s against the establishment values of Anglo-American core culture. Accordingly, the decade between 1965 and 1975 marked what was soon to become El Movimiento Chicano, or the Chicano (Power) Movement, which first erupted on the Californian campuses.

43 As an outgrowth of college and high school students’ revolt, El Movimiento was characterized by huelgas [protests, demonstrations, boycotts or sit-ins] over the denial of equal civil rights; nonetheless, it was partly a generational phenomenon in its early days, and today by no means all those of Mexican origin would describe themselves as Chicanos. On the other hand, in his Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise (1990), another noted Chicano historian, Juan Gómez-Quiñones, details the “ideological” implications of the term ‘Chicano’ within that intensely politicized climate in this manner: “To voice and express hopes and affirmations, and certainly the praxis of an overt identity, there came into use among the youth the term Chicano, a word used as a group referent” (104). In addition, Gómez-Quiñones refers the notion of Chicanismo as “a set of beliefs; in particular, a political practice” (ibid.); he goes on to claim that the ideology of Chicanismo, or “Chicanoism” [sic.], has foregrounded the feelings of

[…] dignity, self-worth, pride, uniqueness, and a feeling of cultural rebirth made it attractive to many Mexicans in a way that cut across class, regional and generational lines […] it emphasized Mexican cultural consciousness and heritage as well as pride in speaking [the] Spanish language and economic opportunity. (ibid.)

As such, the Chicano Movement’s strong emphasis was laid on the conceptualization of “race” as national identity – full political rights and equal socioeconomic participation were its primary goals. However, the purview which claims that Chicanos should benefit from the full rights of U.S. citizenship must be considered the temperate side of Chicano supremacist programme. More radical and occasionally extremist groups voiced territorial claims laden with a sharpened and more jingoistic ethnic consciousness – echoing, in tone, the ‘Nation of Islam’ ideal that Louis Farrakhan preached. Aside from the demands of this new generation of Chicano students and scholars, various Movement factions had taken protean forms in other sites of resistance. As such, one of the many rhizoidal roots of El Movimiento budded when

César E. Chávez and Dolores Huerta’s National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) called a 250-mile march for thousands of people in March, 1966, and ultimately a strike at its destination in Delano, California. Out of NFWA’s strike, throughout which they adopted the non-violence policy of the historic African American leader

44 Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged the first Movement manifesto, El Plan de Delano [The Plan of Delano]. This document outlined NFWA’s hopes for the farmworkers’ efforts and adopted Dr. King’s resolute optimism by embracing the motto of the era: “We shall overcome” (López y Rivas, 109-10). Luis Miguel Valdez, who was to become the leading force—and personally, the founder of a unique dramatic mode of artistic production—in Chicano national consciousness, contributed significantly to the drafting of this declaration. At its crescendo the anonymous plan proclaims: “We are sons of the Mexican Revolution, a revolution of the poor seeking bread and justice. Our revolution shall not be an armed one, but we want the order which now exists to be undone, and that a new social order replace it […] Viva la causa!” Eventually, the Delano strike became a nationwide boycott of table grapes in 1967 that openly declared the conflicts which had perpetuated since the growth of California’s agricultural economy from the early years of the century. Inspired by this event, Chicano scholars, writers, and artists began to excavate an “unofficial” history of a series of racial and class conflicts which soon had an instrumental role in subverting the simulacra of the stooped, fruit-picking “Mexican.” For instance, Luis Valdez’s independent troupe, (ETC), was established in the fields of Delano in 1965 as a means of raising the political consciousness of the farmworkers, boosting their morale and inspiring them into action. ETC was originally not a classical theatre nor were its actors professionals; they were the very farmworkers themselves, and their mundane experiences were the subject matter. As a bilingual agitprop theater, in which the grassroots audience could freely participate, ETC performed on flatbed trucks, in meeting halls or in streets with no more props than cardboard signs to identify the characters and their social roles. ETC’s form was simple; it was based on a skit of ten to fifteen minutes duration, called acto, which is marked by improvised action, irony, humor, symbolism, simplicity, and music; and its content focused on self-discovery, collective assertion of Chicano rights, and an unbending intent to emphasize the ideology of Chicanismo.13

113.3. For a “first-hand” background on Valdez and his ETC, see Beth Bagby, “El Teatro Campesino: Interviews with Luis Valdez,” The Tulane Drama Review 11.4 (1967): 70-80.

45

A performance of El Teatro Campasino - 1966 A performance of El Teatro Campasino - 1969 Location: Unknown - Photographer: John A. Kouns Location: Unknown - Photographer: Unknown

Source: http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/node/179 Source: http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/node/178

Inspired by ETC, various theatre groups all over the U.S. southwestern states rapidly became a weapon for the cultural-guerrilla of the Chicano nationalist mobilization. In Valdez’s own words, “Chicano theater, then, is first a reaffirmation of LIFE” (“Notes on Chicano Theater” 143). Valdez goes on to explicate that

[t]he nature of Chicanismo calls for a revolutionary turn in the arts as well as in society. Chicano theater must be revolutionary in technique as well as content. It must be popular, subject to no other critics except the pueblo [‘people’] itself, but it must also educate the pueblo toward an appreciation of social change, on and off the stage. (ibid. 145)

ETC’s adept medley of bilingualism, folklore, and social dynamics had revolutionary impact on other Chicano artists, most notably on novelists and poets, who had been struggling to capture the multiplicity of Chicano voice on the written page.14 On the other hand, unlike the first-generation scholars of Mexican descent, who were isolated within the scholarly activities of an Anglo-dominated academia, the college students of Californian campuses demanded a new type of intellectual who should actively engage in the public political sphere. Thus, a watershed in forming the nationalist orientation within the dominant student factions found an outlet in Denver, Colorado. The occasion was the first Chicano Youth Conference

114.4. Valdez also moved into the commercial theatre with his play “Zoot Suit” (1977), which was based on the of 1940s in LA, to be made into a movie with the same title in 1981 by Universal Studios. It was with his 1987 film La Bamba that Valdez achieved a world-wide fame.

46 held in March 1969 at the headquarters of the barrio-based organization called Crusade for Justice, which had been founded by the noted political activist Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales in 1965 to address the issues faced by urban Chicanos. The conference produced another tremendously crucial manifesto of the era, titled El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán [‘The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán’] (abbr. El Plan), which became the political framework and also a program of liberation from racism and exploitation on account of its resolute accent on Chicanismo. The cultural-nationalist resolutions of the Denver meeting and El Plan posited two crucial strategies at the core of the search for the historical Chicano self: Firstly, the recuperation of the term “Chicano” from its previously dyslogistic sense would help elaborate the re-definition of a corporate Chicano identity which had predated the Spanish conquest (1519), let alone, the Anglo invasion (1848). With this politicized maneuver of self-definition, the concept of “cultural heritage,” as a source of ethnic pride as well as a dynamic force of social resistance, would distinguish an authentic Chicano culture from its hoax long displayed within Anglo belles-lettres.15 In addition, this budding ethnocentric awareness, which secerned Chicanos from other hyphenated European or Latin American immigrants, could unite the heterogeneous Chicano communities (scattered around the U.S.) in asserting that they did not enter into the U.S., but the Yankees came unto them with their guns – in a well-known aphorism: “We did not cross the border, the border crossed us.” Secondly, El Plan focused on the notion of Aztlán, or Aztatlán, which is the name given to the mythical and mystical homeland—never pinpointed in maps like the Atlantis—of the ancestors of both the Aztecs and their Chicano descendants. As the Chicano symbol Aztlán bears a double-meaning: Geographically, it frames the U.S. Southwest that Mexico ceded in 1848. On the other hand, and more crucially, Aztlán symbolized the “spiritual union” of Chicanos, “something that is carried within the heart” to regenerate a new mythos, a new self-assertive concept for Chicanos (Leal, “In Search of Aztlán” 8). Although a small extremist cohort might have reclaimed these ancestral territories as a birthright so as to provide a location

115.5. In “Cultural Nationalism and Xicano Literature During the Decade of 1965-1975” (1981), Alurista argues: “[…] much of the literature that had flowed from the pens of Anglo-American novelists, social commentators, journalists, and academicians since 1848 had rendered the Mexican in the United States as lazy, ignorant, criminally prone, and definitely not worthy of trust” (22-3).

47 for a Spanish-speaking autonomous patria [country] along the border, the redemptive myth of a lost paradise staunchly validated the ethnic pride and cultural heritage of Chicanos, whom the Anglos deemed as having no history and no culture at all – theirs in effect has been an extension of an archaic one.16 In this regard, the opening statement of “El Plan” is worth quoting in its entirety:

In the spirit of a new people that is consciously not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun [the Aztecs], declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny. […] Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans. We do not recognize capricious frontiers on the bronze continents. Brotherhood unites us, and love for our brothers makes us a people whose time has come and who struggles against the foreigner “gabacho” [Anglo] who exploits our riches and destroys our culture. With our heart in our hands and our hands in the soil, we declare the independence of our mestizo nation. We are a bronze people with a bronze culture. Before the world, before all of North America, before all our brothers in the bronze continent, we are a nation, we are a union of free pueblos, we are Aztlán.

(Anaya & Lomelí eds., Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland 1)

Owing to such an Aztec ancestry, enounced with an exceedingly hyper-masculine call in this excerpt, Chicano culture and corporate identity were postulated as essentially superior and antithetical to Anglo-American ethos marked by its coarse materialism, irksome technocracy, and spiritual sterility. Moreover, this document relied on actualizing a series of other conceptual polarities such as Chicano activists

116.6. The twelve essays in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (1989), edited by Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí, render detailed analyses of the significance of the myth of Aztlán with respect to its historical, mythical, artistic, and ideological imports. For instance, in their respective essays Luis Leal and Michael Pina delineate that the Aztecas were the last remaining tribe of the seven caves in Aztlán [the place of whiteness]. According to one Nahuatl origination myth, around A.D. 820 the Aztecs were advised by their earthbound leader, Huitzilopochtli, who was also a deifying war-god, to leave Aztlán and head for south—to what is now the Yucatán Peninsula—in search for their promised land. In the course of their prolonged peregrination Huitzilopochtli instructed his people to change their name from Aztecas to Méjicas. The Aztecs believed that the final destination of their pilgrimage would be signaled by a presaged scene: An eagle alighted on a nopal, holding a serpent on its beak, or devouring it; that is, the very symbol that is today emblazoned on the Mexican flag. After their arrival to Yucatán around late twelfth-century, and upon establishing their empire in A.D. 1325 (or 1345) at the city of Tenochtitlán—now buried under modern Mexico City—the Aztecs reminisced about Aztlán as a bygone terrestrial paradise where men never grew old. In 1450 the noted Aztec king Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina (ruled 1440-69), alias Montezuma I, sent his sorcerer-emissaries on an expedition to retrace the route traveled by their forefathers, locate their primeval homeland and find Coatlicue, the goddess of the earth and Huitzilopochtli’s mother. See Luis Leal, “In Search of Aztlán” and Michael Pina, “The Archaic, Historical and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán,” in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (1989), ed. by Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998,). 6-13; 14-48.

48 versus “Mexican-American” accommodationists, and Chicana loyalists to la causa [the Movement ideology] versus las vendidas [sell-outs], namely the budding Chicana feminists. In a rationale congruent with Benedict Anderson’s noted proclamation in the epigram to this section, Aztlán was too used as a collective symbol around which a sense of nationhood, indeed, an “imagined” one, was cemented. Soon, the thematic concerns of El Plan were articulated in a rapidly expanding literature which was to be inseparable from the Chicano Movement, and the political de rigueur of this writing was the myth of Aztlán, the homeland of the Aztecs. Following the First Annual Chicano Youth Conference another worth mentioning conference was arranged at the University of California in Santa Barbara, in April, 1969. The primary goal of the Santa Barbara conference was to address the issues concerning the requirements of Chicanos in higher education. The conference produced one other crucial manifesto, El Plan de Santa Bárbara [The Plan of Santa Barbara], which was meant to explore cohesive ways to establish Chicano studies programs in the academia around the U.S., and to constitute a representative Chicano curriculum and a canon from the rapidly burgeoning literature (see Muñoz, 191-202 for the Plan of Barbara). Considering this boom in Chicano letters, Philip Ortego coined the term “Chicano Renaissance,” in his 1971 article with the same title, to subsume all literary and other artistic activities which were directly influenced by the Movement rhetoric as well as those produced by the ideologically un-engaged artists addressing la raza heritage. For instance, while Mario Suárez’s story “El Hoyo” (1947) had exalted the heterogeneity of Chicano ethnicity, cultural productions of El Movimiento could not and did not espouse Suárez’s anti-essentializing ideal. Conversely, the writings and critical approaches of the era attested to a staunch orientation for the representation of a Chicano identity in an essentialist manner. Even so, the term “Renaissance” might be useful with its stress on the rejuvenation of a cultural tradition that had begun long before 1848, and the rebirth of a people hitherto tagged as Latinos, , Mexicans, ethnic-Mexicans, Latin-Americans, Mexican-Americans or Spanish-Americans – no need to reiterate the horde of well-known pejoratives. In order to illustrate the essentials of El Movimiento writings, two eminent figures, a poet and a novelist, merit further analysis to conclude the present section.

49 Although the charismatic civil rights champion Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales’s lengthy poem “I am Joaquín” (1967) and the inaugural novel of Rudolfo Anaya’s loosely- knit trilogy, Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Heart of Aztlán (1976), and Tortuga (1979), are inherently diverse not only in generic but also in thematic terms, these two crucial literary works epitomize the literature of the Chicano Movement in its fullest, albeit complementing it from two distinct positions. With a firm political agenda of mobilizing a whole generation of Chicano student-activists, Rodolfo Gonzales penned down his “I am Joaquín” in 1967 to be distributed as mimeographed leaflets by his Crusade for Justice, and recited like an anthem in caucuses and huelgas.17 Since then, the poem has been a foundational text in various Chicano studies programs. Chicano historian Carlos Muñoz, Jr., sees the text as more than a poem but as “an ambitious essay that attempted to dramatize key events and personalities from important moments of Mexican and Mexican American 18 history” (loc. cit. 61). In the one-page preface to the 1972 Bantam edition, Gonzales describes his own poem as “a social statement, a conclusion of our mestizaje, a welding of the oppressor (Spaniard) and the oppressed (Indian)” (1). After all, “I am Joaquín” attempts to stand, in Gonzales’s words, as “a call to action as a total people, emerging from a glorious history, traveling through social pain and conflicts, confessing our weaknesses while we shout about our strength […]” (ibid.). Recited in a straightforward style and from the perspective of a first-person persona, throughout the poem the persona, Joaquín, embarks not only on a mythical odyssey but also a historical quest to resume almost two millennia of Mexican, and

117.7. “I am Joaquín” was released in book format in 1967 as I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín by La Causa Publications in Oakland, CA., and reissued by a mainstream press, Bantam Books, in 1972 as an annotated study under the title, I Am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem. The poem was also adopted by Luis Valdez and his ETC in 1969 into a 20-minute, 16mm, colored motion-picture. Occasionally tinged with indigenous tunes and at times with the mariachi music, the film can rather be called a pictorial collage of an ample number of still snapshots, murals, and paintings of various crucial moments and personages from MeXicano history, with Valdez reading the whole poem in his overwhelming voice, albeit with some deviations from the poem (some 130 lines are omitted). All quotations here are from the 1972 Bantam edition. 118.8. Apart from numerous essays by Chicano literary-critics, individual chapters from Juan Bruce- Novoa’s Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 48-68; Cordelia Candelaria’s Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction (Westport: Greenwood, 1986), 42- 50; and Rafael Pérez-Torrez’s Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 69-77 offer detailed readings of the poem. José E. Limón’s analysis in his Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence of Mexican-American Social Poetry (Berkeley: University of California P, 1992), 115-30, is also of significant value.

50 by extension, Chicano history. Thus, Gonzales’ retrospective account, far from being a partial one, is a quasi-epical survey, commencing with the primordial origins of his indigenous race, proceeding with the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in 1521 and the consequent birth of the mestizo nation; moving onto the independence of Mexico from Spain in 1821, transitioning into the 1848 annexation of Mexican lands by the Anglos, and concluding with the perennial exploitation of Chicanos during the 1960s. As Rafael Pérez-Torres asserts, Chicano cultural production has often tried to “activate and articulate an identity through an appeal to the glories of past indigenous civilizations” (Movements 48). In a similar tone, albeit with an addition, the poet has already stressed that Chicanos must first come to terms with the violence and inequities of their own history in order to develop “an honest, clear conclusion of who we were, who we are, and where we are going” (loc. cit.) With an aspiration against oblivion, but more crucially an impregnable will to survival, Gonzales sets the original foundation for Mexican miscegenation which is respectively prompted by the Spanish conquest, the subsequent resistance to it, and the inevitable blood ties as its corollary. Tallying, in structural terms, with classical epics, “I am Joaquín” too starts in mid-action (in the mid-1960s) with the phrase “I am Joaquín,” a Chicano everyman figure, who is “lost in a world of confusion, / caught up in the whirl of a / gringo society” (6). The dilemma of the persona stems from the choice he is impelled to make “between / the paradox of / victory of the spirit, / despite physical hunger, / or / to exist in the grasp / of American social neurosis, / sterilization of the soul / and a full stomach” (9). Accordingly, Joaquín resorts to his centuries-old legacy for spiritual empowerment by means of which, he claims, all Chicanos must collectively shape their own destiny, for they do have to acknowledge that they have not always been merely marionettes but the active agents in such a tumultuous history:

I withdraw to the safety within the circle of life— MY OWN PEOPLE. I am Cuauhtémoc, proud and noble, leader of men, king of an empire civilized beyond the dreams of the gachupín Cortés, who also is the blood, the image of myself.

51 I am the Maya prince. I am Nezahualcóyotl great leader of the Chichimecas. I am the sword and flame of Cortés the despot. And I am the eagle and serpent of the Aztec civilization. (12-16)

Through a diachronic narrative, whereby Mexican people are envisaged as the noble vestiges of Mayan princes and Aztec kings as well as Hernán Cortés, the despotic Spanish conquistador, the poet idyllically structures not only a glorious but also a traumatic account of mestizaje with which Chicanos must initially confront – they were at once “both tyrant and slave” (19). Yet, mestizaje is viewed as a form of subjectivity that forms, in Cristina Beltran’s terms, a “hierarchy of hybridity” (599). Within this built-in hierarchy the privileging of their indigenous legacy as opposed to the Spanish heritage—the former as compensatory and unifying source of hubris—is clearly evident. Here, the celebration of the indigenous component of mestizaje produces a resistive narrative against the “elitist” Hispanic vision which has initially glorified the Spanish assets of Mexican culture hence ostracized the indigenous roots of Mexican racial and cultural fiber. Subsequent to this opening unit of the poem, this clash is extended through a series of other paradoxes and ideological disparities, portraying Mexican history as the tumultuous history of a divided people after her liberation from the yoke of the Spanish rule in 1821. The multiplicity of Mexican national identity, which has emerged out of the genetic mixture of the Aztecs and Spaniards, is now fragmented by political and ideological enmities. At this juncture, Joaquín identifies himself with those revolutionary figures as well as the loyalists to the “Hispanic” status quo:

I rode with Pancho Villa, crude and warm, […] I am Emiliano Zapata. […] I ride with revolutionists against myself. I am the Rurales, coarse and brutal, I am the mountain Indian, superior over all. […]

52 I have been the bloody revolution, the victor, the vanquished. I have killed and been killed. I am the despots Díaz and Huerta and the apostle of democracy, Francisco Madero. (34-40)

Once again Mexican identity is fragmented, but it is a fraction of ideology between revolutionists and loyalists, between democrats and dictators. In this instance, the competing contradictions in cultural and communal terms are accented in a political sense rather than genetic heredity. In the third thematic section of the poem, Joaquín begins to delineate another series of conquests, emanating, this time, from the Treaty of Guadalupe- Hidalgo (1848). According to Bruce-Novoa, when the poem turns its focus onto the Anglo-American scene it offers an alternative; that is, “separatism or assimilation” (Chicano Poetry 51):

I stand here looking back, and now I see the present, and still I am the campesino, I am the fat political coyote— I, of the same name, Joaquín, in a country that has wiped out all my history, stifled all my pride, in a country that has placed a different weight of indignity upon my age- old burdened back. Inferiority is the new load. . . . The Indian has endured and still emerged the winner the Mestizo must yet overcome, And the gachupín will just ignore. I look at myself and see part of me who rejects my father and my mother and dissolves into the melting pot to disappear in shame. (51-2)

53 With these lines, the merging of cultures/races—requisite for the creation of Mexican mestizaje—is belabored, and a process of cultural maintenance usurps within the boundaries of the U.S. To Gonzales, the multiplicity extant in Mexican identity, now, allows Chicanos to claim both the bloody triumph of the Spanish conquistadors and the spiritual/cultural authenticity of the ancient indigenous tribes in Mexico. Yet, in the U.S. context accommodation, or cultural hybridity if you will, would be legitimatizing the pillage of their lands as Joaquín depicts it below:

I have made the Anglo rich, yet equality is but a word— the Treaty of Hidalgo has been broken and is but another treacherous promise. My land is lost and stolen, My culture has been raped. I lengthen the line at the welfare door and fill the jails with crime. These then are the rewards this society has for sons of chiefs and kings and bloody revolutionists. (66-9)

In this instance, both the ideological conflicts and the diversity of blood ties (out of which emerged such mestizo revolutionists as Don Hidalgo, Zapata, Villa, Madero, and the like) that have all the way characterized the evolution of national Mexican identity are replaced with a singular collective experience; that is, the social victimization of Chicanos in the face of a new external foe. Accordingly, Gonzales envisions “Chicano” identity which at once claims and coalesces the blood of the Spaniards as well as that of those Mexic-Amerindian chiefs, in order to reinforce his contemporary status as a subject defined by an egalitarian struggle for democracy, human rights, and freedom of speech hitherto pursued by those historic champions. To Gonzales, hybridity must be re-defined in the U.S. context: If this new mestizo subject engages in an unidirectional mixing process (read ‘assimilation’), he would no longer be able to invoke a radical and politicized identity; to blend into the Anglo culture is to dissolve into the melting pot and to “disappear in shame” (52).

54 Integration into the Anglo society is betrayal and self-denial. It requires disowning one’s father and mother: “I sometimes / sell my brother out” only to gain “token leadership” (52). As a result, the persona drastically alters his tone to unify all the labels that have externally and/or internally been imposed upon himself:

La Raza! Méjicano! Español! Latino! Hispano! Chicano! or whatever I call myself, I look the same, I feel the same I cry and sing the same. (98)

Joaquín’s is now a struggle towards smelting all the so-called diversities into one elemental self. This sensory faculty does conjure the notion of la raza cósmica, a cosmic race, which congregates around a will to national self-affirmation against the dominant Anglo-American ethos, for cultural survival is at stake here. Moreover, although the idea of the homeland Aztlán was not pointedly brought up prior to the “Spiritual Plan of Aztlán” of the 1969 Denver meeting, “I Am Joaquín” was ahead of its time in having advanced this trope several years earlier. With numerous allusions to the notion of a homeland such as the line “THE GROUND WAS MINE” (19), the poem invokes the feeling of territorial ownership. What the exoteric Chicano subject ultimately needs in this ancestral homeland is an impregnable will to withstand the threat of culturcide by forcing the System to affirm the legitimacy of Chicano culture and ethnicity. The concluding lines of this epic poem provides such a plain call for (r)evolution:

I am the masses of my people and I refuse to be absorbed. I am Joaquín The odds are great but my spirit is strong, my faith unbreakable, my blood is pure. I am Aztec prince and Christian Christ. I SHALL ENDURE! I WILL ENDURE! (100)

55 Hence, what Rodolfo Gonzales has achieved throughout this quasi-epic poem, laden with mythical and hyper-masculine overtones (women appear only twice in this 492- line poem and they are rendered anonymous supporters of their men) has been a galvanizing impulse for Chicano artists working other artistic forms. A poignant case in point is Rudolfo Alfonso Anaya’s early oeuvre. In a 1977 interview with Bruce-Novoa, Anaya discusses the (omni)presence of a distinctive orientation within Chicano letters, which has also dominated, especially, his first two novels, Bless Me, Ultima (1972) and Heart of Aztlán (1976). “Chicano literature,” Anaya contends, “reflects, in its more formal aspects, the mythos of the people, and the writings speak to the underlying philosophical assumptions which form the particular worldview of a culture” (Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors 195). By “formal aspects” Anaya is not only referring to the novelistic traits, but rather to an artist’s stance which should be “guided by culture, history, language, native mythology” (ibid.). On the one hand, Anaya’s fiction in general, and his Bless Me, Ultima (the first Chicano best-seller) in particular has played a crucial role in the evolution of the Chicano novel. On the other hand, following Tomás Rivera, Anaya’s winning of the Quinto Sol Literary Award yielded to a clash or, better yet, a diversity in Chicano fiction.19 Whereas Rivera’s subject matter has been the nomadic lives of the uprooted Tejano farmers, Anaya portrays the conundrum of Nuevo-méjicanos [‘New Mexicans’] entrenched with everlasting roots in the region. Moreover, on account of its endeavor to merge the two dominant political and artistic perspectives of the turbulent 1970s, namely, the stagnation of the archaic world of native (Aztec) mythology vs. the social dynamics of the day-to-day “Chicano” reality, it is mandatory to include a succinct analysis of Bless Me, Ultima which tries to accompl ish such reconciliation. Narrated through an extended flashback, the first-person narrative of Bless Me, Ultima is the linear account of two sequent years from the childhood of a seven- year-old boy named Antonio Juan Márez y Luna. The story takes place prior to and

119.9. The first three recipients of the Premio Quinto Sol - National Chicano Literary Award are Rivera’s … y no se lo tragó la tierra in 1970, Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima in 1971, and in 1972 Hinojosa’s Estampoas del Valley y otras obras / Sketches of the Valley and Other Works (1973).

56 shortly after World War II—the eve of a new atomic/nuclear age—in a fictional, river-valley town named Guadalupe which bears resemblance to the actual city of Santa Rosa in the state of New Mexico. Reminiscent of Villarreal’s Pocho or

Rivera’s ... And the Earth Did Not Part, Anaya too structures his protagonist’s conflicting psyche which has been beset by internal drives as well as the forces beyond his control; and yet, Antonio is not bereft of a visionary sage. An erudite and esteemed curandera named Última (alias, La Grande), who has been invited to spend her last uncanny years with the Márez family, will introduce and guide Antonio into the esote rica of nature and the enigmatic world of tribal ritual and the occult. Aside from the literal meaning of her name (the Spanish verb ultimar means ‘to end’) references to the notion of time in the opening lines such as “magical,” it “stands still” or “the beginning that came with Ultima” (1) are a prelude to Última’s gnostic connection to the most remote origins of those lands and of those people; Última, in a sense, is the last buckle in the long chain of indigenous tradition which stretches back to the mythical epochs of the ancient Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayans, and Olmecs. Moreover, by illuminating Antonio’s theosophical vision this old lady will help him reconcile all his existential dilemmas, regarding a key one; that is, believing deeply in the tenets of Catholicism whilst having a potent will to commune with the ancient spirituality of those primeval yores and lores. At the outset, Anaya posits this consuming dilemma on an age-old duality of human continuum, viz., the static-agricultural vs. the dynamic-nomadic, which builds the dramatic tension marked by the colliding roots of Antonio’s parents.20 On the one hand, Antonio’s mother, María, who is from the Luna [the Moon] clan of farmers,

220.0. In “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol” (1958), the acclaimed anthropologist Eric R. Wolf argues that depictions on the Mexican family revolve around two opposing types:

The first kind of family is congruent with the closed and static life of the Indian village. It may be called the Indian family. In this kind of family, the husband is ideally dominant, but in reality labor and authority are shared equally among both marriage partners. Exploitation of one sex by the other is atypical; sexual feats do not add to a person’s status in the eyes of others. Physical punishment and authoritarian treatment of children are rare. The second kind of family is congruent with the much more open, mobile, manipulative life in communities which are actively geared to the life of the nation, a life in which power relationships between individuals and groups are of great moment. This kind of family may be called the Mexican family. Here, the father’s authority is unquestioned on both the real and the ideal plane. Double sex standards prevail, and male sexuality is charged with a desire to exercise domination. Children are ruled with a heavy hand; physical punishment is frequent. (36)

See also Alfredo Mirandé, “The Chicano Family: A Reanalysis of Conflicting Views,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39.4 (1977): 747-56.

57 fervently wishes her son to be an telluric-priest like the Lunas’ original ascendant. On the other hand, as a member of the Márez family [derived from ‘mar,’ meaning the sea], who have their origins in the Spanish conquistadors, Gabriel aspires to bequeath his prenuptial vaquero days and his dreams of moving into the vast prairies of New Mexico to his sons, and particularly to Antonio. And in-between his parents is Antonio who desires to live up to them both. Hence, from the onset Bless Me, Ultima becomes a dialogical treatment of many antithetical issues such as the forces of evil vs. those of good, experience vs. purity, patriarchy vs. matriarchy, the dreams of the elders vs. the aspirations of the youngsters, and the world as a gorgeous place, yet it is fraught with horror, and so on. For instance, throughout the novel, Antonio witnesses three murders and the drowning of a close friend, and thrice undergoes near-death experience himself, so he must ensure equilibrium between these polarized forces, or else he will become another soul lost in Chicano letters as epitomiz ed by Richard Rubio of Villarreal’s Pocho. To perplex matters further for Antonio, Anaya proposes an alternative notion of faith and ethical codes based on the age-old indigenous beliefs. The author even fabricates his own brand-new mythoi and offers a pagan deity, the Golden Carp. The legend has it that in a time before time the Golden Carp had been one of the favored gods whose worshippers somehow sinned. As punishment the wrongdoers were transformed into fish by the infuriated gods from whom the Golden Carp pleaded that they also metamorphose him into a fish so that he could swim among and guard his believers. Since then, the legend has been passed on, and the Golden Carp has been sighted by those scorned for being “different” (120) in their town. The Golden Carp is, thus, exactly an opposite image of the omnipotent, albeit unresponsive Father God of Christianity who has forsaken His true believers in the face of evildoers. Moreover, a combination of lakes and arroyos that encircles their hometown of Guadalupe—as if it were floating on a huge mass of water like the lake-grit Aztec 21 capital Tenochtitlán —holds other mysteries such as a siren-like nymph, or the unhomely llorona. Other significant incidents, which include the ineffectuality of medical science as well as the prayers of the parish priest in a futile effort to dispel

221.1. Built in A.D. 1325, or 1345, Tenochtitlán—now buried under modern Mexico City—was located on what was once an island in the now-drained lake of Texcoco (“the lake of the moon”).

58 the curses cast by the town’s wicked-minded bruja sisters, and the fact that Última is the only one to undo those evil spells, greatly deepen Antonio’s doubts as regards the “official” Catholicism. Yet, Última is by no means a diabolic crone. On the contrary, her crashing supremacy over the brujas does stem from her potent faculty to coalesce occultism and a peculiar type of Mexican “folk” Catholicism as practiced for centuries. In order for Antonio to build strength from life, as Última exhorts him to do in his path to become a “Chicano” man, first he has to undergo a series of trials redolent of the traditional initiation pattern similar to that of becoming a shaman; that is the triadic “birth-death-rebirth” pattern. It is at those moments Anaya utilizes a series of visionary dreams, or nightmares, to reflect not only Antonio’s inner conflicts, but his emotional rites-of-passages as well. While these visions, which construct a matrix of imagination, myth, and personal ordeals, shed light on bygone events, they are also premonitions about upcoming catastrophes. For instance, in the first dream instance Antonio witnesses his own birth in a quasi-astral experience: The midwife is Última who, after the parturition, steps in a severe fray between the Luna and the Márez families over the burial ground of Antonio’s umbilical cord that will determine the path he will pursue in life. Última assertively claims the fetal placenta for herself, uttering: “I pulled this baby into the light of life, so […] Only I will know his destiny” (7). In a subsequent dream, Antonio’s bloodline is again an issue of terrible scrap between his parents: María insists that Antonio was baptized in the sweet water of a moonlit lake whereas Gabriel takes a counter stand, asserting that the salty water of the ocean runs through his son’s veins. Out of their dispute breaks an apocalyptic tempest which is once more abated by Última, the arbiter, when she informs María and Gabriel that “the sweet water of the moon which falls as rain is the same water that gathers into rivers and flows to fill the seas” (126); and turning to Antonio, Última preaches the ancient understanding of the wholeness of all life that “waters are one,” a part of “the great cycle that binds us all” (ibid.). Such scenes reveal Última’s role as a cultural locksmith and Antonio’s as the picklock. In the end, Antonio comprehends that as the mestizo offspring of his innately mismatched parents he is himself the living proof that opposites can surely coalesce into something auspicious. Thus, even after Última’s tragic death, the novel ends with an optimistic air; depicting that Antonio

59 no longer needs Última’s aegis and that he will soon overcome the ontological and existential conflicts that have haunted his ephemeral puberty. In Antonio’s words:

Take the llano [the vast prairies of New Mexico] and the river valley, the moon and the sea, God and the golden carp—and make something new […] And that is what Ultima tried to teach me, that the tragic consequences of life can be overcome by the magical strength that resides in the human heart. (261; 263)

To conclude, in the midst of turbulent times and against the industrial ways of a sterile (Anglo) life, Bless Me, Ultima preached (and still preaches) a humanizing praxis based on indigenous philosophies, a nostalgic respect for the land, and a spiritual optimism in the harmonious unity of all creatures. Retrospectively, the powerful role of the Chicano Movement in promoting an excessive corpus of unprecedented, yet ideologically stimulated literary creation is beyond question. It is also indubitable that if there exists, today, a distinct scholarly field within U.S. academia as well as other transnational university curricula called the Chicano Studies/Courses, it owes its existence, albeit marginalized mostly under various ethnic or minority studies programs, to those militant Chicano activists who have tried to produce a supremacist tenor evinced with a centripetal mode of ethnicity.

Such an insulated and monolithically ethnocentric posture—molded in the welter of the tumultuous Civil Rights Movement—is plausibly an unavoidable phase in Chicanos’ long history of socio-cultural, economic, political, and racial apartheid. On the other hand, it is erroneous to conceive the Chicano Movement either as a homogenous and harmonious movement, or without internal discrepancies. For instance, the cultural- nationalist tendency in Chicano creative and critical writings, produced by Alurista, Acuña, Gonzales, Anaya, and a host of others, has indicated a symbolic continuity of the collective indigenous consciousness (a Jungian inspired stance called indigenismo [exaltation of indigenous roots]) between their “oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life” (Fanon, Wretched of the Earth 210) and modern Chicano identity which is assumed under the threat of the encroaching dominant culture. Homi Bhabha claims that “the people” inscribed in narratives of the nation are constructed in “double time;” that is, both as “the historical ‘objects’ of a nationalist pedagogy,” and “the ‘subjects’ of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the people” (“DissemiNation” 297). However, considering the stranglehold of the counter-mythos of Aztlán as a symbolic space of

60 cohesiveness, Bhabha’s reading of an “originary presence,” far from being expunged, has been re-employed by those Chicanos so as to potently invoke a nationalizing mythology of origins. This endeavor has surely served not as a means to retroversion to nativism (which is technically impossible) but, at least, to rarefy the negative psychic effects of multiple-colonizations. Hence, the rhetoric of nation-building under the controversial rubric of “Aztlán” (in a homeland/lostland dyad) was thus the requisite strategy for the Chicano Movement ideology that sought for pristine origins by means of which, again in Bhabha’s terms, “the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process” (ibid.). In this vein, in the preface to the noted collection, Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland (1989), the editors Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí claim that “by reappropriating Aztlán the Chicano did not choose to live in the past; rather, the community chose to find its tap root of identity in its history so that it could more confidently create the future” (ii). But every “nation” throughout the human continuum is by no means without its sins; and, especially the phallocentric Aztec empire is no exception to the rule. Hence, an accented dissent from within Chicano intellectual circles (not to mention the burgeoning Chicana feminists) has averred that the excavation of the Aztec ethos and its transferral into the present—Ricardo Ránchez calls it, “a pollyanna Indian-ness”

(Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors 232)—has created a narrow critical lens. As Chicano folklorist Genaro Padilla utters: “[I]nstead of allowing the mythic past to generate re- empowering cultural narratives, what we often ended up with was shrill sloganeering of that abused myth” (“Myth” 124). One other disapproval from the same intellectual camp echoes Frantz Fanon who does focus on the material repercussions of colonial domination: “I am ready to concede,” Fanon claims, “that on the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything in the diet of the Mexican peasant [and by extension Chicanos] of today” (loc. cit. 209). What is more, literature and the arts should renounce ideological “musts” and hollow slogans, thus political limitations, if they are to be truly bona fide. The impetus to write in the caló slang about one’s own life in the barrio, or the impulse to recreate a parochial vision of Chicano culture by means of eliciting the community’s collective memory from Mexic-Amerindian mythology are certainly plausible. After all, mythopoetically informed texts are socio-historical

61 products, and, as sociologists and anthropologists acknowledge, they are utilized as socially symbolic acts and discursive devices for imaginary problem-solving within a society at dire historical moments (Jameson, The Political Unconscious 79). In fact, various political mantras, as dictated in the three Plans of Delano, Aztlán, and Santa Barbara, prevailed in the Chicano communities only to generate a naive yet cripplingly vision. Hence, under the holistic rubric of the chicanismo-carnalismo- machismo-familialismo-indigenismo pentaskele, the essentialist and essentializing Movement rhetoric could not and did not allow Chicanos any chance of a dialogue either with the mainstream or with their fellow Chicana comrades. Consequently, while the Quinto Sol generation continued to publish well into the 1980s (and some still do), it appeared that with the death of “grand narratives” and ethnocentric platitudes, the militant Chicano discursive realm was losing grounds toward the late 1970s. Regarding this paradigmatic shift, Bruce-Novoa points out that “[t]he most significant change was not generic, thematic nor stylistic, but much more fundamental and radical: it was sexual” (“Chicano Literary Production” 86).

In the final analysis, the atavistic, partisan, and parochial mode of ethnicity and sexuality fetishized by la raza ideology and in writings on la causa was bound to come under a relentless inquiry from the quashed voices that had been gagged for long. If ethnic, or minority, writing is, by and large, an effort to “break the silence,” foremost among the silenced, in this context, were the Chicana feminist critics and artists who started venting their outrage at their obliteration from the political realm and their relegation to domestic boundaries. Yet, they would supply Chicano letters with a fresh vista on life itself by opening it up to a dialogue with the Chicano culture and its internal phobias all well as with the U.S. mainstream, other ethnic writings, and the world at large. After all, Chicano letters, far from being a monolithic entity, has intrinsically been marked by a dialogic interplay of languages, voices, and subjectivities. While the 1980s, the so-called “Decade of the Hispanic,” marked the resurgence of a new phase of American conservatism, the New Right, the decade indeed belonged to Chicanas and other U.S. Latinas who had already initiated a discursive battle of reconsidering mythic archetypes and parochial identity paradigms in creating a sui generis academic voice and a unique literary agency of their own. With all that in mind, the chapters that follow focus on their arduous endeavors.

62 CHAPTER TWO

XICANISMA: THEORIZING FEMINISM(S) FROM THE BORDERLANDS

The acclaimed Chicana novelist, poet, and essayist Ana Castillo resolves the introduction to her collection of essays on the tenets of Chicana feminist thought, entitled Massacre of the Dreamers (1994), with a lurid story from her Aztec legacy. Castillo’s narrative, elaborated with Miguel León-Portilla’s The Broken Spears (1959), would read as follows: The penultimate Aztec emperor, Moteuczoma Xocoyotzín, summons thousands of oracles, otherwise called the dreamers, from all around the empire to Tenochtitlán. What these seers have been sharing is the same premonition that Moteuczoma’s power would be abdicated by the prophesied return of the ancient Toltec god-ruler, Quetzalcoatl (‘The-Plumed-Serpent’), who would reclaim his right to the throne. Since the cyclical and apocalyptic Aztec ethos has been intricately mired with the incantatory omens of the soothsayers, Moteuczoma orders all those esteemed dreamers to be slaughtered not only out of desperation or fear, but simply as a sheer sign of his long-loathed power. No one after that has dared tell of their dreams. In the end, though, it is his own fatalistic obsession with predestination that has conducted the omen-haunted Aztec “patriarch” to mistake the Caucasian featured, shiny armored, and horse-mounted Hernán Cortés for Quetzalcoatl.1 It is thus nobody but Moteuczoma himself who has opened wide the gates of the Aztec empire to the

11.. Amongst a myriad of others Quetzalcoatl—the Nahua god of knowledge, light, and wind—is the most cherished deity in the polytheistic Aztec pantheon. One creation story has it that Quetzalcoatl and his three brothers have been commissioned by Ometéotl (“The-Supreme-Being”) to create the four distinct parts of the cosmos. Quetzalcoatl, the creator of the west, is also known to be in constant rivalry with his sibling, Tezcatlipoca, who is so covetous of Quetzalcoatl’s popularity that he conspires with Tlazolteotl—the goddess of lust and intoxication—to dishonor his brother via a wicked-minded plot. The conspiracy serves well, and the intoxicated Quetzalcoatl commits incest with his sister, thus leaves his country in grave disgrace. Yet, he is prophesized to return from the east in the year ce-acatl (“one-reed”). One other crucial Aztec origination story is about the four successive creations and desolations of the entire cosmos with each epoch ruled by a particular deity. For instance, as symbols of the opposing forces, requisite for a cosmic balance, Tlazolteotl was the enigmatic and cruel creator/ruler of the First Sun, whereas Quetzalcoatl was the nurturant creator/ruler of the Second Sun. The Aztecs believed that the final era of humanity, the Fifth Sun, must be sustained through a worship of human sacrifices to the sun god, Tonatiuh; or the apocalypse will consume all. Ironically, ce-acatl (the year of Quetzalcoatl’s prophesized return) coincides with April 21, 1519 in the Christian calendar which is the very day of Hernán Cortés’s shoring on the island of San Juan de Ulúa, Mexico. See Mythology: Myths, Legends, & Fantasies, ed. by Janet Parker and Julie Stanton (Edison: Wellfleet, 2004), 484-88.

63 Spanish conquistadors with no demurral, hence, initiated a disastrous chain of events which would wreak bane upon his own domain (León-Portilla, 11-15). The motivation behind Castillo’s entitling her oft-cited study after this gruesome decimation of the dreamers is to attest, in her own words, that “[d]reams may provide vision, knowledge and guidance […] The dreamer, the poet, the visionary is banished at the point when her/his society becomes based on the denigration of life and the annihilation of the spirit for the sake of phallocratic aggrandizement and the accumulation of wealth by a militant elite” (16). Castillo argues—probably, with the 1990 Gulf crisis and burning oil-wells in her mind—that similar occurrences are once again taking place in the U.S. and around the globe; and she claims that Chicanas, the present-day “silenced dreamers,” have been foreseeing the signs of an upcoming perdition for a long time. With that in mind, since the last quarter of the 20th century Chicana feminists, corroborated with other U.S. Latinas, have been trying to open up new discursive and practical sites of resistance vis-à-vis intricate forms of ongoing subjugations in terms of ethnicity/“race”, nationality, gender, sexuality and class, to name the most obvious.2 In the context of the “subjugation-resistance” dyad Chicanas and other U.S. Latinas have concomitantly focused on issues dealing with the realm of their spiritual praxes vs. organized religion; their artistic and educational struggles vs. the “Academia” and mainstream publishing industry; their welfare and labor ideologies vs. the Capitalist system; their claims of indigenous heritage vs. the “Anglo” ethos, and a whole range of other socio-cultural/-economic/-political issues related to the public and private spheres. The present chapter, hence, probes into the roots of the multiple forms of oppressions endured by Chicanas during the Chicano Movement, which have catered them an unprecedented perspective to scrutinizing the age-old issue gender discrimination as well as racial and economic inequities. Out of their struggles emerged a whole new understanding of U.S. Latina écriture féminine which responds to Ana Castillo’s urgent wake-up call.

22.. In her article “U.S. Third World Feminism” (1991), Chicana feminist Chéla Sandoval comments on the correlation within the dyadic “subjugation-resistance” relation as follows:

Any social order which is hierarchically organized into relations of domination and subordination creates particular subject positions within which the subordinated can legitimately function. These subject positions, once self-consciously recognized by their inhabitants, can become transformed into more effective sites of resistance to the current ordering of power relations. (11)

64 2.1. The Birth of Frontera Feminism

- We are the colored in a white feminist movement. - We are the feminists among the people of our culture. - We are often the lesbians among the straight. - We do this bridging by naming ourselves and by telling our stories in our own words.

— Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back (1981)

For silence to transform into speech, sounds and words, it must first traverse through our female bodies. For the body to give birth to utterance, the human entity must recognize itself as carnal—skin, muscles, entrails, brain, belly. Because our bodies have been stolen, brutalized or numbed, it is difficult to speak from/through them … When she transforms silence into language, a woman transgresses.

— Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul (1990)

The feminism(s) practiced by Chicanas and other U.S. Latina activists since the early 1970s cannot be pinned down to a single origin, nor can they be claimed to have moved in a linear direction. The roots of Chicana feminism have been marked by three seemingly diverse, yet entwined trends as illustrated by Beatriz Pesquera and Denise Segura in their “There is No Going Back: Chicanas and Feminism” (1993). The first trend Pesquera and Segura present is Chicana Liberal Feminism which strives to formulate new political strategies in an effort to raise the consciousness of Chicanas in their quests for improving their status amongst their own communities, whilst focusing on larger societal institutions to uplift all Chicanos. The second trend is Chicana Insurgent Feminism which highlights the issues of production and re- production. The Chicana insurgent feminist wants radical changes; her struggle is also against patriarchal hegemony, racial discrimination and economic exploitation, yet she is more militant in her revolutionary demands. The last trend, Chicana Cultural Nationalist Feminism, comprises Chicanas who are resolutely concerned with the unequal gender roles within Chicano communities, whilst equally committed to Chicano culture, heritage, and to la causa. (Pesquera & Segura, 105-8) These three different forms of Chicana feminism(s) have competed with one another, depending on the dynamics of regional and religious alliances, differences in social class and educational strata, ethnic roots, biological inheritance, sexual orientation, and so on. Irrespective of such differences in definitions, alliances, or directions, every social protest movement does have a vague shared origin; as does Chicana feminism.

65 Historically, despite the myriad instances and individuals of a remarkably “feminist” imperative prior the era of El Movimiento Chicano (1965-1975), the boom of critical and creative writings by contemporary Chicana writers and other U.S. Latinas has its taproot in that political decade of intense militancy and nationalistic fervor as covered in Chapter One.3 Broadly speaking, Chicana “feminist” discourse emerged in the early 1970s as resistive gesture in an effort to open up sites of contestation against the social order patriarchal hegemony. In particular, Chicanas developed a countervailing stance against the diffusion of an hyperbolic machismo, (or Chicano masculinity syndrome, if you will) into the capillary vessels of the Chicano Movement which was meant to be an egalitarian call for equality, self- determination, human rights, social justice, and freedom of speech for all Mexican and Latin American descent people(s) of the U.S. Given that El Movimiento’s supremacist rhetoric of cultural-nationalism had hitherto repressed female voices—not to mention gays and lesbians—new strategies of self-definition were explored by early Chicana activists who were then struggling within almost all sectors of El Movimiento such as student groups, farm workers’ lodges, theatre companies, and even paramilitary units. As sociologist Alma García, the editor of and contributor to a noted compilation, Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (1997) [abbr. CFT], attests: “[S]ome Chicanas by the early 1970s began to seriously question the very cultural nationalism […] that had first engaged them in the movement” (“Introduction” to CFT 17). The primary goal of those ‘some Chicanas’ García speaks of was to keep their ethnic consciousness militantly intact while raising their voices in a challenge to the machismo they were subjected to in all spheres of Chicano life.

33.. In her “Our Feminist Heritage” (1977), Martha Cotera claims that “feminism” is an historically dynamic aspect of Chicanas’ cultural heritage and an integral facet of their fiber. Cotera prompts Chicanas that they might emulate their feminist models from a long line of heroines in MeXicanaX history. Major exemplars of the fortitude of Mexican women include Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1895), the 17th-century feminist/intellectual/nun/poet/playwright; the 19th-century anonymous heroines of the Mexican Revolution called Las Adelitas; the members of Las Hijas de Cuauhtemóc, a Mexican feminist organization that regularly protested the Porfirio Díaz regime in the early 1900s; painter Frida Khalo (1907-1954) who was also a committed leftist activist; and many Mexican advocates of suffrage movement of the 1930s. In the U.S. context, Emma Tenayuca, a champion of labor rights in the 1930s and Dolores Huerta, the vice-chairwoman of the NFWA during the 1960s, were models of great significance. Aside from those “historic” figures, the Mexic-Amerindian queens/goddesses who ruled alongside male chiefs/deities, and the timeless curandera-bruja dyad demonstrate the impact of women’s historical and allegorical presence in MeXicanoX history, culture, and psyche.

66 The leading Chicana feminist “foremothers” (i.e.,( Martha Cotera, Mirta Vidal, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vasquez, Lydia Aguirre, Sylvia Gonzales, Anna Nieto- Gómez, Bernice Rincón, Rosaura Sanchez, Adelaida R. Del Castillo, Elvira Saragoza, 4 Sonia A. López, Elizabeth Martínez, and Francisca Flores among others ) collectively claimed, albeit with a variety of overtones, that their feminist standing was crucial both in theory and political praxis to keeping El Movimiento alive by ameliorating in-group gender relations with the adoption of mutual objectives. For instance, one of the most salient of those strident Chicanas, namely, Anna Nieto-Gómez, wrote in 1974:

[…] the Chicana femenista has continually had to justify, clarify, and educate people in the political and philosophical issues of the Chicana woman. This has not been easy. They have acted at the cost of being called ‘vendidas’ (sell-outs) among their own group, the Chicanos. At the same time the femenistas have had to pressure the woman’s movement with little or no solid backing from the Chicano movement. (“La Femenista” in CFT 87)

While exhorting the urgency of a femenista standing, Nieto-Gómez’s article was a germinal attempt to stimulate people of Mexican origin toward working in unison against the racial, sexual, cultural, political, and most crucially, economic subjugation of all Chicanos.5 This is why, from the onset of a discernibly feminist standing, the feminism(s) divulged and practiced by those Chicanas have been deeply rooted in the material conditions in which each and every member of Chicano communities around the U.S. struggles. As Saldívar-Hull attests: “Chicana feminism, both in its theory and method, is tied to the material world” (“Feminism on the Border” 220). Thus, notwithstanding a number of recent Chicana feminists, who are now concerned with more abstract subjects within the discursive realms of cultural,

44.. See Chicana Feminist Thought (1997), which is by far the most inclusive collection, encompassing the introuvable articles and seminar presentations en bloc as well as other anonymous documents released especially by those early Chicana feminists between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. 55.. In her “The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement” (1977), Sonia A. López sheds light on why El Movimiento could not endure after the late 1970s. López claims that one crucial reason was the leading male figures’ myopic exclusion of gender issues from their ethno-nationalist agenda. (CFT 100-6) An explicit case is Anna Nieto-Gomez’s expelling from the Chicano studies department—chaired by Rodolfo F. Acuña—at California State University, Northridge, in the mid- 1970s for her critiques against El Movimiento. (see Muñoz, Youth, Identity, Power 160) Likewise, Denise A. Segura, in her “Challenging the Chicano Text” (2001), critiques the bible of Chicano studies, namely Acuña’s Occupied America (1972), as sexist; and she cannot help but share with her readers Acuña’s reply to her criticism as “frivolous.” Segura concludes that those male scholars’ exclusion of sustained analyses of gender-specific issues from the larger agenda of El Movimiento was a willful “political choice” rather than a mere necessity of the times. (544)

67 literary, sociological, and ethnographical fields, almost all early Chicana femenistas opined on the vitality of tangible issues, and urged principally for the basic needs of a humane existence. Teresa Córdova assembles the following worldly issues from the feminist writings of the 1970s: “welfare rights, childcare, health, birth control, sterilization [forced by the U.S. government], legal rights, prison experience of Chicanas, sex roles, images of Chicanas, heroines of history, labor struggles (mostly historical), and organizing themselves as Chicanas” (“Roots and Resistance” 178). Nevertheless, the jeremiads of early Chicana feminists by no means underestimated the fratricidal gender wars they had to engage within El Movimiento which was obtuse to any subject other than racial or class oriented. Thus, early

Chicana feminists became aware—and perhaps more aware than anyone else—that individuals may coincidentally be constituted both as oppressor and oppressed to the extent that they are located within different, albeit intersecting modes of systematic dominations. For instance, an upper-/mid-class “white” woman might be oppressed by patriarchy while she might oppress others such as poor “white” men and women alike, or all “people of color,” by her privileged racial and class position. Likewise, a non-white man might be oppressed by the dominant Anglo culture while he can surely be an oppressor in his own household. Thus, by addressing the unequal gender relations within Chicano culture at large, early Chicana feminists turned the critical lens inward, illustrating how the “politics of location” was crucial in rejecting the prioritization of only one of the dynamics of racism, (hetero)sexism, classism. In another article titled “Sexism in the Movimiento” (1976), Nieto-Gómez outlines the impact of this nascent Chicana feminist ideology as follows:

Chicana feminism is the recognition that women are oppressed as a group and are exploited as part of la Raza people. It is a direction to be responsible to identify and act upon the issues and needs of Chicana women. Chicana feminists are involved in understanding the nature of women’s oppression [...] Chicana feminism is involved in developing and initiating a means to end the oppression of women and all people. (CFT 98-9)

With Nieto-Gómez’s sentiments in mind, when Ana Castillo, in her Massacre of the Dreamers, covers the history of Chicana activism, which has been the modus operandi of experiencing and negotiating multiple forms of subjugations since the late 1960s, she coins the appellation, “Xicanisma.” Castillo understanding of Xicanisma, or

68 Chicana feminism, denotes the realpolitik of the politically conscious Chicanas and Latinas in the U.S. where much concern for racism has been polarized in the prevalent

‘black vs. white’ binarism, leaving no room or, at best, little chance of dialogue for the “others” of Others. In effect, Xicanisma dissents incisively to the solipsism of the Euro-American feminist discourse: “For the brown woman the term feminism,” Castillo claims, “was and continues to be inseparably linked with white women of middle- and upper-class background” (ibid. 10). It goes without saying that the “white” feminist movement, theory, and praxis have been neither singular nor homogeneous in their interests, goals, and analyses. Yet, in their focus on the

‘Universal’ plight of woman, almost all Western feminists—located within the global hegemony of the Academia and mass-market publishing industry—have historically obscured the race-/class-based oppression suffered by the black and/or brown woman. In lieu of the totalizing view of the “sisterhood-against-sexism” doctrine with its “gender-as-power” motto, long preached through a gynocentric tenor of the white women’s liberation movements, Chicanas have inevitably perceived themselves from a (di)stance attuned to the way Castillo renders herself as follows:

I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking [in her Three Guineas] as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including 6 in the United States and in Mexico. (“A Countryless Woman” in Massacre 21)

Evident from Castillo’s self-styled position is that early Chicana feminists were peripheral to the agenda of the Second-Wave Feminism. Hence, the intense feeling of mistrust of Euro-American feminist ideology and its leading names provided another common denominator as well as incentive for the early Chicana feminism(s). However, due to the fact that the Movement generation of Chicano leaders and author(itie)s such as Rodolfo Acuña, Octavio Romano-V, Alurista, Rodolfo

66.. For an analysis of the departures of the “early” Chicana feminist thought from the white feminist agenda, see Martha Cotera’s “Feminism As We See It” (1977), “Among Feminists: Racist Classist Issues—1976” (1977), and “Feminism: The Chicano and Anglo Versions: A Historical Analysis” (1980); Adelaida R. Del Castillo’s “La Visión Chicana” (1974); Anna Nieto-Gómez’s “La Feminista” (1974) and “Chicana Feminism” (1976). All of these essays are collected in Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings, ed. by Alma M. García (NY: Routledge, 1997).

69 Gonzales, Luis Valdez, César E. Chávez, and Reies L. Tijerina viewed any analysis of gender-specific issues within El Movimiento as a peril not only to their cause, but to the very survival of their culture, Chicana feminists faced a firm resistance when they started to challenge traditional gender roles. In this vein, Cynthia Orozco identifies four main sexist reactions that emerged out of the supremacist idea(l)s of El Movimiento with regard to Chicana feminists:

(1) ‘El problema es el gabacho no el macho’ [The problem is the Anglo not the Macho]. (2) Feminism was Anglo, middle-class, and bourgeois. (3) Feminism was a diversion from the ‘real’ and ‘basic’ issues, that is, racism and class exploitation. (4) Feminism sought to destroy ‘la familia’ supposedly the base of Mexican culture and the basis for resistance to domination.7 (“Sexism in Chicano Studies” in CFT 265)

This backlash from their own communities forced Chicana feminists to discuss how they should relate their “petit” movement to the “grand” Movimiento. As a result, the efforts of the early Chicana feminists within the Chicano Movement in redefining themselves as equal participants—neither granted accessorial roles nor endowed with backstage spots—transformed them into an all-defying group in relation to one otherwise cohort of Chicana activists known as the Loyalists. Although these self-styled loyalists recognized the vitality of concomitant political and social equality with their male peers, they were unwilling, or not brave enough, to adopt a feminist stance that would also slander them as “anti-family, anti- cultural, anti-man and therefore an anti-Chicano” (Nieto-Gómez, “La Feminsta” 88). An early Chicana feminist, Enriqueta Longeaux y Vásquez, expounded upon this view in a 1972 article in these terms: “When a family is involved in human rights movement, as is the Mexican-American family, there is little room for a woman’s liberation movement alone. There is little room for having a definition of woman’s role as such” (“The Woman of La Raza” in CFT 31). That is, perhaps, why numerous Chicanas who participated in the first National Chicano Youth Liberation Conference bitterly stated: “It was the consensus of the group that the Chicana does not want to be liberated” (ibid. 29).

77.. Orozco’s essay was first released in Chicana Voices: Intersections in Class, Race and Gender (1986). This book is the collection of the proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the National Association of Chicano Studies held in 1984 in Austin, Texas, and holds a special place; because, for the first time the male-oriented association focused on the issues related to Chicana feminism.

70 From the perspective of Chicana feminist ideology, then, the most suitable vantage point to initiate a critique of the absolutism of El Movimiento (the corporate chicanismo—machismo—carnalismo—familismo—indigenismo rubric) is to scrutinize the two principal manifestos of the movement; viz., “The Plan of Santa Bárbara” and “The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán.” For instance, while the Plan of Santa Barbara stressed the vitality of establishing Chicano studies programs within U.S. universities, “not once did it make reference to women, female liberation, or Chicana studies. Indeed, ‘El Plan’ was a ‘man’-ifesto” (Orozco, loc. cit. 266). On the other hand, the whole Movimiento rhetoric, shaped by the style and foci of the Plan of Aztlán, did not conceive Chicanas as existing in isolation not only from the actual biological family unit, but also from the larger familia de la raza [the-race-as-family] whose racial and class oriented interests were deemed to be superior to every other issue. In a key article, “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse” (1989), Alma García sheds light to such an understanding of the Chicano family as “a source of cultural and political resistance to the various types of discrimination experienced in the American society” (219). It can thus be concluded that the conflict between the ethno-nationalist rhetoric of El Movimiento and early Chicana feminism was resolutely rooted in the very documents that initially proclaimed Chicano liberation and self-determination through the idolization of the “Chicano” family. Hence, the designation of “la familia” was (and still is) beyond one’s nuclear family to include extended grids of related kin, as well as friends, neighbors and even strangers.8 This unyielding emphasis on family-unity/-fidelity assigned Chicanas a limiting (and limited) role; that is, the trope of the self-sacrificing “mother” as the center of Chicano culture. On the other hand, although the Chicano family has always been believed to serve as a sanctuary, the asymmetric conjugal power under the sway of the Mexican-American male, who has long been confused by insecurity and inferiority complexes, might very well

88.. For instance, in Rudolfo A. Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), Antonio’s remark about Última’s unquestioned inclusion in their family is a patent indication of this mindset. He states: “I knew that my father and mother did good by providing a home for Ultima. It was the custom to provide for the old and the sick. There was always room in the safety and warmth of la familia for one more person, be that person stranger or friend” (5). On the other hand, Antonio’s elder siblings, veterans of World War II, choose to participate in the American Dream and leave their family; from thereon they haunt Antonio’s dreams, persistently asking to be redeemed by him.

71 transform the family into a traumatic site fraught with multiple forms of violence such as physical and psychological harassment, incest, pedophilia, and rape. In her testimonial account, entitled “Nopalitos,” Helena María Viramontes spills the beans about that paradoxical view of the Chicano family both as a sanctuary as well as a pathological incubator of various social traumas:

Family ties are fierce. Especially for mujeres. We are raised to care for. We are raised to stick together, for the family unit is our source of safety. Outside our home there lies a dominant culture that is foreign to us, isolates us, and labels us as alien. But what may be seen as nurturing, close unit, may also become suffocating, manipulative, and sadly victimizing. (35)

Furthermore, the historical division of the private and the public spheres into gendered spaces has not been restricted to Chicano culture, but is prevalent in almost all patriarchal societies. Regardless of a woman’s ethnic/“racial” make-up, then, her subordination within the family is primarily constructed by the artificial separation of the economic sphere of production from the domestic sphere of reproduction, hence setting child-bearing/-rearing and (unpaid) housewifery apart from social labor. Yet, under the successive conditions of modern, late, or global capitalism, most, if not all,

Chicanas and other mid-class women of color have had to operate—unlike white upper-class women—in market relations as laborers, and thus defined not merely by the indoor role of mothers/wives. Yet, with regard to Chicanas the main objectives of what might be termed the ‘housewifery ideology’ of El Movimiento was to relegate Chicanas to domestic boundaries, and in turn to deny them the authority of decision- 9 making in “serious” matters. As such, the desired “Chicana” has been a Virgin Mary model, who should be a ministrant wife for her combating husband, a cherishing mother for her sons, and an exemplar to her daughters. It is to accomplish these goals that El Movimiento endorsed the family as a “site for political struggle” (R. Saldívar, Chicano Narrative 21). In that way the Chicana par excellence would preserve her home like a bastion in an alien(ating) milieu. Such an ideological evaluation of family-unity, or “political familism” in sociologist Maxine Baca Zinn’s terms, primarily mandated strict controlling mechanisms on the autonomy of Chicanas’

99.. See Chicano sociologist Alfredo Mirandé’s “The Chicano Family: A Reanalysis of Conflicting Views,” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39.4 (1977): 747-56.

72 souls and bodies.10 As Saldívar-Hull states: “The code of family loyalty begins with the assumption that men can claim possession of female sexuality” (Feminism on the

Border 141). In order to preserve the ‘family-unity/loyalty’ rhetoric intact, then, the Movement ideology deployed a facile means of control, justified by the so-called betrayal of Malintzín Tenépal (or la malinche as she is often called in a derogatory way) and her alleged role in the conquest of the Aztecs by the Spaniards. Although it has allegorically lingered for six centuries in national Mexican psyche, the misogynist scheme of El Movimiento was patterned after this betrayal. Drawn from Octavio Paz’s hetero-normative insights on Mexican identity, culture, and sexuality, all of which he compiled in his El laberinto de la soledad (1950), Chicano nationalists simply stigmatized any disobliging Chicana, or Latina, with these slurs: malinchista [traitress], puta [whore], agringada [Americanized], agabachada [white-simulated], or in Paz’s (in)famous phrase, la chingada [the-screwed-one]. Since then, the litany of such injurious epithets for “la mujer mala” [the-bad-woman] has been ascribed to Latinas refusing to fetter themselves to the “good” woman role.11 Accordingly, from the early 1970s Chicana feminist authors (as( well as 12 noted visual artists such as Yolanda M. López, Ester Hernández, and Judith Baca ) have evaluated the paradigm of sexuality by reassessing the virgin-whore dichotomy as a deliberate political act. As such, the political content, far from reducing the aesthetic value of the creative work, was deemed to be an invigorating device that transforms the work of art into a more powerful artifact. As Anzaldúa claims: “Creative acts are forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies

110.0. In “Political Familisim: Toward Sex Role Equality in Chicano Families” (1975), Baca Zinn defines political familisim as a “phenomenon in which the continuity of family groups and the adherence to family ideology provide the basis for struggle. El Movimiento has gone into the Chicano home” (15). 111.1. Anzaldúa further enumerates some other disruptive labels reserved only for Chicanas who are accused, particularly, of talking too much or too loudly: hocicona [big mouth], repelona [whiner], chismosa [gossipmonger]. Anzaldúa goes on to claim, “In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women. I’ve never heard them applied to men” (Borderlands 76). 112.2. In terms of reconsidering an internal mythology and debunking the “virgin vs. whore” binary, Chicana painters and muralists have turned to their own lived experiences in an effort to redesign their own archetypes. For instance, in the representative works of Baca, Hernández and López, the Virgin of Guadalupe icon, far from being a docile and non-sexualized mediatrix, acquires a karate outfit, sneakers, a sewing machine, or a suitcase which would be utilized as a dynamic reflection of her “Chicana” feminist ideology. On the other hand, Carmen Lomas Garza’s series of monitos [mise-en-scenes of cartoon-like settings and figures] titled Cuadros de Familia / Family Pictures (1990) celebrate various “Chicano” family rituals in which males are depicted as active participants in the traditionally accepted feminine chores such as making and cooking tamales.

73 for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercises. We build culture as we inscribe in these various forms” (“Haciendo caras” xxiv). On the other hand, the facts that many “Chicana” texts were not published until the mid- 1970s and that the plethora of Chicana publications did not appear before the mid- 1980s, do not distort the reality that Chicanas were producing critical and creative (especially poetry) writings, releasing their own journals, newsletters and newspapers, and organizing caucuses in this early period.13 Yet, as Anzaldúa contends in the epigram to the present section, it was too difficult for the early Chicana feminist to break her internalized pattern of silence into public art. By the early 1980s, though, the long-term of feelings of being rendered invisible in the eyes of “white” feminists as well as being stigmatized as “sell-outs” by their own communities have led many Chicanas to delve into their own cultural heritages and idiosyncratic experiences as a means to analyzing structural forms of multiple oppressions which have been germane only to their kind. For instance, in 1981 the two “notorious” Chicana feminists, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, coedited an unorthodox compendium of various genres, titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color.14 In this “Bridge” project the editors initially identify what might be termed an autochthonous, or a nativistic feminist criticism if you will, on behalf of a panoply of women of color from discrete ethnic groups, the “U.S. feminists of color,” hitherto silenced either by the System or their own communities, or worse, a collusion of both. Thus, the editors’ agenda in compiling this field-defining anthology has been to establish a mutual intellectual venue from whence each contributor would individually project her own theorizing of feminism(s) drawn from her own cultural heritage and

113.3. See Angie Chabrám-Dernersesian’s article “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don’t Want to Be a Man” (1992) in which she cites numerous Chicana poets of the late 1960s and 1970s who inscribed their own independent ethnic identities through their poetry. Chabrám-Dernersesian enumerates Magarita Virgina Sánchez, Viola Correa, Raquel Rodríguez, Sara Estrella, Noemí Lorenza, Martha Cotera, and Phyllis López. (81-91) Additionally, in Chicana Feminist Thought, Alma García highlights the following journals and newspapers published by/for/about Chicanas during the 1970s: Encuentro Femenil, Regeneracíon, Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, El Grito Del Norte, Comisión Femenil Mexicana Newsletter, Chicana Service Action Center Newsletter, El Popo Femenil, and La Razón Mestiza. Furthermore, Martha Cotera enumerates thirty-four Chicana conferences, caucuses, and workshops organized just between 1969-1975. (see CFT 8-9; 142-44) 114.4. The six sections of This Bridge explore issues concerning (1) childhood ordeals; (2) lessons learned from female ancestors/elders; (3) racism in the white women’s movement; (4) internal divisions of women of color; (5) creative writing and (6) spirituality as tools to improve the self and the society.

74 personal ordeals. Accordingly, This Bridge epitomized the editors’ idea that their own feminist political theory should attempt to delineate the ways in which Third World women construct a feminist standing “specifically from our racial/cultural background and experience” (This Bridge liii). Succinctly, with This Bridge Moraga and Anzaldúa have greatly contributed in offsetting the “old” methodology of starting out with abstract theoretical analyses and then providing empirical data to endorse that emerging theoretical position.15 The editors claim, “we sought out and believe we found, non-rhetorical, highly personal chronicles that present a political analysis in everyday terms” (ibid. liv). Moraga names it “Theory in the Flesh,” which refers to a rendezvous “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” (ibid. 21). As distinctly apparent from the titular “Bridge,” Anzaldúa’s and Moraga collection is a crossroads itself, proving that the seemingly disparate forms of subjugation, experienced simultaneously by Third World women and all U.S. women of color, are in effect interconnected and not dissimilar matters. Hence, This Bridge is also the “back-breaking” project of bridging alliances between all women of color, and it has been a premiere platform for these women to create what might be called a “Frontera Feminism,” a border feminism, in an effort to address an intended white feminist readership who have long been impeded by their own blinkers. In a similar vein, Tey Diana Rebolledo, one other noted contemporary Chicana literary critic, echoes Castillo, Moraga and Anzaldúa, albeit with an accent on the crossbreeding of their own critical discourse with the discursive practices of “Western” theory in an effort to accept “that which is useful and discarding that which is merely meant to impress” (“The Politics of Poetics” 354). It is on this grounds that Castillo’s model of the Xicanista, the Chicana woman-of-consciousness, serves as an alternate feminist prodigy who might create a syncretic analytic approach to juxtapose 1) her past with the present [“As[ Mexic Amerindians we must, to find a clue as to who we are from whom we descend, become akin to archeologists”

115.5. In her Technologies of Gender (1987) Teresa de Lauretis accredits This Bridge Called My Back for its part in marking a crucial U-turn in “Feminist” consciousness. The critic states that “the shift in feminist consciousness that has been taking place during this decade [the 1980s] may be said to have begun […] with 1981, the year of publication of This Bridge Called My Back […]” (10).

75 (“Introduction” to Massacre 6)];] 2) theory with socio-cultural/-political praxes [“we[ can rescue Xicanisma from the suffocating atmosphere of conference rooms […] and carry it out to our work place, social gatherings, kitchens, bedrooms, and society in general” (ibid. 11)];] and 3) her inherited indigenous beliefs with personal instinctive motivations [“It is our task as Xicanistas to not only reclaim our indigenismo—but also to reinsert the forsaken feminine into our consciousness” (ibid. 12)].] Evident from Castillo, Anzaldúa, Moraga, and Rebolledo’s corporate ideological stand is that the articulation of a discernibly Chicana “identity politics” through such a series of syntheses marks one crucial basis of conscientización, the Xicanista consciousness.16 Subsequent to the “Bridge” project Moraga has continued to develop her own feminist stance which is mainly informed by one’s cultural/personal experience. In her multi-genre collection of experiential essays, short prose pieces, poems, and memoirs, titled Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983), and especially in the capstone essay, “A Long Line of Vendidas,” Moraga highlights the principal tenets of Chicana feminist theorizing, and its ideological and methodical overlaps initially with “Black” feminism: “Contrary to popular belief among Chicanos,” Moraga justifies, “Chicana Feminism did not borrow from white feminists to create a movement. If any direct ‘borrowing’ was done, it was from Black feminists” (132). Moraga clarifies that the “Black” Collective of the Combahee River group (CRC) “had considerable impact in creating an analysis of U.S. Third World women’s oppression” (133).17 For Moraga, the writings of “Black” feminists initiated a new type of feminism practiced neither in the United States nor in Europe, providing Chicanas an unprecedented framework for the analysis of the nexus of ethnicity/“race,” gender, sexual orientation, and class issues in all their political nuances. Moraga’s expression of Chicana feminism commences with a potent affection between women: “When we name this bond between women of our race,

16. 16. The term ‘identity politics’ has been employed in the sense that Paula M. L. Moya explicates as a

[…] social practice in which a person or persons who identify with or are identified with a recognizable group such as ‘women’ or ‘gays’ make arguments or take action with the purpose of affecting social, economic, or educational policy relative to that group. Within this social practice, the identity of the political practitioner both motivates and is a central facet of the claim, argument or action. (Learning from Experience 103.n7)

17. 17. CRC is a Boston origined black-socialist-lesbian-feminist group formed in 1974 whose name is inspired from Harriet Tubman’s insurgent guerrilla actions on June 2, 1863, in Port Royal, South Carolina. For CRC’s first manifesto, see This Bridge Called My Back 234.

76 from this Chicana feminism emerges” (ibid. 139). The mujerista model that Moraga demands, in effect, imbricates with the notion of ‘womanist’ as coined in 1983 by the acclaimed “Black” author and critic Alice Walker to denote a woman “who loves other women, sexually and/or non-sexually. Appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility […] and women’s strength […] Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (In Search x-xi).18 Such literal and/or figurative affection for and commitment to other women provides Moraga and many Chicana feminists one other fundamental blueprint for Xicanisma with which the Xicanista adheres her self-interpellation as “Chicana” to various issues pertinent to the aforementioned ‘subjugation-resistance’ dyad. In an effort to provide a proper analysis to the ‘subjugation-resistance’ dyad Chicana and Latina intellectuals and artists, have first delved into the roots of their subjugation by initiating a battle of recuperation of the “mythicized” Malinche trope from its extremely derogatory connotations.19 In brief, Chicana feminists have rendered la Malinche far from being a wicked personification of treason, a supine victim of Cortés’s libido, or a lascivious agent of the bastardization of her race. On the contrary, they have delineated Malinche as the strong cultural symbol of MeXicanaX womanhood which is dynamic and empowering. In one other crucial anthology, titled 20 Infinite Divisions (1993) , the coeditors, Tey D. Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, present four general approaches of Chicana critics and artists in their revision and deconstruction of the Malinche trope. Firstly, they have found it unilateral to lay the blame for the downfall of the Aztecs entirely on Malinche; for, it was the historical conjunctures, and not personal choice, that had mired Malinche in the amidst of a whirlwind of events during her

118.8. A mujerista is literally a “womanist.” The term was first coined in Peru, denoting a sectarian woman-centered group who, influenced by an essentialist ideology about women, turned away from the powerful Peruvian feminist movement in the late 1970s, and yet gradually disappeared in the late 1980s. See the editors’ preface to A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice, ed. by María Pilar Aquino et. al., (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002), xx.n3. 119.9. The earliest attempt by a Chicana providing a feminist reading of the Malinche archetype, is Adelaida R. Del Castillo’s “Malintzín Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective” (1973). Following Castillo’s oft-cited essay the forthcoming studies on Malinche preserve the scholar’s initial sentiments, albeit expanding them with slightly different overtones and ideological concerns. 220.0. Taking their cue from Bernice Zamora’s five-line poem, “So Not To Be Mottled” (1971), which reads, “You insult me / When you say I’m / Schizophrenic. / My divisions are / Infinite.” (rpt. in Infinite Divisions 78), that the co-editors have titled this seminal reader “Infinite Divisions,” so as to highlight the multiplicity of Chicana subjectivity in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

77 twenty-five years of brief life. Born around 1502, the “historical” Malinche figure

(also( known as Malintzín Tenépal, or with her Christianized name, Doña Marina) was once the would-be princess of a Nahua tribe through her father’s linage. Following her father’s death she was betrayed by her own mother who wished to enthrone her son from her second marriage. Thus, she was declared dead and sold to some Mayan flesh-mongers from whence she was once again bestowed to a foreigner. In an ironical twist, the foreigner turned out to be Cortés, the Conqueror. Moreover, it was the atrocities of the dictatorial Aztec regime itself and not Malinche alone that propelled the empire’s long-subjugated city-states to aid the Spanish conquistadors. Secondly, the well-educated Malinche’s mastery of three different languages (her( natal Nahuatl, the Mayan dialect of her adapted culture, and later her agile acquisition of Castilian Spanish) at the age of fifteen gave her the ultimate power to sway not only over languages or cultures but also politics. If “writing” is defined, in general terms, as an act of interpretation or translation of thoughts, feelings, and experiences from one medium to another, Chicana authors’ valorization of Malinche as the ur-translator, otherwise put a literary foremother, might be more than logical. Thirdly, Malinche’s assistance to Cortés as translator, tactical advisor, and concubine was not merely due to her impuissance or her ineluctable destiny. She pursued that role, for she was farsighted and could anticipate the eventual victory of the Spanish forces; hence, she deliberately and decisively chose to take side with Cortés to save her remaining lot from total genocide by persuading them not to rebel. She was thus a survivor herself as well as the savior of what was left of her people. And finally, Malinche has been re-excavated as the missing “matriarchal” link in Chicanos’ mestizo make-up which was deemed inferior by the vindicators of an assimilated existence in American society until the mid-1960s. As Norma Alarcón claims, “the historical founding moment of the construction of mestioza(o) subjectivity entails the rejection and denial of the dark Indian Mother […], and to actually deny the Indian position even as that position is visually stylized and represented in the making of the fatherland” (“Chicana Feminism” 252). In lieu of an acculturated definition of the hyphenated “Mexican-American,” then, the Malinche oxymoron (i.e., mother-whore) has been employed by Chicana feminists to accentuate their mestizaje per se. Rather than rely only on male scholars’ paradigms for

78 criticizing racism, then, through the Malinche trope Chicanas have rewritten their hybridity in an effort to expose how the age-old internal and/or external biases on the somatic stigmas of “Indianness” have been used to undermine the empowering attributes of “real” MeXicanaX womanhood. The feminist writings produced by Chicana artist-critics are as variegated as the women they are attempting to delineate and theorize on. For that matter, apart from the woman-centered re-evaluation of Malinche and the Virgin of Guadalupe Chicana writings display a wide range of other concerns and issues. In this vein, from the successive publications of This Bridge Called My Back anthology and its two sequels onward, first and foremost of these concerns has become the theme of “Chicana Sexuality” which has subsequently been explored by an estimable number of Chicana scholars in their quests for structuring their own feminist definitions, and expanding their frameworks beyond the two monolithic vectors of race and class.21 As such, This Bridge has supplied a new array of themes, feelings, and images, and it still continues to shed light on, perhaps, the most “illicit” of the subversive discourses issued by Chicana feminism(s); that is, lesbianism as an aperture to the long- contested issue of spiritual, intellectual and somatic freedom.22 By the late 1970s, Chicana lesbian-feminists who explicitly embraced their sexual orientation challenged the status quo formidably, thus they were (and still are) demonized as a menace to the very sanctity of Chicano culture. Carla Trujillo, one noted Chicana lesbian-feminist and also the editor of a crucial compendium on the issue, Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About (1991), explicates that lesbianism is the taboo subject in Chicano communities, and that to question heterosexuality is an audacious act. Yet, by pursuing sexual practices that, now, posit men into an abject position, and by jettisoning the socio-biologically dictated imago of the “good” mother/daughter/sister/wife/lover/neighbor, Chicana lesbians have

221.1. The sequels to This Bridge are Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color ed. by Anzaldúa (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990), and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation ed. by Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, (New York: Routledge, 2002). 222.2. For an extensive analysis of “Chicana Sexuality” as a central theme in establishing an alternative Chicana identity politics, these two readers are also of substantial value: The Sexuality of Latinas, ed. by Norma Alarcón, Ana Castillo and Cherríe Moraga (Berkeley: Third Woman, 1989), and Building with Our Hands: New Directions in Chicana Studies ed. by Adela de la Torre and Beatriz M. Pesquera (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

79 rebutted almost all taken-for-granted notions on Chicana (hetero)sexuality and also the heteronormative tenets of Catholicism that consider homosexuality a grave sin (see Trujillo, “Fear and Loathing” 186-94). As Moraga asserts:

For a generation, nationalist leaders used a kind of “selective memory,” drawing exclusively from those aspects of Mexican and Native cultures that served the interests of male heterosexuals. At times, they took the worst of Mexican machismo and Aztec warrior bravado, combined it with some of the most oppressive male- convinced idealizations of “traditional” Mexican womanhood and called that cultural integrity. (Last Generation 156-57)

Moraga further adds that most Chicanos see homosexuality as “his [the white man’s] disease with which he sinisterly infects Third World people, men and women alike” (Loving 114). In that context, a woman cannot be a “dyke” and a Chicana, nor can a man be a “faggot” and a Chicano at the same time. Therefore, for some heterosexual Chicanas there has been a reluctance to associate themselves with their fellow lesbians lest they, too, should be stigmatized as “queer” or be tokenized as publicizing themselves for the sake of an entry into the mainstream (print culture).23 Yet, almost all Chicana lesbian artists, writers, and critics do have a profound loyalty to the Chicano culture, to the Spanish language, to their families, and inevitably, to class issues. To explicitly prefer women is the utmost rejection of patriarchy, not the rejection of the whole fiber of “Chicano” ethnicity. For instance, Moraga makes it plain that lesbianism as a sexual act is averse to the idea of sex as a procreative “work,” hence women as birthing-machines. (ibid. 125) Lesbianism as an icon of feminine individuality and sexual self-determination is, then, purely about womanly intimacy, exemption from the heterosexual practices of patriarchal dictates, and carnal knowledge-pleasure-power. As such, Chicana lesbian-feminists have produced a cogent discourse for a resistive and liberatory womanhood for all their sisters-in- arms by snatching la pistola of heterosexuality from the hands of patriarchy. Consequently, by genuinely embracing their lesbianism some of the most prolific Chicana feminists such as the “notorious” editors of and some contributors to

This Bridge and many others—who are also the best known in the U.S. academia,

23. 23. Trujillo further refutes the general bias that views lesbian Chicanas as rejecters of motherhood thus formidable threats to the very continuance of Chicano culture. As Trujillo poignantly clarifies, “Motherhood among Chicana lesbians does exist. Many lesbians are mothers as byproducts of divorce, earlier liaisons with men, or through artificial insemination” (“Fear and Loathing” 190).

80 hence welcomed by mainstream presses—have accomplished a great deal in making Chicana sexuality a central part of their feminist theorizing. Even still, drawing upon the above-noted Pazian renditions of the sexual arch-traitress (Malinche), lesbianism was, too, regarded as a betrayal on account of its resistance to the symbolic order of patriarchy.24 Thus, those “unorthodox” Chicanas have been banished literally and/or figuratively from their own communities; yet, the theoretical and experiential edification extracted from this additional apartheid has further widened the theorizing horizons for their gender-specific issues. For instance, Chicana lesbian-feminists have been more cautious than their militant peers in steering clear of the abyss of totalization, for they are much more sentient that their vehemence on lesbian-subjectivity/-sexuality can very well be construed as another form of essentialism. To sum up, Chicana lesbianism, far from building further oppressive binaries, or a fetishizing view of (homo)sexuality, favors for a politics of coalition under the umbrella of lesbianism. This standpoint is astutely stated by Moraga as follows:

My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most silence and

oppression […] In this country, lesbianism is a poverty – as is being brown, as is being a woman, as is being just plain poor. The danger lies in ranking the oppressions. The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without an emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connection among oppressed groups can take place. (Loving in the War Years 52-53)

Accordingly, Moraga’s Loving in the War Years has been a pioneering text in its resistance to the grading of oppressions and its celebration of its gürea [light-skinned] author’s coming to terms with her lesbian sexuality, whereby Moraga surmounts her unhomliness rather than disavow her heterosexist and homophobic culture. Consequently, Moraga proves her point that her lesbian subjectivity is not a peril, but the cornerstone to her passion for and commitment to her cultural heritage, mestizo roots, her fellow Chicanas, other women, and the whole humanity.

224.4. Although Malinche was evidently not a lesbian, there has been a widespread slant amongst the heteronormative Latino communities which stigmatizes Chicana and Latina lesbians as Malinche’s modern-day entourages. Such a strategy of “sexual subjugation” imbricates with what Adrienne Rich terms as the socially mandated mechanism of “compulsory heterosexuality” whereby women are not allowed to attach their libido to the persons of the same sex, so the unrivaled male hegemony is easily coerced. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5.4 (1980): 631-660.

81 In the 1990s, a last direction in elaborating the “Frontera Feminism” has been explored by Anzaldúa with the metaphor of haciendo caras [‘making faces’] that she formulated in her edited, Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color (1990). This new feminist identity, which defies the “dominant culture’s interpretation of ‘our’ experience,” Anzaldúa claims, exists in the sitios—the in-between spaces—of “the masks we’ve internalized, one on top of another” (xv). Anzaldúa articulates her theorem of political subversion and social renewal in asserting that “[t]he masks are already steeped with self-hatred and other internalized oppressions. However, it is the place—the interface—between the masks that provides the space from which we can thrust out and crack the masks” (xvi). Anzaldúa’s theorizing from the “interface” is a call to the Chicana subject, first, to appreciate the complexity and relationality of her multiple identities (and, by implication, “faces”) in terms of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; and, then, to break the age-old monolithic stereotypes imposed on her both from the dominant Anglo culture and from within their own culture. For the Chicana feminist, then, the proper methodology to undo those false representations requires a mestizaje, or hybrid, hermeneutics, through which different texts, theories, critical perspectives, and lived realities converge into a new intellectual venue.

To Anzaldúa, academic Chicanas have spoken, and should continue to speak from those “cracked spaces”—which are at the same time the most propitious sites of revolutionary potential—so as to find practical application of their theories into every aspect of lived realities and, more crucially, to de-academize “Theory” from within the academia. It is, in other words, the new strategy to overcome the impasse that Afro-Caribbean poet monished against with the title of her now-classic essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House,” which is also issued in This Bridge (106-9). Thus, to establish their own theoretical paradigms, Chicana feminists have looked in unconventional places; in Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s words, “in the prefaces to anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies, in our cultural artifacts, our cuentos, and, if we are fortunate enough to have access to a good library, in the essays published in marginalized journals not widely distributed by the dominant institutions” (Saldívar-Hull, “Feminism on the Border” 206).

82 The present section of Chapter Two has aimed to premise the lynchpins of

Xicanisma that have paved the way for far more intriguing texts—Caren Kaplan calls them “out-law genres” (1992)—which have been in vogue from at least the 1980s onward. The apotheosis of those texts, be they autobiographical, epistolary, creative, theoretical, historical, philosophical, or any amalgam thereof, is Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) which accumulates the issues thus far covered through the lens of a multi-lingual and polyphonic border feminism, and doing this with a lesbian touch. The ideological, theoretical, artistic, and linguistic insights extracted from this path-clearing and field-defining text have helped construct the analytical framework of the chapters that follow which shall scrutinize creative writings by two fronteristas, or border feminists, in Saldívar-Hull’s terms (see Feminism on the Border 60; 176n3). It is at this juncture, then, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera needs to be analyzed before moving to the next chapter; for the Tejana [Texas-born] Anzaldúa employs the U.S.-Mexican borderlands (or,( the Lower Río Grande region, which her compatriot, the noted Américo Paredes employed in his own “out-law” monograph three decades prior to Anzaldúa) in an effort to articulate her own liberating vision beyond the physical sphere towards broader theoretical, aesthetic, spiritual, intellectual, and psychological realms; thereby, defying any form of essentialism, parochialism, binarism, and subjugation — be they dictated from above by the Anglo- American culture or from within the normative Chicano culture.

83 2.2. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera — 25 “La palabra de la Nueva Mestiza es más fuerte que la Pistola en la Mano”

… at its earliest period in history the Lower Rio Grande was inhabited by outlaws, whose principal offense was an independent spirit.

— Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (1958)

In the spirit of a new people that is consciously not only of its proud historical heritage but also of the brutal “gringo” invasion of our territories, we, the Chicano inhabitants and civilizers of the northern land of Aztlán from whence came our forefathers, reclaiming the land of their birth and consecrating the determination of our people of the sun, declare that the call of our blood is our power, our responsibility, and our inevitable destiny … Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans.

— anon., “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” (1969)

This land was Mexican once was Indian always and is. And will be again.

— Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

With the inevitable conjunctural and paradigmatic changes of unprecedented magnitudes from the late 1970s onward (within social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, technological, and many other realms) not only in the U.S. but in a global scale, the “border-hero” typology and the “border-zone” trope set forth by the noted Américo Paredes have become passé – notwithstanding, the longstanding tribute paid to him as the Don [father] of Chicano Studies and his With His Pistol in His Hand (1958) as the ur-text thereof. Thus, the aim of what follows is by no means to demean Don Américo’s formulation of border history, culture, and subjectivity. Instead, by focusing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), the present section avers that the essentialist paradigm of the “clash-of-cultures” can no longer be

225.5. Almost a decade prior to the surge of the Chicano Movement, Américo Paredes had been the most acclaimed Mexican-American scholar, pioneering single handedly from within but against the grain. The ongoing impact of his With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958) on the evolution of and critical approaches to Chicano letters has been scrutinized in Chapter One of the present study. In this historio-fictional monograph Paredes presents two important critical topres: (1) the border-man with his pistol in hand (typified in the ballad of Gregorio Cortéz) as a paradigmatic Tex-Mex ethnic-hero, set against the socio-political and cultural sway of Anglos and their vilified Mexican stereotypes in print culture; and (2) the U.S.-Mexican borderlands as a topographical buffer zone where the cultural and actual collisions between the Anglos and Mexicans took place. The Spanish subtitle of the present section translates as “The“ word of the New Mestiza is mightier than the Pistol in Hand.” In twisting a Spanish idiom which originally reads, “La palabra es más cortante que el filo de una espada” [The word is mightier than the sword], the present section has aimed to evoke not only an explicit tribute to the subject matter of Paredes’s scholarly inquiry and the title of his study in Spanish (“Con Su Pistola en la Mano”), but also a critical swerve from that seminal book and its two essential premises resumed above.

84 adequate in reflecting the “border subjectivity” proper at its fullest in the current age of economic and cultural globalization. In this vein, Anzaldúa’s Borderlands has been an astute response to both Don Américo and the “Aztlán” rhetoric of the subsequent generation of Chicano nationalists. On the one hand, by critically signifyin’ not only upon Don Américo’s premises on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, but also the dualistic Cartesian mindset prevalent within the power structures of Euro-American culture, Doña Gloria wages her own war against interlocking systems of oppressive registers such as racism, (neo)colonialism, and (hetero)sexism.26 On the other hand, by expanding upon the critiques of early Chicana feminists lodged against certain ethnocentric tropes and parochial identity paradigms that dictate what it means to be “Chicano,” Anzaldúa coincidently fights another battle – indeed, an internal one. What follows is, then, an inquiry into Doña Gloria’s contribution on how the newly arising phenomena of the border, border-crossing, and border(ed)land(s) have redefined the U.S.-Mexican border history, culture, and subjectivity neither as circumscribed by certain geopolitical spaces nor identity-based doctrines, but as wrought by multiple webs of systematic subjugations along multiple axes of power relations recently at play. In Borderlands Anzaldúa undertakes a consciousness-raising project in an effort to inform her reader, on the one hand, of the “collective” history of oppression of Chicanos by the dominant Anglo-American society and of Chicanas by their own culture. On the other hand, Anzaldúa inscribes the “personal” effects of that double burden peculiarly on herself – a lesbian of color who resides at the interstice of two cultures and two value systems on the U.S.-Mexican border. Thus the autobiographical subject of Borderlands constructs her identity by juxtaposing her subjective location(s)

226.6. The term signifyin’, or signifyin(g), is adopted from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s noted study, The Signifying Monkey (1988), in which the scholar deploys the term to denote “formal revision, or intertextuality, within the African American literary tradition” (xxi). Taking his cue from an enigmatic trickster figure from the Yoruba mythology (Esu-Elegbara) and his New World derivative (the Signifying Monkey), Gates defines the gesture of signifyin(g) in writing as the “repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference” (xxiv) of certain tropes, themes, rhetorical structures, and narrative strategies of the antecedents by the succeeding generations. Gates claims that such revisions are by no means monotonous replications; for the signifyin’ author modifies and takes these tropological or formal structures one step beyond, enriching and adopting them into the conjunctures of his/her time. In this light, Anzaldúa’s revision of Paredes’s “border” tropes is an act of signifyin(g). What is more interesting is that Anzaldúa also devotes a short poem in the last chapter of her Borderlands to the trickster-god “Esu-Elegbara” (see Borderlands 102).

85 both as an “object” (the daughter of a Tejano sharecropper family whose lands were pilfered; a working-class woman of Mexican descent; and a brown-colored queer), and a “subject” (a poet, a cultural theorist, an academic, a feminist). Surmounting this dyadic position as a firm anchorage in her project, Anzaldúa uses the communal experience of oppression and her own personal experience of liminality so as to build a bridge between these multiple subjectivities and ideological positions. As Anzaldúa further clarifies in a 1995 interview with Ann Reuman, even the etymology of her surname evokes such reconciliatory and mediatorial connotations in the Basque language: “‘An’ means over or heaven, the upper world, the sky world, the world of the head and the intellect. ‘Zal’ is the underworld, the world of the unconscious, the world of the instincts, the feelings. And ‘dúa’ is the joining of the two, and that is the earth part, the middle ground” (“Coming into Play” 40). Up to her untimely passing on May 15, 2004 at the age of sixty-one, An~zal~dúa practiced what Cherríe Moraga has termed “Theory in the Flesh.” Even though her flesh has united with la tierra madre [the mother earth], it is through her ideas and writings that Anzaldúa is still “practicing what [she’s] preaching” (Reuman, 8). To achieve her theoretical and aesthetic goals, but more crucially to translate them into an initial step for broader social praxes, Anzaldúa fosters a new

(r)evolutionary methodology that she names the “new mestiza consciousness.” On Anzaldúa’s materialist-feminist view, this complex, resilient, and volatile mode of critical thinking has risen out of multiple forms of oppression, whilst it is a conscious struggle to dismantle them. Therefore, the egalitarian vision she petitions in her Borderlands is pertinent not only to her fellow Chicana (lesbian) feminists or Chicano (cultural) nationalists, but also to all humans who have long suffered from the grim grip of a sterile politics of exclusion which dictates an acute EITHER/OR syndrome ruggedly engrafted in “Western” culture, philosophy, and realpolitik. As idealistic or naïve as it sounds, the initial step for the emanation of such a BOTH/AND perspective involves a tolerance for ambiguities and contradictions of any kind. In other words, the phobia which surges from the ambivalence of having a foot in-between various seemingly incompatible worlds at once, or the fear from those who paradigmatically occupy such liminal locations, must be transformed into an arsenal for the emancipation of the mind, soul, and the world at large. Such a

86 faculty of tolerance, otherwise stated, the audacity in the face of difference is the main pathway toward coming to terms with a higher philosophical awareness that human evolution has yet to reach at its destination. As such, this liberal insight evokes a subject-in-process, defying the interlacing registers of oppression (or privilege) in terms of ethnicity/“race,” nationality, class, and gender, to name the most obvious. Due to the fact that such holistic identity paradigms suppress the so-called ambivalent locations of “liminality” as taboo, hence dictate that a person can occupy only one place at a particular time (that is, the basic principle of Newtonian physics), some visceral mode-of-seeing other than that of the rational, or scientific, is crucial in such an ambitious quest. This uncanny gnostic view, which Anzaldúa calls conocimiento, is fortified with a kaleidoscopic perspective of metaphysical, spiritual, or shamanic liminality towards the culmination of an all-embracing love, or at least, appreciation for racial, cultural, lingual, as well as sexual mestizaje, to begin with. The methodology, metaphors, concepts, philosophical arguments, aesthetics, and the critical/spiritual vision that are offered in Borderlands have become popular shortly after the publication of the book which remains a pivotal text in many inter- disciplinary fields, including, but not limited to, Border Studies, Cultural Studies, Minority Studies, Women’s Studies, and Queer Studies. Accordingly, the myriad of critics of this noted text have eclectically focused—in line with their own schemes— on the various issues Borderlands offers or the way it offers them. As such different readings of the text have either hailed or crucified (1) Anzaldúa’s autobiographical voice which is a multilingual motley of personally coded experiences and other familial/communal voices; (2) her invocation of the pre-Columbian myths, indigenous iconography, and religious imagery in a utopic effort to rectify them form a feminist stance; (3) her relating of this huge cultural repository to her otherized ethnicity in the U.S., her otherized gender in her own community, and her otherized sexuality in a straight world; (4) her hybridization of an academically sanctioned language (with endnotes and references) with the “downtrodden” patios of Chicano mundane affairs; and (5) her fusing of the two imperial languages, viz., English and Spanish, with other non-status dialects/vocabulary into her multilingual medium to present her subject matter. In a gesture congruent with the “new mestiza consciousness” that Borderlands offers, the text itself resists any facile categorization in terms of the

87 currently available textual genres, narrative conventions, and lingual praxes. As Saldívar-Hull claims: “Anzaldúa’s text is itself a mestizaje […] Borderlands resists genre boundaries as well as geopolitical borders” (Feminism on the Border 70). In fact, such rasquache sensibility in Borderlands is the prime stimulus in situating the text into a new and defiant generic category that Caren Kaplan has cunningly named, an out-law genre – notwithstanding, the negative connotations the term may evoke.27 To further expound upon Kaplan, Sidonie Smith, in her Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993), combines the two conventional genres, viz., the manifesto and autobiography, adding another alternate to Kaplan’s out-law texts. Smith evaluates Borderlands within the framework of this new textual mode that she calls the autobiographical manifesto.28 From Smith’s vantage point, Borderlands refutes the

227.7. In her “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects” (1992), Kaplan probes into the affinity between genre, the politics of representation, and the practice of life-writing; and she posits her coinage, “out-law genres,” in an effort to offer an alternate to the “Western” autobiography convention. Kaplan claims that out-law texts are amalgams of a various combination of the hitherto established genres such as autobiography, mythical/magical narrative, critical essay, prison notes, diary entries, epistolary document, creative writing (prose/poetry), historiography, political pamphlet/manifesto, etc. The overtly political aim of the out-law text in following such a textual, or rhetorical, move is to ground the imaginary space of the final product within the realm of the real which is overdetermined by the specific historical, material, economic, and political sites that the speaking/writing subject has marginally inhabited. Thus, the conscious act of blurring the boundaries between genres, between fact and fiction, and between art and life in these out-laws ultimately resists any easy generic categorization inasmuch the author problematizes the taken-for-granted genres. Moreover, this unorthodox generic form as practiced, especially, by disempowered women of color from all around the world, defies not only the sovereignty of the self- indulgent “I/eye” authority in Western patriarchal mode of self-writing, but also the confessional mode that Euro-American women have embraced in voicing a long-muted “individual” voice. 228.8. According to Smith the speaking subject of the autobiographical manifesto, firstly, frees herself from the confined object status to move into an emancipated subject position; hence, rejects all essentializing identifications such as “woman,” “queer,” “black,” etc., imposed on her by the “Universal” subject; that is, the self-conscious, Western, heterosexual, male, and rational “I/eye” subject. (157-58). Secondly, the manifesto subject is cognizant of the material and ideological roots of her oppression so that she initiates a cultural critique by foregrounding her own experiences “into the light of the day.” Thus, the legitimacy of these now-manifested experiences challenges the truth value of the hitherto oppressive epistemologies. (158-59) Thirdly, the autobiographical manifesto subject, as in most autobiographies, effectively sets askew the binary of private and public spheres by “displaying before an impersonal public an individual’s interpretation of experience” (159). Fourthly, a seminal rhetorical ground of appeal for these manifestos is “group identification” as members of non-dominant, or subordinated, groups rather than radical individuality. (161) Lastly, the auto-biographical manifesto defies not only Euro- American male autobiographies, which are stimulated by a nostalgic drive for a bygone past, but also Western female narratives which equally display a similar anxiety; that is, a prospective fear, now, for the loss of future. (162-63) On the contrary, the subject of the autobiographical manifesto writes under “the sign of hope,” fascinatingly displaying the “possibility of change” in “a potentially liberated future” (163). Conjoining past anxieties with a future-oriented and hopeful perspective, the autobiographical manifesto, in the end, “issues the call for a new, revolutionary, subject, [and] offers an agenda for ‘I’ transformations” (163).

88 basic generic definition on self-writing—that is, a firsthand account of the events in a person’s life—one step beyond in various respects: For one, Anzaldúa re-creates her life by more than just putting together the raw material of her life as a mnemonic affair; rather, she blends native myth, indigenous iconography, familial/communal anecdote, supernatural legend, experimental poetry, religious symbology, her sueños [dreams], and corridos with “high” theory and historical data which are neither entirely accurate nor linear, and at times even anachronic. On the other hand, the polyphonic and multilingual subject of Borderlands evidences that self-writing is not a prerogative only of the “Universal Man” who has long been sanctioned within the “dualistic ontology” of Western epistemologies. While Smith’s theorem on the “autobiographical manifesto” provides an invaluable insight, some of her deductions—let alone, her “high” language of critique against the “high” language of Western theory—fall short of the interests of the present section, and must be punctuated accordingly: Firstly, at the very onset of her reading Smith plainly avers that Borderlands lacks “a rhetoric of revolutionary explosiveness and exuberant or excessive performance” (169). Yet, throughout the remaining section of her analysis, Smith’s repetitive emphases on the “revolutionary subject” (169, 172, 175, 182), which, she claims, Borderlands does promote, create a discrepancy in her reading. In this vein, Smith dismisses one of the most crucial aspects of the text; that is, the “revolutionary” politics of Anzaldúa’s self-ascribed queer position as a resistive vector—in Smith’s words, a “third perspective”—against the “Universal” subject. Smith not even once mentions this attribute of Borderlands; instead, she prefers to persistently foreground the “pastoral qualities” of the text, again paradoxically, to highlight its “anti-pastoral” mood. To further strengthen her argument Smith goes so far as to relate Borderlands to the slave narratives which were in effect produced and published in an entirely different spatiotemporal context and with disparate political goals.29 Lastly, while Smith’s analysis proves a lucid demarcation between the discursive, metaphorical, and physical features of the

29. In his MMyy HHistory,istory, NNotot YYours:ours: TThehe FFormationormation ooff MMexican-Americanexican-American AAutobiographyutobiography (1993), Chicano folklorist Genero M. Padilla attests to this issue as follows:

Whereas slave narratives were published and often widely distributed to promote the abolitionist cause, Mexican American personal narratives—for example, the scores of personal narratives collected from Mexican Californians in the 1870s—were meant to function only as supplemental material for American historians and were, therefore […] quite intentionally not published. (9)

89 borderlands that Borderlands also discerns, she nonetheless dwells much on the topographical determinants of the border region which, Smith maintains, mold “the geographical subject signaled in the title” (169) of Anzaldúa’s text. As shall be analyzed below, since such pedantic approaches to Borderlands, and from a single framework of reference, are themselves totalizing attempts towards the text, several additional gestures must perforce be explicated, if briefly, so as to consider Borderlands in terms of its generic borderlessness and its “revolutionary” rhetorical maneuvers. For instance, John Beverly’s 1989 article, titled “The Margin at the Center,” scrutinizes the historical evolution of a new textual genre which has sprung from the terrifying world of dictatorial regimes, particularly, in Latin American countries from the 1960s onward. The genre Beverly examines is the testimonio, “a novel or novella-length [testimonial] narrative in book or pamphlet form […] told in the first person by a narrator who is also the real protagonist or witness of the events he or she recounts” (92). On Beverly’s account, the narrator of the testimonio speaks “to communicate a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, implicated in the act of narration itself” (94). The ideological premises set forth by Kaplan and Smith are inherently abound in the testimonio, marking it as another vehicle for a “voice in literature to a previously ‘voiceless’, anonymous, collective popular-democratic subject, the pueblo or ‘people’” (98). The testimonio might thus be seen as “a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian form of narrative in the sense that it implies that any life so narrated can have a kind of representational value” (96). Although Borderlands cannot entirely be considered, say, a testimonial novella or pamphlet, the rhetorical and thematic aspects of the text, which are also set against a backdrop of de facto as well as de jure inscribed violence, trauma, and genocide, bring the text into reciprocal proximity with the testimonio. Nevertheless, in Beverley’s reading of the testimonio there lies a clear demarcation between the “testimonio narrator,” who is “either functionally illiterate, or if literate, not a professional writer,” and an “interlocutor,” who is “an intellectual, often a journalist or a writer” (94). The final product appears after the interlocutor engages in a series of transcriptions and editings (i.e., from videotapes or notes) of the raw material that the narrator has pleased to reveal. This aspect of the testimonio brings about obvious disadvantages in terms of authenticity and authority as well as

90 various advantages at the level of representation.30 What is relevant to Borderlands is that in her text Anzaldúa is both the eye-witness, or participant observer, and the professional writer herself; she is both the object and the subject of her inquiry, and both an insider and an outsider to her subject-matter. Thus, one other textual gesture from the margins needs to be presented so as to adequately scrutinize the authority of the spearkerly/writerly subject of Borderlands. In her noted Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (1992), cultural critic Mary Louise Pratt, sheds light on this issue with her explication of an unruly discursive gesture that she calls “autoethnographic expression,” and its textual praxis, “autoethnography.” Most dictionary entries would define ethnographic study as a “scientific” fieldwork research-project throughout which the university-trained specialist (mostly white, Euro-American, male) engages in, watches over and records the daily life of a culturally and geographically far-flung “other” culture, and thence writes a descriptive report of that “target” culture (probably, in his cozy study). Pratt claims that the representation of that “exotic” culture obliges the white ethnographer an interpretative and often a creative mode of writing, especially, if he is unable to grasp certain “tribal” codes under his scrutiny. Accordingly, his cultural critique, or ethnographic gaze, is often attuned to his subjective stance which imposes a hierarchy of values molded by his own privileged position. It is at this juncture that Pratt borrows the key concept of “transculturation” from the Cuban sociologist Fernando Ortiz’s Cuban Counterpoint (1940) to claim that “subordinated or marginal groups [do have the ability to] select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (6). In Pratt’s view, although “subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for” (6). For Pratt, “autoethnographic expression” refers to those transcultural “instances in which colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways

330.0. For further background on testimonio see, David W. Foster, “Latin American Documentary Narrative,” PMLA 99.1 (1984): 41-55; and Georg Gugelberg & Michael Kearney, “Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America”; George Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism”; Lynda Marín, “Speaking out Together: Testimonials of Latin American Women”; Nancy S. Sternbach “Re-membering the Dead: Latin American Women’s ‘Testimonial’ Discourse,” all forgathered in the special issue [“Voices of the Voiceless in Testimonial Literature”] of Latin American Perspectives 18.3 (1991): 3-14, 15-31, 51-68, 91-102.

91 that engage with the colonizer’s own terms” (7). Hence when the conquered, colonized, subordinated, or marginalized writers practice transculturation through the mimicry of an established genre of the dominant culture, they always form their own eclectic frame in their own idiom to adequately represent their own insider/outsider position. To torture with a cliché, one might suggest that like the “monstrous” Calibán in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the subaltern writers of the contact zones, too, talk back to the authority of the norm-setters and with the idiom of the purveyors of knowledge, or with the language of Prospero, if you will. To sum up, it is due to the hallmarks of Kaplan’s “out-law genre,” Smith’s “autobiographic manifesto,” Beverly’s “testimonio,” and Pratt’s “autoethnography” that help situate Borderlands within the framework of one last profoundly political form of literature; that is, “resistance literature” as termed by Barbara Harlow in her 1987 book with the same title. What approximates Borderlands to the paradigm of resistance literature is the text’s explicit critique of the successive waves of colonial, inter-colonial, and neo-colonial practices of the U.S. towards Chicanos as well as the neighboring Mexico, and the text’s counter-stand against that prevailing imperialistic legacy which has determined its spatiotemporal context. What is more, Anzaldúa does allure her readers, as if they were the would-be recruits to her cause, to engage in the endeavor she has discursively initiated. So the obvious question arises: “What is the most effective way to read Borderlands: as an historical treatise, a political manifesto, an autobiography, a testimonio, a chapbook of poetry, or an amalgam of all?” Evidently, although genre-mixing is neither a new nor a merely Anzaldúan practice, “Western” theory has yet to coin an adequate label for this hybrid text. Nevertheless, Anzaldúa herself gives a name to her own writing in her article “Border Arte” (1993); that is, autohistoria which “goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography, in telling the writer/artists’ personal story, it also includes the artist’s cultural history” (113). Perhaps, one other way to situate Borderlands in the world of print culture would be possible with AnaLouise Keating’s coinage, “Écriture Mestizaje” (Women Reading 122). As shall be analyzed in this section, rather than give an explicit answer to one other thorny question, “What is the best textual practice that could help marginalized people(s) represent themselves?” Borderlands, as an autohistoria, forces the reader to appreciate the aesthetics of the

92 border through an understanding of the artificiality of borders (be they drawn on the white page or on the crimson dust of Tejano plains), and to embrace the textual ambiguity of her text so as to arrive at new meanings within multiple contexts at once. In the above-cited Reuman interview, Anzaldúa states that Borderlands had been planned to appear only as a chapbook of poetry with a short preface. Yet, with Joan Pinkvoss’s editorial directions the text fortuitously reached its present format which at first glance reads as a bilingual collection of prose and poetry forgathered in two separate parts of a single book. Since the organizational structure of Borderlands mirrors much about its subject matter and the way it deals with it, it would be beneficial at this juncture to dwell, if briefly, on the multiform structure of the book. The prose part of Borderlands, “Atravesando Fronteras / Crossing Borders,” incorporates seven chapters or, better yet, intertwined essays; each divided into several subsections. The earlier essays in this part (chapters 1, 2, 3) delineate their own hermeneutical mapping of the historically and hierarchically imposed geopolitical and cultural borders in the embattled borderlands between Mexico and the U.S. The history Anzaldúa recites here is by no means “History” in the traditional sense should one compare it to the “old guard” Don Américo’s With His Pistol in His Hand (1958) or the Chicano historian Acuña’s Occupied America (1972). After all, Anzaldúa’s account is an adamantly feminist one in that she commits an outrageous crime; that is, she spills the beans about the integral subjugation of women by her community, and its internal phobias and weaknesses with all the means available. Moreover, assembling a medley of personal, familial, communal and mythopoeic voices as well as epigraphic corridos, dichos, sueños, and experimental poems other than that of an objective historian, Anzaldúa installs an experiential account in these earlier essays. As a result, her polyphonic historiography defies not only the unequivocal Anglo version, which has systematically muted Chicanos (and other minorities, for that matter), but also the “official” Chicano chronicles which, in a move similar to their oppressors, have also tried to convey an essentialized account by discursively erasing all straight Chicanas, Chicana feminists, and the marginal (read ‘queers’). In a sometimes brooding, even phantasmagoric, but always with a future- oriented hopeful note, the latter essays (chapters 4, 5, 6) mainly focus on the author’s metaphysical, instinctive, poetic, and spiritual detour for establishing a resistive

93 identity in the face of this double oppression. These essays mainly punctuate the vital role of the ritualistic act/art of writing in the process of self-discovery and recuperation from past traumas and cultural dictates. In that quest the down-to-earth mood of the earlier essays, which are formulated against the material terms of oppression, is merged with a profoundly mystical perspective inasmuch as the author establishes a deep spiritual connection to the most remote origins of her legacy which are not tainted by the hegemonic collusion of imperialism and patriarchy – initiated by the mighty Aztecs (the valorization of the father/eagle/sun/Huitzilopochtli over the mother/serpent/earth/Coatlicue), intensified by the Spanish conquest (the destruction of the Indian ways), finalized by the U.S. invasion (the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo), and sealed off with the violent rules of Global Capitalism (the 1982 devaluation of the Mexican peso and the semi-slavery maquiladora industry). In her article, “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera” (1994), Chicana critic Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano presents a blueprint for deciphering Borderlands, and posits a major caveat for the text’s non-Chicana receptors such as white feminists or area specialists. Yarbro-Bejarano warns these unequipped “Western” eyes against what she calls the “serpentine movement” (17) of the seven poetic-prose chapters which gradually prepare the reader for the poetry part of Borderlands only to cycle back where the book begins in the first place. As such, the poetry section of the book, titled “Un Agitado Viento / Ehécatl, the Wind,” comprises thirty-eight poems in six parts throughout which Anzaldúa goes on to convey her methodology of political struggle against her double burden mentioned above. These autobiographical and fictional poems in English, Spanish, or Spanglish deal with the themes pertinent to gender inequity, sexuality, queerness, spirituality, Indian cosmology, organized religion, working-class issues, literal/metaphorical border-crossings, female archetypes, loss of racial/sexual/cultural/personal/territorial agency, and political struggle for a better future (Adams, “Northamerican Silences” 132-35). Thus, these poems are structurally and thematically inseparable from the arguments submitted in the prose section. As such, each poem may be received either as an epigram or an epilogue to the earlier discussions; for, both the prose and poetry parts chart a future-oriented and hopeful enunciation of mestiza consciousness as a remedy to these ongoing atrocities. Thus,

94 with the last poem of the poetry section, the text’s seemingly incised narrative design (at the level of both content and form) acquires a neat unity in the end.31 In order not to be dazzled by that non-linear, or “serpentine,” movement (the structural and thematic pattern of cyclical departures and returns), it is at this juncture that the “Preface” to Borderlands needs to be scrutinized, for the overall contents of Anzaldúa’s entire project are sketched out in this condensed albeit intricate preamble. The opening paragraph is as follows:

The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with in this book is the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest. In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. (n.pag.)

Here, what strikes the “neutral” reader at once is the three different phraseologies of a single word, ‘borderland.’ The opening sentence opts for the word’s singular form and with the lower-case ‘b’, limiting the author’s subject matter to the locally and historically fabricated U.S.-Mexican border region. The next sentence, on the other hand, deploys the word “borderlands,” and as such dislodges that initial notion of a singular “border” from its measurable facets, transmitting it into a topographically unrestricted imaginative realm, where larger social forces define a series of other restrictive registers in psychological, sexual, intellectual, and spiritual terms. While these two opening sentences do posit a binary of ‘material vs. immaterial’ around the

331.1. Amongst a number of recent criticism which focus mainly on the poems of Borderlands the following works are of crucial value: Kate Adams, “Northamerican Silences: History, Identity, and Witness in the Poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa,” in Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Crit icism, ed. by Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York: Oxford UP, 1994), 130-45; Ann E. Reuman, “‘Wild Tongues Can’t be Tamed’: Gloria Anzaldúa’s (R)evolution of Voice,” in Violence, Silence, and Anger: Women’s Writing as Transgression, ed. by Deidre Lahsgari (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1995), 305-19; Chapter Three of Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000), 59-79; Linda Garber, “Spirit, Culture, Sex: Elements of the Creative Process in Anzaldúa’s Poetry,” and Inés Hernández-Ávila, “Tierra Tremenda: The Earth’s Agony and Ectasy in the Work of Gloria Anzaldúa,” in EntreMundos/Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa, ed. by AnaLouise Keating (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 213-26; 233-41. The eclective analyses by Rafael Pérez-Torrez in his Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), and by Tey Rebolledo in her Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1995) also provide invaluable insight. For an exhaustive catalogue of criticism—published between 1989-2006—on Anzaldúa’s oeuvre, see AnaLouise Keating’s bibliography as an appendix to the twentieth-year anniversary edition of Borderlands/La Frontera (2007).

95 central notion of the “border,” the third sentence intervenes with the word “Borderlands,” coalescing that physically defined borderland of the first sentence to the universally expanded and open-ended border(ed)lands of the second, both of which are indeed dependent on and inform each other. By including the “race” and “class” paradigms into that initial binary, the last sentence further complicates the multiplicity of the Borderlands ethos; and by thematically and stylistically building a mutual knot between other timeworn binaries such as ‘actual vs. metaphysical’, ‘cultural vs. natural’, ‘local vs. universal’ etc., the last sentence hence sheds light on

Anzaldúa’s “serpentine” formulae, set against the dualistic Cartesian line-of-thought. The following paragraphs follow a similar trajectory in setting askew, this time, other binaries by complicating them with other identity vectors:

I am a border woman. I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas-Mexican border, and others, all my life. It’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. (n.pag.)

While defining herself as “a border woman” per se, Anzaldúa once again stresses the ineluctable role of certain topographical phenomena (i.e., territory, place, landscape). However, these seemingly “natural” factors are also informed by and evoke other “cultural” inconsistencies that are not necessarily specified in material terms. What ultimately results from the merging of such physical and psychical ruptures is an uncomfortable terrain to inhabit — especially, for the border woman (with “Indian” heritage and contours) who is double-burdened by her minority location in the dominant (colonizer) culture and her muted state in her own (colonized) culture. In the next paragraph, though, Anzaldúa reveals that what is deemed contradictory and uncomfortable can be transformed by the border woman into something auspicious:

However, there have been compensations for this mestiza, and certain joys. Living on borders and in margins, keeping one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an “alien” element. There is an exhilaration in being a participant in the further evolution of humankind, in being “worked” on. I have the sense

that certain “faculties” – not just in me but in every border resident, colored or non- colored – and dormant areas of consciousness are being activated, awakened. Strange,

huh? And yes, the “alien” element has become familiar – never comfortable, not with society’s clamor to uphold the old, to rejoin the flock, to go to bed with the herd. No not comfortable but home. (n.pag.)

96 The morbid features of this patently hostile world of material antinomies, hence, necessitate the border-dweller to excavate a quiescent, albeit potentially liberating prowess that has long been buried belowground; that is, simply the ability to move in and out of two or more cultures by transforming the once-paralyzing borders into drawbridges that can be set up where required. Here, the personal enigma of the border woman takes on another dimension by specifying her with the racial adjective, mestiza — literally, the female-gendered hybrid of Mexic-Amerindian and Spanish peoples. Yet, an orthodox eugenics on miscegenation cannot gloss over this new breed of subject-in-process, for mestizaje on the borderlands is neither an innately given attribute nor a finalized destination. Rather, the new mestiza subjectivity must constantly be (re)produced, and as such it denotes an open-ended state of flux between the seemingly incompatible symbolic orders. Consequently, this “new” mestiza structures a home out of her ambiguous state of constant displacement, or banishment, which is not “Home” in the traditional sense with its connotations of security, coherence, tranquility, and comfort. It is rather a perilous site, either for the “colored or non-colored” unless “all border residents” embrace that hard-acquired consciousness against the hitherto repressive forces. With a playful subversion of the derogatory word “alien,” which in the U.S.-Mexican border context explicitly refers to an illegal immigrant, Anzaldúa subverts the constrictive and negative totalizations on the notion of alienness. The “alien element” she envisions is rather like a biochemical enzyme, or an embryonic plasma, in which her mestiza consciousness will germinate, evolve, and finally rise as the apotheosis of the next leap in the long continuum of human evolution. The following paragraphs of the preface briefly elaborate on the vitality of the act of writing for such an excruciating but requisite laboring activity, and how the author reconciles that new consciousness in an effort to create herself a new home and a new existence out of writing. Central to this task is by all means her language. Therefore, a final crucial aspect of the materialist-feminist politics of Anzaldúa’s overall project lies in the concluding paragraph of her preface in which the author conveys her bold meditations on the patois of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands and the idiolect of her own Borderlands that are essentially one:

97 The switching of “codes” in this book from English to Castillian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling of Nahuatl to a mixture of all of these, reflects my language, a new language—the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born. Presently this infant language, this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we as Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we

need always make the first overture – to translate to Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway.

This book is our invitation to you – from the new mestizas. (n.pag.)

Metonymic of the notion of mestizaje, the bastard language of the borderlands also defies any monolithic understanding of an “Arian” purity. As Anzaldúa admits, in the Reuman interview, that she has tried to create her own language by merging “the kind of historical, rational language of high theory” requisite for academic activities with “the poetic language of myths and of collective self-expression” of the borderlands. (“Coming” 4) Anzaldúa goes on to claim: “[…] my whole struggle has been against the colonial legacy of this language being imposed on me and Chicanos and other marginalized groups” (ibid. 11). Thus, when the author permits “other” repressed, albeit residual languages of the borderlands such as the numerous dialects spoken both in northern Mexico and southern Texas to share the privileged status hitherto enjoyed by the two imperial languages, the sheer binary of ‘ vs. Castillian Spanish’ is rendered futile. What Anzaldúa tries to articulate via her multilingual medium is, in her own words, “a nos/otras, the nos [in Spanish] is us/we/me/the subject; and the otras is them/they/the object, and in nos/otras we are them and they are us, and we are contaminated by each other” (ibid.). Moreover, the inclusion of the residual Aztec language (Nahuatl), and the Aztec mythology for that matter, helps her not to romanticize her native origin as a long-lost edenic point of reference, but to embrace it “as a living, socio-ideological concrete thing” (Bakhtin, Dialogic 293) as well as a psychic force that informs and sustains the present. While Anzaldúa offers such an unprecedented mode of expression, which she calls “” (Reuman, “Coming” 11), she is aware that the patois of the borderlands and the idiolect in her own Borderlands are going to frustrate the monolingual reader of both the English language which is “laden with alien ideologies” (Anzaldúa, “Haciendo caras” xxii), and of Spanish “where the language is gender-fixed” (Reuman, “Coming” 11). Furthermore, since Anzaldúa articulates her utmost confidence in the uniqueness of her heteroglossic world and the new

98 communicative possibilities it generates, she unapologetically declares that she is not going to trouble herself with translations whenever the meaning is unclear. This ploy of Anzaldúa’s is a maneuver of “strategic essentialism,” as Gayatri Spivak would call it (“Subaltern Studies” 205), which will impart to the monolingual interlocutor the feeling of alienation that all borderlands dwellers, including the author herself, constantly experience as a reality of their mundane affairs. While this final paragraph seems to concentrate by and large on the issue of language, the juxtaposition of the phrases “we as Chicanos” and the female gendered “new mestizas” also defies any one-dimensional analysis in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and language. From at least the mid-1960s onward in almost all printed academic or non-academic writing, Mexican-Americans have traditionally embraced the male-gendered appellation “Chicanos” with the term’s emphasis on their indigenous roots (Aztec and Mayan) and working-class origins. Yet, whenever the discussions should pinpoint Chicanas, the whole community has been culturally, linguistically and iconographically slashed as Chicanos/as, or Chicanas/os. While Anzaldúa considers herself a part of the “we-as-Chicanos,” she embraces that 1960s’ staunch tone against the “you” of “Anglos, Mexicans and Latinos.” Thus, the long- standing racial binary of ‘black vs. white’ is further complicated with the inclusion of real Mexicans (from the other side) and other Latinos as a part of the “you” who have also looked down upon the “bastard” culture and language of Chicanos. On the other hand, in the last sentence of her preface Anzaldúa does invite the reader as if she was a welcoming hostess. What merits attention in this invitation to meet “halfway” is that the invitation is marked by a subversion of the female- gendered ‘mestiza’ to surpass the all-inclusive ‘Chicano.’ Thus, the initial emphasis on the “switching of languages” transforms, at this juncture, into the switching of the

“gender” paradigm. With this cunning subversion in a single paragraph, Anzaldúa not only complicates the assortment of identity formations in terms of gender such as male/female, mestizo/a, Latino/a, or Chicano/a, but also notes that even a single identity vector (here, “gender” as a fluid variable) is always bound to other paradigms (i.e., race, class, nationality, etc.) like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, or a plant with a rhizoidal root system. One must wonder and ask, then, how the prevailing “race” paradigm becomes a nodal point in constructing sexist-racism with such slurs as the

99 hot-Latina, or the macho-Mexican; classist-racism as in the lazy/poor-Mexican; religious-racism as in the fanatic/morbid-Mexican, and the like. The new mestiza consciousness that Anzaldúa offers is, then, an all-defying methodology against these intricate registers. To sympathize with, or better yet, achieve that liberating vision one has to follow the path Borderlands leads with its seven serpentine essays. In this vein, Borderlands opens with an ambitious historical essay, titled

“The Homeland, Aztlán / El otro México [The Other Mexico].” As the preamble to the book this opening chapter serves as an accelerated history course, providing the neutral reader with a revisionist synopsis of (1) the historical colonization of what is now the U.S. Southwest and the neo-colonization of its adjacent neighbor, Mexico; (2) the ongoing institutionalized crimes committed against all non-white denizens of the border region; and (3) the still-aching issue of (il)legal immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries due to economic exigencies and “dirty” wars.

In this panoramic survey, Anzaldúa initially breaks the earthbound shackles of her reader, and becomes a guide through a quasi-astral expedition through time and space back to the earliest peopling of the Américas. Later, Anzaldúa and her reader glide over the migration routes of the Aztecs; watch them below as they leave their primordial homeland, Aztlán, in 1168 A.D.; escort them in their peregrination south- ward to the heart of Mexico under the aegis of the war-god Huitzilopochtli. The reader then alights at the capital city of Tenochtitlán to witness the rise of the Aztec empire in the year 1325 as they chisel their patriarchal rules onto the face of the mother earth. Abruptly, the reader leaps forward in time to the 16th-century to testify Cortés’s victory over the mighty Aztecs in 1521; thence, the reader beholds the birth of a new people that has never existed before – the mestizos. Yet, the genetic mixture of the Spaniard and the “pure-blooded Indians” (27) does not come to a halt there. Determined to find more Eldorados the Spanish conquistadors bring with them the newly created mestizos from Mexico in their quest north to reach Aztlán, the golden land of plenty where people never grow old. As these mestizos return to their ancestors’ lands to “form an even greater mestizaje” (27) with the Native Americans of the southwest, the reader is still on their tracks. Suddenly, the “War” breaks out and the reader finds her/himself over the battlefields where the U.S. trounces Mexico and annexes her lands in 1848. The subsequent scene underneath is

100 replete with guns, blood, racial hatred, claims of Manifest Destiny, atrocities of the Texas Rangers, and institutionalized oppression. The reader watches how suddenly the ‘home-land’ becomes a ‘lost-land’ with the erection of an artificial border which incises not only la tierra madre, but a whole pueblo. The maiming of the mother earth and of her people stretches into the next century; to further expound on this issue, Anzaldúa lets her aunt unfold a testimonio in which the U.S. border-patrol grabs a fifth generation Mexican-American boy, Pedro, and deports him to the nethermost part of Mexico just because he could not speak English and did not carry his birth certificate with him. Next, the reader is situated vis-à-vis Anzaldúa’s mother who talks about the Great Depression years when her own mother has been tricked by an Anglo shyster, and lost all her cattle and lands. Finally, Anzaldúa herself provides a testimonial account of the transformation of the old pastoral lifestyle of the region into a sharecropper industry with the dictates of large-scale agribusiness corporations in the 1950s. Now, the participant-observer Anzaldúa speaks of the final maiming of the mother earth into “neat rectangles and squares” (31). By the time this quasi-astral expedition through time and space halts to a grind, the late 1980s have already arrived with all their material ramifications. What is most crucial about this final resolution is that in the end the entire structure of Anzaldúa’s historical account implodes; that is, nothing has changed in the mundane realities of Chicano existence. The past and present, the personal and communal, and the abstract and concrete implode as they spirally inform and invoke each other in a daily battle for survival.32 In his The Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha regards the prototypical “borderline work of culture” as an art, which “does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present. The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living” (7). This new method of dealing with the past is quite different from the way many anticolonial resistance movements have dealt with the past in their ethnonostalgic evocation of an untainted time prior to the colonial contact. On the contrary, Anzaldúa’s relating to

332.2. Anzaldúa says she wrote Borderlands “because Chicanas do NOT know the history, do NOT know the language, do NOT know they’re three-quarters Indian: DO NOT KNOW A LOT because we were displaced in the history books. We were that absence: erased, displaced. In part I wanted to educate Chicanas; but other people of color and whites as well.” (“Border Crossings” 49).

101 the past is revisionist; far from being custom-bound, it responds to the needs of the present and is future-oriented. Hence, Borderlands might justly be assumed as a borderline work of culture par excellence; for when the above-sketched history ends, the reader thematically cycles back to a “past-present” juncture, where Anzaldúa’s historical chapter is prefaced, in the first place, with a bilingual poem through which the persona/Anzaldúa speaks of the timeless human-nature relation and the futility of imposing man-made borders upon nature and within a single people.

In this poem while the persona stands at the artificially erected border, she is also “at the edge where earth touches ocean” (23). Contrary to popular depictions of the border region as a scorching habitat, such soothing allusions to natural phenomena as the wind, ocean, and waves imbue this parlous site with an oasis-like aura where Anzaldúa ponders on the painful decades of a single pueblo’s artificial division. Yet, akin to the wind or the waves, on which the various porous border apparatuses (“steel curtain,” “chainlink fence,” “barbed wire”) have no power, she, too, crawls beneath this obstacle to the other side to reunite with the land and blood of her people. As she trespasses, though, the “gritty wire” dashes wounds in her palms, splitting her flesh asunder; and yet, like the salty water of the ocean her blood, she believes, will help corrode and one day pulverize the metal barrier. It is with this wound imagery that the incision of the land, or maiming it with a border, is projected onto the sacrificial body of the persona. The poem ends in Spanish with these lines: “Yo soy un puente tendido / del mundo gabacho al del mojado, / lo pasado me estira pa’ ‘tras / y lo presente pa’ delante” (25).33 It is also with this mantra-like resolution that the reader is pulled into the alternative history of Chicanos sketched above with Anzaldúa playing the role of a bridge, stretching between past traumas and a hopeful future:

“This land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again” (25). The wound imagery of this poem serves as a springboard for Anzaldúa’s oft- quoted definition of the border as an open wound “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (25). This phrase of the ongoing violence of (neo-) imperialistic confrontations also evokes the inevitable hybridizing of all involved. This is a place where the personal and the public collide, the past and present become

333.3. In English the lines read: “I am a bridge stretching / from the world of the Anglo to that of the wetback [illegal immigrant],/ the past pulls me back / and the present draws me forward, […]”

102 one, different races and cultures conflate, and intimacy sprouts. However, this is also a place of indeterminacy, tension, and ambivalence where ruptures in meaning and cultural incompatibilities perplex life in terms of ethnicity/“race,” class, gender, and sexuality. Yet, since the topography of this physical and psychological site—fraught with the feelings of contradiction, pain, and discomfort—has been “created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary” (25), the location is the perfect locus for personal growth and transformation of consciousness. Because, to Anzaldúa habitual existence of daily comfort deters one from taking action against all kinds of barriers. Here, these unnatural (fault)lines are first drawn between the “legitimate” denizens (“the whites and those who align themselves with whites” [25-6]) and the whole group of atravesados [trespassers] (“the squint-eyed, the preserve, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half breed” [25]). Even the rightful owners of those lands, Chicanos, are (dis)regarded as intruders by the Gringo; let alone, the economic refugees who dare risk their lives every time they attempt to cross the border. Especially, the undocumented woman-crossers are at great risk in the hands of coyotes [human-traffickers]. Thus the chapter ends in a past-present juncture, which Anzaldúa calls “La crisis” (32), so as to give a “tangible” account of how Mexico and other Latin American countries have become America’s backyard, and how their economic structures and cultural integrity have decayed even in the pre-NAFTA years. The next essay in Borderlands, “Movimientos de rebeldiá y las culturas que traicionan” [“Movements of Rebellion and the Cultures that Betray”], expands the notion of the “home” (read ‘culture’ or ‘heritage’) that ostracizes anyone who does not comply with its shared normative mores. The chapter, hence, expounds upon the practical measures which must be taken against this looming peril. It is from this testimonial chapter onward that Anzaldúa’s protean feminist stance is constructed through a series of successive stages with the glorification of her racial, cultural, sexual, and linguistic mestizaje set against all totalizing rules imposed upon her both by the Anglo culture and, especially, by her own culture. In order to initiate her internal cultural critique the author declares earlier: “I had to leave home so I could find my self, find my own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on me” (38). Her flight from “home” will be both a journey in and a journey out.

103 It is also in this chapter that Anzaldúa avers one crucial agent which also serves as a central stage in her literal and/or figurative journey, ultimately leading to the culmination of her new mestiza consciousness. The agent in this initial stage is the Shadow-Beast, which “refuses to take orders from outside authorities. It refuses to take orders from my conscious will, it threatens the sovereignty of my rulership. It is that part of me that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed” (38). Thus, Anzaldúa (and( all crippled Chicanas and blindfolded Chicanos, for that matter) must confront and embrace this frightening, unacceptable, and purely instinctive aspect of her Self, so as to ascertain that the Shadow-Beast is, in effect, an integral facet of her fiber, and that it is rendered abject by cultural dictates and rules from above. The author resolves: “Son las costumbres que tracionan [It is the customs that betray]” (44). The rules both in Anglo and Chicano cultures, Anzaldúa says, are “made by those in power—men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them” (38). Hence, her critique is not solely directed against men, but also to “mothers and mothers-in-laws [who] tell their sons to beat their wives for not obeying them” (38).

In lieu of pursuing a culturally dictated path for women, either to be a wife/mother/nun or a whore, the author offers another route; that is, “education and career” (39). Yet, Anzaldúa is by no means indifferent to both the socio-economic conditions of Chicanos, whose “chief activity is to put food in our mouths” (39), and the necessity of the “[t]ribal rights over those of the individual […] as in the case of all indigenous peoples in the world who are still fighting off intentional, premeditated murder (genocide)” (40). However, such material terms of subjugation must not deter one from taking measures against what the author calls “Cultural Tyranny” (38), which principally targets two cohorts of Chicanas — viz., queer Chicanas and Chicanas who preserve their residual Indian ways and/or bear the somatic stigma of “Indianness.” It is at this juncture that Anzaldúa reiterates a local tale told by the elders of her town. The anecdote is about a shape-shifter called mita’ y mita’ [half and half] who is believed to live as a woman for six months and a man for the rest of the year. What is crucial about this eccentric figure is that although the likes of this wo/man have been considered “a deviation of nature,” they do have “an entry into both [gendered] worlds” (41). Anzaldúa admires such people for this magical power as they defy the rigid rationale that “human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something

104 better” (41). Such so-called deviants are thus closely related to Anzaldúa’s long- feared “Beast” which is also kept repressed in the shadows by some Chicanas, and yet embraced by others. Anzaldúa does embrace her Shadow-Beast with her willful “choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)” (41). To Anzaldúa, it is a “path of knowledge […] a way of balancing, of mitigating duality” against the “absolute despot duality that says we are able to be only one or the other” (41). With this formulation of queer identity Anzaldúa refuses to align it with either masculinity or femininity, but uses it both to reveal the artifice of the division between the two, and to defy the categories of gender and sex as defined by the heterosexually based cultures. Moreover, it is this “queer” perspective that founds the basis of Anzaldúa’s methodology in her broader critiques against other totalizing doctrines pertinent to a variety of social, cultural, racial, and other political issues. With a personal anecdote Anzaldúa claims that lesbianism is, indeed, the “fear of going home […] of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza,” (42). Hence she resolves: “[…] if going home is denied me then I will have to stand and claim my space, making a new culture—una cultura mestiza—with my own lumber, my own bricks and mortar and my own feminist architecture” (44). One of the most fundamental assets of the author’s “feminist architecture” is her alliance with that other ostracized group of Chicanas – the dark-skinned Indian women: “My Chicana identity is grounded in the Indian woman’s history of resistance […] La India en mí es la sombra [The Indian in me is the shadow]” (43; 44). To Anzaldúa, the effects of introjected racism and self-hatred have resulted in the devaluation of the Indian element of Chicano fiber. Moreover, since the dark-skinned Chicana has allegorically been regarded as the granddaughter of Malinche, the arch- traitress, she has been “silenced, gagged, caged, bound into servitude with marriage, bludgeoned for 300 years, sterilized and castrated in the twentieth century” (44). This is why the author declares: “I will not glorify those aspects of my culture which have injured me […] in the name of protecting me” (44). However, by keeping her culturalist stance intact at all times, she is never estranged from her natal culture, either: “I’ll defend my race and culture when they are attacked by non-mexicanos” (43). Thus, the conclusion of this chapter reveals that the author’s tactical positionality of her protean feminist stance is bound to the race, nationality, class,

105 and gender paradigms; never downgrading one or highlighting the other, but evaluating them as an interconnected matrix. The next chapter, “Entering into the Serpent,” further expounds upon the evolutionary stages of Anzaldúa’s mestiza consciousness (initiated( in the preceding essay with her Shadow-Beast) by rarifying it, this time, with the Serpent topos which is “older than Freud, older than gender” (48). To Anzaldúa, entering into the serpent is “to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul” (48). In other words, it is the next step to recover both the feminine and the indigenous parts of her total “Self” that have been negated by racism, sexism, and homophobia. In this vein, the essay opens with two personal anecdotes to recount an early brush with the “animal body, the animal soul” when Anzaldúa was yet a child. In the first memoir her mother warns her: “Don’t go to the outhouse at night […] A snake will crawl into your nalgas [buttocks (or vagina)], make you pregnant. They seek warmth in the cold” (47). This cautionary tale directs both to the conscious and subliminal levels; it warns, literally, against the venomous bite of snakes and, metaphorically, the perilous encounters that may occur when one leaves the sanctioned boundaries of home, and by extension, race, family, religion, culture, and tradition. In the next memoir, though, Anzaldúa does come vis-à-vis a rattle-snake in daylight while working in the cornfield, and receives a trivial bite. Her mother intervenes just in time to prevent further invenomation and cleaves the serpent into two. But later, the tomboy Anzaldúa joins the two pieces of the serpent and buries it into the bosom of the mother earth, and at night falls into a dreadful dream of shape-shifting into a serpent herself. This instinctive, or intuitive, ordeal would mark an epiphanous moment in Anzaldúa’s early spiritual/sexual awakening to be resolved through certain phases in the next forty painstaking years of her life. As noted earlier, the normative Mexican and, by extension, Chicano cultures have held the “Guadalupe vs. malinche/llorona” binary like the sword of Damocles over the souls and bodies of women. The sheer existence of such a binary has also helped repress another form of non-normativity; that is, queerness which is indeed the

“Beast” in almost all cultures. To Anzaldúa, these female archetypes have been limiting: “Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada [Malinche] to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-suffering people.” (53)

106 In Borderlands Anzaldúa, akin to an archaeologist, or an etymologist, excavates an alternative genealogy for these three topoi in an effort to reveal the artificial division already inherent in their man-made ontology. In so doing, she draws on the ways these female icons, all of whom she embraces as “Our Mothers” (53), have been set apart from each other throughout history to serve a single agenda; that is, the domestication of women. As such, Anzaldúa expands the history (sketched in her first chapter) of how the matriarchal order, or at any rate gender equality, in ancient Mesoamerican societies and religious cosmology had initially been marred with the arrival of the patriarchal, caste-/class-based, and imperialist Aztec hegemony, and later eradicated with the unilateral doctrines of the Catholic Church in the post-conquest Hispanic period. In her quest to give a new face to these essentially imbricated topoi, Anzaldúa extends the origins of Lady Guadalupe and her true nature to a time long before the Aztec domination (1325), much less, the Spanish conquest (1521) or the Anglo incursion (1848). According to both folk version(s) and official church chronicles, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to a newly-convert Nahua native of commoner status ten years after the conquest. Speaking in the Nahuatl language, the Virgin revealed that she was the Mother of God, and that her Indian name was “María Coatlalopeuh. Coatl is the Nahuatl word for serpent. Lopeuh means ‘the one who has dominion over serpents’” (51). Aside from the various miracles she displayed, it was due to her native name, Coatlalopeuh, which is homonymous with ‘Guadalupe’ (the( patroness saint of Cortés’s hometown, Estremadura) that the Spanish clergy readily identified her with the Holy Virgin. Yet, the location of her divine appearance at Mount Tepeyác in the northern outskirts of Mexico City was of more significance to the would-be converts; for it was originally the sacred site of an ancient temple devoted to one fertility goddess called Tonantzín, or Tonantsi, of the Aztec-conquered Totanac tribe. Thus the indigenous masses considered Lady Guadalupe as the avatar of Tonantsi, and legions of them rapidly turned to Christianity. (Burkhart, “Cult of the Virgin” 217) In her revisionist genealogy, Anzaldúa hinges upon Lady Guadalupe’s Indian name, Coatlalopeuh, to relate her to the earliest of the Nahuatl fertility deities called Coatlicue (“Serpent-Skirt”). Suffice it here to note that the extremely complex Aztec pantheon and religious cosmology have been built on many intricate layers of earlier

107 cultures as they conquered all Mesoamerica. The elemental deity in the polytheistic Nahuatl cosmology is conceived both as unitary and dual; and unlike the Olympus pantheon maleness does not represent superiority at all. This supreme being is called Ometéotl, “master of duality, whose dual male-female nature is represented by the pair Ometecuhtli and Omecíhuatl, the lord and lady of duality” (Ruether, Goddesses 192). As the perfect figure of unity-in-duality Ometéotl channelizes all contradictory and plural forces of the cosmos to coexist in harmony. (ibid.) As the descendants of this hermaphroditic entity, the horde of other second-rank gods and goddesses, including Coatlicue and her derivatives, have also been described as androgynous figures, and often imbricated, or grouped, with other deities in different contexts (i.e., feast days, prayers, religious rituals, etc.). Additionally, in Nahuatl, the word coatl (“serpent”) is also synonymous with such words of duality as twin, double, pair, and the like. As the foremost Mesoamerican deity, Coatlicue is a protean and composite entity with a litany of aspects, distinguishable by different epithets, physical features, and characteristics. Among others, the overlapping divinities Tonantzín, Cihuacoatl,

Tlazolteotl, and Coyolxauhqui are all aspects, or topoi, of the polysemous Coatlicue.34 Coatlicue is not only the mother of the war-god, Huitzilopochtli, the lunar-goddess, Coyolxauhqui, and other celestial deities, but also the creator and destroyer of all nature and life. In line with this multi-faceted nature the 2.5 meter tall monolithic basalt statue of Coatlicue petrifies the beholder and skews all binarism. Instead of a head, the outlandish sculpture of Coatlicue has a Janus-faced caput with two snakes facing each other; she wears a necklace of human hands and hearts with a skull in the middle, and a skirt made of braided serpents fastened by a snake buckle;

334.4. • Cihuacoatl (“Serpent-Lady”) is one evil aspect of Coatlicue. This deity dated back to the ancient Toltecs and was later appropriated by the Aztecs. Cihuacoatl was said to dress in white and walk through the city at night, crying for her lost children at war; her wails were considered an omen of war. Although she had been venerated as the patron of women who died in childbirth, after the Conquest she, like all native idols, was further demonized and associated with (infant) immolation. Thus, she is also the antecedent of la llorona (“The-Weeping-One”) in modern Mexico.

• Tonantzín (“Our-Holy-Mother”) is the benevolent aspect of Coatlicue. Yet, Tonantzín is not an unilateral deity, either; for she is always the embodiment of both “good” and “evil.” She often imbricates with the moon deity, Coyolxauhqui, and in other contexts she converges into Cihuacoatl. • Tlazolteotl (“Filth-Eater”) is one other sinister aspect of Coatlicue, and she is also imbricated with the dark side of Tonantzín. The primary features of Tlazolteotl are excessive promiscuity, witchcraft, perverseness, and moral evils of all kinds; and yet, she also has the power to forgive all sins (filths) with a satisfying penance in her presence. See Rebolledo, Women Singingin the Snow 51-2; Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe 212-14; Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers 105-20.

108 her feet and hands are claws.35

The Statue of Coatlicue The Virgin of Guadalupe Source: Malgorzata, Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Source: Malgorzata, Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, The Black Madonna in Latin America and The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe (Albuquerque: University of New Europe (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), p. 126 Mexico Press, 2007), p. 13 Anzaldúa elucidates that when the patrilinear Aztec regime took total control over Mesoamerica, they “drove the powerful female deities underground by giving them monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place, thus splitting the female Self and the female deities” (49). Stripped of her diabolic facets and rendered harmless, the once-devilish Coatlicue could survive only through her innocuous aspect, Tonantzín, the “good” mother. To Anzaldúa, Coatlicue is thus a genealogical model, or moment, of unmitigated wholeness; an icon of sheer power of creation and destruction, and a stimulus for excessive sexual drive prior to that patriarchal takeover hence the forced split between the genders. Moreover, Anzaldúa attests to a further dissection: “After the Conquest, the Spaniards and their Church continued to split Tonantsi/Guadalupe. They desexed Guadalupe, taking Coatalopeuh, the serpent/sexuality out of her” (49). From

335.5. It is believed that during the final battle for Tenochtitlán in 1521, Coatlicue’s statue fell over from its altar on the Great Temple. To prove his ultimate victory over the Aztecs and their religion Cortés had the statue buried and built his city on top of it. In 1790 it was discovered by accident in the main plaza of Mexico City. The authorities had this idol buried at once due to the “seriousness” of the natives’ homages to its presence. In 1803 it was re-excavated for archeological scrutiny and buried again. In 1824 the statue was re-excavated, this time, never to be buried again. The statue is now displayed in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. See Sheila M. Contreras, Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature (Austin: University of Texas P, 2008), 117-18.

109 thereon, Lady Guadalupe, the non-sexual mediatrix, has been the positive pole in the “virgin/whore” dichotomy; an antithesis of the Coatlicue-Malinche-Llorona triad. In recovering and revering Lady Guadalupe’s primordial linkage to Coatlicue through Tonantzín, Anzaldúa envisions the brown Madonna as the mestiza par excellence, “a synthesis of the old world and new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered” (52). Like the structural mosaic of Borderlands, disparate languages and other cultural elements coalesce in this syncretic figure. In fact, when the reader squirms—with a “serpentine” movement— back to Anzaldúa’s previous chapter, in which the “Shadow-Beast” has vaguely been described with serpentine features (“her( lidless serpent eyes, her cold clammy moist hand dragging us underground, fangs bared and hissing” [42]),) the role of Coatlicue as an inner diosa, a goddess within, becomes more manifest. Coatlicue is the embodiment of those curtailed and warring aspects of the psyche which must initially be resuscitated so as to serve as a springboard for the culmination of the new mestiza consciousness. Such a re-envisioning of a new mythos for the ‘Guadalupe-Coatlicue’ oxymoron conveys Anzaldúa’s overall project to offset the age-old mindset of the hegemonic masculine order along with its reinforcing Systems of (mis)perceiving, (mis)interpreting, and (dis)connecting with the world. Anzaldúa ends this preparatory chapter by revealing the impasses of the phallocentric symbolic order—be it Chicano or Euro-American—which has not only impoverished the “Chicana” fecundity, but also hindered all human touch with primordial ways of relating to the world prior to the crude victory of rationality, modern science, and technological mastery. The author laments: “We have been taught that the spirit is outside our bodies or above our heads somewhere up in the sky with God. We are supposed to forget that every cell in our bodies, every bone and bird and worm has spirit in it” (58). Anzaldúa condemns both the Anglo system of education and organized religions for this oblivion in the name of the “consciousness of duality” which, she claims, is “the root of all violence” (59). On the contrary, Anzaldúa’s hard-acquired indigenous mode of perceptiveness regards

“the world of the imagination—the world of the soul—and of the spirit just [as] real as physical reality” (59). She goes on to explain: “In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from

110 them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them” (59). Thus, the likes of Anzaldúa and her mita’ y mita’ figure are more inclined to break “the ‘official’ reality of the rational, reasoning mode which is concerned with external reality” (58-9). Furthermore, these highly sentient people, who “live in the interface between the two” (59), perceive the world with an enigmatic cognitive skill that Anzaldúa calls “la facultad.” Anzaldúa depicts this protective and productive faculty as a hyper-sensitive “capacity to see in surface phenomenon the meaning of deeper realities […] It is an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning. It is an acute awareness mediated by the part of the psyche that does not speak” (60). To Anzaldúa, “[t]hose who do not feel psychologically or physically safe are more apt to develop this [dormant] sense [of proximity] […]—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign” (60). Another crucial aspect of la facultad is that it shatters the ‘Ignorance-is-Bliss,’ cliché, insofar as it “breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception, […] causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance, […] takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depth to open up, causes a shift in perception” (61). Once la facultad is let loose to rein over rationality, “there is no looking back, no going back” (56) to “our innocence, our unknowing ways, our safe and easy ignorance” (61). As a defense mechanism induced and honed by iterative ordeals of pain, trauma, and estrangement la facultad also prepares one to “plunge vertically” (60) underground. Retreating to that phase of acute meditation, otherwise stated, an internal quest deep down into the abyss of the unconscious, is to enter Coatlicue’s outlandish realm which was once considered by the archaic Olmecs as “the most sacred place on earth, a place of refuge, the creative womb from which all things were born and to which all things returned” (56). Metonymic of one primal Nahuatl creation myth, Anzaldúa, too, delves into this underground realm of the dead, Miktlán36, to retrieve

336.6. Legend has it that the cosmos was destroyed by the gods four times before, but every time a particular deity helped create it anew. In the Aztec cosmology, the final era of humanity is re- created with the deeds of Quetzalcoatl – a.k.a., the wind-god Ehécatl. In this story, after the Fourth-Sun has been destroyed by the ferocious Coatlicue, Quetzalcoatl journeys into the underworld realm, Miktlán. In an effort to reanimate humanity, he gathers human bones there. Yet, the underground Lord is irritated and sends his demons to trouble Quetzalcoatl. During the chase Quetzalcoatl drops the bones, breaking them into pieces. But Cihuacatl picks up the shattered bones and provides a bowl in which Quetzalcoatl blends his blood with the bone pieces to create the first human pair of Quinto Sol – the current era of the Fifth-Sun. See Mythology: Myths, Legends, & Fantasies, ed. by Janet Parker and Julie Stanton (Edison: Wellfleet 2004), 486-87.

111 the severed pieces of her Self. With this recognition of, or connection to, Coatlicue the author prepares the reader for the next developmental stage of her (r)evolutionary consciousness that she calls the “Coatlicue State.” Through this laborious phase she will ultimately reincorporate the stifled aspects of her total Self and embrace those disjointed snippets in an effort to re-cognize her innate wholeness. In Borderlands Anzaldúa, who has transited this stage of self-re-making and “uncovered the lie” (42) of dualistic (il)logic, speaks with a higher spiritual and philosophical awareness; thereby, directing her reader to the same path she has taken.

The next chapter, “La herencia de Coatlicue / The Coatlicue State,” which is by far the most phantasmagoric essay in the book, details this inner quest to cross over, or descent into, Coatlicue’s womb, only to re-emerge as a transformed being. Yet, Anzaldúa’s earliest brush with Coatlicue had occurred long before she received that snakebite in the cornfield. In this chapter although the author does not reveal in detail the roots of what she calls la seña, or the mark of the Beast, which indicates “that something was fundamentally wrong with me […] that I was not normal” (64;

65), it is from an earlier article—issued in This Bridge Called My Back (1981)—that the reader might get a glimpse of this earliest wound which must be healed first.

In this candid autobiographical essay, entitled “La Prieta” [dark-skinned-one], Anzaldúa renders the old images of her race-/class-/gender-based shame which have long plagued her. She reveals that from her early infancy onward, her swarthy complexion (“like an Indian” [220]) had caused ample distress, especially, in her fair- skinned grandmother who reflected her own “Shadow-Beasts” in her granddaughter. Moreover, the reader learns that the earliest “mark of the beast” has been the author’s precocious menarche when she was three months old due to an abnormal hormonal imbalance. Anzaldúa’s mother would lay the blame on herself for her daughter’s secret anomaly “for having fucked before the wedding ceremony” (221). And yet, “In her eyes and in the eyes of others,” as Anzaldúa claims, “I saw myself reflected as ‘strange,’ ‘abnormal,’ ‘QUEER’” (222). In consequence of this long-term sense of alienation Anzaldúa admits that she “split from and disowned parts of myself that others rejected” (Borderlands 67). On the other hand, the mark of the beast is what stimulated her, at a very early age, to develop into the sentient person with a different perception of life, or the “third perspective” that she calls la facultad. Anzaldúa

112 concludes her “La Prieta,” remarking that “it’s taken over thirty years to unlearn the belief instilled in me that white is better than brown,” and that “physical intimacy between women was [not] taboo, dirty” (225; 223).37 Yet, Anzaldúa’s personal conundrum is not an isolated case: “As a person, I, as a people, we, Chicanos, blame ourselves, hate ourselves, terrorize ourselves. Most of this goes on unconsciously; we only know that there is something ‘wrong’ with us” (Borderlands 67). It is during those phases of introjected rage and masochistic self-loathing that Anzaldúa retreats into those agonizing, paralyzing, and depressive states of lethargy. Thus, it is more than fitting to associate these daunting moments of self- repudiation and inertia with the goddess of destruction, rage, and death. In order to delay, or completely avoid, this perilous encounter, Anzaldúa states that one might very well resort to the tedious patterns of daily life or to some other addictive activity. On the other hand, Anzaldúa has chosen to face Coatlicue in an effort to put to use her “greatest disappointments and painful experiences” (68) as an introversive lens through which she would re-evaluate her self-knowledge as well as that of her own culture. With reference to Coatlicue’s procreativeness, Anzaldúa finally resolves: “Let the wound caused by the serpent be cured by the serpent” (72). However, the Coatlicue State has its own captivating dangers should one accept it as the final destination, and not “a way station” (68). Thus, once equipped with the necessary means of “Knowing” (70), it is imperative to rise from this underground burrow so that “a new life begins,” or else “she will remain a stone forever” (71). As Anzaldúa ends this crucial chapter, she thematically cycles back to her previous essay (“Entering( into the Serpent”) in which Lady Guadalupe’s indigenous name has been explicated as “she who crushed the serpent” (51), denoting the victory of Christianity over the idolatrous Aztecs religion. Yet, the fully-equipped Anzaldúa now reinterprets this epithet as the one who “takes dominion over the serpents—over

337.7. “La Prieta” also sheds a light on an untitled poem in Borderlands that reads: “Dead, / the doctor by the operating table said. / I passed between the two fangs, / the flickering tongue. / Having come through the mouth of the serpent, / swallowed, […]” (56). In “La Prieta” Anzaldúa reveals that as a young woman she underwent a full hysterectomy: “My bowels fucked with a surgeon’s knife, uterus and ovaries pitched into the trash” (231-32). It is during such traumatic experiences, which the author calls her “bouts with death” (Borderlands 57), that Coatlicue had led her crossing between life and death. It is also with these “bouts with death” that Anzaldúa’s writing acquires shamanic quality which ultimately aims at spiritual and practical solutions for the healing of the individual and the community. Chapter 6 of Borderlands concentrates on this issue in vivid detail.

113 my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weakness and strengths” (73). Nothing is discarded from her fiber; ultimately, “[a]ll the lost pieces of myself come flying from the deserts and the mountains and the valleys, magnetized toward that center. Completa” (73). Now, she is “the one who is at one with the beasts” (51), just as Guadalupe’s counterpart, Coatlicue, has always been. She is no more the woman who used to have “this fear / that she has no names / that she has many names / that she doesn’t know her names […]” (65). Yet, there is one more quest to be completed. The following essays of Borderlands, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” trace the vital role of language and the creative act/art of writing as the midwife (Cihuacatl) of this ritual of self-discovery, or the eruption of the repressed (Coatlicue), both of which help form the last stage of the new mestiza consciousness and subjectivity. In “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Anzaldúa undertakes the role of a border-linguist to articulate her own theory of border language by further expounding upon her ideas submitted in her preface. Once again, the chapter opens with two childhood memoirs on the disciplining of the “ethnic” and “female” body. In the first anecdote she recalls a dentist saying: “We are going to control your tongue […] do something about your tongue” while he was “cleaning my roots” (75). The second anecdote renders how Anzaldúa was penalized by her white teacher in elementary school for not speaking English at all times. Meanwhile, she was also rebuked, ironically, by her own Spanish-speaking mother for speaking “bad” English at home with a heavy accent “like a Mexican” (76). Moreover, the tradition of female silence in MeXicanoX culture is what troubled the bodacious Anzaldúa from early childhood onward. Reminiscent of the ancient myth of Philomela, the author drastically ends this preamble by asserting: “Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (76). What is unsaid in this equation is that ‘wild tongues’ always find some way out. The two connotations of the tongue trope are self-evident: First, it is the gender-specific voice which resists the symbolic order of “Language” and the boundaries erected by it; and second, it is the unique Chicano language which must acquire legitimacy not only from the Anglos, but also from the purists and most Latinos who harshly accuse Chicanos of “ruining the Spanish language” (77). This double marginalization of both the distinctively ‘ethnic’ and ‘feminine’ voices is a

114 reminder of the multiple and converging forms of oppressions that Anzaldúa simultaneously fights against. Moreover, since “[e]thnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity” (81), the deleterious effects of introjected self-hatred, which are imposed from above by what Anzaldúa calls the “Linguistic Terrorism” of Anglo American cultural hegemony, have left Chicanos with “an orphan language” (80). For Anzaldúa, Chicano-Spanish is the ultimate solution to this orphanage syndrome: It’s “a living language” which “developed naturally” to become “neither español ni inglés, but both […], a forked tongue” (77); and as she further elaborates: “There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience” (80). As such, Anzaldúa lists the top-eight of the many dialects all of which Chicanos use interchangeably in different contexts, and she supplies a detailed socio-historical account of each. Since Chicano existence is not confined only to the U.S. Southwest, to Anzaldúa, it is their language that is their “homeland” (77) with the potential of binding them on a common ground not only across the U.S., but also across the border divide – to the Mexicans on the other side. Thus, certain mutual cultural codes, practices, and tropes bear the potential for community-building which is not prescribed by a strictly “National” identity, but convened around a shared form of life; however may that life be divided by a barbed-wire: “Being Mexican is a state of soul—not of mind, not one of citizenship” (84). On the other hand, the specific border tongue of Chicanos has the linguistic potential in articulating new cultural practices, new experiences, and new forms of understanding hitherto silenced by and extraneous to mainstream paradigms; but, this is a never-ending process with extreme patience required. For this reason, Anzaldúa’s protean feminist stance, which is primarily established in opposition to the notion of silencing and further augmented by her “Chicano-Spanish,” merits recognition. As she states: “I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence” (81). After setting the tenets of this unique hybrid patois, the penultimate essay of Borderlands, “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and Black Ink,” gives a detailed account of the author’s writing strategies. Her “border language” in this creative phase is employed to serve not only as a mnemonic device that lends meaning to her

115 personal/communal existence or helps create an aesthetic effect, but also as a political arsenal with the potential of making deep-level transformations in peoples’ minds and souls. As a genetic as well as cultural hybrid of different roots Anzaldúa readily juxtaposes in her writing whatever available material she can reap from her disparate legacies. As Walter Mignolo claims, “To read Borderlands is to read three languages and three literatures concurrently, which is, at the same time, a new way of languaging” (“Linguistic Maps” 189). Yet, at this juncture—as with her overall project—Anzaldúa marks a clear distinction between Euro-American approaches to the work of art, the function of art, and the role of the artist, and their counterparts embedded in the legacy of “my people, the Indians” (88). The locution “tlilli, tlapalli,” in the title is literally “the red and black ink” in the ancient Aztec lexicon, and it is a direct reference to the Aztecs’ hieroglyphic texts called amoxtli, or codices (singular ‘codex’), which functioned with symbols rather than words. Anzaldúa explicates that the Aztecs “did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious, social and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined” (88). Cordelia Candelaria further explains that the Aztec socio-poetic rituals of story-telling, or poetry recitals, were called ‘flor y canto’ [‘flower and song’] which embodied “the holistic, synthetic power of poetry to transform mundane experience into mystical insight” (Chicano Poetry 35). Hence, under the conduct of the poet/storyteller, who occasionally took the role of a shape-shifter shaman, these communal activities had a transcendental impact on every participant, especially, when accompanied by ritualistic dance, music, and hallucinogenic substances. On the contrary, Western culture, Anzaldúa claims, judges an object of art with respect to “[t]he aesthetic of virtuosity [which] attempts to manage the energies of its own internal systems such as conflicts, harmonies, resolutions and balances […] It is individual” (98; 99). To Anzaldúa, Western ethnocentrism, in a misguided effort to unconsciously re-connect with what is lost in the path to Rationality, does thingify, for example, the so-called primitive art object (i.e., tribal masks, totems, drums, etc.) in high-security museums or fancy exhibition halls. Yet, once detached from its ritualistic function, or as Anzaldúa puts it, “from nature” (90), the spiritual and functional power of the art(ifact) is lost forever. Consequently, the author advises: “Let’s stop importing Greek myths and the

116 Western Cartesian split point of view [here, the “material vs. spiritual” in art-making] and root ourselves in the mythological soil and soul of this continent” (90). In her own writing Anzaldúa purports to evoke the sacred role of the artist as shaman who does have transformative power: “When I create stories in my mind […] I ‘trance’” (91). She calls her creative phases the “Shamanic States.” It is through these meditative phases that the “metaphorical mind” which functions with “images” precedes the “analytical consciousness” which operates with “words” (91). After all, “being in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland,” Anzaldúa claims, “is what makes poets write and artists create” (95). Metonymic of the multiply-inflected Coatlicue State, the Shamanic State is also a painful but an ameliorative stage. In the following excerpt Anzaldúa elaborates on her deep “obsession” (97) with writing:

When I don’t write the images down for several days or weeks or months, I get physically ill. Because writing invokes images from my unconscious, and because some of the images are residues of trauma […] I sometimes get sick when I do write. […] But, in reconstructing the traumas behind the images, I make “sense” of them, and once they have “meaning” they are changed, transformed. It is then that writing heals me, brings me great joy. (92)

Once again, another article from This Bridge anthology sheds light on this essential part of the healing process. In this oft-quoted epistolary piece, cunningly titled “Speaking in Tongues,” Anzaldúa states: “The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy. It is the quest for the self, for the center of the self, which we women of color have come to think of as “other” – the dark, the feminine […] To write is to confront one’s demons, look at them in the face and live to write about them” (187; 190). The very title of this article evokes the “Shamanic” quality of Anzaldúa’s oeuvre. Thus her Borderlands, in particular, both as a spiritual performance of transcultural exchange and also a tangible artistic product, acquires the status of a modern-day codex adapted to today’s standards of print culture. In Borderlands, Anzaldúa further clarifies that being a writer and the art/act of writing itself are ordeals akin to those of “being a Chicana, or being a queer—a lot of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls” (94). Since the author’s utmost purport in writing is to “write the myths in me, the myths I am, the myths I want to become” (93), the final written-word (squirming( like a serpent) on the two- dimensional white page “transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into

117 a numinous experience” (95). Needless to further elaborate that in many ancient belief systems the skin-shedding serpent symbolizes renewal and rebirth; so does Anzaldúa’s Coatlicue. The new mestiza subject is this border-dwelling self that emerges from the “Shamanic State” as a transformed being, declaring her presence to the world at large. Yet, Anzaldúa concludes this chapter by implying that her writing, which she also figures as a way of “learning to live with la coatlicue” (95), is never definitive, but “always a path/state to something else” (95).

That “something else” is resolved in the final chapter of the prose part of Borderlands, titled “La conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness.” Once again, Anzaldúa begins this essay with a tribute albeit with a twist, this time, to

Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos’ La Raza Cósmica (1925) [The Cosmic Race]. In brief, what is special about Vasconcelos is that in his work he has put forth his patriotic design of a national Mexican identity (and( other Latin American peoples, for that matter) as a superior, “fifth race embracing the four greatest races of the world” (Borderlands 99). Yet, John Francis Burke, in his Mestizo Democracy (2002), gives a cogent analysis of the various shortcomings of Vasconcelos’ utopic idea(l)s. Burke claims, for instance, that Vasconcelos’ modernist vision for racial and cultural hybridity (attuned( to the zeitgeist of the 1920s) openly exalts the gradual integration and ultimate assimilation of all the indigenous cultural ingredients and genetic hues of Latin American native peoples within the holistic Hispanic “pot” which is, for Vasconcelos, far more idyllic and civilized (Burke, 52-82). Thus, Vasconcelos has favored the “e pluribus unum” doctrine, or unity-rather-than-diversity ideal, to the Latin American context with the European cultural patterns and Caucasian genes as the dominant and amelioratory elements in such a unidirectional mixing process. However, Anzaldúa’s revisionist adoption of this Latin American model of nation-making eschews its chauvinist, (hetero)sexist, territorial, Catholic-bound, and overtly racist tones which were adopted by the supremacist “Chicano Movement” intellectuals during the 1960s. Her model extends beyond the limits of such a unitary concept of nationality prevalent in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries. On the one hand, Anzaldúa envisions ‘racial mestizaje’ as a lateral (not hierarchical) process of hybridization in that the “mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species with a

118 rich gene pool” (99). On the other hand, and more crucially, her vision for ‘cultural mestizaje’ has great potential for the “uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness” (102). Because, this new culture will be produced by those who hold the codes and values of more than one culture; thereby, prompting them to be more inclined to tolerate ambiguities, reject borders and boundaries of any kind, embrace other cultures, and overcome the self-choking burden of liminality that Anzaldúa calls “un choque” (100), a cultural shock. That is why, the participants, or makers, of this new hybrid culture of Anglo, Mexican and indigenous legacies are not, nor should they be, confined to the blindfolded adherences to a single particular political formation, intellectual camp, ideological doctrine, or identity-based initiative. As Anzaldúa poignantly claims, “it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. […] All reaction is limited by, and dependent on, what it is reacting against” (100). Such a defiant “counterstance,” as Anzaldúa calls it, might only be “a step towards liberation from cultural domination. But it is not a way of life” (100). Nor is it enough for the new mestiza to situate herself at the crossroads of different cultural codes (Mexican,( Spanish, Anglo, Indian, etc.),) of different ideological positions (feminist, nationalist, proletariat, etc.), and of different identity vectors (ethnicity/“race”, class, gender, etc.), but be the crossroads herself. As such the new life that Anzaldúa demands abounds with “numerous possibilities” in that it requires the new mestiza to claim “both shores at once, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes” (100-1) in overcoming the vicious duality of ‘the oppressor (subject) vs. the oppressed (object).’ In effect, the poetry part of Borderlands has a blueprint poem, titled “To live in the Borderlands means you,” which defies the hitherto understanding of mestizaje as delimitated by the two “old” genetic vectors of the Spaniard and the Indian. Addressing the “new” mestiza, the poem claims that to live in the borderlands means, “you / are neither hispana india 38 negra española / ni gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breed.” The poem ends with these lines: “To survive the Borderlands / you must live sin fronteras [without borders] / be a crossroads” (217).

338.8. [“neither Hispanic, Indian, black, Spanish / nor white, you are mestiza, , halfbreed”].

119 However, to be (at) a crossroads assigns the new mestiza the difficult task of existing in, or even searching for, a constant state of ambivalence, contradiction, and indeterminacy with no secure grounds or facile answers. Nor does Anzaldúa supply one; it is like “floundering in uncharted seas,” she says (101). But it is only then, in such a state of constant flux, that the new mestiza might “work out a synthesis” (101). That is, in lieu of falling into the trap of reversing the age-old racial stereotypes and colonial binaries (and re-invoking them, now, for the common interests of her fellow Chicanos),) the new mestiza must add “a third element which is greater than the sum of [all] its severed parts” (102). Only then, the new mestiza, Anzaldúa claims, might develop the intellectual/spiritual elasticity that will help her “break the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and […] show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (102). The “third element” is the ever-evolving stage of the regenerative ‘new mestiza consciousness.’ Once equipped with this wholesome humanistic sensibility, the new mestiza develops an understanding for difference and tolerance towards the “other,” and more crucially, a fortitude even to forgive the oppressor for the mutual good of the whole society and the world at large. As Anzaldúa utters, “we need to allow whites to be our allies. Through our literature, art, corridos, and folktales we must share our history with them so […] [t]hey will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead” (107). Echoing – only in tone – the historic African American leader Booker T. Washington’s famous “Cast-down-your-bucket-where-you-are” anecdote that he delivered in his Atlanta Exposition Address in 1895, Anzaldúa demands: “[T]ell us what you need from us” (108). These new forms of alliances, Anzaldúa claims, “could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (emphasis added; 102). Here, Anzaldúa’s high hopes by no means evoke a wishful delusion to foster one other “trendy” form of “Cyber-Age” spirituality that dictates a shallow interconnection among all things. As Rosa Linda Fregoso claims, the U.S.-Mexican border paradigm “has a more politically charged meaning, referring to geopolitical configurations of power and to power relations within a cultural process” (Bronze Screen 64). Accordingly, Anzaldúa’s border paradigm is a real (r)evolutionary ethics which will promote an “oceanic feeling” with its liberating potential in a future that is yet to come; for indeed, the current modes-of-reasoning

120 have surely proved inadequate to bring harmonious relations across racial, class, national, cultural, and gender lines. 39 Although this imaginative, or discursive, practice of Anzaldúa’s seems to be superfluous and insufficient to change the real world of economic crises and ongoing violence, it is a precursory step – indeed, an indispensable one. In other words, such a methodology of cultural critique which initially aims at change of individual minds and hearts shall enkindle, in its next stage, the spark of one’s moral obligation to urgent political action for societal and global change. As Anzaldúa claims, “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads” (109). In this vein, after Anzaldúa accomplishes her own transformation by using her “inventory” (104) in refashioning His(s)tory with the use of her self-styled symbols, metaphors, stories, legends, and myths—or “images” as she calls them collectively— she returns. She returns to the borderland, her homeland. Hence, the chapter ends with a section, “El retorno” [The return], in which Anzaldúa celebrates her homecoming by connecting (once( again, in a past-present juncture) a particular memory from her childhood with the current socio-economic situation of her hometown, located in the Lower Río Grande Valley, Texas. In this anecdote little Anzaldúa is with her whole family, planting watermelon seeds and watching them as they “survive and grow, give fruit hundred of times the size of the seed”; she goes on to explain: “We water them and hoe them. We harvest them” (113). Here, Anzaldúa reiterates exactly the same the revolutionary idea(l)s of the

Chicano Movement manifesto—namely, “The Spiritual Plan of Aztlán” (1969)— which has defined the ancestral homeland of the Aztecs, Aztlán, as a unifying symbol that legitimizes current Chicano political identity and territorial ownership. In the plan the Chicano political leaders has written: “Aztlán belongs to those who plant the

339.9. Sigmund Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) states that his friend, Romain Rolland, came up with the term ‘oceanic feeling’ in a review letter on Freud’s The Future of an Illusion (1927), which “treats [established] religion as an illusion” (11). In the letter, Rolland, however entirely agreeing with Freud’s judgment, tries to inform him on the “true source of religious sentiments,” and avers this peculiar feeling shared by “millions of people” (ibid.) To Rolland oceanic sensation refers to one’s feeling connected to all of life, to all of nature and creation, “a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling of something limitless; unbounded—as it were ‘oceanic’” (ibid.) It is no surprise that when Freud “scientifically” admits, “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in my self” (ibid. 12), Anzaldúa’s earlier remark, “I know things older than Freud, older than gender” (Borderlands 48), acquires a whole new dimension.

121 seed, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans” (Anaya & Lomelí eds., Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland 1). Yet, far from its original design by the Movement activists as an adamantly “National” territory where the essentialist mentality reigns for “Chicano” solidarity, Anzaldúa re-imagines Aztlán as a feminist utopia: “The struggle of the mestiza is above all a feminist one (106). Thus, in this new ‘imagiNational’ [sic] homeland she reserves a non-elitist niche for a variety of people(s) other than Chican@s@ – most notably, queers of “all colors, all classes, all races, all time periods” (106) for their role in relating “people with each other” (107). With this new politics-of-inclusion Aztlán becomes, in Chicana critic Emma Pérez’s words, “a new territory, a new intellectual locale, a new spiritual space, a new psychic and psychological terrain” for those who will join forces for the decolonization of minds (Pérez, “Gloria Anzaldúa” 3). Only then, Anzaldúa claims, that the natural cycle of “[g]rowth, death, decay, birth” can be restored to its original intact order (113). With this cyclical Native American worldview Anzaldúa also brings her text structurally and thematically in full circle. While the penultimate stanza of the epigraphic poem in the opening chapter of Borderlands has had an iconographic breach in its last line,

This land was Mexican once was Indian always and is. And will be again. (25) the same stanza is re-employed as the closing words of the final essay, now, with the gap closed; thereby, promoting a hopeful note that spirally opens up a new cycle into a future that is yet to materialize with the culmination of the ‘new mestiza consciousness’:

This land was Mexican once was Indian always and is. And will be again. (113)

Healing the ruptures is Doña Gloria’s utmost legacy.

122 CHAPTER THREE

WRITING THE SELF BEYOND THE BORDERS

From her first novel, The House on Mango Street (1984), through her collection of stories, Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991), to her latest novel, Caramelo (2002), Sandra Cisneros has become the voice of working-class Chicanas and a beacon for other Latina authors, who have started to dominate the U.S. Latino literary realm and academic community from the mid-1980s, the so-called “Decade of the Hispanic,” onward. Her three collections of poetry, Bad Boys (1980), and especially, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (1987) and Loose Woman (1994), have also brought a fresh breath into the poetic world of U.S. Latin@s. As the first “Chicana” to receive a contract with a major publishing company—the Random House—the internationally acclaimed Cisneros is now without a doubt the most celebrated Latina writer with a literary career of nearly four decades, numerous awards for her oeuvre, and her fiction (translated into over a dozen languages) as a staple in a wide range of school curriculums in the U.S. as well as across the globe.1 Although a biographical sketch of an author’s life, or personality for that matter, is often deemed inessential for the “textual” analysis of his or her subject matter, in the case of what might be called the “minor(ity) writer” such an analysis elucidates the consequent literary product – especially, if the work of fiction under scrutiny has been crafted out of the idiosyncratic aspects of a subaltern ethnic space such as the barrio. Such an anti-Barthesian precept is particularly applicable to

11.. In 1985 The House on Mango Street won the prestigious Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. Women Hollering Creek won the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, was elected as a noteworthy book of the year by and The American Library Journal, and was nominated Best Book of Fiction for 1991 by the Los Angeles Times. In 1995, Cisneros was awarded the MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship. Other literary honors include a Texas Medal of the Arts, 2003; two fellowships in fiction and poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, 1982, 1987; two honorary doctoral degrees, one from the State University of New York at Purchase, 1993, and the other from Loyola University of Chicago, 2001; a lifetime achievement award from the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago; the Roberta Holloway Lectureship at the University of California, Berkeley, 1988; the Chicano Short Story award from the University of Arizona, 1986; the Texas Institute of Letters Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, 1984; an Illinois Artist Grant, 1984; and an artist residency at the Foundation Michael Karolyi, Venice, Italy, 1983. See the artist’s website at www.sandracisneros.com

123 Cisneros’ fiction and poetry; for, in several interviews, lectures, and essays the author has offered many insights into the correlation between her life and art as well as her academic inquires.2 For instance, when asked if her Mango Street is an autobiographical recollection of childhood memories, Cisneros informs that the text is “an invented autobiography with elements from different parts of my life and extended into my students’ lives and the voice of my life in the twenties” (Kevane &

Heredia, “Home in the Heart” 50). In another interview the author claims:

All fiction is non-fiction. Every piece of fiction is based on something that really happened. On the other hand, it is not autobiography because my family would be the first to confess: “Well it didn’t happen that way.” […] They don’t understand I’m not writing auto- biography. What I’m doing is I’m writing true stories. They’re all stories I lived, or witnessed, or heard; stories that were told to me. I collected those stories and I arranged them in an order so they would be clear and cohesive. Because in real life, there is no order. (Pilar E. Rodríguez-Aranda, “On the Solitary Fate” 64)

Cisneros’ bitter sentiment that “in real life there is no order” sheds a light on her fiction and poetry through which she has tried to reorganize it into a “clear and cohesive” state of tranquility; for, from her early childhood onward the author has been beset by a series of ambiguities to be reconciled, again, through her own pen.

3.1. Sandra Cisneros: A Long Way from the Barrio to the “Other Side”

Born on December 20, 1954, in Chicago to a Mexican father and a Chicana mother, Cisneros resumes her childhood rather wryly when she says: “I am the only daughter in a family of six boys. That explains everything” (“Only Daughter” 256). In an autobiographical essay, titled “Ghosts and Voices” (1987), she recounts that it was her brothers’ male-bonding (along with her father’s patriarchal demeanor) which marked her as an “odd-woman-out-forever” (69). Yet, being an outcast in and off the family is what stimulated the young Cisneros into the world of books that would help her transform her solitude into something auspicious. Tracing her evolution as a

22.. Major sources into Cisneros’ art and life include, Pilar E. Rodríguez-Aranda, “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-Three: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” The Americas Review 18.1 (1990): 64-80; Cisneros’ own essays, “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession,” “Notes to a Young(er) Writer,” “Do You Know Me? I Wrote The House on Mango Street,” The Americas Review 15.1 (1987): 69-79, and “Only Daughter,” Glamour (Nov. 1990): 256-58

124 lover of fiction Cisneros reserves accolades for her mother, Elvira Cordero Anguiano, for her part in freeing the author from the feminine drudgery of a typical MeXicanoX household and supplying her with a library card (“Living as a Writer” 68-69). Cisneros claims that even as a child she began to hear a narrator’s voice in her head who recorded, or fictionalized, even the most routine events that surrounded her mundane affairs; she says: “This is how I glamorized my days in the third-floor flats and shabby neighborhoods where the best friend I was always waiting for never materialized” (“Ghosts and Voices” 70). One important reason that the long-awaited “best friend” never materialized is that the Cisneros family moved very often from one “shabby” neighborhood to another for economic reasons. Moreover, their annual travels from Chicago across the border to Mexico (City) for extended visits to the paternal side of the family further deepened the feeling of isolation during the author’s childhood and adolescence (ibid. 69); for, in Mexico, the author was not accepted as a “Mexican” and in the U.S. she could not pursue the typical “American” role, either. As Cisneros recounts:

I felt, as a teenager, that I could not inherit my culture intact without revising some part of it. That did not mean I wanted to reject the entire culture […] I know that part of the trauma that I went through from my teen years through the twenties up until recently, and that other Latinas are going through too, is coming to terms with what Norma [Alarcón] calls “reinventing ourselves,” revising ourselves. We accept our culture, but not without adapting ourselves as women. (Rodríguez-Aranda, “On the Solitary Fate” 66)

The author refers to her experience of “straddling these two cultures” as a “balancing act” in which she tried to “define some middle ground” (ibid.). In 1966, the Cisneros family finally settled, this time, in a poor Puerto Rican neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago called Humboldt Park when they bought a bungalow, which Cisneros describes as “an ugly little house, bright red as if holding its breath” (Binder, Partial Autobiographies 57). Yet, this final settlement impacted the writer-to-be Cisneros, because “it placed [her] in a neighborhood, a real one, with plenty of friends and neighbors that would evolve into the eccentric characters of [Mango Street]” (ibid.). The author further claims that she has written Mango Street “as a reaction against those people who want to make our barrios look like Sesame Street, or someplace really warm and beautiful;” she goes on to assert:

125 Poor neighborhoods loose their charm after dark, they really do […] I was writing about it in the most real sense that I knew, as a person walking in those neighborhoods with a vagina. I saw it a lot differently than all those ‘chingones’ [‘sapheads’ or ‘fuckers’] that are writing all those bullshit pieces about their barrios. (Rodríguez-Aranda, “On the Solitary Fate” 68-9)

After graduating from Loyola University in 1976, Cisneros finally found a ticket out of the barrio when she enrolled in the University of Iowa’s prestigious Writer’s Workshop where she experienced a cultural shock and also had an epiphany in a seminar titled ‘On Memory and the Imagination.’ In that seminar, they were discussing Gustave Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1957) in which the French phenomenologist appropriated the house metaphor to represent the inner lives, memories and dreams of humans. It was at that moment that Cisneros realized that her budding literary voice and the themes she wanted to explore diverged from both those of Chicano forefathers and canonical American authors – not to mention, her Anglo classmates with their privileged social backgrounds and fancy diplomas. Cisneros says:

I remember sitting in the classroom, my face getting hot and realized: “My God, I’m different! I’m different from everybody in this classroom.” […] I knew I was a Mexican woman. But I didn’t think that had anything to do with why I felt so much imbalance in my life, whereas it had everything to do with it! My race, my gender, and my class! And it didn’t make sense until that moment, sitting in that seminar. That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about. (Rodríguez-Aranda, ibid. 65)

Drawing upon her own experiences and those of her community, Cisneros instantly decided to write about the world that she knew best; it was the world of “third-floor flats, and fear of rats, and drunk husbands sending rocks through the windows, anything as far from the poetic as possible” (“Ghosts and Voices” 73). On Latina writing in general Cisneros further adds: “There are so few of us writing about the powerless, and that world, the world of thousands of silent women, women like my mama and Emily Dickinson’s housekeeper, needs to be, must be recorded so that their stories can finally be heard” (“Notes to a Young(er) Writer” 76). Hence, certain recurrent motifs have been preeminent in Cisneros’ fiction and poetry. Among these thematic concerns the normative MeXicanoX community, like one giant organism itself with all its methods of silencing Chicanas resonates more as an antagonist than a recurrent motif. It is thus no coincidence that throughout her writing career the author has unwaveringly taken issue with the age-old binary of

126 “virgin vs. whore.” She says: “We’re raised with a Mexican culture that has two role models: La Malinche y la Virgen de Guadalupe. And you know that’s a hard route to go, one or the other, there’s no in-betweens” (Rodríguez-Aranda, 65). To subvert this monolithic duality, Cisneros re-envisions the brown Madonna, or La Lupe as she calls her, from a perspective similar to that of Gloria Anzaldúa’s. In her iconoclastic experiential essay, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess” (1996), which might surely be regarded as a blasphemy by many orthodox Chicanos, Cisneros recounts that for many years she became frustrated whenever she saw the image of the Virgin for the ethos of silence and submission she has reinforced; she says: “What a culture of denial. […] She was damn dangerous, an ideal so lofty and unrealistic it was laughable. Did boys have to aspire to be Jesus?” (48). Akin to Anzaldúa, Cisneros thus traces the archaic roots of the Virgin of Guadalupe to the mischievous Nahua deities Coatlicue and Tlazolteotl. As she re-chisels her modern day Virgin model out of the traditional icon, Cisneros asserts that her own version of Lady Guadalupe is a “sex goddess, a goddess who makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy, who reminds me I must […] speak from the vulva … speak the most basic, honest truth, and write from my panocha [cunt]” (ibid. 49). In reinserting “sex” into the asexualized image of the Virgin, Cisneros firstly transforms her from an unattainable personification of ideal(ized) femininity to an unruly figure of freedom that legitimizes MeXicanaX womanhood with all its “illicit” nuances. Secondly, the author foregrounds the link between the body and the (literary) voice in a maneuver reminiscent of one of the leading figures of French feminism, Hélène Cixous, to draw attention on how the woman’s sexual discovery and exploration of her body constitutes an indispensable step in her creative production throughout which the body and text are intricately linked.3 Cisneros’ own re-discovery of her sexual organs, sexual energy and sexual pleasure via her reinterpretation of the Guadalupe icon helps her overcome the superimposed feeling

33.. In her “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975) Cixous highlights women’s creative production as a means to set them free from intellectual and somatic restraints as follows:

By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into an uncanny stranger on display—the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhabitations. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. […] Write yourself. Your body must be heard. Only then will the immense resources of the unconscious spring forth […] A woman without a body, dumb, blind, can’t possibly be a good fighter. She is reduced to being the servant of the militant male, his shadow. (880)

127 of shame and silence just as her écriture mestizaje does. Hence, not unlike the public persona of the author4, the defiant female characters Cisneros portrays throughout her fiction and poetry are meant to overcome the material and ideological forces such as poverty and male-supremacy that entrap them in their own subaltern ethnic milieu as well as in the dominant white culture. The author gives voice to those triple- burdened Latinas who, in actual barrios and also in their male-oriented written and oral literatures, have been rendered voiceless, self-sacrificing and male-dependent. For instance, the sixty poems in her My Wicked, Wicked Ways portray the literal and figurative journey of a female persona who intellectually, emotionally and sexually matures and finds her place in the world. In four sections the poems deal with the successive stages of this quest: her childhood ordeals in the oppressive Chicago barrio with the white culture as a backdrop; her relationship to her family; her educational journey out of the barrio and through Europe; and finally her return to her home in an effort to negotiate her newly found identity with the world around her. For instance, toward the end of the collection, in “By Way of Explanation,” the persona finally situates her body in a world geography, extending herself across many geo-cultural spaces to claim her mastery over them:

There is— / I suppose— / a bit of Madagascar / in me / I never mention. / And somehow / Amazons / have escaped / your rapt / attention. / The nose / is strictly / Egypt / for your / information. / The heart / a cruel / white circle— /pure Bengali. / Here are the knees / you claim are yours— / devout Moroccans. / The breasts / to your surprise, / Gauguin’s Papeete. / Pale moon of belly— / Andalusian! / The hands— / Twin comedies / from Pago Pago. / The eyes— / bituminous / Tierra del Fuego. / Odd womb. / Embalmed. / Quintana Roo. (92-3)

After her repatriation to her home as a changed person, the poems in Cisneros’ next poetry collection, Loose Woman, focus more on Mexican and Chicano icons in an effort to challenge the stereotype of the passive, pure “Mexican” woman. In a more mature voice and from a more comfortable stance with her body, Cisneros expresses different aspects of what it means to be a “gendered” and “racialized”

44.. The shiny purple color with which Cisneros painted, or “Mexicanized,” her 1903 Victorian house in the historic King William district in San Antonio, Texas, created a two-year standoff with city authorities that received the attention of national media. In the 1997 the city’s Historic Design and Review Commission charged that the color was historically unfitting for the district, but Cisneros argued to the contrary: “The issue is bigger than my house. The issue is about historical inclusion […] Purple is historic to us. It only goes back a thousand years or so to the pyramids […] of the Aztecs.” In the end, Cisneros won the case. See Ellen McCracken, “Postmodern Ethnicity in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo,” Journal of American Studies Turkey (JAST) 12 (2000): 3-12; 4.

128 subject to challenge conventional notions on what its means to be a “Chicana.” In so doing, she oscillates in a bipolar movement between the normative Mexican cultural paradigms and her newly found peace in her body and writing. The titular poem of the collection, “Loose Woman,” expresses such defiant act of reinventing the self:

They say I’m a beast. / And feast on it. When all along / I thought what a woman was. / They say I’m a bitch. / Or Witch. I’ve claimed / the same and never winched. / […] Diamonds and pearls / tumble from my tongue. / Or toads and serpents. / Depending on the mood I’m in. / I like to itch I provoke. / The rustle of rumor / like crinoline. / I am the woman of myth and bullshit. / (True. I authored some of it.) / I built my little house of ill repute. / Brick by brick. Labored, / loved and masoned it. / By all accounts I am / a danger to society. / […] I strike terror among the men / I can’t be bothered what they think./ […] I’m a Bitch. Beast. Macha. / ¡Wáchale! / Ping! Ping! Ping! / I break things. (138-40)

Nevertheless, Cisneros does not limit her self to the poetic exploration of the Chicanas and only to those who live on the U.S. side of the border divide. Cisneros’s scope of overt political commitments extends spatial, temporal and national borders. In that sense, the titular story of Cisneros’ collection, Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories, recounts the tale of a Mexican woman, named Cleófilas, who initially experiences her home in Mexico in a rather oppressive patriarchal context. While the submissive Cleófilas crosses the border from Mexico to the U.S. to live with her abusive husband, Juan Pedro, she for the longest time does not challenge the pre- assigned space of home, but rather succumbs to it. As a woman with limited English in her new home in Seguín, Texas, she mostly spends time in the house – a space still restricted by patriarchal power and by the confinement of stereotypical gender roles, as personified by her two widow neighbors, Soledad (“solitude”) and Dolores (“pain”). Only when she once crosses the border, this time, from private to public space at a hospital, does Cleófilas start to envision different possibilities for herself and for her unborn child in her womb. With the help of two local Chicanas, Graciela (“grace”) and Felice (“felicity”), whom she gets to know at the hospital, Cleófilas finally summons the courage to leave her husband to repatriate to Mexico. Thus, stepping out of the confinement of home is also a means for woman to step out of the role of victim. The re-crossing of the arroyo, the bordering creek, in Felice’s truck becomes a climactic moment in the story, when Cleófilas starts to grasp the import of unrestrained female potential: “Everything about this woman, this Felice, amazed Cleófilas. The fact that she drove a pickup. A pickup, mind you,

129 but when Cleófilas asked if it was her husband’s, she said she didn’t have a husband. The pickup was hers. She herself had chosen it. She herself was paying for it” (55). When Cleófilas finally returns home, it is not a retroactive move to an idealized past. Instead, the possibility of “transgression” remains within her as she re-members her journey as a path towards consciousness. The transnational home-space in this story turns from a site of confinement and oppression to a source of creative potential and female-coalition as the protagonist learns to question conventional boundaries of gender and home-space to which she was long exposed in both Mexico and the U.S. via popular mediums such as romance novels, soap operas, telenovelas, and other popular legends such as the tale of la llorona – the weeping one of the rivers. Cisneros’ Caramelo, her magnum opus of 435 pages, is the fictionalized multi-generational saga of her own family. Crafted in a style that is sometimes anecdotal, digressive; often poetic and humorous, and constantly laden with popular icons, personages, sayings, songs, and myths from Mexican, Mexican-American, Anglo-American and indigenous cultures, the novel traces the roots and branches of the protagonist’s enormous family tree in both sides of the border divide, juxtaposing the tales of her ancestors, family members, and sometimes even strangers. As such, the book’s title refers to a caramel-colored hand-crafted traditional Mexican rebozo (“shawl”) – the leitmotif which symbolizes both the interconnectedness of all these stories and the author’s self-conscious act of weaving these individual snippets.

Covering almost a century, the eighty-six chapters—which resemble snapshots arranged in a family album—begin when the protagonist and narrator, Celaya Reyes (or “Lala”) takes one of the family’s annual trips from Chicago to Mexico. This trip on Route 66 is also Lala’s narrative journey from childhood to adolescence and from the present to the past. Upon arriving at Mexico, Cisneros’ novel departs from the normative representation of Chicano culture with its “connectedness” to Mexico; instead it explores the tensions and differences within the Mexican and Chicano cultures. While doing so the focus is not only on Lala, but her papá, and especially Soledad, her “Awful” Grandmother, a despotic matriarch whose provocative tales, or wounds, once revealed in the narrative become a revelation for Lala. By the book’s end, the different threads of these three lives are weaved into a tightly knot rebozo. By combining historical facts (even in footnotes) with their fictionalized versions, or

130 “healthy lies” (n.pag), the protagonist tries to capture a truth more authentic than no historical data could convey. After all, the novel opens with a bilingual locution, “Cuéntame algo, aunque sea una mentira. / Tell me a story, even if it’s a lie,” in an effort to highlight that the story of a people is often truer than “History.” As Lala attempts to recapture a past that is embedded in stories, she delves into the genealogy of her family – her parent’s marriage, her father’s efforts to build a business in the U.S, and other euphoric or traumatic historical factors that contributed to the growth of her extended family. What emerges from these anecdotes and memories are portraits of a horde of complex individuals struggling in intricate relationships on both sides of the border divide. In the end, little Lala transforms from a rebellious daughter of a Mexican clan into an insightful adult capable of surmounting her existential questions and rage through her creativity. As Lala learns the ability to write her own history she does determine a fate of her own. Cisneros’ ultimate concern to create such female characters in her poems, novels, and short stories is that those defiant characters, who do not succumb to the traditional and stereotypical role of the humble, pure, silent, submissive “Chicana,” offer an insight into the possible resistance strategies for all Latinas. With all that in mind, Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street is illustrative with its focus on the young Chicana protagonist whose gradual realization that she is meant to be a writer is what would help her discover an autonomous identity and rebuild a genuine connection to her own culture as she intellectually, emotionally, spiritually and sexually matures. In her Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (2000) Sonia Saldívar-Hull claims that Cisneros’ Mango Street is “a primer for the political New Mestiza consciousness advocated by Chicana theorists like Anzaldúa and Moraga” (101). Hence, a justification is in order so as to avoid anachronism, for the organizational structure of this study has instantiated Anzaldúa’s notion of the “new mestiza consciousness” in the previous chapter. The primary motive for this organizational choice is that while the world that Cisneros created in 1984 is purely fictive with no academic concerns, it is through the critical lens that is formulated in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) that the subversive narrative strategies and alternative thematic concerns of Cisneros’ fiction shall be analyzed.

131 3.2. The House on Mango Street

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.

—Henry James, The Art of the Novel (1962)

Not a flat. Not an apartment in back. Not a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty petunias. My books and my stories. My two shoes waiting beside the bed. Nobody to shake a stick at. Nobody’s garbage to pick up after.

Only a house quiet as snow, a space for my self to go, clean as paper before the poem.

—Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street (1984)

First published in 1984 by the University of Houston’s in

Texas, Mango Street comprises forty-four self-contained yet interrelated stories, or 5 literary vignettes, which range from two paragraphs to five pages in length. Narrated from the first person perspective of a little Chicana girl, named Esperanza Cordero, these lyrical sketches offer, on the one hand, an impressionistic insight into the communal life of a fictive Chicago barrio called Mango St. in the late 1960s. On the other hand, unfolding not in a chronologically memoir fashion but rather in a non- sequential series of fragmented snapshots, these elliptic sketches detail the impact of this poor inner-city ghetto and its heterogeneous inhabitants of Latin American and Mexican descent on Esperanza’s ephemeral journey from puberty into adolescence.

What the discrete stories of Mango Street reflect is, then, not the mimetic representation of the protagonist’s day-to-day reality within a coherent spatiotemporal context, but the performative process itself through which Esperanza comes to consciousness as a “colored” woman, circumscribed by the ideological forces that envelop not only her life but also the lives of those others in the barrio. From the first reviews onward, specifying a literary genre for the text has been much debated on whether the book should be considered as a novel or a collection of stories. At first glance, Mango Street appears to be a chapbook of poetic stories which revolve mostly around the plights of a wide array of lonely, abused, and disillusioned barrio women. Yet, this patchwork quality as stitched by the central

55.. After its initial publication, Mango Street was twice released by Arte Público in 1985 and in 1988 as a revised second edition. Here, subsequent references are from the more “accessible” 1991 Random House/Vintage edition. Page numbers are indicated parenthetically.

132 character is indeed what gives the ostensibly disparate snippets a novelistic unity, revolving around a single plot, general setting, recurrent motifs, themes and archetypal characters. Hence, as Maria Karafilis notes, “Cisneros forces the reader to do what

Esperanza must do – to make sense of these disjointed parts and fragments and construct them into a life, an experience, a narrative” (67). With these unifying textual and thematic aspects in mind, it seems tenable to regard and analyze the text as a novel or, better yet, a novella of 110 pages. Cisneros herself has called her poetically-charged sketches in Mango Street “lazy poems,” and compares the writing process of the book—which took almost seven years to complete—to knitting “a quilt by the light of a flashlight” (“Do You Know Me?” 79).6 She claims,

I wanted to write stories that were a cross between poetry and fiction. […] I wanted to write a collection which could be read at any random point without having any knowledge of what came before or after. Or, that could be read in a series to tell one big story. I wanted stories like poems, compact and lyrical and ending with a reverberation. […] In other words, for me each of the stories could’ve been developed into poems, but they were not poems. They were stories, albeit hovering in that grey area between two genres. (italics added; ibid. 78-9)

Akin to the stories Cisneros sketches in Mango Street, her protagonist hovers in many grey areas of her life or, in Renato Rosaldo’s words, in “a border zone peopled with multiple subjectivities and a plurality of languages and cultures” (“Fables” 85). Esperanza is an approximately twelve-year-old girl yet she is about to pass the brink of childhood into adolescence; she lives in an enclosed inner-city ghetto with the “Latino” cultural codes and behavioral patterns prevalent yet she has hints about the opportunities and probable threats that the outer-world poses; she is encircled by self- sacrificing grownup female models, who are epitomes of the Holy Virgin, yet her own peers display the bodacious traits of would-be Malinches; she perceives the barrio as a sanctuary hence its dwellers as an extended family yet she witnesses and experiences the violence perpetuated in that dilapidated neighborhood; she actually endorses the notion of family and loves her father yet the symbolic father (or( husbands, for that matter) are the custodians of the very social structure that subjugates women; she is cognizant from the onset that she must break loose from the barrio to embark on an “individual(istic)” journey for self-discovery yet she gradually becomes aware of her

66.. It is interesting to note that the verb “to knit” in Spanish is tejer (from the Latin texere) which has the same linguistic root as the Spanish word texto meaning “text” in English. (Rojas, 171)

133 “communitarian” obligation to come back, especially, for the women she will one day leave behind. Thus, Esperanza has to find some equilibrium between the welter of the dual forces which impel her to remain loyal to her culture, on the one hand, and on the other, those that prompt her to pursue an autonomous life outside the barrio. The only means to surmount the ambiguities that inform Esperanza’s life is inextricably related to her becoming the master of her (life)story during this toilsome trajectory of negotiating, remembering, and narrating her one-year-long ordeals in the barrio. Serving as the temporal framework of the stories, this single year covers Esperanza’s rite-of-passage period from innocence to knowledge as she discovers the double-bind of being a woman and a “Latina” at the fringes of the social fabric of “white” America which looms as a vague backdrop to her life. But, most of all, it is during this year that Esperanza learns to divulge herself through the creative act of writing amidst the Mango St. community. In the 1988 “Second Revised Edition” of the book the editors of the Arte Público Press remind that Mango Street is about

[…] the physiological and social development of a writer who struggles to derive emotional and creative sustenance where material and educational sources are absent. Her sensitive portrayal enchants us and reaffirms our belief that art and talent can survive, even under the most adverse conditions. (“Afterword” 103)

With this editorial remark and the above-mentioned thematic concerns in mind, the text very well fits into the literary category of the Bildungsroman, or its correspondent variant, the Künstlerroman – the portrayal of the development of an individual who, in the end, becomes an artist of some kind.7 Yet, since Mango Street complicates both the thematic and formal conventions of the Bildungsroman proper, a terse analysis of the salient traits of the genre is requisite to further expound on the alternative thematic concerns and subversive narrative techniques that Cisneros has deployed in re-fashioning a new 20th-century Künstlerroman which is germane to and inclusive of the “Latina” experience from the margins.

77.. Accordingly, Mango Street can be grouped with the ur-texts of “Chicano” coming-of-age novels such as José A. Villarreal’s Pocho (1959), Tomás Rivera’s ... y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971), and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972). Other important Chicano coming-of-age novels include Américo Parades’ George Washington Gomez (1939), Luis Perez’s El Coyote the Rebel (1947) and Ronaldo Hinojosa-Smith’s Klail City (1976). Modified autobiographical novels such as Ernesto Galarza’s Barrio Boy (1971), Oscar Zeta Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972) and Richard Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory (1981) also display the characteristics of the Bildungsroman and/or the Künstlerroman.

134 In her Daughters of Self Creation (1996) Chicana critic Annie O. Eysturoy provides a general framework to the Bildungsroman, claiming that this specific genre

[…] emerged within the particular social and intellectual context of eighteenth- century Germany and had traditionally been defined as the somewhat autobiographical novel of formation, portraying a young man’s development from innocence and ignorance to maturity and knowledge. (7-8)

Like most critics of the genre have done, Eysturoy takes Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s

Apprenticeship (1795) as the prototype of the genre, and goes on to claim that “[s]ociety becomes the locus for experience and to some extend the antagonist of the Bildungsroman. The protagonist has to measure his or her emerging self against the values and spirit of a particular social context” (6). The generic and thematic criteria that Eysturoy outlines mark the definitive origins of the Bildungsroman which are rooted in the Enlightenment ideals, social conservatism, and bourgeois mindset of the German context. Eysturoy’s account focuses on the notion of society as a battleground of experience which has always been a male prerogative. Yet, the paradoxical nature of the genre lies in the fact that while the primary motivation of the Bildungsroman is prompted by the inner restlessness and subversive dynamism of its young, white, heterosexual, male, and bourgeois “hero,” which, in the first place, propel him to take a personal flight for self-discovery, almost all European Bildungsromane conclude in a seemingly “positive” and didactic note – that is to say, in socialized stability with the male protagonist having achieved a coherent sense of unity and recognized his proper place and role in the world. In other words, posterior to his quest the matured protagonist, far from displaying a revolutionary resistance to the existing social order, accommodates harmoniously to the socio-culturally sanctioned norms of his society by way of reintegrating and conforming, thus, reproducing the dominant ideology that he has once repudiated. Such a semi-willing compromise, or surrender if you will, often culminates with the hero, now, as a “convinced citizen” getting married to a suitable spouse who would be the epitome of the bulk of establishment values.8 With all that in mind, the specific origins and ideals of the Bildungsroman have been subject to various debates on whether the genre could prevail across different

88.. See Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 5-17.

135 historical periods and cultural contexts, and be incorporated by other national literatures – especially, in the aftermath of the two World Wars and with the succeeding culmination of the intellectual climate of Postmodernism and Poststructuralism both of which have refused the possibility of attaining a self-contained and coherent, or unitary, selfhood. Influenced mostly by the critical position of French thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan, the main motive for this rebuttal of, or skepticism toward, “subject-centered” doctrines lies in the premise that all social-practices/-relations and meaning are linguistically produced and they are historically relative. Furthermore, with the academic prevalence of the deconstructive methodology in analyzing meaning and social-practices the two crucial concepts of “experience” and “(cultural) identity” in subjectivity-related issues have also been considered arbitrary, indeterminate and historically contingent. Thus, the mere claims to truth, (objective) knowledge and unitary selfhood, which are extracted from experiential praxes are too rendered unreliable, or at best naive, in that meaning is constantly (re)constituted by the (pre)existing mechanisms of signification through which can humans construe and interact with their environment.9 Nevertheless, the postmodern distrust of the “Humanist,” or universalizing, approaches to subjectivity have proven insightful — especially, in exposing the latent and manifest mechanisms of normalization, or marginalization, both of which have been embedded within the discursive practices of “Western Institutions” against the so-called deviants of all sorts. But, such a dismissal of the totalizing imprint of “history” and “discourse” has re-defined all the taken-for-granted identity categories as socially “constructed rather than self-evidently deduced from experience, since […] experience cannot be a source of objective knowledge” (Mohanty, “Epistemic Status” 42). In the process of undoing all the hitherto accepted accounts of experience and identity categories as discursively produced, the prevalent identity paradigms of race and gender have also been rendered arbitrary and fictive. Yet, for the historically subjugated groups in terms of ethnicity/“race,” gender, class, and sexual orientation, an identity politics, which is based on their shared experience of oppression, is still relevant (unfortunately) as a well-grounded political point of departure, as an incentive

99.. See Paula Moya, Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2002), 4-12.

136 for reactionary action, and as a material framework of reference in positioning themselves vis-à-vis ongoing social injustice. Accordingly, what is considered the classical Bildungsroman has often been deemed incapable of carrying out its “humanist” ideals in a world of chaos and (dis)illusionment where identities and experiential realities are still evaluated from a dyadic limited and limiting position; that is, either from the essentialist lens, which reflects “the identity common to members of a social group” as “stable and more or less unchanging, since it is based on the experiences they share” (Mohanty, ibid.), or from the postmodernist lens with its dual rejection of firstly, all identity-based (or subject-centered) knowledges and experiential initiatives as mere constructs, and secondly the possibility of structuring an autonomous and non-fragmented identity. Yet, the age-old notion of the bildung (which translates as the formation, education, or development of an individual within a linear movement toward wholeness), far from disappearing altogether, has gone under a process of transformation and revision attuned to the changing zeitgeist of the last two centuries. From this position, the myriad of twentieth-century Bildungsromane written, especially, by “racially” marginalized female voices of the United States, is a sound testimony that the genre has not been discarded at all.10 Bonnie Braendlin asserts that the change in the Bildungsroman manifests itself in the plight of the marginal(ized) subject who struggles to construct an identity as “defined […] not by the patriarchal Anglo-American power structure” (75). Moreover, in her “: Chicana Rites- of-Passage” (1984) Lynette Seator points to the two indispensable determinants of “gender” and “sexuality” which add a whole new dimension to Chicana writers’ strategies of modifying the Bildungsroman in producing what might be called a distinctively Chicana coming-of-age narrative. “The rites-of-passage of a Mexican-

110.0. Seminal Bildungsromane by “women-of-color” include Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), ’s Brown Girl, Brownston es (1959), Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), Nicholasa Mohr’s Nilda (1973), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1975), Nicholasa Mohr’s El Bronx Remembered (1975), Isabella Trambley’s Victuum (1976), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1983), Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984), Estella Portillo Trambley’s Trini (1986), ’s The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), Judith Ortiz Cofer’s Silent Dancing (1989), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), ’s When I was Puerto Rican (1993), Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street (1993) and Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus (1995). It is crucial to note that these authors represent only a small fragment of a much larger group of writers who have not abandoned, yet modified the traditional Bildungsroman.

137 American woman [and, one might add other U.S. Latinas],” Seator states, “will not fit the formula of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman,”

[…] nor will her rites be consonant with stereotypic sex roles in Chicano coming-of-age novels. As long as the achievement of an identity through a temporal process in which the child struggles to adulthood is male-identified, a discussion of the struggle toward an autonomous female identity will be viewed as feminist; and within the closely held values of ethnicity “feminism” is likely to be equated with subversion. (23)

Thus situated, Cisneros’ Mango Street is significant in that the proper development, or the bildung, of the protagonist is inextricably related to her ability in establishing a new “Chicana” identity politics which is neither limited by an ethnocentrically essentializing mindset nor deemed impossible to be achieved by the Euro-American postmodernist precepts. In order to steer away from such a polarized impasse and to articulate new amalgam of subjectivity, Cisneros both reformulates the traditional notion of the bildung and revises the formal aspects of the classical coming-of-age narrative to suit her alternative thematic concerns and ideological critiques. In structural terms, in lieu of following a chronological thread of development toward her protagonist’s unity, Cisneros subverts the narrative linearity of the Bildungsroman by deploying a series of 44 cyclic (or non-linear) and multi-voiced vignettes each of which can stand on its own as a short story, or some of which can be regarded as poetry written in prose form. Unlike the chapters in conventional coming-of-age novels—which tend to move toward a closure with the matured protagonist having achieved a coherent selfhood—when the fragmented sketches of Mango Street come into full circle with the final vignette, the last story of the narrative cycle does not quite exactly reunite with the opening story; though, it seems to do so. Nor is the narrative cycle simply sealed off, but rather the last story spirally invokes a new cycle, indeed an open-ended one, that will extend far into the future. As shall be analyzed in what follows, with such an ideologically-laden authorial strategy Cisneros avoids her protagonist to arrive at a fixed social location and to display a unitary, or essentialist, sense of selfhood. Instead, Esperanza in the end becomes a subject-in-flux who, throughout her story, has been furnished with the “new mestiza consciousness” in adopting into what the future circumstances (on an extra-textual plane) will unfold before her. Thus, when the reading process is over

138 the plausibly felicitous ramifications of such a (dis)closure for the emotionally developed and multi-faceted Esperanza are left unto the reader of the text. In linguistic terms, the first person narrative voice of the vignettes is mainly in the standard which is at times saturated or, in Frances Aparicio’s term, “tropicalized,” with a handful of colloquial locutions in the barrio Spanglish.11 From the onset to the ending, this narrative voice is always attuned with the patently infantile and ostensibly unsophisticated idiom of Esperanza’s age stratum. As such, “Cisneros plays off a tension between the simplicity of the young narrator’s point of view and the somber realities she represents [such[ as psychological harassment, rape, incest, pedophilia, wife-/daughter-battering, (infant) death, terminal illness, cultural bigotry, racial xenophobia, and class depravity, etc.]”] (Quintana, Home Girls 57). Accordingly, to delimit Esperanza’s voice merely as simplistic, or childish, would be misleading; for, it is also saturated with an intensely figurative and poetical diction replete with metaphors, similes, internal rhymes, other rhetorical devices, and multi- layered connotations, especially, for the biculturally and bilingually informed reader.12 For instance, the second epigraph to this section, the penultimate vignette titled “A House of My Own,” and the following excerpt from the 3rrdd vignette, titled “Hairs,” are nothing but poetry enveloped in prose form:

[…] my mother’s hair, my mother’s hair, like little rosettes, like candy circles all curly and pretty because she pinned it in pincurls all day, sweet to put your nose into when she is holding you, holding you and you feel safe, is the warm smell of bread before you bake it, is the smell when she makes room for you on her side of the bed still warm with her skin, and you sleep near her, the rain outside falling and Papa snoring. The snoring, the rain and Mama’s hair that smells like bread. (“Hairs” 6-7)

In her bold experimentation with form, content and language, Cisneros thus blurs the boundaries between the established genres and—in the epigraphic words of Henry

James quoted here—pierces her own unique window in the big “House of Fiction.” In so doing, the author allows Esperanza to render, from multiple perspectives and with different sensibilities and sensitivities, a more comprehensive portrayal of the ordeals of the heterogeneous people of Mango St. than a single genre might have addressed.

111.1. See Frances R. Aparicio, “On Sub-versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English,” American Literature 66.4 (1994): 795-801. 112.2. Against those critics who have tended to identify Esperanza only as a childlike narrator, Cisneros approaches the matter from a different perspective in a 1992 interview; she claims:

If you take Mango Street and translate it, it’s Spanish. The syntax, the sensibility, the diminutives, the way of looking at inanimate objects—that’s not a child’s voice as is sometimes said. That’s Spanish! I didn’t notice that when I was writing it. (Jussawalla & Dasenbrock, eds., Interviews 289)

139 Yet, despite the entire narrative’s ostensibly single focalizer, who is able to attest to her own feelings and thoughts as well as those of other characters mostly without adult introspection, Cisneros at times deploys a third-person free indirect discourse. By interjecting this vaguely detached voice of a more mature interlocutor, who is equipped with a complex lexicon and a more developed insight than the protagonist’s juvenile vision, Cisneros both complicates the narrator’s ambiguous insider/outsider location to her subject matter and foreshadows that the entire text is but a retrospective fictional account of one emotionally and intellectually matured Esperanza Cordero with the lived-experiences of Mango St. left behind yet still within her. By way of juxtaposing such a cyclical pattern of departures and returns in the narrative voice, Cisneros ultimately defies the monolithic linearity of the narrative voice of classical coming-of-age novels in an additional effort to attribute a polyphonic character to her novella. Mango Street is, above all, dedicated bilingually “A las Mujeres / To the Women” who have been muted in the written and oral Chicano literary tradition and entirely excluded from U.S. mainstream (print) culture. For instance, in the 16tthh vignette, titled “And Some More,” Esperanza, her little sister Nenny, and two other girls, Rachel and Lucy, chatter on the names that Eskimos allot for snow and the various names of cloud types. The four girls’ childish bickering, which starts with Esperanza saying “The Eskimos got thirty different names for snow […] I read it in a book” (35), soon turns into a cruel name-calling contest. As in all stories, Esperanza controls this particular story—which is written in the form of a dialogue with no quotation marks—by reporting it. Yet, Esperanza’s voice is at times lost, or feebly heard, amidst the cacophonous voices of the other girls. More crucially, in the intervals between these insulting verbal exchanges, some of which become too difficult to identify, a further unidentifiable voice thrusts itself (or herself) into the girls’ conversation. At each interval this intrusive voice enumerates a few Latin@ (nick)names, and at the end of the story the sum of this name-index reaches up to over fifty different categorical entries. At the crescendo of their noisy calumny, though, callow Esperanza realizes that “That’s stupid” (36), and the outsider voice once again barges in, demanding: “Who’s stupid?” (36) The answer to this query, which is the last sentence of the story, is also the last entry in the series of the Latin@ name-index, now including, “Rachel, Lucy, Esperanza, and Nenny” (36).

140 This example is illustrative of the semantic and ideological uses of Cisneros’ narrative ploy in merging the voices of the juvenile and mature Esperanza(s). On a semantic plane, while little Esperanza cannot initially help but persist to prove an upper hand to Rachel and Lucy in their verbal warfare, she soon reveals that she is about to trespass the threshold from puberty to adolescence, thus, abruptly ceases their childish scrap. Although the world of books could supply little Esperanza with the sufficient information, say, on the thirty Eskimo names for snow, the unidentifiable voice represents the wry wisdom that the lived-experiences of the barrio could reveal more about the real life on Mango St. As such, the message enunciated by the matured voice further clarifies the point that the heterogeneous Latino people of the barrio are much more colorful than one could imagine or find in books, especially, much more chatoyant than the media-boosted moniker Hispanic, or the hyphenated term Mexican-American, might gloss over. Thus, the rivalrous voice of the “individual” Esperanza transforms at this juncture into an all-inclusive perspective, highlighting that the major thrust of the book’s ideological message rests, in Ellen McCracken’s terms, on a “community-oriented introspection” rather than an isolationist escapism for individualistic acquisitiveness.13 In other stories such as the 15tthh one, titled “Darius & the Clouds,” the above mentioned free indirect discourse and the intertextual quality of the disparate vignettes are more readily detected, especially, when juxtaposed with the minutiae extracted from the 19tthh story, titled “Chanclas.” The vignette, “Darius & the Clouds” starts as follows:

You can never have too much sky. You can fall asleep and wake up drunk on sky, and sky can keep you safe when you are sad. Here there is too much sadness and not enough sky. Butterflies are few and so are flowers and most things that are beautiful. Still, we take what we can get and make the most of it. (33)

Here, the poetically-charged and insightful voice of this opening paragraph is clearly laden with a community-oriented vision (“we take what we can get”); in the next paragraph, though, the narrative voice abruptly oscillates back to Esperanza’s simple and childish lexicon as narrated in the following terms:

113.3. See Ellen McCracken, “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street: Community-Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence,” in Breaking Boundaries, ed. by Asuncion Horno-Delgado, et al., (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts P, 1989), 62-71, 64.

141 Darius, who doesn’t like school, who is sometimes stupid and mostly a fool, said something wise today, though most days he says nothing. Darius, who chases girls with firecrackers or a stick that touched a rat and thinks he’s tough, today pointed up because the world was full of clouds, the kind like pillows. (33)

On the other hand, the setting for the story “Chanclas,” is the baptism party of Esperanza’s cousin in a church basement where “All of a sudden, Mama is sick” (47). Here, Esperanza does not figure out why her mother abruptly feels dizzy, and thinks rather naively that the reason is that she has eaten “Too many tamales” (47). It is probable that Esperanza still cannot savvy intoxication even after “Uncle Nacho says too many this and tilts his thumb to his lips” (47). Hence, over the recurring theme of “drunkenness” in these two disparate but thematically interrelated stories, Cisneros creates an obvious insularity between the child-narrator of this particular vignette, who has no clue about the intoxicating effects of alcohol, and the more mature voice of an adult looking back on past experiences (in the story “Darius & the Clouds”) who knows, or has personally experienced, what it means to “wake up drunk on sky” (33). Among others, a final but hilarious example on Esperanza’s naiveté which humors the “all-knowing” reader is the 27tthh vignette, titled “The Earl of Tennessee.” In this story, rumor has it that this jukebox repairman named “Earl is married and has a wife somewhere” (71). Some people, including little Esperanza, claim that they have occasionally seen Earl’s wife, but as Esperanza informs, they “never agree on what she looks like” (71). Esperanza’s mother describes the lady as “a skinny thing, blond and pale like salamanders that have never seen the sun” (71); the boys say that she is “a tall red-headed lady who wears tight pink pants and green glasses” (71). Despite all their dissent, people agree on one thing; that is, they have always observed Earl and this woman “walk fast into the apartment, lock the door behind them and never stay long” (71). Confused by people’s disagreement on the aspect of this particular wife, naïve Esperanza does not infer (but the reader surely does) that, whether Earl has a wife somewhere or not, he certainly receives different hookers in his house. Mango Street is replete with such examples as to the merging of the two disparate voices; one, indicating little Esperanza’s naiveté and the other, displaying the wisdom of a mature Esperanza. If the entire text had been narrated only through the eyes of an experienced narrator and in simple past tense, it would be impossible, or rather ostentatious, to trace the young protagonist’s day-to-day growing awareness

142 and the impressionistic reflections of her milieu with the effect of a lived-reality. On the other hand, if the narrative voice had been limited only to Esperanza’s childish idiom, the above mentioned ideological thrust of the book would be forfeited. In the final analysis, such a merging of the two narrative voices by no means creates a discrepancy; on the contrary, this harmonious polyphonic narrative becomes inclusive not only of the juvenile and mature Esperanza(s), but of many other silenced denizens of Mango St. As such, a further narrative analysis of the vignettes such as “A Smart Cookie” and “Marin” among many others, reveals that in an effort to save the lived-experiences of the barrio from oblivion Esperanza endeavors, at her best, to embrace and give voice to those muted barrio dwellers – even to those who cannot speak English such as the illegal immigrant boy in the story, “Geraldo No Last Name,” who is killed in a hit-and-run accident, or the newly-immigrated Mamacita character of the aptly titled story, “No Speak English.” Nevertheless, the major ideological thrust of the book is by all means prompted by Esperanza’s quest for a voice of her own, hence, an autonomous identity which is to be shaped within but also as a resistive measure against the pre- established order of the patriarchal barrio community. Hence, while Mango Street can be read, in Ramon Saldívar’s words, as a “feminist plea […] for private self- creation” (Chicano Narrative 183), the book never loses touch with its “community” oriented perspective through which the crucial concept of cultural heritage takes on different overtones as the story unfolds. In this vein, the book opens with the titular story in which the Cordero family is portrayed as having eventually settled in a house of their own. Yet, Esperanza’s earliest memory of herself and her family has been marked by a constant feeling of displacement and thus “unbelonging.”

We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. Each time it seemed there’d be one more of us. By the time we got to Mango Street we were six—Mama, Papa, Carlos, Kiki, my sister Nenny and me. (3)

At first glance, the retrospective voice of this opening paragraph gives the impression that an ostensibly detached Esperanza is ruminating upon her formative years from a “safe” temporal distance and through an extended flashback. Yet, the next paragraph

143 abruptly switches this past tense narration to a mere simple present tense, hurling the reader into the narrative at once:

The house on Mango Street is ours, and we don’t have to pay rent to anybody, or share the yard with the people downstairs, or be careful not to make too much noise, and there isn’t a landlord banging on the ceiling with a broom. (3)

The sudden shift in the tense of the narrative voice creates an initial ambiguity with regard to both the narrator’s insider/outsider location and her temporal aloofness in relation to her subject matter. Thus the reader is perplexed, or rather becomes more eager, to find out that the upcoming story is not a classical coming-of-age story, where a matured first-person narrator retrospectively reveals the story of his or her bildung process. On the contrary, Esperanza is in the very midst of the action as she gradually divulges the people, places and events that are shaping her consciousness; and the turn of events start with their purchase of a house in a barrio called Mango St. On a thematic plane, such a yearning to own a house (and not a rented flat) is synonymous with pursuing the uniform ideology of the “American Dream” with its tantalizing carrot of upward social mobility. After a long period of instability the Corderos, too, seem to have achieved a certain degree of stability, domestic privacy and financial relief; “But even so,” as Esperanza immediately adds, “it’s not the house we’d thought we’d get” (3). What the idealized dream-house has formerly signified for the itinerant Corderos is a house “that would be ours for always so we wouldn’t have to move each year” (4). Yet, the way Esperanza subsequently depicts the house (not my or our house) indicates that the house on Mango St. by no means stands for a delayed state of gratification or a sign of stability; for, she renders the new house not by what it embodies but by what it lacks:

But the house on Mango Street is not the way they told it at all. It’s small and red with tight steps in front and windows so small you’d think they were holding their breath. Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is so swollen you have to push hard to get in. There is no front yard, only four little elms the city planted by the curb. Out back is a small garage for the car we don’t own yet and a small yard that looks smaller between the two buildings on either side. There are stairs in our house, but they’re ordinary hallway stairs, and the house has only one washroom. Everybody has to share a bedroom—Mama and Papa, Carlos and Kiki, me and Nenny. (4)

Since this suffocating and claustrophobic house is the first setting, or the initial stage, for Esperanza’s budding consciousness, it becomes patent that from the outset the

144 protagonist’s (life)story will be marked by a dialectical tension between the feelings of belonging vs. unbelonging which must be surmounted in establishing a salubrious self-image and developing a critical acumen toward her milieu. Therefore, it is not unexpected that Esperanza cannot feel a cordial attachment to their new house on Mango St.; for, it is only moderately better than the formerly rented tenements. To Esperanza, the physical condition of the new house is a reminder that to own a house is not always congruent with owning a “real” house with “real stairs […] inside like the houses on T.V.,” like the one “Papa talked about when he held the lottery ticket and […] Mama dreamed up in the stories she told us before we went to bed” (4). As noted in the earlier sections of this study, since the year 1848 “Chicano” history has been marked by a divided and disorienting vision since it attests to a pro- longed continuum of literal or figurative migrations and constant cultural relocations.

The familial history of the Corderos—like many literary predecessors, i.e., the Rubios of Pocho (1959), or the Márezes of Bless Me, Ultima (1972)—is but a small fragment of this greater spatiotemporal ambivalence; that is, to be torn between the feelings of being-in-home vs. being-in-exile, be they lead a pastoral life on the plains of the U.S.-Southwest, or remain fixed in an inner-city barrio. The concept of unheimlich which Homi Bhabha explicates in his “The World and the Home” (1992) corresponds to such dialectical relationship between the feelings of ‘belonging vs. unbelonging’ also embedded in Esperanza’s developing consciousness. Taking his cue from Freud, Bhabha asserts that to be “unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the ‘unhomely’ be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres” (141). Thus situated, Bhabha’s definition of “unhomeliness” precisely accounts for Esperanza’s sense of estrangement toward the house on Mango St.; for, although the Corderos now own a physical edifice to call “home,” Esperanza cannot help but continue to feel an acute sense of disillusionment as well as alienation. As the title of the book signals, the two major determinants in the course of Esperanza’s bildung, viz. Corderos’ private house and the public domain of Mango St., are both going to play a significant role. Hence, Esperanza’s residual desire to find a satisfactory “real” home serves as an extended metaphor for another kind of search which is that of an autonomous self-conception and an authentic relationship to that outer space around her. In order to surmount what Bhabha calls the “unhomely

145 moment,” which “relates the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history to the wider disjunctions of political existence” (ibid. 144), Esperanza has to interact with the other barrio-dwellers and incorporate their lives into her story during her coming-of-age period. Hence, unlike the conventional Bildungroman protagonists, who have embarked on an educational journey outside the perimeters of the town(life), Esperanza must experience the barrio as a micro-universe of shattered dreams, so as to achieve the desired status of fulfillment both on the personal (private) and communal (public) planes. It is at that moment when Esperanza once again resorts to past tense and relates a pre-Mango-Street incident to link her conundrum in “the wider disjunctions of political existence” in Bhabha’s words. The seeds of Esperanza’s earliest desire for the ideal house, or in other words, her will to distance herself from the current house on Mango St., were sown in that deleterious memory of an “unhomely moment”:

Once when we were living on Loomis, a nun from my school passed by and saw me playing out front. The laundromat downstairs had been boarded up because it had been robbed two days before and the owner had painted on the wood YES WE’RE OPEN so as not to lose business. Where do you live? she asked. There, I said pointing up to the third floor. You live there? There. I had to look to where she pointed—the third floor, the paint peeling, wooden bars Papa had nailed on the windows so we wouldn’t fall out. You live there? The way she said it made me feel like nothing. There. I lived there. I nodded. (4-5)

This anecdote instances that Esperanza’s depiction of their previous flat on Loomis St. in terms of economic depravity is more “a metonymical description and presentation of self” than a mere physical edifice to dwell in (Olivares, 1985: 236). In defining the “unhomely moment” Bhabha further adds that “the intimate recesses of the domestic space become the sites for history’s most intricate invasions” (loc. cit.). Thus, the anonymous ‘Nun’ character of this opening story (and also of the 43rrdd story, “A Rice Sandwich”) by and to whom the protagonist is twice forced to divulge the sign of her poverty and humiliation, becomes an incentive for Esperanza’s desire to find a satisfactory house of her own. Epitomizing the authority of the Catholic Church as an ideological state apparatus in Althusserian terms, the nun represents the collective voice, or the standards and dictates, of the ruling class (Saldívar-Hull, loc. cit. 88). It is by confronting with this representative and repressive voice of the status quo that

146 Esperanza’s self-conception is devastatingly invaded, ultimately inducing her to “feel like nothing.” Burdened with an acute sense of shame and degradation, Esperanza hence realizes that she needs to find another house and reinvent another self:

I knew then I had to have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it. The house on Mango Street isn’t it. For the time being, Mama says. Temporary, says Papa. But I know how those things go. (5)

Now cognizant of her parents’ inability to provide the ideal house she desires, naïve but sentient Esperanza (“I know how those things go”) starts to differentiate between the broken promises of her family and her own vision of reality. As such she alters the collective tone of the initial sentences (We didn’t always live …before that we lived … by the time we got to Mango …) to a self-reliant first-person perspective (“I knew then … I could point to … I know how …). While Esperanza distances herself from the context of her parents with such a mantra-like ending, the reader is also allured into the domestic sphere of the barrio to interact with other barrio-dwellers. “Until then,” Esperanza says, “I am a red balloon, a balloon tied to an anchor” (9). rrdd The anchor metaphor in the 3 vignette, titled “Boys & Girls,” represents the ethos of female silence, or the tradition male-dependency, induced both by the intense exigencies of class depravity and also by the set of societal values of the patriarchal Latino culture which is endemic to the entire Mango St. community. In her juvenile vision, Esperanza is aware of the well-defined gendered roles of her community; regarding her younger brothers in a language of oppositions, she says: “The boys and girls live in separate worlds. The boys in their universe and we in ours” (8). Yet, such normative codes extend spatial and temporal as well as national boundaries. For instance, in the 7tthh vignette, titled “Laughter,” Esperanza states that while hanging out with Nenny, Rachel and Lucy, she has come across with “a house that looked, in my mind, like houses I had seen in Mexico” (17). Esperanza cannot precisely define why she, on a subliminal level, has instantly likened that certain house to those houses in Mexico, since “[t]here was nothing about the house that looked exactly like the houses I remembered” (17-18). But when she assuredly concludes, “it seemed to feel right” (18), even her little sister, Nenny, agrees with her: “Yes, that’s Mexico all right (18). Thus, it becomes obvious that the houses on each side of the U.S.-Mexican border share common attributes represented not by what they look like but by what

147 they hold inside. In brief, to the Cordero girls the houses in both countries are confining in that they are the very incubators of the ethos of female silence and male- dependency against which Esperanza must struggle. Esperanza’s connection to Mexico and to her repressive cultural heritage further clarifies as she delves into the meaning of her name with the 4tthh story, “My Name.” In this story, her budding awareness initially prompts her to question the multi-layered connotations of her own name. Through her bilingual and bicultural filter Esperanza provides a terse etymology of her name: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting” (10). Suffice it here to note that a name is the foremost identifier of an individual as it often contains within it various ethnocultural signifiers. Born in the U.S. with a foreign name, Esperanza feels impelled to focus on the (am)bivalence of her name as it registers multiple layers of meaning in both English and Spanish; for, while the Spanish noun esperanza literally translates to “hope” in English, the word has its root in the Spanish verb esperar which also means “to wait” or “to expect.” Although the noun form, esperanza, does not exactly offer the latter meanings, the verb esperar denotes waiting in the sense of a “waiting room” in a bus terminal (i.e., “sala de espera”).) Soon this onomastic analysis turns into an ethno-cultural critique as Esperanza meditates on the matriarchal roots of her name to clarify how her name also associates with the feeling of “sadness” she elicits while listening to “the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings, when he is shaving, songs like sobbing” (10):

It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse—which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female—but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong. (10)

The personal story of Esperanza’s great-grandmother, “a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry” until “my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off […] as if she were a fancy chandelier” (11), functions as a caveat against a destiny that might be Esperanza’s. The story goes on: “She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (11). The great-grandmother’s legacy is embedded within the age-old Mexican culture which has long been consolidated by a male-dominated ideology, proverbially dictating that

148 “La mujer en sus que haceres, para eso son las mujeres” or “Las palabras son hembras; los hechos son hombres.”14 Keenly aware of this prolonged heritage of immobility and confinement, which extends national and temporal borders, Esperanza ruminates: “I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window” (11). Esperanza’s will to defy the predestined image of a passive Esperanza is an early indication that she does have the potential to be the “hope” of transition, a promising voice for new future possibilities unbounded by cultural dictates. Yet, her yearning to reject the oppressive set of patriarchal conventions, which had formerly prevented the great-grandmother from being “all the things she wanted to be” (11), does not signal a total rejection of her namesake and the whole baggage of cultural heritage represented by her; for, at the same time little Esperanza has to fight another battle in another front: “At school they say my name funny if the were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver” (11). Immersed in a profound sense of alienation and abjection at school, which acts as a micro-replica of the U.S. mainstream culture, Esperanza’s celebration of her natal language as the determinant of her ethno-cultural background entails an act of prioritization, or preservation, of her Mexican heritage. Moreover, the symbolic implication of her surname, Cordero, which means “lamb” (of God), merits analysis, since it is another inherited aspect of her culture via her father’s lineage. According to Julian Olivares, Esperanza’s surname operates in an ironic manner because she refuses to sacrifice her gender to patriarchic society while it does serve as a sacrificial symbol by which the individual speaks and acts for the community (“Entering” 213). Yet, that filial heritage, which has long been immersed in patriarchal codes, still needs to be written anew. Consequently, Esperanza aspires “to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. something like Zeze the X will do” (11). Esperanza’s longing for a more defiant name is metonymical to determining an autonomous identity independent of both patriarchal and ethnocentric ideologies. Her preference for the name “Zeze the X,” amongst a horde of suitable alternatives, either in English or Spanish, indicates an

114.4. These two proverbs translate as “A woman’s place is in the home” and “Words are female; deeds are male.” See Joseph Raymond, “Mexican Proverbs,” Western Folklore, 12:4 (1953): 249-56.

149 audacious rejection of a predetermined place within the existing social constraints of both cultures; for, neither her own family nor the dominant white culture would prescribe such an odd name. The name “Zeze the X” is by no means associated with the generations of Mexican women and by extension Chicanas and other U.S. Latinas, who have been debilitated with their anger pacified as the world passes by while they wait by the window. Nor can it contain any innate stigma of ethnic invisibility whatsoever imposed from above by the white culture.15 By claiming such a culturally and sexually unbounded self-conception (epitomized by the letter “X”) Esperanza envisions for herself a state of tabula rasa which would be replenished again on her own terms. Yet, before Esperanza attains both the new house and the name she desires, she must venture into the lives of the barrio people. In most stories Esperanza renders the barrio in positive terms. In effect, she is not against the barrio per se, but the patriarchal mindset with which it is governed.16 As such, in the 12tthh vignette, titled “Those Who Don’t,” Esperanza understands that she cannot entirely renounce Mango St. so as to provide a basis for her gender critique. She rather attests to her utmost attachment to the barrio when it comes to the issue of “racial”/ethnic solidarity for (cultural) survival. She says: “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with shiny knives” (28). In this brief vignette, the dominant culture’s stigmatizing of all Latinos as potential gang members is subverted by a dialectical vision of ‘inside(rs) vs. outside(rs)’. Esperanza considers all those ignorant outsiders “stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake” (28); and instead she provides a collective portrait of her own people she knows from the inside:

But we aren’t afraid. We know the guy with the crooked eye is Davey the Baby’s brother, and the tall one next to him in the straw brim, that’s Rosa’s Eddie V., and the big one that looks like a dumb grown man, he’s Fat Boy, though he’s not fat anymore nor a boy. (28)

115.5. In a 1996 interview with Martha Satz, Cisneros ruminates on the name “Zeze the X” as follows:

ZeeZee the X came from my own love affair with the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I loved the X in Malcolm X and the idea of his choosing that as a name. I am and always have been enamored with exotic names that begin with letters of the alphabet like X or Y or Z, those strange letters. […] And for Esperanza it’s so nice to have a name with Z in it because it lends a sense of flair. There’s a zest to it. It sounds exotic and wild. So it’s not just X. There’s wildness to Z. (“Returning to One’s Home” 171) 16. In the Rodriguez-Aranda interview Cisneros says:

None of us wants to abandon our culture. We’re very Mexican, we’re all Chicanas. Part of being Mexican is that love and affinity we have for our cultura. We’re family centered, and that family

extends to the whole Raza. We don’t want to be exiled from our people. (66)

150 In her childish but quasi-ethnographic version of Mango St. Esperanza thus refutes all those stereotypical biases about the working-class Latinos and the living spaces they are forcefully confined to live in. Moreover, while this story clearly reveals the “racial” identity of the barrio, it also attests to an underlying implication about the territorial conflicts between different people of color who have shared a prolonged history of racial subjugation and economic exploitation, albeit segregated in differently “colored” ghettos of Chicago; Esperanza says, “All brown all around, we are safe. But watch us drive into a neighborhood of another color and our knees go shakity-shake and our car windows get rolled up tight and our eyes look straight” (28). As in most stories, the visual and thematic economy of this particular vignette does not permit Esperanza to delve below the surface, for instance, into the inner life of a “neighborhood of another color”; it is vague whether or not she has that kind of experience or information. Yet, the element of Esperanza’s and her people’s obvious fear of those other people-of-color is still present in the text. With these few sentences the vignette poses a rigorous, albeit unuttered, critique against the status quo with all its artificial real-estate policies in keeping different “racial” worlds apart, and fueling that reciprocal fear to prevent different people of color to build a unified front (on the basis of economic terms) against the System. As Esperanza ends the vignette, simply by saying, “Yeah. That is how it goes and goes (28),” she insinuates this continuous cycle of racial segregation imposed from above by the “white” policy makers. tthh Nevertheless, the 8 vignette, “Gil’s Furniture Bought & Sold,” is a testimony that Mango St. can also be a safe haven for the socially outcast irrespective of skin color. Hence, an old enigmatic “black” man called Gil might very well be embraced as an indispensable part of the barrio with his second-hand furniture shop where the Corderos “bought a used refrigerator” (19). Therefore, what the individual stories of Mango Street attest, in Ramon Saldívar words, is “the crucial roles of racial and material as well as ideological conditions of oppression,” while they do record “the enormously complex process of the construction of the gendered subject” (loc. cit. 181). The complexity that Saldívar utters arises from the fact that Esperanza and other Latinas of Mango St. are triply oppressed by the crisscrossing vectors of racism, capitalism, and sexism. Esperanza’s confused feelings for the barrio become more complicated in her encounters, especially, with the women of the barrio, since

151 she almost never delves into the minds or feelings of the barrio men. Because, while providing a tutelary asylum for its dwellers, it is this very barrio—with all its normative dictates, well-defined gender roles and economic shortfalls—which cripples Latinas deterring them to make the best of what they have got. Ruminating on her own wasted potential Esperanza’s mother, whose name is never mentioned in the book, says: “I could’ve been somebody, you know?” (90). It is with this bitter confession of Mrs. Cordero’s that the 36tthh story, “A Smart Cookie,” opens to draw attention on the constrictive extents of internalized self-contempt, imposed from above by the institutionalized forms of oppression that figure the poor and non-white incapable of realizing their real prospects. Esperanza reveals that her mother “has lived in this city her whole life. She can speak two languages. She can sing an opera. She knows how to fix a T.V.” (90); but ironically, Mrs. Cordero “doesn’t know which subway train to take to get downtown” without Esperanza holding “her hand very tight while we wait for the right train to arrive” (90). Despite all her versatility and her figurative role as a shelter for Esperanza (as depicted in the lyrical vignette, “Hairs”), Mrs. Cordero cannot easily venture outside the perimeters of the barrio on her own. She associates that immobility with her own childhood trauma prompted initially by a profound feeling of shame and further consolidated after she has engaged only to her home(life) in marriage. To Esperanza she divulges her own story: “Shame is a bad thing, you know. It keeps you down. You want to know why I quit school? Because I didn’t have nice clothes. No clothes, but I had brains” (91). As this passage illustrates, the infantile feeling of inadequacy have extensive ramifications from which Mrs. Cordero tries to prevent her daughter. But, when the undereducated Mrs. Cordero wants to warn her daughter, she simply does not use a “high” language like Adrianne Rich’s such as “A mother’s victimization does not merely humiliate her, it mutilates the daughter who watches her for clues as to what it means to be a woman. […] The mother’s self-hatred and low expectations are the binding-rags for the psyche of the daughter” (Of Woman Born 243). Instead, with a plain word of advice Mrs. Cordero says: “Esperanza, you go to school. Study hard […] Got to take care all your own” (91). The message is obvious; that is, never to give up education for a “smart” way out (read ‘marriage’), so that Esperanza may not wind up with the ruefulness her mother still maintains.

152 But before having invested with such awareness in determining her own path for freedom, Esperanza must further interact with the other barrio Latinas; for, each encounter will be marked as a different rite-of-passage in the course of her bildung. And yet, limited by the only two accessible female role models, viz. the “good” woman vs. the “bad” woman, it is going to be a restricting and restricted route for Esperanza to envision for herself an alternative model of subjectivity which is neither essentially good nor bad, but an amalgam of both. Hence, while few stories offer an insight into Esperanza’s filial background, most of the vignettes reserve a vast niche for the plights of the panoply of silenced Latinas (more than two dozens) who will, in one way or another, help her transcend this duality. As such, from the fifth story onward the text turns almost into a virtual gallery of disillusioned barrio Latinas who are constantly maimed physically and spiritually by overprotective fathers, locked indoors by jealous husbands, or abandoned again by them to take care of their unruly kids. The closer Esperanza will relate with the barrio—not only as an indispensable source of knowledge, security and support, but also as an incubator of various social traumas—the clearer it will become what it takes to actualize the “real me, the one nobody sees” (“My Name” 11), as she calls it. Hence, with the 11tthh and 12tthh stories Esperanza steps outside the familial circle to acquaint the reader with her first guide, a slightly older immigrant girl, named Marin, who lives with her cousin Louie’s family “because her own family is in Puerto Rico” (23). The way Esperanza renders her attests to Marin’s potential to be an elderly sister figure, or the “best friend” to whom “I can tell my secrets;” the

“one who will understand my jokes without having to explain them” (“Boys & Girls” 9). To Esperanza Marin is a bodacious role model since “[…] she wears dark nylons all the time and lots of makeup she gets free from selling Avon […] Marin’s skirts are shorter […] her eyes are pretty […] Marin is already older than us in many ways” (23; 27). Yet Marin, too, is figuratively imprisoned due to the intricate matrix of economic and familial factors: “She can’t come out—gotta baby-sit with Louie’s sisters—but she stands in the doorway a lot [...] We never see Marin until her aunt comes home from work, and then she can only stay out in front” (23; 27). Esperanza’s fascination with this Puerto Rican girl centers around Marin’s ostensibly vaster knowledge about the opposite sex and “feminine” issues as well as

153 her peculiar agenda to break the cycle of domestic confinement — the three realms which are yet uncharted on Esperanza’s route to freedom. Marin’s secret agenda to ameliorate her current situation is plain and simple: Her “boyfriend is in Puerto Rico” and “they’re getting married when she goes back” (26), thus Marin fantasizes about finding “a real job downtown because that’s where the best jobs are, since you always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes […]” (26). Yet, her plans to earn “real” money will not work out; for, “Louie’s parents are going to send her back to her mother with a letter saying she’s too much trouble” (26-7). While the implication of what it means to be “too much trouble” is self-evident, Esperanza associates Marin’s troubling ways to the fact that “She is older and knows lots of things. She is the one who told us how Davey the Baby’s sister got pregnant and what cream is best for taking off your mustache hair […] and lots of things I can’t remember now” (27). In this vein, Marin seems to be a fully-equipped figure in Esperanza’s juvenile vision, yet Marin’s plans to break the vicious cycle of domestic confinement prove to be distorted, or in other words, deeply immersed in the patriarchal rhetoric of a prince charming who would bring her a ‘happily-ever-after’ ending as in fairy tales. Aside from her B-plan to “meet someone in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big house far away” (26), when Marin delivers this simple advice to Esperanza that “what matters […] is for the boys to see us and for us to see them” (27), she ultimately proves to possess neither the will nor the wisdom to shape her own destiny. The grave irony in Marin’s understanding of freedom is that it is entirely male-dependent; hence, as the name esperanza negatively suggests, Marin is (and will most likely be) in a state of “waiting,” rather than acting on her own toward a future filled with “hope.” As such, Esperanza ends Marin’s story with these lamenting remarks: “Marin, under the streetlight, dancing by her self, is singing the same song somewhere. I know. Is waiting for a car to stop, a star to fall, someone to change her life” (27). The mature, albeit nonjudgmental, tone of this dramatic ending is far from a small child’s vision, and it assuredly indicates that little Esperanza has become aware that she needs to search for other alternatives to break the vicious cycle of domestic confinement; for, although Marin might achieve a certain degree of freedom somewhere outside the barrio, she will have to cross over to the “dark” side and

154 probably become, in Octavio Paz’s infamous term, a mala mujer.17 Although Esperanza does not want to emulate this role model, the counterpart to the “bad woman” in the normative and strictly religious Latino culture can only be accessed through the institution of marriage which, for little barrio girls, appears to be the only way to escape from an oppressive family thus become dominant in their own homes. Yet, as Esperanza witnesses the plights of married Latinas she will discover that marriage alone brings neither the freedom nor the happiness these girls long for. For instance, in Mango Street three stories are reserved to another relatively older girl, named Sally, “the girl with eyes like Egypt and nylons the color of smoke” (81). By the 31sstt story titled “Sally,” Esperanza is beckoned to Sally in her quest for alternative “friends” once she is disillusioned with Marin; but once again Esperanza’s motive in befriending Sally lies in the appearances in that the “boys at school think she’s beautiful” with “her hair shiny black like raven feathers and when she laughs, she flicks her hair back like a satin shawl over her shoulder” (81). As the object of male-gaze with her painted “eyes like Cleopatra” (81), Sally is also the subject of the “stories the boys tell in the coatroom” (82). At home Sally is rebuked, especially, by her religious father who “says to be this beautiful is trouble” (81). Moreover, Esperanza’s mother too voices her disapproval of Sally that “to wear black so young is dangerous” (82). Esperanza is right to believe that after school hours Sally is forced to “rub the blue paint off your eyelids […] walk fast to the house you can’t come out from […] become a different Sally” (82). Sally does have to be a different person at home, since in the 37tthh vignette, titled “What Sally Said,” Esperanza reports what she has never experienced herself in her own home. That is, Sally confesses her occasional subjection to physical violence of her father who pummels her “with his hands just like a dog […] like if I was an animal”; for, he is threatened by Sally’s sexuality that she “is going to run away like his sisters who made the family ashamed” (92). To draw the last straw, upon seeing Sally once “taking to a boy […] he just went crazy,” Sally claims, “he just forgot he was her father between the buckle and the belt” (92).

117.7. In his The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), Octavio Paz explains that la mala mujer, the bad woman, “is not passive like the ‘self-denying mother,’ the ‘waiting sweetheart,’ the hermetic idol: She comes and goes, she looks for men and then leaves them” (39).

155 In the last story about Sally, the 40tthh piece titled “Linoleum Roses,” though, Sally seems to be at last free of those violent outbursts; for, she “met a marshmallow salesman at a school bazaar, and she married him in another state where it’s legal to get married before eight grade” (101). However, her status as a prisoner is further consolidated in marriage, since her husband “won’t let her talk on the telephone. And he doesn’t let her look out the window. And he doesn’t like her friends, so nobody gets to visit her unless he is working” (101-2). While Sally claims that “she likes being married because now she gets to buy her own things when her husband gives her money,” Esperanza is aware that in reality “she did it to escape” (101). After all, Sally has exchanged the prison-house of her father’s for that of her husband, hence the threat of violence continues to loom. The only consolation for Sally now is “all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes” (102). What Sally might, and probably, will become after she loses all the beauty, the youth and her husband’s suffocating vigilance is not hard to guess. For instance, as the relatively longer title of the 13tthh story suggests, in Mango St. “There Was an Old Woman She Had So Many Children She Didn’t Know What to Do.” This vignette is reserved for Rosa Vargas, a single mother, who “cries everyday for the man who left without even leaving a dollar for bologna or a note explaining how come” (29). Abandonment is Rosa’s reward, although she has certainly fulfilled her role as a wife and a mother as the self-abnegating path of the Holy Virgin ordered. In creating such a lady-in-distress persona, Cisneros parodies a popular nursery rhyme, the Mother Goose, which reads: “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe./ She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. / She gave them some broth without any bread, / Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed” (Kellner, 116). Yet, Rosa Vargas’ truer-to-life story is quite different from this nursery rhyme which speaks about the well-behaved children of a lonely but blissful mother. As Esperanza recounts, “Rosa Vargas’ kids are too many and too much [...] They are bad those Vargases […] They are without respect for all things living, including themselves;” but she also adds that “It’s not her fault you know” (29). Because old Rosa Vargas is so engulfed by her obligations as a single mother, she has no choice but to entrust her unruly children at the mercy of Mango St. Hence it is not surprising that after the barrio had enough of protecting and caring for the Vargas kids, several

156 of them are severely injured and one of them died horribly. Rosa’s situation, as Saldívar-Hull claims, refutes “the stereotype of Chicana family unit as a phenomenon that is often romanticized by Chicano men and dominant institutions attempting to diffuse responsibility for the perpetuation of exploitation” (loc. cit. 95-6). What Saldívar-Hull implies with the romanticization of la familia, or the idolization of the good woman, for that matter, corresponds to the Pazian purview that “[t]hanks to suffering and her ability to endure it without protest, she transcends her condition and acquires the same attributes as men” (Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude 39). Yet, Cisneros proves to be less concerned with the impact of such a male- dominated view on the conundrum, especially, of “grownup” Latinas as she opts to reflect the barrio reality through the vulnerable lens of little Esperanza, focusing mostly on adolescents. In posing her poignant feminist critique against the well- defined norms of a patriarchal social structure, or worse, the indoctrination of its rules to those barrio girls, the author delves into the roots of the noxious role and brain-washing function of the mediums of popular and traditional culture for these little Latinas.18 Accordingly, Mango Street makes significant allusions to popular fairy tales and children’s stories, in an effort to unearth their insidious role in reinforcing and transmitting the ethos of female silence and male-dependence. The organizational choice to present these fairy tale allusions merits analysis, since they are located almost in the middle of the book where the protagonist is also in the halfway of her emotional and intellectual maturation. With the adaptation of such classical tales as “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” or “Little Red Riding Hood,” all of which partake the theme of a damsel-in-distress, who needs to be rescued, the novella undertakes the tone of a revisionist fairy tale. Yet, while Cisneros’ barrio tales embody certain characteristic elements of those original fairy tales, the stultifying settings and “unromantic” endings of her stories attest to vexing ramifications for

118.8. In her “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession” (1987) Cisneros discusses the influence of myths, children’s books and popular T.V. programs on her own psyche when she was a child. She claims that the lifestyle of her own family, as a working-class Mexican-American family, often conflicted with the ideals presented in those popular culture media and (urban) fairy tales:

I dreamed our family as the fairy-tale victims of an evil curse, the cause of our temporary hard times. “Just for a spell, we were told. […] I dreamed myself in a family of six sons. The brothers had been changed into swans by an evil spell only the sister could break. Was it no coincide my family name translated “keeper of swans”? I dreamed myself Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling.” Ridiculous, ugly,

perennially the new kids. But one day the spell would wear off. I kept telling myself. “Temporary.” (71)

157 their Latina heroines. In brief, Cisneros’ barrio tales subvert the traditional pattern of male-dependence and marriage as the sole means to a “happily-ever-after” ending. Studies on the role and function of fairy tales on the emotional and intellectual maturation of children have shown that fairy tales serve different ideological ends for boys and girls.19 For instance, Elizabeth Harries, in her “Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales” (2004), ruminates on the theme of “rescue” as follows:

Rather than design a life for themselves, the women ‘in thrall’ to fairy-tale patterns wait for male rescue, or at least for something to happen. They half-consciously submit to being male property, handed from father to suitor or husband without complaint or volition. And it is the gender economy of the often-repeated fairy tales that has betrayed them. (100)

With that in mind, the 26tthh story in Mango Street, titled “Edna’s Ruthie,” is a direct allusion to Andersen’s popular tale, “The Nightingale,” in which a lovely nightingale is snatched from the forest, where it used to sing for the common people, and placed in a jeweled cage in the emperor’s court. Just when the nightingale seems to grow content with its imprisoned status, an artificial nightingale is fabricated for the emperor, ultimately, eclipsing the real nightingale. Only then, the nightingale is set free from the palace and able to return to its natural habitat. Accordingly, “Edna’s Ruthie,” is about a relatively older lady called Ruthie to whom Esperanza is beckoned, not only because Ruthie can whistle “beautiful like the Emperor’s nightingale” (68), nor is she “the only grown-up we know who likes to play” (67), “but she can sing and dance too. She had lots of job offers when she was young […] used to write children’s books once” (68-9). Yet, despite all her talents, a good-spirited heart, and a bright future, Ruthie’s narrative reveals that she has opted for marriage and “a pretty house outside the city” (69) – a house just as the likes of young Marin and Sally desire. What Esperanza is initially puzzled about Ruthie is “why she is sleeping on a couch in her mother’s living room when she has a real house all her own” (69). Soon Ruthie’s conundrum clarifies; it is quite similar to that of the nightingale in the fairy tale; she was once at the center of her husband’s attention, but then forced to return to the barrio, most probably, replaced by another woman. In contrast to the ending of the original tale in which the nightingale can

119.9. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales [1976] (London & New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

158 tweet and glide blithely, Ruthie is always doomed to be someone’s property with all her chances wasted and no economic means left to pursue a self-reliant life. As the title of the story indicates, the grownup Ruthie figuratively regresses to a child-like state, and is now a possession of Edna’s, her mother’s. Upon acknowledging Ruthie’s tale, Esperanza gets another first-hand impression on the perilous outcomes of forfeiting one’s potentials and personal talents for a quick way out. With Ruthie’s conundrum, she begins to become aware of the manipulative messages embedded in the so-called “fairy” tales with their “happily-ever-after” endings in marriage. sstt In the 31 story, titled “Rafaela Who Drinks Coconut & Papaya Juice on Tuesdays,” Cisneros makes another direct allusion, this time, to the Grimm Brothers’ “Rapunzel,” which recounts the well-known story of a young beautiful princess who was abducted by an evil witch and imprisoned in a tower with no doors but only a lancet window and Rapunzel’s long braids to communicate with the outside world. In the end, Rapunzel is saved by her prince-charming and they live happily ever after. In Cisneros’ grim barrio version there is the Rafaela character, “who is still young but getting old from leaning out the window so much, gets locked indoors because her husband is afraid Rafaela will run away since she is too beautiful to look at” (79). The always observant Esperanza can get a glimpse of young, beautiful and married Rafaela only on Tuesdays when Rafaela’s jealous husband stays out late to play dominoes. That’s when Rafaela “throws a crumpled dollar down and always ask for coconut or sometimes papaya juice, and we send it to her in a paper shopping bag she lets down with clothesline” (80). With no children to run after yet still entrapped in her home, Rafaela can do nothing but wish “there were sweeter drinks, not bitter like an empty room, but sweet sweet like the island” (80). The reference to the image of the “window” as a liminal space between the street and home, or the public and private spheres, resonates in the previously mentioned story, “My Name,” which has revealed the story of Esperanza’s great- grandmother who “looked out the window her whole life” (11). Thus, in the long chain of pacified women from Esperanza’s great-grandmother onward, Rafaela will also pursue the role of a damsel-in-distress, waiting by her window for her prince- charming as she wishfully “dreams her hair is like Rapunzel’s” (79). Akin to Marin’s, Rafaela’s perpetual wistfulness for “someone offering sweeter drinks, someone

159 promising to keep them on a silver string” (80) is an indication that she will not be an adequate guide in Esperanza’s route to freedom, either. While Rafaela’s narrative is saturated with images akin to those in the original “Rapunzel” tale, her craving for “sweeter drinks […] sweet like the island” hints at Cisneros’ broader concerns for issues other than various forms of subjugation, or exploitation, in terms of gender and sexuality. Here, the “island” image is a referent to Rafaela’s ethnic, cultural or filial roots which lie in some insular Latin American country such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, or the Dominican Republic. As such, when Rafaela’s desire for the “coconut” or “papaya” juice is juxtaposed with the titular “mango,” these tropical fruits suggest a series of alternative readings which can be traced in the long history of American intervention in the political affairs of Latin American countries. Firstly, cast into the cold and urban setting of the industrial city of Chicago, these tropical fruits represent the nostalgia of a “homeland” which has irrevocably been lost for many immigrants, or political refugees, from the so-called Third World countries in Latin America, seeking asylum in the U.S. due to economic exigencies or coercive conflicts they faced in their natal homes. Secondly, as rare and expensive commodities in the “American” market these fruits denote the historical exploitation of the Western Hemisphere by the U.S. from the 1823 Monroe Doctrine onward; further denoting the derogatory term, “banana republic.” Thirdly, although these fruits may symbolize either a strong will to survival even under the most inauspicious conditions, or the “tropicalization” of the First World metropolis, for that matter, their delicate texture is an indication that what is deemed strong and enduring may also be prone to ripen easily and rapidly if entrenched from their natural habitat. Hence, while Mango St. functions as a figurative greenhouse which fosters the blooming and survival of the Latino culture in a hostile environment, it is by no means impregnable in the face of cultural hegemony, or cultural imperialism, especially, through the incursive means of Anglo-American melting pot ideologies. In this vein, the themes of nostalgia and the consequent feeling of alienation shared by many émigrés such as Ruthie and Marin are illustrated at their best in the 30tthh story, titled “No Speak English,” which focuses on a newly immigrated family, but mostly on the dire situation of the mother character, called Mamacita. Esperanza recalls that she has seen her once – on the day of her arrival to Mango St. with a baby

160 boy in her arms; “Then we didn’t see her” (77), she says. Like all entrapped women of the barrio, Mamacita soon becomes a prisoner in her own house: “She sits all day by the window and plays the Spanish radio show and sings the homesick songs about her country […] She still sighs for her pink house, and then […] she cries” (77). Yet, the reason why Mamacita “doesn’t come out” (77) is due to an entirely different factor: “she is afraid to speak English, and maybe this is so since she only knows eight words” (77). Frustrated by Mamacita’s refusal to learn English, hence her resistance to incorporation into the dominant culture, her husband, who “saved his money to bring her here” (76), shouts: “We are home. This is home” (78). Like the nun character of the opening story, here the husband figure is also a representative agent, or the repressive voice, of the established order. Thus, it is Mamacita’s loyalty to her ethnic roots as well as the nostalgia she maintains for her natal home and language that has virtually mired her in her own house as a prisoner. However, the insidious means of cultural hegemony has already sneaked into Mamacita’s sanctuary/prison; for “the baby boy, who has begun to talk, starts to sing the Pepsi commercial he heard on the T.V” (78). It is at that point of desperation that Mamacita talks to her baby boy with one of the few English phrases she knows: “No speak English, no speak English” (78). Furthermore, in the 25tthh vignette, titled “Geraldo No Last Name,” in which the Marin character reappears but for the last time in the book, Cisneros illustrates the utmost cost of being an outcast in the Anglo-American “System” by rendering a young illegal-immigrant boy, Geraldo, who is “Just another brazer who didn’t speak English. Just another wetback” (66). The lives, or tales, of Marin and Geraldo intersect on a Saturday night when “she met him at a dance […] And how was she know she’d be the last one to see him alive” (65). Geraldo has become the victim of a hit-and-run accident and died at the hospital with “No Name. Nothing in his pockets” (66). For Marin, Geraldo “was just someone she danced with. Somebody she met that night […] somebody she didn’t even know […] He wasn’t anything to her. He wasn’t her boyfriend or anything like that” (65; 66). Nevertheless, Marin’s diligence to wait by his side at the hospital for the surgeon who did not show up, and later troubling herself to explain what happened “Once to the hospital people and twice to the police” (66), indicate that the stereotypical definitions on what it means

161 to be a “good” or “bad” woman do not appeal when it comes to the issue of in-group solidarity in terms of ethnicity/“race.” Marin could have simply sneaked off but she did not. The bottom line is that if it was not for Marin, Geraldo’s anonymous tale would sink into oblivion, and his family, whose “home is in another country,” would go on ruminating, “Geraldo—he went north . . . we never heard from him again” (66). With this terse but highly intricate tale, it becomes apparent that, not all stigmatized female role models such as the “infamous” Marin signal an inherent, or an essential, “badness.” Nor do they all represent an insurmountable impasse in the face of oppression induced both from within the barrio culture and from above the white society. Accordingly, several friends of Esperanza’s and other “auntie-type” advisors might very well become a beacon in her flight for freedom. In an earlier story, the 5tthh one titled “Cathy Queen of Cats,” Esperanza has just embarked on her quest for alternative role models, or “friends” as she called them then; thus she could not appreciate the gravity of a relatively older girl named Alicia. In this vein, she has reserved only two sentences for Alicia as a minutia embedded in the narrative of some other potential friend, called Cathy, who has claimed that “Alicia is stuck-up ever since she went to college. She used to like me but now she doesn’t” (12). The significance of the Alicia character could become more lucid only after Esperanza has encountered with young Marin and old Rosa Vargas, who have surely proved to be inadequate models in her route to liberation. Hence, Cisneros devotes an entire section to Alicia in the 14tthh vignette, titled “Alicia Who Sees Mice”; for, Esperanza’s horizon of expectations will broaden more when she ultimately befriends Alicia, “a good girl,” who is “young and smart and studies for the first time at the university” (32; 31). Yet, Alicia’s situation is more complicated and ambiguous than a single mother’s, or an abandoned or an imprisoned wife’s. Upon her mother’s untimely death Alicia has instantly become a surrogate mother for her younger siblings as she “inherited her mama’s rolling pin and sleepiness” to “rise and make lunchbox tortillas” (31). When Esperanza ends Alicia’s narrative with the remark that Alicia “Is afraid of nothing except four-legged fur. And fathers” (italics added; 32), she insinuates that Alicia is in a rather grave situation that she is also required to become, now, a surrogate wife for her scary father, who admonishes that “a woman’s place is sleeping so she can wake up early with the tortilla star” (31).

162 To Alicia, the morning star (Venus) in the form of the culturally-coded image of “tortilla star” does not connote wishing-upon-a-star; instead, it signals her “womanly” obligation to wake up early with her rolling pin and cook tortillas for her family. In that sense, the “tortilla” trope here is far from a gastronomic marker of idiosyncrasy or a sign of ethnic diversity as it has widely been used in Chicano letters; it rather acts as a symbol of a patriarchal ideology on the subservient role of Latinas (Olivarez, 1985: 237). Yet, Alicia’s diligence to take “two trains and a bus” (31) in a toilsome effort to attend her collage classes, hence her refusal “to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (32), provides Esperanza with “a clear-sighted, non- mystified vision of the barrio” (McCracken, loc. cit. 70), further suggesting that with ample determination and hard work one might very well draw a felicitous route for an autonomous life even under the most adverse circumstances. Surely, “the most adverse circumstances” at issue here is a relatively contingent notion. Accordingly, in one of the two longest stories in Mango Street, titled “Born Bad,” Esperanza delves into the lurid tale of her aunt who would play the most crucial role in the course of her bildung. As such the organizational allotment of this particular story as the 23rrdd piece (in other words, one step beyond the halfway of the 44 stories) is an indication that with this story Esperanza is about to pass the brink of puerility into adolescence in various respects. Since the story is reserved for her aunt named Lupe, a moniker for “Guadalupe,” it might suggest an archetypal reading to the most revered religious icon amongst Latinos; namely, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Yet, by positioning aunt Lupe in an extraordinarily pathetic conundrum, or under the most adverse conditions, Cisneros deconstructs the fabulous import of the dark-skinned Madonna to stress the randomization of fate in determining who will turn out to be “good” or

“bad,” and that all seemingly predetermined, or providential, notions on “goodness vs. badness” are in effect culturally inscribed thus prone to change. Ruminating upon an old snapshot, Esperanza recounts that aunt Lupe used to be “pretty like my mother. Dark. Good to look at. In her Joan Crawford dress and swimmer legs. Aunt Lupe of the photographs” (58). But now, aunt Lupe is suffering from a nasty malady, most likely from polio, which has mired her in her (death)bed and also claimed her eyesight. Lupe’s once-strong swimmer legs are, now, “bunched under the yellow sheets, the bones limp gone as worms […] bent and wrinkled like a

163 baby […] drowning under the sticky yellow light”; she has become “a little oyster, a little piece of meat on an open shell for us to look at” (58; 59; 60). Often eclipsing Jesus Christ in the entire Latin America, the Virgin of Guadalupe has always been a pedestal source of devotion and awe with her providential apparition, miraculous deeds, and her magnificent shrine in Mexico. In contrast to her namesake, aunt Lupe has become the object of Esperanza and her friend’s ridicules as they mimic her irritating voice and gestures “with our heads thrown back, our arms limp and useless, dangling like the dead” (61). Moreover, aunt Lupe’s dilapidated apartment, “where sunlight never came […] the dirty dishes in the sink […] the ceilings dusty with flies, the ugly maroon walls, the bottles and sticky spoons […] the smell” (60), is far from the sublime shrine of Lady Guadalupe where every year thousands teem to pay their homage to this rara avis. Furthermore, while aunt Lupe has also become an asexualized figure like the Holy Virgin, her inability to perform her role as a “wife” has not been willed by a providential miracle, but ironically by an unpredictable disease – ultimately, leaving “the husband who wanted a wife again” (61). Nevertheless, the utmost import of Lupe is that Esperanza has always found refuge in Lupe’s dark apartment, she says: “I took my library books to her house […] She listened to every book, every poem I read to her” (60). When Esperanza recites her own poem, which reads, “I want to be / like the waves on the sea, / like the clouds in the wind, / but I’m me. / One day I’ll jump / out of my skin. / I’ll shake the sky / like a hundred violins,” aunt Lupe delivers the most beneficial counsel to Esperanza; in a tired voice Lupe says: “That’s nice. That’s very good […] You just remember to keep writing Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free” (61). It is with this advice that aunt Lupe, far from playing the role of a saintly martyr or a divine symbol of self-abnegation, transforms into a spiritual guide and a moral anchor in Esperanza’s quest. Moreover, since Esperanza has found solace to read and write her own poems for the first time in Lupe’s dark apartment, she starts to differentiate, albeit rather vaguely, between her desire for the idealized (American-)dream house she had at the beginning of the text and, now, any house, or symbolic space, in which she would pursue a self-reliant artistic life. Yet, at the moment naïve Esperanza proves that she needs further guidance to establish a sound link between the act of writing and the act of moving out of the barrio; resorting to past tense, the narrator

164 claims: “[…] at that time I didn’t know what she meant” (61). Like many ridiculed oracles or blind prophets in various world mythologies, the import of aunt Lupe’s message will be appreciated after her demise. Hence, it is only after aunt Lupe dies that the narrator could claim, “And then we began to dream the dreams” (61). In this last sentence of the story the shift in the narrative voice from first person singular to first person plural merits analysis; for, in the first half of the book the reader has the impression of listening to Esperanza as if she is telling stories, but now the text assumes the tone of a meticulously written text, or a young girl’s diary, in which the protagonist has recorded the memoirs of her first year’s experience in the barrio. It is at this point that the first person plural narrative voice juxtaposes the past and present of the naïve and matured Esperanza(s) within a “past- present” juncture from whence the narrator fills the void of her story. Nevertheless, in the barrio Esperanza is not the only one who would apprize the power of words and poetry which would also be a means to endure the hardships of daily life. In the 33rrdd story, “Minerva Writes Poems,” Esperanza finds a final potential friend named Minerva who is scarcely older, “but already she has two kids and a husband who left […] and keeps leaving” (84; 85). The two girls’ company is an artistic fellowship; Esperanza says, “She lets me read her poems, I let her read mine” (84). In a sense, Minerva is empowered by her poetry as it allows her a “temporary” escape from the drudgery of mundane affairs as she writes her poems after her kids go to sleep, but still she is “always sad like a house on fire—always something wrong” (84). This young poetess can also be likened to the noted Emily Dickinson; for, she too writes poems not for a readership, but “on little pieces of paper that she folds over and over and holds in her hands for a long time […]” (84). Minerva, whose name directly alludes to the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess of wisdom and martial arts (Athena), is the living proof that even the most intelligent, strongest, or artistically gifted women of the barrio are doomed to lead a pathetic life with no chance of “eventual” salvation unless they are first charged with the consciousness to change it and then act accordingly. Immersed in a static vision of her fate that “her luck is unlucky” (84), Minerva feels compelled to be dependent on her abusive husband, letting him in again and again every time he says “he is sorry […] Same story” (85). Bequeathed with this legacy of desertion-abuse-desertion,

165 the vicious cycle of domestic confinement for Minerva continues unbroken: “Her mother raised her kids alone and it looks like her daughters will go that way too” (84). When Minerva asks for a final advice on what to do with her husband, Esperanza utters a lamenting sense of impuissance: “I don’t know which way she’ll go. There is nothing I can do” (85). Consequently, from the poetess Minerva’s inaptitude to control her fate, Esperanza extracts another crucial “lesson in women’s domestic oppression and how to begin transcending it” (McCracken, loc. cit. 69). Yet, the helpless Esperanza of the narrative’s present temporality is not ready to transcend the “material” terms of her own entrapment; thus after Lupe’s death she wants to seek further “spiritual” guidance, this time, in “a witch woman” (62) who th appears in the 24th story, “Elenita, Cards, Palm, Water.” But the equivocal message Esperanza receives from the curandera further perplexes her desire for a house of her own. When Elenita practices her own art and foretells, “I see a home in the heart […] A new house, a house made of heart,” vexed Esperanza replies, “I don’t get it” (64). She is yet unaware that “a home in the heart” will be self-generated through her own art of writing and thus be impregnable to the criticism of people like the nuns. Moreover, the reader might very well assume that with Elenita’s Spanish-influenced accent, the word “heart” might have been pronounced as art with the omission of the /h/ sound. Yet again, naïve Esperanza has not yet reached such intellectual maturity to infer what “a house made of art” might denote – much less construct one. Unsatisfied and confused, Esperanza turns to nature in her search for further “spiritual” remedy to her vexing sense of belonging vs. unbelonging which she holds from the beginning of her life in the barrio. In the 29tthh vignette, “Four Skinny Trees,” Esperanza gazes from her window upon those four trees, “Four raggedy excuses planted by the city” (74) when she is “too sad and too skinny to keep keeping” (75). The motivation behind Esperanza’s interest in those trees “with skinny necks and pointy elbows like mine” (74) is that “they are the only ones who understand me. I am the only one who understands them;” for, akin to Esperanza they “do not belong here but are here” (74). Moreover, despite the concrete ground they are planted in the trees are tethered to the earth, growing steadily and secretly underground:

166 They send ferocious roots beneath the ground. They grow up and they grow down and grab the earth between their hairy toes and bite the sky with violent teeth and never quit their anger. This is how they keep. (74)

Echoing the dying aunt Lupe’s alliterative words, “keep writing” (61), the trees also teach Esperanza another valuable lesson, now, on how “to keep keeping” (75) thus to maintain her diligence to grow strong without losing her roots in the barrio despite all the detriments thereof. As the narrative unfolds, Esperanza’s spiritual, emotional, intellectual and lingual maturity will go hand in hand with her biological growth which will be marked by a troublesome series of sexual rites-of-passages. Now, as a sexually budding girl, she will apply what she has learned from all those female role models from different age groups; that is, to negotiate her sexuality with traditional notions of “Latina” womanhood to create an autonomous self. For instance, the 17tthh story, titled “The Family of Little Feet,” is a prelude to the inevitable loss of Esperanza’s innocence on her way to coming to terms with her newly budding sexuality. In this story, Esperanza and her girl sidekicks are bestowed with a bunch of discarded high heels. Here, Cisneros’ concern for fairy tales once again reverberates as the girls exclaim, “Hurray! Today we are Cinderella because our feet fit exactly” (40). As if by a spell the girls instantly turn into belles of the ball; “But the truth is,” as Esperanza admits, “it is scary to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached to a long long leg” (emphasis added; 40). Despite all objectifying gazes upon them, the girls practice walking in those high heels like real women do while people’s opinions vary – especially, “the men can’t take their eyes off us” (40), Esperanza observes. Mr. Benny, the grocer, catcalls: “Them are dangerous […] You girls too young to be wearing shoes like that. Take them shoes off before I call the cops”; then a boy taunts the girls, “Ladies, lead me to heaven”; and finally some other girls just “pretend we are invisible” (41). Soon the girls come to the bitter realization that the high heels have targeted them only as sexual objects which must either be kept controlled, or left at the mercy of the barrio justice. Hence, when the girls’ exuberant parade extends beyond the perimeters of Mango St. they encounter a “bum man,” who asks little Rachel to “come closer. I can’t see very well. Come closer. Please” (41). Echoing the vicious wolf’s call in “Little Red Riding Hood,” this ill-natured request proves that the high heels (a

167 metonym for their newly-found sexuality) invite a perilous attention. The uneasiness of this awareness reaches to its zenith when the bum man finally insists Rachel, “If I give you a dollar will you kiss me?” (41). In contrast to the endings of “Cinderella” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the heroines are rescued respectively by a crystal shoe and a boy-scout, Esperanza and her friends toss away those “magic high heels” (40) – symbolically, deferring their inevitable sexual maturity to a later date. Accordingly, in the 35tthh vignette, “Beautiful & Cruel,” Esperanza decides to initiate her “own quiet war” (89), in order “not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain” (88). Instead, she is now determined to leave “the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate” (89). Ironically, with this male-emulated strategy of petit insurrection, she wants to assume the role of the “bad woman” to whom she is exposed in the movies where “there is always one with red red lips who is beautiful and cruel. She is the one who drives the man crazy and laughs them all away. Her power is her own” (89). But the power of sexuality has already proved to be a double-edged sword in the tales of Marin, Sally and Rafaela. Thus, when Esperanza tries to envision such defiant stance for herself, the unruliness of such sexual power in a male-dominated and male-centered world brings her to a vexing realization. In the longest story of the book, the 38tthh piece, titled “The Monkey Garden,” and in the next story, “Red Clowns,” Esperanza’s emotional, or psychic, wellbeing is ruptured severely when she is forced to face the previously deferred realization of her own sexual maturation. The aforementioned Sally character, albeit in her prenuptial days of “freedom,” plays a pivotal role in this realization that takes place initially in an abandoned junkyard called the monkey garden, which was “a wonderful thing to look at in the spring” (95). To Esperanza and the barrio kids, the monkey garden with an abundance of fruit trees, insects and flowers, was an Edenic asylum, “where our mothers would find us” (95), until one day Sally is escorted into this garden by Tito’s “grinning” buddies on the pretense of retrieving her usurped keys. “One of the boys invented the rules,” Esperanza says, in that unless Sally gave “a kiss for each one” she would not get the keys back (96; 97). Caught off-guard when Tito’s mother says “What do you want me to do […] call the cops?”, Esperanza reckons that she has to rescue Sally; hence arms herself with “three big rocks and a brick” (97). But when

168 she reaches the spot on the spur of the moment, “Sally said go home” (97). Deeply troubled with the feelings of rejection and humiliation, Esperanza hides herself in the garden and longs for her own (sexual) demise: “I wanted to will my blood to stop, my heart to quit pumping. I wanted to be dead, to turn into rain, my eyes melt into the ground like two black snails (97-8). On the brink of sexual maturity Esperanza hence painfully realizes that she would no more be able to occupy the world of children and will soon enter the world of adults: “I looked at my feet […] They didn’t seem to be my feet anymore. And the garden that had been such a good place to play didn’t seem mine either” (98). Yet, the masculine-defined rules of the “game,” which seem to be the sole means to sexuality, will not gloss over how she has previously contemplated (in the 28tthh story, titled “Sire”) on her own erotic desires, as uttered in the following terms:

Everything is holing its breath inside me. Everything is waiting to explode like Christmas. I want to be all new and shiny. I want to sit out bad at night, a boy around my neck and the wind under my skirt. (73)

Esperanza’s fall from grace, or in other words, her tragic initiation to sex ultimately takes place in the 39tthh story, “Red Clowns,” when the unspeakable befalls her in an amusement park she ventures with Sally on one evening. In the carnival Sally leaves Esperanza alone and takes off with a “big boy” in the aftermath of which the lonely Esperanza is gang-raped by a bunch of boys, most probably white boys; for, one of the molesters has recurrently said: “I love you, Spanish girl, I love you” (100). Thus, the story opens with Esperanza’s bitter accusations directed not only against Sally for her part in deserting her, but to all the active and passive participants in what Ellen McCracken calls a “conspiracy of silence” which has prepared the grounds of this ultimate act of female silencing in the first place.20 In an anguished and frustrated tone Esperanza commences her condemnatory monologue:

Sally, you lied. It wasn’t what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn’t want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it’s supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did you lie to me? (99)

220.0. See María Herrera-Sobek, “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction,” in Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature, ed by. María Herrera- Sobek and Helena María Viramontes, (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1996), 245-256; 252.

169 Burdened with the weight of this trauma, Esperanza is initially out of words to fully describe the event; she can merely say: “I don’t remember. It was dark. I don’t remember. I don’t remember. Please don’t make me tell it all” (100). However, by the end of the vignette, Esperanza gains consciousness only to re-toss her mantra-like accusations at those custodians of an ideal(ized) “Latina” womanhood who have—in their superimposition of the shroud of sexual ignorance on barrio girls—fostered false expectations on love, and concealed such horrible dimension of sexual subjugation:

Why did you leave me alone? I waited my whole life. You’re a liar. They all lied. All the books and magazines, everything that told it wrong. Only his dirty fingernails against my sin, only his sour smell again. (100)

In her “The Politics of Rape” (1996) María Herrera-Sobek states that “the victim of sexual assault loses her identity as a human being and is transformed into a formless entity devoid of feeling and bodily sensations” (250). Although Herrera-Sobek’s premise partially applies to Esperanza’s violation, the politics of her rape are more perplexed due to the fact that she is a “Chicana” molded in the intricate history of subjugation in terms of race, gender and class. Esperanza’s assaulters might justifiably be considered as white boys; hence her brutal encounter with male power adds a whole new dimension of racial politics to the horror of sexual politics, suggesting that Esperanza’s rape is only a small fragment in the larger history of masculine occupation of a non-resistant feminized object such as the land (Saldívar, loc. cit. 186). Nevertheless, following this trying ordeal Esperanza by no means becomes “a formless entity devoid of feeling and bodily sensations” in Herrera-Sobek’s words. Now cognizant of the false messages in the fairytales of her childhood, or in other popular media, she focuses on leaving the barrio to acquire a house of her own. Thus, Esperanza is once again forced to seek a mystic, or spiritual, force in life when three old sisters, called las comadres, happen to find her in the 41sstt story, “Three Sisters.” The setting, the funeral of Lucy and Rachel’s baby sister, is once again saturated with the theme of death. Esperanza realizes that the three eerie ladies, or co-mothers, have magical powers: “They came with the wind that blows in August, thin as a spider web and barely noticed […] Three who did not seem to be related to anything but the moon” (103). After a scrutiny at Esperanza’s palms the three sisters—who are also reminiscent of the Moiræ (“The Spinsters”) or the “Three Fates” the in Greek and

170 Roman pantheons—resolve, “She’s special. Yes, she’ll go very far” (104); thus grant Esperanza a wish to make albeit with an injunction:

When you leave you must remember always to come back for the others. A circle you understand? You will always be Esperanza. You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know. You can’t forget who you are. […] You must remember to come back. For the ones who can’t leave as easily as you. Will you remember? (105)

Confused Esperanza ruminates: “It was […] as if she knew what I had wished for, and I felt ashamed for having made such a selfish wish” (105). By now, Esperanza has always thought that by moving from Mango St. to a faraway place, where “[t]here’d be no nosy neighbors watching, no motorcycles and cars, no sheets and towels and laundry” (“Sally” 83), she would leave what she has always considered to be “temporary” and now agonizing. In the course of sexual maturity and after the rape incident, she is now prompted to remember who she really is, a “Hope,” since she will never be able to erase the year that she has lived on Mango St. in that all these experiences will become an incentive for her liberated creative self. Colligated with aunt Lupe and Elenita’s messages, the three enigmatic sisters’ presage reminds Esperanza that regardless of what she has gone through in the barrio she is burdened with a communitarian responsibility that she should return to Mango St. as capable of changing it after she finds expression and freedom in the liberating space of writing.

In this vein, Alicia—the sound of reason, intellect and eruditeness—reappears nndd in the next story, the 42 vignette, titled “Alicia & I Talking on Edna’s Steps.” Upon sensing Esperanza’s profound desire to leave the barrio, Alicia re-instills in Esperanza not a magical or a spiritual sense of belonging, but a tangible perspective of social responsibility; she says: “You live right here, 4006 Mango […] Like it or not you are Mango Street, and one day you’ll come back too” (106; 107). When Esperanza refuses to comply, “Not me. Not until somebody makes it better,” Alicia preaches her utmost ideologically-charged message: “Who’s going to do it? The mayor?” (107). Hence Alicia carries the theme of personal salvation one step beyond by colligating it to the political import of a community-oriented premise in that it is up to Alicia and Esperanza “to become ‘new intellectuals’ who confront and defy the dangers of Mango Street and engage in real sociopolitical and cultural confrontations by speaking to their own people” (Saldivar-Hull, loc. cit. 102). Yet, a number of critics

171 have harshly criticized Cisneros for foregrounding such an “assimilationist” desire to reject one’s own house, and by extension, culture, family, tradition and race. For instance, in his oft-quoted 1984 review of Mango Street Juan Rodriguez writes:

That Esperanza chooses to leave Mango Street, chooses to move away from her social/cultural base to become more ‘Anglicized,’ more individualistic; that she chooses to move from the real to the fantasy plane of the world as the only means of accepting and surviving the limited and limiting conditions of her barrio becomes problematic to the more serious reader. (italics added; qtd. in Quintana, Home Girls 150-51.n9)

However, by the 34tthh vignette, “Bums in the Attic,” Esperanza has already proved that her critical perspective is by no means directed at an individual(istic) escape for personal salvation. Although part of her initial desire for a house of her own is to avoid the humiliation of living in a run-down house, by the end of the text Esperanza’s motivation is entirely different from the typical “American” mid-class dictates. As such, the house Esperanza aspires to own is narrated in the following terms:

One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from. Passing bums will ask, Can I come in? I’ll offer them the attic, ask them to stay, because I know how it is to be without a house. Some days after dinner, guests and I will sit in front of a fire. Floorboards will squeak upstairs. The attic grumble. Rats? they’ll ask. Bums, I’ll say, and I’ll be happy. (“Bums in the Attic” 87)

In the light of such a patently community-oriented socialist perspective, one wonders what “becomes problematic” in Cisneros’ text, and to whom Juan Rodriguez implies with his phrase “the more serious reader.” Most likely, the critic is not contented with the idea that a “Chicana” should really want a house of her own and that she indeed has the power to create it from scratch; or perhaps, Rodriguez is disturbed with Cisneros’ astute vision that Esperanza’s house would by no means be “a man’s house. Not a daddy’s. A house all my own. With my porch and my pillow, my pretty purple petunias. My books and my stories” (“A House of My Own” 108). Since this house will be a “womanly” space free of patriarchal rules and also a refuge for Esperanza’s creative endeavors, it instantly echoes Virginia Woolf’s classic of modernist feminism, A Room of One’s Own (1929), in which Woolf argues that it is requisite that a woman needs her own private space to become a successful writer, a space where she can create thus garner financial independence. It is a stark reality that Esperanza’s desire for “a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the

172 poem” (108), arises from such a feminist critique of “gendered” space. Yet, it is also a fact that her desire for this socially, culturally and financially liberated space has initially been prompted by her peculiar experience of exclusion from the national rhetoric of the American Dream due to the fact that she is also a “racialized” subject. Hence, Mango Street “roots the individual self in the broader socio-political reality of the Chicano community” (McCracken, 63-4). Therefore, the phrase “a space for myself to go” both signals a spiritual sanctuary she carries within, and denotes a continuous cycle of leaving-returning to the collective life of the Mango St. through writing. This dual promise of a literal and figurative return provides an additional reading to the trope of the “house,” which previously signified, firstly, the concrete rundown edifice which must be left behind, and secondly, an extended metaphor for the re-configuration of Esperanza’s identity. As such, in the last story of the book the house trope becomes text itself with which Esperanza returns to the barrio. In this vein, the 44tthh story, titled “Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,” opens with the revelation of the “fictionalized” nature of Esperanza’s (life)story in the barrio. Through her creativity, Esperanza has finally come to inhabit the house of storytelling:

I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head. I tell them after the mailman says, Here’s you mail. Here’s your mail he said. I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes. I say, “And so she trudged up the wooden stair, her sad brown shoes taking her to the house she never liked.” I like to tell stories. I am going to tell you a story about a girl who didn’t want to belong. (109)

In the next paragraph, Esperanza seems to have brought the narrative into full circle as she reiterates the opening paragraph of the first story.21 Yet, the significant twist in the last sentence of this paragraph deters the reader from detecting a harmonious closure in the text:

We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, but what I remember most is Mango Street, sad red house, the house I belong but do not belong to. (109-10)

221.1. The opening paragraph of the first story, “The House on Mango Street,” reads as follows:

We didn’t always live on Mango Street. Before that we lived on Loomis on the third floor, and before that we lived on Keeler. Before Keeler it was Paulina, and before that I can’t remember. But what I remember most is moving a lot. (3)

173 Evidently, the authoritative narrator of this passage is quite distanced from the inexperienced narrator of the opening paragraph of the book. By writing, Esperanza has not only gained control of her past but also created a present and will mold a future in which she can both metaphorically and literally be liberated from and, at the same time, attached to the barrio. Thus the narrative by no means suggests a closure where the protagonist succumbs to the beginning of the text. Esperanza says,

I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much. I write it down and Mango says goodbyes sometimes. She does not hold me with both arms. She sets me free. One day I will pack my bags of books and paper. One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away. Friends and neighbors will say, What happened to that Esperanza? Where did she go with all those books and paper? Why did she march so far away? They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out. (110)

Consequently, with these final sentences the text ends with Esperanza’s anticipated departure from the house on Mango St. and her literary return to it through writing. The rapid temporal shifts in these passages from an instance of past remembrance (“What I remember most of Mango Street”) to the present of writing (“I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much”), to a future projection (“One day I will say goodbye to Mango”) and back again to the historical present further draws attention on the self-conscious act of writing and the performative quality of the entire narrative itself. In discovering a literary voice of her own and the power of the written word, Esperanza has found the key that unlocks the doors that have held barrio women captive and the key that unlocks the door to her “home in the heart.” As for Cisneros, with her Mango Street she has created a defiant Bildungsroman which resists the “universal” traits of both Euro-American and Chicano coming-of-age narratives in its experimentation with form and content. With her groundbreaking substitution of an inner-city-barrio-house for the central symbol of Aztlán (Chicanos’ southwestern homeland), the expression of the nationalist mode of “Chicano” identity has gained a new perspective. With her adolescent female protagonist, who is on her way to becoming an artist committed to social change, Cisneros has presented that (young) Chicanas do have the potential to successfully build a balance between their own

174 needs and the needs of their people to the ultimate benefit of both. Such communal ideology of Mango Street is one of the most effective tools that Cisneros has employed in her revision of the Bildungsroman proper; for, Esperanza’s bildung takes place within the geographic and cultural space of her community, rather than through escape. Instead of foregrounding the individual, Cisneros has illustrated that when Esperanza comes to understand her complex position as a “gendered” and also a “racialized” subject via her association with the members of her community, her departure from her community will not signal an individual quest for emancipation, or an act of betrayal, but rather a genuine (re)connection with her community. Therefore, in contrast to the traditional bildung dictum to focus exclusively on a single protagonist, Cisneros gives voices to almost all the barrio people. In this way the author revises the classical Bildungsroman which sacrifices the experiences and voices of other characters to privilege one’s individual line of progress toward a unified selfhood. Equipped with Anzaldúa’s notion of the ‘new mestiza consciousness,’ Esperanza’s ultimate decision to return to her community demonstrates her utmost commitment to creating new liberating places not only for herself but also for her community – especially, for the barrio women. Thus, the vague concept of “cultural identity” as articulated by Cisneros is not limited by an emphasis on individual autonomy, but extended within a dialectical context of connectedness to history, community, family. As Esperanza balances her past and present, her complex subject position signals a fluid and progressive notion of “Chicana” identity. She is a subject-in-flux who can now authorize her experience as a subject instead of having that experience objectify her. This is exactly the political act as defined by Anzaldúa in the introduction of Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras (1990):

For many of us the act of writing, painting, performing and filming are act of deliberate and desperate determination to subvert the status quo. Creative acts are forms of political activism employing definite aesthetic strategies for resisting dominant cultural norms and are not merely aesthetic exercises. We build culture as we inscribe in these various forms. (xxiv)

Like Anzaldúa who, in her Borderlands/La Frontera returns to her home town on the U.S.-Mexican border, Esperanza returns to the barrio as the new type of intellectual who will work on the borders between her people and the white society, and also on the borders between Chicanos and Chicanas for the common good of all her people.

175 CHAPTER FOUR

RECOVERING FROM THE SILENCE OF EXILE

When we arrived, we were expelled like fetuses from the warm belly of an airplane. Shocked by the cold, we held hands as we skidded like new colts on the unfamiliar ice. We waited winter in a room sealed by our strangeness. Watching the shifting tale of the streets, our urge to fly toward the sun etched in nail prints like tiny wings in the grey plaster of the windowsill, we hoped all the while that the lost in city’s monochrome there were colors we couldn’t see.

— Judith Ortiz Cofer, “Arrival” (1987)

Arriving at “American” literary and academic scenes more belated than the well-established Chicanas (spearheaded by Cisneros and Anzaldúa in the mid-1980s), U.S. Latina writers from a wide range of national origins in various Latin American countries such as Puerto Rico, Cuba, or the Dominican Republic partake many artistic and ideological concerns with those of their fellow “mestiza” trailblazers in contributing to the Border Literature proper.1 Yet, unlike many Chicanas, who were born, or have lived, in the U.S. Southwest and whose writings have been profoundly influenced by the physical and psychological effects of the U.S.-Mexican border, Latina writers in the U.S. have turned their critical attention to a variety of artistic and ideological concerns informed by their own peculiar status of “cultural liminality.” The major issues that U.S. Latina writing deals with include 1) the role of personal/familial history which has been ruptured by a traumatic experience of forced exile or (semi)willing immigration to the U.S. for economic or political reasons; 2) the nostalgic pull of the memory of a bygone “homeland” which must be re-constructed through narration for a psychic harmony; 3) the arduous and often futile attempts of assimilation into a foreign Yankee society hence the deleterious effects of such an endeavor; 4) the acute sense of a socialized ambivalence prompted by a double vision which constantly

11.. A partial list of U.S. Latina writers includes Judith Ortiz Cofer, Esmeralda Santiago and Rosario Ferré and Nicholasa Mohr from Puerto Rico; Cristina García, Himilce Novas, Maria Irene Fornes, and Achy Obejas from Cuba; and Julia Álvarez from the Dominican Republic.

176 oscillates in a bipolar movement between the two irreconcilable “Latino vs. Anglo” cultures on the thresholds of nationality, ethnicity, and language to name a few. The critical-theoretical and literary works of these dislocated Latinas inevitably attest to their conundrum in leading a liminal existence, not on a strictly topographical land formation such as the U.S.-Mexican border, but—to reiterate a well- known aphorism—in the belly of the beast. Thus, the polarized world(view) of these disoriented exiles inevitably illustrates a series of ideological concerns, emanating from “[t]he coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference” which at once merge but also induce “un choque, a cultural collision”

(Anzaldúa, Borderlands 100). As cultural hybrids, who dwell within a myriad of borderlands between a WASP-dominated ethos and their own idiosyncratic cultural codes, U.S. Latina writing adds a whole new dimension to the phenomenon of Border Literature which now acts both as a creative and a curative endeavor for U.S. Latina writers to heal the traumatic ruptures of their dispersal as they surmount a variety of cultural, national, and lingual borders. As Ellen Mayock asserts: “Writing has become both the [U.S. Latina] author’s existence in and travel to cultural locations” (“Bicultural Construction” 229). Ultimately, Latina diasporic texts turn out to be the “space of translation, neither the one nor the Other, a third space of flux and negotiation between colonized and colonizer” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 38). Having been forced to exile from her native homeland at the age of ten Dominican-American novelist, poet and scholar Julia Álvarez is the epitome of those Latina authors; for, her own peculiar existence as a “hyphenated American” pervades her (semi)autobiographical and historical novels as well as her poetry and critical writings. It is at this juncture that a terse “literary” sketch of the author’s life shall be pertinent to shed light on Álvarez’s narrative strategies and her prize winning oeuvre.2

22.. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents won the 1991 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Book Award and was selected a Notable Book in 1991 by New York Times Book Review and in 1992 by the American Library Association. Álvarez is also the recipient of numerous awards, including the Jessica Nobel-Maxwell Poetry Prize in 1995 by the American Poetry Review, and the American Academy of Poetry Prize at Syracuse University, New York. In the Time of the Butterflies was selected a Notable Book in 1994 by the American Library Association; a Book of the Month Club choice for 1994; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction in 1995; was chosen as one of the Best Books for Young Adults in 1995 by the Young Adult Library Services Association and the American Library Association. See the author’s official website at /www.alvarezjulia.com/.

177 4.1. Julia Álvarez: Re-membering the Past, Re-membering the Self

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted … Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.

— Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile” (1984)

Born on March 27, 1950, Julia Álvarez spent her formative years in her natal country of the Dominican Republic (abbr. D.R.) in the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. In her natal milieu, she was furnished with the coziness and security of living amongst an extended clan of the Álvarezes and a swarm of servants and maids owing to the family’s affluent economic status. Yet, this community, with all its seemingly infinite options for a colorful life, was not so conductive, especially, to women’s reading and writing on the grounds of two key cultural paradigms: “machismo” and “Catholicism.” On the other hand, as Álvarez states, “The power of stories was all around me, for the tradition of storytelling in deeply rooted in my Dominican culture” (STD 138). Hence, as a child Álvarez became adept at reciting poetry, especially, for special familial gatherings which would result in an early love for literature in young Álvarez to mold herself as a well-established writer in the future. In her (literary) autobiography, titled Something to Declare (1998)3, Álvarez elaborates on the troublesome relation between her creativity and her machismo- governed, Catholicism-devoted family. As a Latina she was supposed to keep family matters in secret, never daring to spill the beans out unlike the way she would boldly do through her creative writing and personal essays; she states:

And those same words [“My mother told me never ever to repeat this story”] could have been spoken to me by any number of women and men in my family. I had transgressed an unspoken rule of la familia. By opening my mouth, I had disobeyed. By opening my mouth on paper, I had done even worse. I had broadcast my disobedience. (STD 123)

33.. In an expository fashion, the personal essays in Something to Declare [abbr. STD] provide a sincere insight into Álvarez’s life as she contemplates on the dual themes of coming to the U.S. and becoming a writer. The first part of the book, “Customs,” recounts Álvarez’s childhood and adolescent experiences with an emphasis on some crucial familial and political incidents in the author’s life that had taken place both in the D.R. and the U.S. The second part, “Declarations,” details Álvarez’s writing strategies and how she has molded her own authentic literary voice.

178 Regardless of the seemingly blissful familial atmosphere sketched above, the political climate of the D.R. from 1930 to 1961 endangered the lives of well-positioned, or “elite,” families like the Álvarezes who dwelled in the capital city, Santo Domingo. To make matters worse, Álvarez’s father, a respected physician, had involved in an underground revolutionary group, Movimiento Revolucionario 14 de Junio (MR1J4), to topple the tyrannical regime of Rafaél Leonidas Molina de Trujillo.4 When the coup d’état against General Trujillo failed the Álvarezes were faced with the threat of an atrocious persecution. With the assistance of some “American” co-conspirators, though, Álvarez’s father was offered a fellowship to specialize in heart surgery in the U.S. (STD 16). Consequently, in August, 1960, the Álvarezes were deracinated from everything that they had ever known and cherished. In a 1998 interview with Juanita Heredia the author ruminates on the ramifications of this forced exile: “Our departure […] was abrupt and we were not prepared as children […] it was one of the most traumatic experiences of my life” (“Citizen of the World” 21). In another interview, Álvarez claims that overnight she, “lost almost everything: a homeland, a language, family connections, a way of understanding, a warmth” (Rosario-Sievert, 32). This brief familial history recounts how the author had become a refugee within the boundaries of the U.S. in the early 1960s when speaking a language other than English was looked down upon as “un-American” (STD 61). Upon her family’s arrival in New York, the author and her whole family were instantly mired in- between two cultures and two languages; Álvarez says: “I left the Dominican Republic and landed not in the United States, but in either the English language or the world of imagination” (Rosario-Sievert, 32). After a difficult process of readjusting to a new cultural space as well as a whole different system of socio-cultural paradigms, most immigrant, dislocated, or diasporic, families experience an identity crisis which lingers on for the rest of their

44.. General Trujillo represents the second of the longest one-man rules (after Fidel Castro) in Latin America’s turbulent political history. Trujillo ruled the D.R. with an iron fist from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. See Chapter One in Andrea Rodriguez, “Trujillo en Dos Novellas Latino Americanas.” MA Thesis. (Connecticut: Central Connecticut State University, July 2003). Trujillo does not play a central role either in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents or in ¡Yo!, however in In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), which has been defined by the author herself as the ‘fictional’ account of the epoch, Trujillo’s dictatorial regime becomes a bloody canvas on which Álvarez vividly projects her political awareness.

179 lives – the Álvarez family was no exception.5 By the same token, the beginning of a new life in the U.S. would also be the beginning of a long process of acculturation for little Julia, and her assimilation would predominantly pivot around the acquisition of the English language. That was a difficult time of adjustment when the Álvarez family entered a transitory phase of waiting for the dictatorial regime to dissolve hence for their reunion with their island home and culture. Yet, even after Trujillo was assassinated in 1961, “assimilation” had already extracted a heavy toll on the Álvarezes in that they stayed in the U.S. only to visit their homeland in annual summer vacations. Accordingly, Álvarez’s Something to Declare is replete with the author’s central preoccupation with language as it relates to her identity and writing career. In fact, much of what she declares in the book focuses on the issue of her lingual hybridity and its toilsome manifestation through the act of writing. However, it is also interesting to note that back in the D.R., the author and her sisters were not enrolled in a public school, but instead sent to an “American” school, the Carol Morgan School, for a better education, she reckons. (STD 23) Hence, even back in her home country Álvarez’s “English became all mixed up with [her] Spanish […] There wasn’t a sentence that wasn’t colonized by an English word” (STD 24). Thus, the author traces her earliest experiences with the English language as she displays a “growing distance from Spanish” (STD 63) in the D.R.; her consequent awareness as a “‘hyphenated’ person” (STD 66) in the U.S.; and her ongoing interest in the written-word to become a “successful hybrid” in an adopted country and in a second language (STD 68). Álvarez ultimately mastered the English language; yet, the task of losing her accent was not easy. In the end, as she puts it: “The inevitable, of course, has happened. I now speak my native language ‘with an accent’ […] that I speak perfect childhood Spanish” (STD 61). But such a loss has also provided her with “a portable homeland” in the realm of the printed world. (Rosario-Sievert, 32). Álvarez further

55.. In his “Diasporas” (1994), James Clifford argues that assimilation for “diasporic populations” is more perplexed than it is for other émigrés. “In assimilationist national ideologies such as those of the United States,” Clifford writes, “immigrants may experience loss and nostalgia, but only en route to a whole new home in a new place” (307). By contrast, “[diasporic] peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and violent loss,” claims Clifford, “cannot be ‘cured’ by merging into a new national community” (ibid.).

180 declares that: “I couldn’t even imagine myself as someone other than the person I had become in English, a woman who writes books in the language of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman” (STD 72). Even so, “much of my verbal rhythm, my word choices, my attention to the sound of my prose,” claims Alvarez, “comes from my native language as spoken by la familia” (STD 126). Hence, although she has now established herself as a well-known “American” writer, Álvarez has always had perplexities whenever she code-switches in her writing; she recounts,

I made a discovery one summer when I was reading poetry in Spanish early in the morning. I’d move on to my writing and find myself encountering difficulties, drawing blanks left and right as I tried to express a thought or capture an image or strike the right tone in a passage. I finally figured it out: the whole rhythm of my thinking and writing had switched to my first, native tongue. I was translating into, not writing in, English. I could hear the ropes and pulleys and levers and switches in what I was writing, as if I were unloading the words off a boat that had just come in from another language, far away. (STD 286)

In the “Afterword” to her first poetry collection, Homecoming (1984), Álvarez vividly utters the import of such spatial and lingual interplay on her aesthetics: “[I] surely know where [my] roots really are—deep in the terra firma of the language” (120). Her other collections of poetry, The Other Side/El otro lado (1995), Seven Trees (1998) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004) are also preoccupied with the influence of bilingualism on the construction of the ethnic identity of her personas. Álvarez’s obsession with language and the indispensability of the ritualistic act of writing, or telling stories, dominates her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991) and its sequel, ¡Yo! (1997). Despite the fact that Álvarez persistently rejects calling these novels merely as “autobiographies,” the texts are oftentimes classified and analyzed by critics as autobiographical fiction.6 Álvarez brings an end to this debate as follows:

A lot of the García Girls was based on my own experience […] But there is a lot of fictionalizing, using the material of your life but being primarily interested in making a good story. It’s the combining, the exaggeration, the redoing, the adding on, that makes it original rather than autobiographical. (Rosario-Sievert, 35)

66.. See Julie Barak, “‘Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre’: A Second Coming into Language in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” MELUS 23:1 (1998): 159-176; Ricardo Castells, “The Silence of Exile in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” Bilingual Review/La Revista Bilingue 26:1 (2001): 34-42; David Vázquez, “I Can’t Be Me Without My People: Julia Alvarez and the Postmodern Personal Narrative,” Latino Studies 1:3 (2003): 383-402.

181 This is perhaps why Álvarez has felt impelled to remind, at the beginning of both novels that they are merely works of fiction and everything in them are either the product of her imagination or are used fictitiously. Nevertheless, these two novels are replete with autobiographical data—especially, the traumatic and post-traumatic ordeals and the issue of assimilation related to the author’s exile—which, in the main, is another distinguishable trait of the exiled U.S. Latina authors’ writing strategies. Accordingly, the issue of reconciliation with one’s own historical ties, or familial legacy, in finding an authentic voice is a predominant theme in Álvarez’s oeuvre. Since the experience of exile—a lurid condition which is vividly put forth by

Said in the epigram to this section—has an ongoing impact on almost all U.S. Latina authors, these writers are often propelled to reconstruct these ruptures by displacing a central patriarchal figure with a woman-oriented household. (Ortega & Saporta- Sternbach, 12) By projecting their own personal testimonies, these female figures will not only rewrite their own personal/familial history, but also produce an alternative matriarchal account of their communities. In his Imagined Communities (1983), Benedict Anderson asserts that the experience of exile has profound effects on the consciousness of the exiled subjects which,

[…] by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives. After experiencing the physiological and emotional changes produced by puberty, it is impossible to ‘remember’ the consciousness of childhood. […] Out of this estrangement comes a conception of personhood, identity […] which, because it cannot be ‘remembered,’ must be narrated. (204)

Thus, the interpolation of a matriarchal medium as the key to retrieving the voices not only of the dead, but also of what would constitute the forgotten past, is patently detected in almost all Álvarez’s works. Álvarez establishes such a bridge to her cultural legacy in her two historical novels, In the Time of the Butterflies (1994) and In the Name of Salomé (2000).7 In the postscript to her Butterflies Álvarez claims that as an exiled author she has always been sentient of the fact that one must reinvent and/or narrate both self and history in order to resist amnesia:

For I wanted to immerse my readers in an epoch in the life of the Dominican Republic that I believe can only finally be understood by fiction, only finally be redeemed by the imagination. A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart. (324)

77.. Butterflies was filmed in 1999 by Phoenix Pictures, featuring Salma Hayek as the leading actress.

182 In so doing, Álvarez underscores the importance of a female storyteller within the family/community/nation, who has the ability to record and transmit their stories from one generation to another so that their cultural heritage will not sink into oblivion. The presence of such fictional female storytellers in Álvarez’s novels is crucial in that it is only through those female mediators (Yolanda in García Girls, Dedé in Butterflies, and Salomé and Camila in Salomé) does the author convey her hybrid narrative voice. For instance, Butterflies is Álvarez’s rewriting of a series of messy political events in the lives of the revolutionary Mirabal sisters—known by their nom de guerre, Las Moriposas, “The Butterflies”—in the turbulent history of the D.R. In this political fiction the events narrated by Dedé, the only surviving Mirabal sister, have a strong impact on and a close affinity with the author’s own life. Because, the Mirabal sisters, three of whom were ambushed and assassinated by Trujillo’s henchmen (after paying their weekly visit to the detained husbands of two of the sisters) a few months posterior to the Álvarezes’ escape to the U.S., were the founders of the resistance movement, MR1J4, in which Álvarez father was involved. In her official website Álvarez explains her political commitment in Butterflies as follows: “[B]eing a survivor placed a responsibility on me to tell the story of these brave young women who did not survive the dictatorship.” In the “Afterword” to the novel the author further ruminates on her broader political and feminist concerns which have been influenced by the guerilla deeds of the Mirabal sisters:

[…] through this fictionalized story I will bring acquaintance of these famous sisters to English speaking readers. November 25th, the day of their murder, is observed in many Latin American countries as the International Day Against Violence Towards Women. Obviously, these sisters, who fought one tyrant, have served as models for women fighting against injustices of all kinds. […] ¡Vivan las mariposas! (324)

The author’s Salomé again deals with the narratives of two important female figures from a noted Dominican family. In relating the stories of Salomé Ureña—the th 19 -century poet laureate of the D.R. during the country’s break from Spain—and her daughter, Camila Henríques-Ureña, Álvarez weaves the stories of these two women with various transnational and major political events (from 1850 to 1973) such as the U.S. Civil War, the assassinations of President Lincoln and President Garfield, Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, the Prohibition, World War I, Russia’s achievement of the atom bomb, McCarthyism, Castro’s revolution in Cuba, and

183 Pinochet’s takeover (with the aid of CIA) in Chile. As such, in an effort to offer an alternative historiography from the female perspective, Álvarez displays how the lives of these two women exceed spatiotemporal borders across generations and nations. In the light of this literary biography of the author and her major concerns, the following section focuses on How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and its sequel, ¡Yo!, for their attempt to textually reanimate the grimness of and the survival strategies against the hardships of pursuing an exilic life in the U.S.8 Thus, Álvarez’s preoccupation with the issues of assimilation/alienation through lingual hybridity; fragmented identity crises through cultural hybridity; racial/sexual/social apartheid in a patriarchal society; and in return, recreating a personal/communal/national through a female point of view can vividly be traced in her García Girls. Yet, the deeply ambiguous stance that the protagonist, Yolanda García, displays toward her cultural liminality at the thematic ending of the novel needs to be reconciled once and for all. Taking off from this ambiguous resolution, ¡Yo! offers how Yo(landa) finally comes to terms with her liminality through the creative act of story telling/writing. After all, ¡Yo! opens with the clues on how the protagonist has become a popular “U.S. Latina” author. Yet, because Yolanda has “apprehended” the lives of her family and her life-long acquaintances as raw material for her first novel, she was repelled for revealing their most intimate secrets. To fill the void and emancipate herself from the feeling of guilt Yolanda feels obliged to give them their own voices in an attempt to receive forgiveness, but more significantly, confirmation and acceptance by all those people who, in one way or another, have been involved in her life. At the cost of becoming objectified Yolanda in the end gains recognition and acceptance from those people, and most crucially from her father, Carlos García. The concluding segment of ¡Yo! is particularly critical because Yolanda is ultimately granted a blessing and authorized by her father to be the messenger of their family thus to transmit their story far into the future which would otherwise sink into oblivion.

88.. Quotations from How the García Girls Lost Their Accents are from the 1991 Chapel Hill edition. In the text the title of the novel is abbreviated as García Girls. Quotations from ¡Yo! are from the 1997 Plume edition. All quotations are indicated parenthetically.

184 4.2. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing … language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention.

— Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (1981)

… if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language. Until I can accept as legitimate … all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself … and as long as I have to accommodate … English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue—my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

García Girls spans thirty-three years from the familial saga of the Garcías, a Latino family who were forced to emigrate from their natal home in the Dominican Republic to New York in 1959, in an effort to evade the father’s arrest, and probably his and their own “disappearance,” for his part in a failed takeover against the despotic Trujillo regime. As a loosely autobiographical novel of initiation, García Girls relates the toilsome efforts of the four daughters of the García house (Carla, Sandi, Yolanda, and Sofía) and their parents (Carlos and Laura) as each and every one of them tries to find a means to acclimate to their newly adopted country. With Yolanda García and to a lesser extent, her three sisters as the locus of a series of fifteen discrete and self- contained albeit interrelated stories—which evenly comprise the three major parts of the novel—the reader gets an episodic portrayal not only of the most disturbing and traumatic incidents in the lives of each García, but also of their most blissful and intimate moments both in the U.S. and back in the D.R. In “reverse” chronological order, the narrative thread of García Girls begins in the year 1989 when Yolanda, now, in her late thirties, decides to return to her island home to reunite with her extended family for a piece of mind. The novel concludes at the Garcías’ family compound in the D.R. in 1956 – three years prior to their exile when Yolanda was yet a toddler. In this vein, Part I (re)covers the era from 1989 back to 1972, providing with broad strokes a rather sincere portrayal of the four García sisters as adults in the U.S. with their loves, joys, triumphs, and also their failures,

185 sorrows, longings, and several unresolved issues. Part II commences in 1970 and (re)winds to the early years of the tumultuous decade of the 1960s as the adolescent García girls undergo a difficult process of acculturation in various socio-cultural contexts. Beginning with the moment of their exile as they prepare to leave their privileged social standing to forge a new mid-class “Hispanic” life from scratch in New York, Part III delves into the girls’ earliest memories about their island home in Santo Domingo, (re)navigating within a period of four years from 1960 back to 1956. As the dates of each section evoke, the reverse narrative scheme of the text is designed to reflect the four García girls’ mnemonic endeavor to reconcile with a past which they barely remember thus haunts them even after so many “American” years spent. With its disoriented narrative order García Girls appears, at first glance, to have a lack of temporal and spatial unity; yet, a thorough and “persistent” reading reveals that the author has tightly intertwined the discrete episodes to re-construct a whole, a life experience, as if she has been weaving a patchwork tapestry – occasionally knitting the same patches repetitively onto each other to invigorate her fabric. In this respect, the text as contemplated in the image of an entwined texture, or a puzzle, illustrates the creative process that unites diverse patches of different themes, colors, incidents, people, and voices to produce a remarkable thematic unity. This thematic unity consists, on the one hand, of the traumatic pain of separation as the uprooted Garcías are forced to leave behind everything that has always been cordial to them. On the other hand, it is complemented with the tragicomic post-traumatic anxieties through which the Garcías learn to cope with their bicultural selves as an inevitable result of their abrupt transplantation from a Latin American context to an “Anglo” one. It goes without saying that throughout the entire “Americanization” process, the four García sisters experience the probable and predictable hardships of growing up (as maturing teenagers in a culture of double standards for women) which are further perplexed by their diverse attitudes in the face of a foreign life. For instance, the girls’ futile attempts to adjust to either of the two disparate cultures constantly create confusing and ambivalent emotions about their Latin American past and their Anglo- American present and future. In addition, the girls are perpetually disturbed by their ambiguous state through their bilingual/bicultural world views; their shifting socio- economic status; and their struggles with their bodies mired in-between the

186 irreconcilable values of a strictly patriarchal Latino culture and a seemingly more liberal and more permissive context of (North) American individualism.

Álvarez’s overall narrative techniques—which include a constant ploy of alternating viewpoints and deployment of multiple narrators, polyphonic narration and bilingual locutions—provide the author with the necessary means to satisfactorily reflect the traumas and post-traumatic anxieties that the Garcías experience. Hence, before venturing into a deeper thematic analysis, it will be relevant at this juncture to expound on the author’s predominant narrative strategies in her García Girls which shall reveal some crucial thematic cues on the novel’s major character(s). Jacqueline Stefanko claims that due to the shifting, unstable terrain the exiled U.S. Latina authors inhabit, they reject a unitary and synthesizing narrator who is by no means capable of mediating her story without the intervention of other people. On polyphonic narration, Stefanko asserts:

Polyphonic narration is one mode of crossing the threshold into the anomalous, impure, and unstable. That crossing enables the reader and writer to participate in the breaking down of constructed, pure boundaries and to engage in complex heterogeneous dialogues. (“New Ways of Telling” 51)

In García Girls Álvarez opts for polyphonic narration through the employment of several different points of view such as the omniscient/limited third-person, and the singular/plural first-person viewpoints. Since these rapid shifts in viewpoints, even in a single chapter, might baffle the reader, each of the fifteen chapter titles is followed by the name(s) of the character(s) as a descriptor to the episode. Serving as a subtitle to the chapters, these names and/or nicknames, inform the reader of the identity of the character on whom the narrative will pivot, further indicating the character(s) from whose vantage point the story is told. For instance, three chapters in Part I (“Antojos,” “Joe,” and “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story”) and one chapter in Part II (“Snow”) are subtitled with Yolanda. Additionally, two chapters in Part III (“The Human Body” and “The Drum”) are subtitled with Yoyo – one of Yolanda’s several nicknames. In these chapters, Yolanda’s (nick)name will appear on the upper right-hand corner of the pages. Yet, even these subtitles may mislead the reader as observed at least in one instance. The third chapter in Part I, titled “The Four Girls,” with the subtitle “Carla, Yolanda, Sandra, Sofía,” is actually dominated by and narrated from the mother’s point of view as Mrs. García, the story-teller of the family, narrates several dramatic,

187 tragicomic and bittersweet moments in her daughters’ lives with modifications and censorings in her tales. The reader, then, has to remain wary that subtitles actually reveal about whom the chapters gossip rather than disclosing the particular narrator. The last section of the novel, Part III, opens with a chapter titled “The Blood of the Conquistadores” with the subtitle “Mami, Papi, the Four Girls.” Throughout the entire novel, only this episode is numerically split into two sections: In the first segment, the point of view “exhaustingly” shifts from Yolanda’s father to Yolanda; from Yolanda to her mother; from Laura to two trivial characters, Doña Tatica and Victor (a CIA agent); from them to Carla and Sandra only to switch back to Laura; from Laura to Pupo and Checo (officers in Trujillo’s secret intelligence service); from them to Sandra; and consequently back to Carlos. From a structural standpoint, the ending of the first segment of “The Blood of the Conquistadores” provides the entire novel’s most pressing moment in that these rapid and chaotic shifts in third-person omniscient point of view precisely accounts for the hastily changing conditions and uprising circumstances in a matter of critical hours just prior to the Garcías’ narrow escape from the torture chambers of the dictator. In the second segment of this chapter the point of view finally fixes on the first-person perspectives of two respective individuals: Firstly, Sofía (or Fifi) usurps the narrative. Switching the narrative point of view back to Fifi provides the author with the means to project the pernicious impact of being uprooted from one’s mother culture, heritage and values; for, Fifi is the youngest García. Therefore, she is the one who would be the most disturbed with the least amount of memories of her native past, yet she is also to be the most rebellious and the least confused García girl in many other ways – i.e., she is the most successful girl to adapt into English, and the most maverick daughter against her father’s pseudo authority in America. Secondly, Chucha, the old Haitian maid, closes the chapter with her own first-person viewpoint. Chucha’s own narrative reveals that three decades ago she had also become an exile herself in the D.R. when she had to flee from the extermination of the Haitian inhabitants of the island by Trujillo’s order, and later she was granted a refuge in the García compound by the girls’ grandfather. In this section Chucha merits analysis for various reasons. On the one hand, as practitioner of voodoo rituals, Chucha’s spiritual powers yield her a special gravity and connect her to her African heritage. For

188 instance, whenever the other maids try to look down upon Chucha on the basis of her “blue-black” complexion, she defends herself by casting one of her “spelling looks,” reinforcing their belief that she “got mounted by spirits” (219). What is most crucial about Chucha is that toward the end of the chapter, as the Garcías prepare to take off, she brings a wooden figurine into the girls’ room with a cup of water above the head of the talismanic figurine. When she starts to pray the water in the cup evaporates in the (tropical) heat of the room, and beads of water run down the face of the voodoo statue as if the figurine is shedding tears. It is at that uncanny moment that the little girls start to cry. “Chucha had finally released her own tears in each of us” (221), resolves Fifi, and she marks this moment as her last and only memory about the island.

With that talismanic statue—which was brought from Haiti, and by extension, had been transported via the Middle Passage in the collective psyche of Chucha’s enslaved ancestors—Chucha engages in a gnostic blessing to those would-be exiles. Thus the wooden figurine becomes emblematic not only of the “exile” itself, but of a cross-continental and cross-cultural remedial tool. As such, shortly after the Garcias’ hasty departure for the U.S. Chucha remains alone in the deserted compound. As the chapter concludes Chucha becomes the medium through whom the García sisters will be able to access their island past—a past barely recalled because of the young age at which they left—especially for Fifi whose sole childhood memory is Chucha’s voodoo farewell. Indeed, the García sisters will later be able to recollect the fading memories of their puerility through this Haitian voodoo enchantress. Chucha’s final words, “They will be haunted by what they do and don’t remember. But they have spirit in them. They will invent what they need to survive” (223), unveil the fact that all the stories in the text (in reverse chronological order) have been about the four sisters’ long forgotten and also remembered memories and, ultimately, about their survival tactics. Accordingly, Chucha acts as a passageway to the sisters’ earliest memories of their island home. Through her ability to excavate the voices of the past, Chucha allows the sisters to refresh their memories which would, otherwise, have sunk into oblivion. This also allows the reader to travel backward in space and time – back to the Garcías’ motherland all the way through their earliest memories. From Chucha’s perspective the Garcías are now on their way to become citizens of a “nation of zombies” (221) – entrusting their essence to this Haitian spiritual guide.

189 Aside from “The Blood of the Conquistadores” in Part III, the last chapter of the novel, titled “The Drum,” embodies hints that might disentangle the novel’s diegetic structure as well as its major thematic concerns. The chapter is told in Yolanda’s first-person voice, although she is still a toddler hence unable to access into the linguistic world of adults. Thus, she can interact and attract attention only with the bangs she makes with her toy drum: “Barrabarrabarrabarrabarra BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!” (275) The chapter pivots around that toy drum and a kitten Yolanda rips from a mother cat. Although being warned that stealing the kitten away from its mother would be “a violation of its natural right to live” (285), the tomboy Yolanda still does so. She harbors the kitten in the cavity of her toy drum, but when the kitten responds to its mother’s meows Yolanda panics, tossing the kitten away into bushes, into the unknown. From then on, she suffers from a profound sense of guilt and cannot sleep in peace; she will, even as a grownup, envision the shadow of the mother cat lurking in her room at many nights. As an extended metaphor, the kitten corresponds to the four García girls who could not find adequate protection and affection in their native habitat. They have also been forcefully removed from the safety of their nest and tossed into the unknown at a fragile age. The reverberation of this terrifying incident with the subsequent feelings of guilt and dejection stands as the prime incentive behind the stories Yolanda feels compelled to tell/write, in an effort to expel her ruefulness, to cleanse her sense of regret, and to come to terms with her dual and bewildering identity. She is thus propelled to become the storyteller, the modern-day Scheherazade of the García sisters, so as to comprehend and project the trajectory of her life. In the last paragraph of the novel, which serves as a coda, or a kind of epilogue to the entire text, the adult Yolanda confesses:

There are still times I wake up at three o’clock in the morning and peer into the darkness. At that hour and in that loneliness, I hear her, a black furred thing lurking in the corners of my life, her magenta mouth opening, wailing over some violation that lies at the center of my art. (italics added, 290)

What is crucial about this final resolution is that in the end, the entire structure of the text collapses due to the fact that with these words Yolanda’s first- person narrative voice superimposes the past over the present, creating a past-present juncture through the act of her current narrative performance. In other words, the

190 reader is concurrently situated at the beginning and at the end of the story when Yolanda ultimately reveals herself as the architect, the mastermind, of all the other tales and narrative voices in the novel. Bluntly addressing the reader she divulges her story: [After all those experiences] we moved to the United States. The cat disappeared all together. I saw snow. I solved the riddle of an outdoors made mostly of concrete in New York. My grandmother grew so old she could not remember who she was. I went away to school. I read books. You understand I am collapsing all time now so that it fits what's left in the hollow of my story? (italics added; 289)

Suffice it to say that through the ending of the novel Yolanda’s viewpoint emerges as the most prevailing since she is the only one who uses first-person voice in more than one-third of the text, but this closing chapter further accentuates that it has always been Yolanda who has controlled the entire narrative and given voice to the other personages in her text. It is with this ultimate dissolution in the structure of the narrative that Álvarez concludes the novel like a collapsing castle made of sand. In nearly half of the chapters Álvarez opts for third-person point-of-view most of which are in the limited form. Each of the four García sisters is the focal point at least once from this vantage point with the exception of Yolanda whose voice governs most of the narrative. As such, the reader is situated at a distance to observe and collect hints about each sister’s experiences. Hence, the author (through the budding writer Yolanda who is patently her alter ego) presents the actions of each García more intimately as well as the motives and consequences of his/her actions. In this vein, an interesting use of the third-person point of view can be traced in the episode “Daughter of Invention” in Part II with the subtitle “Mami, Papi, Yoyo.” Here, the vantage point will be exchanged between Yolanda’s mother and Yolanda. This transformation in point of view thematically reflects how, at the conclusion of the chapter, Laura will pass on the heritage of her own storytelling ability—and her restless creative, or inventive, urge (especially, on new houseware gadgetry)—to her daughter who is then on her way to becoming a poet (“Daughter of Invention” 149). On the other hand, seven of the novel’s chapters are written from the first- person point of view with which the distance between the reader and the characters is diminished in order for the reader to (re)structure that particular memory and develop an understanding of the related character. For instance, three episodes in Part III (“The Human Body,” “Still Lives,” and “An American Surprise”) are told by one of

191 the three García sisters’ first-person singular point of view as each of them recalls a particular memory of their childhood in the island. Yet, in the chapter titled “A Regular Revolution” in Part II (with the subtitle “Carla, Sandi, Yoyo, Fifi”) Álvarez deploys the first-person plural point of view, albeit only once in the text. Under the rubric of this narrative strategy, Álvarez relates Carla, Sandra and Yolanda from an articulate position. In other words, the three adolescent sisters (minus Sofía) conjointly act and think the same way about the incidents recounted in this chapter. In “A Regular Revolution,” the smallest of the sisters, rebellious Sofía, is forced to break away from her sisters at the age of sixteen as she is sent(enced) to live back in the D.R. in her parents’ effort to protect her from further assimilating into American vices. Subsequent to several months of separation, when the sisters are reunited in their annual “touch with la familia” (109), the “We” of the narrative voice now becomes the strictly opposing view of the three sisters against Sofía’s abrupt re- conversion into the male-governed lifestyle of her native country; for, now the “Island was old hat” (108) for Carla, Sandra and Yolanda. That is when the “We” of the narrative voice incorporates the three sisters’ collective “feminist” stance set against Fifi’s “brainwashed” position. For instance, the eldest sister, Carla, who is a psychology student at that time, diagnoses Fifi’s abrupt sea-change as “a borderline schizoid response to traumatic cultural displacement” (117); for, the acute sense of unbelonging to the U.S.—in Carla’s semi-professional detached opinion—has caused ample trauma in Sofía who has become, just in a few months in the island, “the after person in those before-after makeovers in magazines” (117). The three sisters’ “We” perspective now represents the voice the woman’s right to choose her own path in life. Their concern for the rights of women, in fact, takes a revolutionary tone when Fifi’s boyfriend, “lovable Manuel” (120), turns out to be a macho tyrant. Without his presence or permission, “Fifi can’t wear pants in public. Fifi can’t talk to another man. Fifi can’t leave the house […] And what’s most disturbing is that Fifi, feisty, lively Fifi, is letting this man tell her what she can and cannot do” (120). With the rallying cry “¡Que viva la revolución!” (126) Carla, Sandra and Yolanda thus undertake a revolutionary mission to liberate Sofía from the island’s patriarchal conservatism. As implied in the title, the chapter relates the three sisters’ guerilla insurrections to re-convert Fifi whose liberation would become a euphemism for

192 what they really wish for all women of Latin America; namely, to awaken them and have them rebel against the double-standardized and machismo-sanctioned customs of their native culture. However, upon realizing that these customs have unshakably been tethered in a culture, where even “the patio is sex segregated” (126), the three girls claim: “We don’t even try anymore to raise consciousness here. It’d be like trying for cathedral ceilings in a tunnel” (121). The collective “We” of the narrative voice, now, becomes acutely aware of the ever-fixed advantage that men have over women who willingly act as accomplices in their own oppression. Nevertheless, despite all their efforts the García sisters cannot prove to be fervent supporters of women’s cause; for, their struggle for acceptance in American mainstream as equal members is as much a question of “race”/ethnicity as it is of gender and sexuality. Moreover, although the episode depicts the stubbornness, strength and intelligence of the García sisters, the closing segment of the chapter is a testimony to the girls’ ambivalent thoughts about their patriarchal homeland and their own feminist ideals. On having caused so much mayhem in their petit struggles to liberate Fifi, Laura decides, “I’m not going to send them anymore to cause trouble!”

(130). It is at this moment that Tía Carmen interrupts: “Don’t forget they are my girls, too. And they’re good girls, no trouble at all. What would I do […] if I didn’t get to have them with me every year?” (130-31). Although the García sisters are ultimately emancipated from the chains of machismo, aunt Carmen’s sincere and unconditional love for and genuine affection toward the García girls yield severe “confusion” (131) in the girls’ minds as well as in their hearts. To conclude, in spite of all the codes of machismo, upon which their native culture is forged, the girls realize the fact that flawed and unjust though that world may seem, within its boundaries they are truly loved and always welcomed. In fact, in the episode “The Kiss” in Part I there is an ironical statement, relating why Yolanda has chosen to become a feminist: “[…] But the third daughter, who had become a feminist in the wake of her divorce […]” (33). It can be deduced from these sentiments that Yolanda has never embraced “feminist” ideals genuinely. Instead, she has opted for a feminist stance only as a barrier, or a reaction against her failed romance during a phase of recovery. But of this later. In García Girls, all male characters constantly and collectively exert, or at least try to exert, their power over women. For that matter, Álvarez does provide a

193 stark contrast between the gender roles in the island (by extension, the entire Latin America) and in the U.S. For instance, Cousin Manuel, “When he’s in the States, where he went to prep school and is now in college, he’s one of us, our buddy. But back on the Island, he struts and turns macho” (“A Regular Revolution” 127). Moreover, the narrative frequently reiterates how the choices and certain forms of “freedoms” that Latin American women benefit from are limited only to a few rich elite. In the Latin American society, as depicted in the text, the two identity vectors of “gender” and “class” delimit what a Latina can and cannot achieve in her life. As such, in the opening episode, titled “Antojos,” the reader gets a glimpse of Yolanda’s cousin, Carmencita, who has learned English while studying at a boarding school in the U.S. for a few years. Yet, the episode soon reveals that Carmencita has been deprived of the opportunity to proceed with her education since only “boys stay for college” (6). Similarly, in “Human Body” in Part III, another case in point is Tía Mimí whose situation also represents the lack of choices for Latinas even for the privileged ones. Although aunt Mimí is deemed to be “the genius in the family” (228), she was allowed to attend to an American college only for two years; for, the elders decided, “too much education would spoil her for marriage. The two years seemed to have done sufficient harm, for at twenty-eight, Mimí was an ‘old maid’” (228-29). With all its structurally discrete albeit thematically interconnected stories, and through its fatiguing shifts in narrative voices, García Girls portrays the endeavors of a bicultural immigrant family, and details, at its best, the extent to which life may become complicated for them both in the U.S. and in their homeland. But at the same time, the novel highlights the power of language and the creative act of story telling/writing as vital liberatory means to express one’s feelings and mind about the world in order to survive. Therefore, as if she has undertaken the role of a negotiator, or a mediatrix, Julia Álvarez introduces this Latin American family with the readers of an English-speaking world. While so doing, the author’s deliberate use of Spanish words and phrases, and also her deployment of a number of Latin American idiomatic expressions, which vividly suit various contexts (be they serious or satirical), bring the reader to a closer proximity with the Garcías’ own set of values. Álvarez’s interplay of languages allows the reader also to experience the Garcías’ socio-cultural dualism and the richness of their cultural heritage as their

194 maternal forefathers (de la Torres) had been among the first Spanish conquistadors. After all, the prevalent themes of lingual/cultural liminality, language acquisition or the loss of one’s accent, and self-expression through (non-)linguistic mediums become crucial tropes in structuring the bilingual/bicultural immigrant self. At first glance, the visual images in the layout of the novel’s cover (i.e., the title of the book and Álvarez’s name in block-capitals seem merrily bouncing around the caricatured depiction of an urban neighborhood in watercolor at the center of a wrapping-paper backdrop) saturates the text, in Ellen McCracken’s words, with “a sense of exotic tropicalism” against the often bleached depictions of U.S. urban cities such as New York (New Latina Narrative 27). Combined with this visual and verbal arrangement of the multicolored cover, the title of the novel also triggers in the reader’s mind that the upcoming story is a cross-cultural narrative of assimilation in which one is likely to encounter with a “colorful” tale of acculturation.9 What is more, the tone of the implied title (as if the author has dropped the “I will tell you a story on…” off the full title) also gives an impression that the novel will, in the manner of an extended joke, deal with that assimilation process in a rather humorous way. It is a stark fact that the most notable aspect regarding Álvarez’s use of the interplay of languages as a literary device is her frequent employment of the gap between Spanish and English to give a humorous air to her novel. For instance, Mrs. García’s occasional malapropisms of idiomatic locutions (i.e., “When in Rome, do unto the Romans” [135], “It takes two to tangle” [135], “[to be] green behind the ears’” [135], “It’s half of one and two dozen of another” [138], “No use trying to drink spilt milk” [140], “let bygones be forgotten” [149], “[…] more sardines in a can than you could shake sticks at” [49]) amuses the reader.10 Another amusing interplay between the languages occurs when the girls entertain themselves with the names of their relatives by making calques, or translating them into literal English, in the chapter “A Regular Revolution.” Thus, Tía Concha and Tía Asunción become aunt

99.. Any reader with the knowledge of Spanish orthography will recognize that even before the novel commences Álvarez has already started playing with linguistic concepts, especially, in the title by situating a Spanish proper noun (with the correct accent on /í/ in “García”) in an English syntax. Similarly, while the title of the sequel to García Girls, namely, ¡Yo! (with the Spanish punctuation of the exclamation mark), is Yolanda’s nickname, it also refers to the first-person pronoun, “I.” 110.0. TheT appropriate idiomatic usages, which Laura malaprops, are: ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’, ‘It takes two to tango’, ‘[to be] wet behind the ears’, ‘It’s six of one and half a dozen of the other’, ‘No use crying over spilt milk’, ‘let bygones be bygones’, ‘more than one can shake a stick at.’

195 Conchshell and aunt Ascension; Tío Mundo becomes uncle World; and cousin Paloma turns into Pigeon. (111) Furthermore, apart from a myriad of single words and phrases in the Spanish language, the deployment of the English translations of various Dominican idioms (such as “No hay moros en la costa”, “Con paciencia y calma, hasta un burro sube la palma”, “Mi casa es su casa”, “En boca cerrada no entran moscas”) should be beguiling for the text’s bilingually informed readers.11 Bakhtin defines such modes of hybridization as “the dialogized transmission of another’s word,” and he goes on to explicate the term as “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses” (Dialogic Imagination 355; 358). On the one hand, such hybridized linguistic forms as Mrs. García’s occasional malaprops and the girls’ literal translations of the names of their relatives reveal the author’s intention to address mostly to the English-speaking reader. On the other hand, these hybridizations yield a burlesque air to the novel to deauthorize, or parody, the “official” language by communicating a spectrum of tones ranging from reverent acceptance to ridicule (Bakhtin, ibid. 77). Indeed, as the story (un)folds it becomes apparent that the author, in several instances, adequately conforms to these two preliminary expectations on the novel, viz. a cross-cultural and a humorous tale. However, not every incident in the novel appears to be humorous. On the contrary, Álvarez’s uses of humor occur at the most awkward and baffling contexts in which each García tries to adapt to his/her new American life. Hence, losing one’s accent becomes an apt metaphor for the process of acculturation which deeply affects the novel’s main characters in almost all episodes; for, the Garcías’ difficulties with their newly acquired language indicate their vexation in defining what it means to be a Dominican in New York, or as Carlos García puts it, “un dominican-york” (107), as he decides to stay in the U.S. even after General Trujillo is assassinated in 1961. Although the new life in the U.S. is painful and hard in the beginning for the whole García family, the patterns of adjustment differ according to the two identity paradigms of “gender” and “age.” (Mujcinovic, 180) On the one hand, the four García

111.1. In the text these authentic idiomatic locutions appear in English as No Moors on the coast (86), With patience and calm, even a burro can climb a palm (138), My house is your house (203), No flies fly into a closed mouth (209).

196 girls embrace acculturation so as to rapidly fit into their Anglo peers’ world while their parents resist assimilation to preserve their cultural and lingual identity. Linguistic studies have shown that bilingual children shift from one linguistic code to the other with relative ease as if they do it unconsciously, while for the adults the failure to actualize the process may prove rather distressing.12 Desiring to possess the codes of the Anglo-American society, the García sisters destroy the little that remains of their island memories. For this reason, they find themselves in a social position where code-switching signals the disintegration of their natal language and culture. On the other hand, while the “male” experience of exile continues to be frustrating, particularly for Carlos, the “female” experience of exile, which is marked by the issue of self-expression, gradually becomes a more positive and self-affirming phenomenon. “In men’s experience,” as Fatima Mujcinovic claims, “exile becomes a site of disempowerment because it strips male immigrants of agency and phallic presence. It symbolizes emasculation, or […] feminization” (“Multiple Articulations” 182). For instance, in the episode titled “Floor Show” in Part II, when the Garcías are invited to a fancy Spanish restaurant in downtown by Dr. Fenning (who has provided, in the first place, the fellowship for the Garcías’ immigration to the U.S.) to celebrate their new lives and to offer a job to Carlos as a hotel physician, Carlos’ machismo- sanctioned self-esteem is deeply shattered on account of two events. The first occasion is that Dr. Fenning himself would pay for the dinner which would shatter Carlos’s hitherto status as the rich son-in-law of the respected de la Torre family. Secondly, he would figuratively be rendered impotent when the tipsy Mrs. Fenning thrusts herself toward Carlos’ body and kisses him hard on the lips in the restroom. As Sandra says of his father: “[…] around American women he was not himself. He rounded his shoulders and was stiffly well-mannered, like a servant” (180). However, in almost all chapters when the García girls (including Mrs. Laura García) experience cultural displacement and alienation, they do explore the means to surmount them in their process of conforming to American mainstream; for instance,

12. See Marguerite Malakoff and Kenji Hakuta, “Translation Skills and Metalinguistic Awareness in Bilinguals,” in LLanguageanguage PProcessingrocessing iinn BBilingualilingual CChildrenhildren, ed. by Ellen Bialystok (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 141- 66; 146.

197 […] Laura had gotten used to the life here. She did not want to go back to the old country where, de la Torre or not, she was only a wife and a mother (and a failed one at that, since she had never provided the required son). Better an independent nobody than a high-class house slave. (“Daughter of Invention” 143)

As noted in the preliminary remarks on the novel’s narrative structure, the text does not follow a traditional plot trajectory due to its reverse chronological order of narration. Thus, the reader should constantly retrieve and transmit the bits and pieces of information given in the preceding chapters so as to build a cause-and-effect relation with the incidents in the upcoming chapters which, indeed, occur at a previous period in the García chronology. For instance, the fundamental question of why Yolanda, now as a middle-aged woman in the D.R., laments over the loss of her mother tongue in the opening chapter is left to be resolved to a patient reader who should seek the answer in the episodes that follow. This narrative technique allows the author to engage the reader, at least figuratively, in such similar immigrant experiences as a persistent excavation of old memories hence a constant oscillation between the past and the present. Indeed, in an interview Álvarez reveals why she has structurally arranged García Girls in reverse chronology: “I wanted the reader to be thinking like an immigrant, forever going back” (Lyons & Oliver, 132). Nevertheless, in contrast to the novel’s reverse plot scheme, the present analysis will, by and large, reconstruct the contents (between the years 1989-56) diachronically for an unequivocal analysis of the Garcías’ struggles with their bicultural/bilingual selves. Among the four sisters it is through Yolanda that the reader gets a first hand impression on the triumphs and frustrations entangled in the “Americanization” process which is related to the representative, creative and frequently the chaotic power of language – a language which specifies the way one perceives the world, or the way one is objectified by the world around. Throughout García Girls, the issue of language acquisition is often emphasized by such phrases as “straightening out” or “losing accents.” For instance, in “The Kiss” in Part I Carlos emphasizes on every occasion how much he had sacrificed for the best education money could buy for his daughters so that they could fit into the mainstream with relative ease by acquiring an English without a stigmatic accent like his. Thus he believes that in return his daughters should respect and appreciate him. On the other hand, the García sisters are often embarrassed by their father’s accent as well as his outlooks “with his thick

198 mustache […] and three-piece suit” (155). Unlike their mother, who speaks English “without a heavy accent” (176), one only needs to listen to Carlos when he speaks with “his broken English” (25) to find out that he is not originally an American. With respect to Yolanda, or “the Big Mouth” as her mother calls her (135), the pain of living on the margins and believing to be an outsider in both her native and adopted cultures, ultimately compels her to write her (life)story so as to give meaning and authenticity to it. Lourdes Rojas states that “oral stories are no longer viable testimonies of these [exiled] women’s experiences, for they can no longer endure to bear witness to a reality defined by the constant struggle to survive at the crossroads” (“Latinas at the Crossroads” l66). Accordingly, in lieu of oral forms to transmit her story, Yolanda commits herself to self-preservation through the written word. It is after all the life-long dilemma she experiences with her Americanization process that has primarily prompted Yolanda to become a poet and, then, to transform herself in the end to a “writer-slash-teacher” (46), as she calls it. However, Yolanda discovers the power of storytelling neither at a relatively older age nor in the U.S. Since she was a little kid back in her island home, there have been cues indicating her destiny to be an adept storyteller, a skillful manipulator of language. Two chapters in Part III, titled “The Human Body” and “The Blood of the Conquistadores,” relate Yolanda’s earliest recognition of the magic of words and the impact of stories back in her island home. In “The Human Body” little Yolanda, reading from The Arabian Nights, is inspired by Scheherazade’s story in which Scheherazade wisely saves her sister and herself from decapitation, tricking the vicious Sultan by telling him a fascinating yet an everlasting story. (232) Yolanda instantly appreciates that one can literally survive by telling entrancing tales. Later in the same chapter, while she is exchanging some corporeal secrets with her male cousin, Mundín, in the gardener’s forbidden shed, the kids are busted by the elders. It is at that very instance that Yolanda abruptly invents a story about some guaridas [Trujillo’s military police] patrolling the adjoining grounds, thus diverts the attention of the jumpy adults. Although her story is an instant construct, or a lie, Yolanda proves to have the skill in putting into use her little knowledge to deliberately influence and affect other people’s lives and attitudes. Retrospectively, Yolanda narrates:

199 I knew that in our family the least mention of the guardia got instant, unmitigated attention. I must have sensed the timing was right, for my grandparents had just returned from their trip [from the U.S. as United Nations workers], and the dictator’s raids would begin [to plunder their houses for valuable American commodities]. (237)

Therefore, Yolanda’s story proves to be not only a childish lie, but an efficient (re)ordering the bits and pieces of factual details. In spite of her young age, at the conclusion of this episode she has become an adept storyteller, a skillful manipulator of facts, a witty teller of lies, and a creator of fiction. The incident comprises an important rite of passage in the course of Yolanda’s development. Yet, another childhood memory instances, this time, the “dark” side of storytelling. In “The Blood of the Conquistadores” little Yolanda suffers from a considerable sense of guilt over some of the stories she has invented. She fears from the horrible repercussions that her family may experience after she has told an old general in Trujillo’s army, “a made-up story about Papi having a gun, which turned out to be true because Papi did really have a hidden gun for some reason” (198). The revelation that she has informed the general of this fact evokes enormous anxiety in the family. In her infantile vision Yolanda feels responsible for jeopardizing their lives. Hence, whenever her mother talks about the incident she refers to it as a time when “you almost got your father killed, Yoyo” (198). On account of this incident Yolanda wishes for her own death: “[…] maybe if she shot her head off, everyone would forgive her for having made up the story of the gun” (199). In this instance, Yolanda apprehends that telling stories can literally be a deadly serious issue.13 As evident from this dreadful incident Yolanda’s path to self-affirmation would not always be smooth, especially, subsequent to their escape to the U.S. and her affiliation with the English language. An early case in point is related in an episode in Part II, titled “Snow.” Although, this two-page long chapter is the shortest piece in the novel, the petrifying childhood memory it relates merits attention since it vividly illustrates the cost of cultural displacement through a language of anxiety.

113.3. It is significant to note that Álvarez devotes the concluding chapter of ¡Yo! (1997) entirely to this particular incident narrated in a few paragraphs in García Girls. The chapter, titled “The Father,” in ¡Yo! once again takes the reader back to Yolanda’s childhood where she and her father will have to reconcile with their shared past related to this made-up-story incident. Because Yolanda had severely been beaten, in other words tortured, by her parents and later forbidden to tell stories; she has serious doubts about her writing career even after she has now become a well-established writer. Yet, in the concluding segment of “The Father,” Carlos will unburden his daughter from this guilt by assigning her the task of transmitting their story into the future.

200 Here, Yolanda is a fourth grade student in New York, struggling to acclimate herself to her newly adopted culture and language, unfortunately, within the context of the dreadful 1962 “Cuban” Missile Crisis. Fear dominates the episode.

Calvin Hall explains that the three types of fear—or anxiety in Freud’s lexicon— are reality anxiety, neurotic anxiety and moral anxiety. The source of the first lies in the external world and its prototype is the traumatic moment of birth marked by the loss of the security of mother’s womb. Neurotic anxiety has its origins in the id. It is a constant dread of being overwhelmed by an uncontrollable urge to think or act in a way that will bring harm to the self. In moral anxiety the source of the threat is the conscience of the superego system. In Freud’s theorem, the superego is achieved by the identification of the individual initially with parents and family; and later with the external society. The superego, thus, represents the social conscience that restrains various drives of the id (see Hall, Freudian Psychology 61-9). In Yolanda’s case, it is easier for her to identify instantly with the values of her nuclear family. However, the other García members are also vexed simultaneously in a demanding process of adjustment to the white Anglo-American culture at the time. Moreover, the uncontrolled motive of Yolanda’s fear principally lies in her sensation of being alienated from/by the English language. Into little Yolanda’s rudimentary vocabulary (i.e., laundromat, corn flakes, subway, snow etc.) such unfamiliar phrases as “nuclear bomb, radioactive fallout, bomb shelter” (167) have recently been added. In addition to her new lexicon, she is also exposed to the uneasy reverberations of “what was happening in Cuba” (166). She further recalls that:

Russian missiles were being assembled, trained supposedly on New York City. President Kennedy, looking worried too, was on the television at home […] At school, we had air raid drills: an ominous bell would go off and we’d file into the hall, fall to the floor, cover our heads with our coats, and imagine our hair falling out, the bones in our arms going soft. (166-67)

All these anxieties obscure Yolanda’s actual appreciation of her environment. In the end, due to the fact that she had never seen real snow on her tropical island home (and owing to the popular culture’s brainwashing devices) Yolanda confuses the first

snowflakes of the year with the hazardous radioactive fallout. Her screams, “Bomb!

Bomb!” (167), strike panic among her American classmates. This tragicomic incident on Yolanda’s bewilderment upon such a natural and cozy weather phenomenon,

201 especially, for children at her age, highlights the disturbing and distorting impact of lingual and cultural displacement. Accordingly, Yolanda’s inadequate linguistic capacity leaves her not only with a narrow choice of words but, more saliently, with a narrow choice of emotions. Thus, she successively experiences all three types of anxiety in Freudian sense; firstly, Yolanda is forced to detach from the security of her native culture which has formerly acted as a figurative womb for her; secondly, the new external world has constantly baffled and belittled her; and lastly, she has not been able to find an adequate role model in her own family to help her structure a salubrious superego. In this relatively brief episode the process of “Americanization” is ruptured by a language of fear. Accordingly, the chapter hints that Yolanda will never fully acquire a sense of place, a sense of belonging to either culture due to her traumatic cultural dislocation which has been formulated initially in this anxious context entirely unfamiliar to her. However, it is not solely Yolanda who experiences such an anxiety based on the dreadful sensation of being torn apart between two different realities through two different languages. Other members of the García family are also subjected to similar vexations early in their lives in New York. For instance, an episode in Part III, titled “Trespass,” where the focal point now fixes on little Carla, merits analysis that might provide a general behavioral pattern in the face of such baffling linguistic impasses. Like Yolanda in “Snow,” Carla in “Trespass” faces the chaotic power of language earlier in her own path to structure an identity in an estranging culture. Additionally, unlike the other three sisters, Carla is laden with the memories of her native home to a far greater extent since she is the eldest. Hence, whereas her siblings can easily celebrate becoming “one American year old [with] a nice flan and […] a candle in the center” (150), it is hardest for Carla to cease lamenting over the loss of “the lush grasses and thick-limbed, vine-ladened trees around the compound back home” (151). Later in the episode, the seventh-grade student Carla comes across with a sign attached on a barbed-wire fence that reads, “PRIVATE, NO TRESPASSING” (151). Beyond the fence lies an abandoned farmland where “[g]rasses and real trees and real bushes still grew” (151). Reminiscent of their own vast fields back in their native island, the flora of that deserted area is quite different from the “little green squares around each look-alike house [where] the trees were no taller than little Fifi” (151) in

202 their new Long Island neighborhood. What is more crucial about the ‘no-trespassing’ sign is that Carla has learned in her Catholic School The Lord’s Prayer in which “trespassing” connotes only ‘to commit a sin.’ Hence, with her limited lexicon she finds it both amusing and bewildering to see a strictly religious advice “that you have to be good” (151) on such a simple fence-sign. The double meaning of the word ‘trespass’ later affects Carla on two disappointing grounds: On the one hand, upon her mother’s explication that “words sometimes meant two things in English,” little Carla is discouraged that she will never master English thus will “never get the hang of this new country” (151). Furthermore, having learned the difference between the notions of private and public, she believes that she will always remain an outsider in the future – just like her sister, Yolanda, who will keep considering herself an “intruder” even in her college years. On the other hand, Carla is left in a dire ambiguous state in which she recognizes the impossibility of calling the U.S. home as well as returning back to her island home since “her parents were sinking roots” (151) in New York just like the recently planted dwarf trees in their vicinity. In comparison with Yolanda’s early school experiences, those of Carla’s are no less deleterious. Memories on Carla’s newly developing language are also related with the reconstruction of a reality of anxiety, but this time with her budding sexuality. Having already lost a school year upon their settlement in the U.S., Carla is further frustrated with the probability of losing one additional year since the capacity of the Catholic School in their neighborhood is full. In addition, the strictly religious Laura will never approve sending her daughters to a “public” school where, she believes, “teachers taught those new crazy ideas about how we all came from monkeys” (152). Thus, Carla is sent to a Catholic School which is located far from their vicinity. At school, which acts as a microcosm of American society, a gang of nasty white boys not only linguistically pigeonhole Carla’s ethnic diversity with xenophobic slurs such as “Go back to where you came from, you dirty spic!” (153)14, but also physically harass the privacy of her newly maturing body:

114.4. The same racist vilification, “Spics! Go back to where you came from!” (171), resonates once again in an episode titled “The Floor Show” in Part II. Here, a female neighbor insults the Garcías, particularly rebuking the smell of their spicy food and the Spanish “noises” they make upstairs. Although the issue of racism is not a predominant theme in the entire novel, Álvarez’s deliberate repetition of this derogatory phrase indicates the author’s determinism to highlight that racism has permeated into almost every social stratum in the U.S. regardless of gender, age or class.

203 One of them, standing behind her in line, pulled her blouse out of her skirt where it was tucked in and lifted it high. “No titties,” he snickered. Another yanked down her socks, displaying her legs, which had begun growing soft, dark hairs. “Monkey legs!” he yelled to his pals […] They were disclosing her secret shame: her body was changing. The girl she had been back home in Spanish was being shed. In her place—almost as if the boys’ ugly words an taunts had the power of spells—was a hairy, breast-budding grownup no one would ever love. (153)

In the above excerpt, the dual power of language, namely its alimentative and destructive power, are foregrounded during the verbal and physical assaults on Carla. It is at those moments that Carla does not necessarily require the physical sanctuary of her native homeland which she deems impossible; instead, she seeks a spiritual refuge in her mother tongue as a recuperative means. Moreover, in Carla’s infantile perspective, the inevitability of physical maturity is closely related to the spellbinding power of the white boys’ idiom against which she desires to “stay herself, a quick skinny girl with brown eyes and a braid down her back” (154). As Saldívar-Hull indicates, Latin American woman’s “[b]rownness signifies alterity,” and she goes on to claim that “the dominant marginalize on the basis of color and language” (Feminism on the Border 148). Notwithstanding all these anxieties and discomfitures, Carla does prove to have the courage and determination to venture everyday to that Catholic School alone rather than having the shame of “being put back a year” (153). At this point in the narrative, when Carla is caught entirely off guard with her “confused feelings,” she is intercepted on her “long and scary trek” (153) to school by an address-seeking “Anglo” man who turns out to be a flasher, sitting in his car, naked below the waist. Prior to her ultimate confrontation with this traumatizing sight, naïve Carla’s fear has arisen due to the anxiety of being asked directions since she still deems her English as a “classroom English, a foreign language” (156). Additionally, the exaggerated fluency of the grownup man’s speech (i.e., “Whereyagoin?”, “Where ya’ going?”, “C’moninere”, “C’m’on” [157]) leaves her quite baffled. Having been both linguistically and socially debilitated, the sight of the pervert’s genitals ultimately deprives Carla of her entire ability to speak: “Not one word, English or Spanish occurred to her” (157). While informing the police about the incident not only little Carla but, this time, her mother is also incapacitated in her code-switching ability. Furthermore, the Garcías’ extended uneasiness with anyone in uniform has been a heritage from the

204 secret police service back in the D.R. As Saldívar-Hull claims, the exiled Latina woman’s confrontation with the Anglo police becomes a continuation of her struggle with the police, or the army, back in Central America (loc. cit. 151). In addition, Mrs. García’s ignorance of the meaning of “to file charges” (159) disturbs the officers. Hence, the police officer with “a too-patient voice with dividers between each word” explains the procedure as if he is “repeating a history lesson [she] should have learned long before she had troubled the police” (159). Moreover, since the Garcías are still “only legal residents” (160) without a green card, Laura (mis)takes the officer’s warning as a compliment when he says that it is her duty as a “responsible citizen” (159) to help them out. Upon hearing these “magic words” (160) Laura, who has promised earlier “not to involve Carla with the police” (159), breaks her promise. Accordingly, Carla is summoned from the kitchen to report exactly what happened. But while being interrogated by the police officers, Carla once again associates the chaotic power of language with her infantile knowledge on sexuality:

Carla thought hard for what could be the name of a man’s genitals. They had come to this country before she had reached puberty in Spanish, so a lot of the key words she would have been picking up in the last year, she had missed. Now she was learning English in a Catholic classroom, where no nun had ever mentioned the words she was needing. (163)

Throughout this interrogation procedure, Carla subconsciously draws an analogy between the previous two disturbing experiences, viz. the playground insults and the stranger’s perversion, with the officers’ manner of investigation. She, once again, feels assaulted; this time, not only by the pervert’s exposure or the boys’ taunts but by the cops who become the “adult versions of the sickly white faces of the boys in the playground” (162). Nevertheless, these traumatic experiences are a testimony to Carla’s stubbornness, stamina and strength of character so that she not only masters the English language in the future, but also earns a Ph.D. on (child) psychology so as to understand human behavior, her own included. Be that as it may, with her own sisters she will prove unhelpful, but severely detached and critical as a specialist. The issue of the chaotic and alimentative power of language is not only limited to the García girls’ puberty, but lingers on throughout their adolescence and adulthood. For instance, in the chapter titled “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story” in Part I, Yolanda, whose quest for identity through language, recalls some “teensy pencils”

205 which are meant to be custom made merely for her as Christmas gift. Although Laura has ordered a toy company to inscribe “Yolanda” on the pencils, the company, on its own initiative, “had substituted the Americanized, southernized Jolinda” (90). This initial encounter with the power of language in defining who she is and who she is anticipated to become, will continue to haunt her during and even after her college years. In the episode, Yolanda relates three successive epochs in her formal education. First of all, back in her euphoric prep years in her sex-segregated boarding school she has no prejudices against or difficulty in flirting with boys from their brother school. Associating her first naïve dating experiences with her newly acquired language, Yolanda, who was then the center of attention, enthusiastically claims:

[…] I had what one teacher called “a vivacious personality.” I had to look up the word in the dictionary and was relieved to find out it didn’t mean I had problems. English was then still a party favor for me—crack open the dictionary; find out if I’d just been insulted, praised, admonished, criticized. (87)

Although this sentiment might lead the reader to the expectation that from this point onward language acquisition will be an amusing ploy for Yolanda and that all her experiences in the process will be pleasant adventures, the situation turns out to be quite the contrary in a few years. Yolanda’s retrospective self-interrogation divulges that although she has convinced her “parents into letting me transfer to this co-ed college” (88), and although she has improved her English by that time, she recalls her tendency to whisper while conversing with her classmates at college. She deems this habit as revealing her sense of being “still a greenhorn in this culture” (90). The correlation between language acquisition and structuring her bilingual/bicultural self is the major inquiry that Yolanda, in her own words, is “exploring here” (88). Despite her enthusiasm for the first English class at college (i.e., having already bought “every one of the required and recommended texts” [88], and being “the proverbially overprepared student” [90]), Yolanda still feels “exposed […] around the seminar table” (88) and “profoundly out of place” (89). In addition to her sense of being an “intruder upon the sanctuary of English majors” (89), her professor’s false smile at “foreign students to show them the natives were friendly” (88) further alienates Yolanda. What is most significant is that all these feelings of estrangement and isolation propel her to develop a sense of identification with and a lure toward a

206 cryptic boy in her class with a foreign name – Rudolf Brodermann Elmenhurst, the third. After her initial acquaintance with this boy, Yolanda and Rudolf are assigned in the English class to work in pairs and write a “fourteen-line treatise on the nature of love” (93) in the form of a sonnet. Yolanda later admits that the poem has indeed been “the first pornographic poem I’d ever co-written” (93), but she could not comprehend that at that time, until Rudolf has clarified that the words, phrases, and images he has opted for are replete with double meanings. It is because of what Yolanda calls her “immigrant’s failing, literalism” (89)15 that she has been deterred to grasp all the connotations and figurative meanings in the sonnet. Having finally detected that Rudy’s intended meaning in such a line as “The coming of the spring upon the boughs” (93), actually refers to ejaculation, Yolanda is doubly shocked from her sexually-inexperienced stance to witness such utter vulgarity, defiling “a place I’d reserved for deep feelings and lofty sentiments!” (93). Later on, the teasing attitude of her classmates as she reads her own “sublimated love sonnet” further divulges her sense of alienation while Rudolf’s poem has “brought down the house” (94). Herein, the choice for the adjective sublimated merits attention; for, the word accentuates Yolanda’s self-image to be an outsider as well as her linguistic inadequacy since the word implies both ‘direct and pure’ in language and ‘desexualized’ in experience. The association Yolanda colligates between language and experience, especially that of sexual kind, reaches to a climax when she ultimately curses her “immigrant origins” (94) upon missing the “jokes everyone was making on the last digits of the year, 1969” (94-5) in which the number explicitly stands for a mode of sexual intercourse [“”] – a concept which is yet extrinsic to her knowledge, linguistic or otherwise. As the episode unfolds, Yolanda and this heartbreaker “Rudy” with “bedroom eyes” (89) involve in a more intimate relationship which is evaluated from different perspectives by each “lover.”

115.5. “Immigrant’s failing” is not peculiar merely to Yolanda. In “Daughter of Invention” in Part II, Yolanda as a ninth grade student is required to prepare an inaugural speech at school – similar to that of Ellison’s nameless protagonist in Invisible Man (1952). Inspired by the great American bard, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Yolanda in her speech metaphorically calls for the student to kill the teacher, referring to one’s advance based on the knowledge of the mentors, while at the same time retaining one’s own authentic individuality. Her father, upon hearing Yolanda rehearsing her text, interprets the metaphor “to kill the teacher” in a literal sense. Having a deep trust in the vitality of religious, familial and educational authority, Carlos furiously destroys the manuscript, provoking Yolanda to call him “Chapita,” the nickname of the tyrannical Dominican dictator. (145)

207 On the one hand, Yolanda, still thinking in linguistic terms (“I didn’t know how to read him. I had nothing in my vocabulary of human behavior to explain him” [92]), behaves in a precautious manner. On the other hand, Rudy seems heedless and always persistent with his straightforward reference to their relationship as “not a goddamn poetry class” (96). Through all these contemplations about her past, Yolanda tries to solve the mystery of having such a sublimated relationship especially with the boy she is deeply “absorbed in” (92), particularly, in a college atmosphere in the decade of the hippies. Regarding those years Yolanda later confesses: “By then I was a lapsed Catholic; my sisters and I had been pretty well Americanized since our arrival in this country a decade before, so really, I didn’t have a good excuse” (87). Thus, there must be some other motive behind her anxiety against prenuptial sexual intercourse with Rudy, propelling him finally to accuse her of being “frigid or something” (97), and abandoning her with vain fantasies of their reconciliation. Understandably, after the breakup Yolanda, as a woman who speaks from the periphery of otherness, laments and foresees the bitter consequences of her biculturalism and her divided self: “I saw what a cold, lonely life awaited me in this country. I would never find someone who would understand my peculiar mix of Catholicism and agnosticism, Hispanic and American styles” (99). The answer of this major query clarifies when Yolanda, now, from a detached position retrospectively compares her undergrad years with her postgraduate years. Back in her relationship with Rudy, Yolanda needed something more than drugs or explicit sexual invitations to be turned on. Yet, Rudy’s overtly salacious patois, which hardly accounted for Yolanda’s fantasies, wiped away any semblance of affection, or any sense of security she might have needed at the moment; she says:

But the guy had no sense of connotation in bed. His vocabulary turned me off even as I was beginning to acknowledge my body’s pleasure. If Rudy had said, Sweet lady, lay across my big, soft bed and let me touch your dear, exquisite body, I might have felt up to being felt up. But I didn’t want to just be in the sack, screwed, balled, laid and fucked my first time around with a man. (italics in the text; 96-7)

Moreover, still reasoning in linguistic terms, Yolanda recalls that she “didn’t have the vocabulary back then to explain even to myself what annoyed me” when she once recognizes the discriminative attitude of Rudy’s insidiously racist parents who

208 have encouraged him that “seeing ‘a Spanish girl,’ […] should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures” (98). But as she presently narrates her story, the now-linguistically competent Yolanda does possess the vocabulary to enunciate her feelings; she says, “It bothered me that they should treat me like a geography lesson for their son” (italics added; 98). Subsequently, Yolanda’s recollection of her linguistic and physical anxieties grows more vivid as she delineates with sharp sketches a completely different image of herself in her postgraduate years: “I was a poet, a bohemian, et cetera. I’d had a couple of lovers. I was on birth control […] Funky and low-down, the kind inspired by […] dropping acid with a guy […]” (102). Yet, despite this turbulent experience, which she has strictly eschewed before, Yolanda cannot ease the trauma of breaking up with her college lover who has still “haunted my sexual awakening with a nightmare of self-doubt” (103). Those ambiguities are resolved once and for all when Rudy and Yolanda accidentally meet after five years. During their catch-up conversation in Yolanda’s apartment, Rudy’s always-persistent-never-changing direct request, “Let’s just fuck” (103), impels Yolanda to throw him out. With the stain of Rudy’s expensive wine on her dress, Yolanda’s concluding exclamation, “Shit, […] this is not going to wash out” (103), is finally devoid of any feeling of “imitating someone else” (95) unlike the way she has always felt in her undergraduate years. Consequently, now as a linguistically competent poet and an experienced and “Americanized” Yolanda is able to fend for herself in English without lacking the suitable vocabulary in such a distressed situation. Furthermore, as revealed two chapters before (“The Four Girls” in Part I) she has become a “writer-slash-teacher” (46) at the cost of her losing her accent. From there on, her future poems, including the “Bedroom Sestina” (50), will be the product of both her mastery over the English language and her (sexual) experience in life. As evident in “The Rudy Elmenhurst Story” lingual impasses, or the gap between Spanish and English, will continue to affect the García sisters’ actions, especially, in their interaction with men. For instance, in the chapter “Joe” in Part I, Yolanda relates her relationship with John, a one-hundred-percent American man, prior to and during their marriage. The episode opens in a private mental institution where Yolanda is out of words and trying to recover from a breakdown she has

209 undergone, mainly, because of her doomed marriage. As Yolanda shares the details of her marriage with her psychotherapist, the main motive of this severe rupture clarifies that it has been due to the huge linguistic gap between husband and wife. This gap is best illustrated in a prenuptial pillow-talk scene where the poetically sentient Yolanda wants to engage John in a rhyming, or punning, game on their names. During the game, whereas Yolanda can efficiently and affectionately pun on the name of her live-in lover (“John’s a hon, lying by the pond, having lots of fun” [71]), John cannot match her poetic skills and sensibilities. No suitable word occurs to him to rhyme “Joe-lan-dah” in English – let alone, in Spanish. His consequent, yet, rather irrelevant rhyming, “And you’re a little squirrel!” (71), cracks a rift between the couple. Since John is unable to traverse across the gap between English and Spanish, Yolanda becomes more frustrated with John’s inability to rhyme even her nickname, “Yo.” She, therefore, scurries “like the mad, into the safety of her first tongue” (72) to retrieve the Spanish word cielo – meaning ‘sky’ – to help him out,

“Sky,” she tried. Then, the saying of it made it right: “Sky, I want to be the sky.” “That’s not allowed.” He turned her around to face him. His eyes, she noticed for the first time, were the same shade of blue as the sky. “Your own rules: you’ve got to rhyme with your name.” “I”—she pointed to herself—“rhymes with the sky!” “But not with Joe!” John wagged his finger at her. His eyes softened with desire. He placed his mouth over her mouth and ohhed her lips open. “Yo rhymes with cielo in Spanish.” Yo’s words fell into the dark, mute cavern of John’s mouth. Cielo, cielo, the word echoed. (72)

In this dialogue, the bivalence of Yolanda’s preferred rhymes and her flight into Spanish, where John “could not catch her, even if he tried” (72), demonstrate her deftness in crossing linguistic borders. On the contrary, John’s patent boast in his language proves that he will never be able to fully reach out to Yolanda’s inner world. Thus, language per se becomes the primary gap, among other trivial clashes, their relationship cannot bridge. On the far side of the rift stands Yolanda with her impulsive, poetic and emotional sensibilities; on the other, “the proudly monolingual” (72) John represents cold rationality, tedious meticulousness and vexing aloofness. Strictly negating Yolanda’s bicultural/bilingual self, which is metaphorically inherent in her nickname Yo (“I” in Spanish), John is—to use Diane Neumaier’s words— committing “cultural genocide” (256) in his persistence to call Yolanda with his Americanized versions of her nickname such as Joe, Joey, or Josephine. Moreover,

210 with an exaggerated confidence in his monolingualism John assigns himself a censoring and domineering position, so that he in the end takes considerable license in suggesting Yolanda that what she needs most is “a goddam shrink!” (73). Indeed, Yolanda’s sense of self is so profoundly structured by/in her own perception of language that upon having acquired some of John’s “Americanisms” in his speech traits, she deeply resents: “My God! […] I’m starting to talk like him!” (73). The rupture in the now-married couple’s relationship ultimately reaches a climax when Yolanda blames John for provoking her, during a scrap, to use the word “fuck” (77) which is presumably her least favorite word in English – a disgust for the word she has probably inherited from her college affair with Rudy, who had once scolded her that their affair was not “a goddamn poetry class” (96). Similarly, John’s rebuke, “Not everyone can be as goddamn poetic as you!” (72), echoes that of Rudy’s. Shortly after her final dispute with John, Yolanda breaks down only to hear and utter a torrent of nonsensical gibberish. The breakdown manifests itself in Yolanda’s losing her entire ability to communicate. This rather consternating scene, in which Yolanda retreats into “Babble babble babble” (78), is poignantly indicative of an acute rupture of communication on a personal level. In the end, Yolanda’s plain farewell note (“Gone to my folks” [79]), which is now devoid of any creative endeavors or affection, ends their relationship. In trying to write such a one-line note telling him she is leaving, she finds that the problem has perilously seeped into her writing craft. Later, she would also simplify the traumatic pain of breakup to her parents, “We just didn’t speak the same language” (81). Yet, on a deeper level ever since her puberty Yolanda has always suffered from being fragmented into multiple selves as evidenced by her Spanish and Anglicized, or “bastardized names” (47). Her divided self as marked by the horde of her monikers (Yo, Yoyo, Jolinda, Yosita, and Joe, Joey, Josephine) has to be reunited finally into one elemental self; but, in her nervous breakdown Yolanda has maimed her own vital bond with words and language. Even her own name and her earlier penchant for words such as love and alive or amor, which are indispensable to her profession as a poet, now, inflict pain and cause physical allergy (82). Yet, the episode concludes with an optimistic air when Yolanda begins to re(dis)cover her love of and dependency on words: “She gains faith as she says each word, and dares further: “World ... squirrel ...

211 rough ... love ... enough […] There is no end to what can be said about the world” (85). “The struggle with language,” claims Joan Hoffman, “highlights the need to find the strength and self-assurance to forge an assimilated dual identity […] that both melds and celebrates cultural and linguistic elements from the Old World and the New” (22). After her full recovery Yolanda is furiously irritated on being called by any of her nicknames; instead, she “wants to be called Yolanda now” (“The Four Girls” 61). Having been engaged in a dynamical tension between pursuing an exilic life and an ongoing yearning for repatriation, throughout the entire novel the Garcías are portrayed as lost in-between two languages and two cultures. The four García sisters have always suffered from cultural displacement to varying degrees, and their estrangement mostly pivots around the dual issue of language acquisition and loss of their accent. In losing their Spanish to adapt into English, the García sisters have also initiated a process of erosion of their natal culture. Hence, it is imperative to return to Yolanda’s homecoming story, titled “Antojos” in Part I, which is structurally the opening albeit thematically and temporally the concluding chapter of the novel. At the dawn of her thirty-ninth birthday Yolanda wants to take a trip to her island home, but now, as a well-established “Dominican-American” writer. Seeking relief for her confused feelings of cultural displacement and lingual estrangement, both of which she adamantly believes are the reason why “she and her sisters have led such turbulent lives—so many husbands, homes, jobs, wrong turns among them” (11), Yolanda “is not so sure she’ll be going back” (7) to the U.S. since “she has never felt at home in the States, never” (12). In “Antojos” the reader immediately encounters “Yoyo” in agony over the loss of her Spanish and in ambiguity about that nostalgic touch with her natal culture. It is interesting to note that Yoyo, one of Yolanda’s several nicknames, appears for the first time in this opening episode in her aunts’ call to make a birthday wish. Blowing the candles, Yoyo wishes “Let this turn out to be my home” (11). In another context, reminiscent of the “rocking chair” or the “carousel” tropes respectively in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) and Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1945), which indicate an ambiguous motion of (in)stability, a “yoyo” is a pendulum-like toy that also performs monotonously an oscillating movement only through ups/downs or backs/forths. Thus, Álvarez’s deployment of the moniker Yoyo in this opening scene

212 foreshadows the ambivalent stance that Yolanda will display towards her native culture in the concluding segment of the episode. As a middle-aged woman Yolanda has mastered English and become a writer/teacher to the detriment of her linguistic competence in her natal tongue. During the reunion she is thus scolded, “¡En español!” by her aunts whenever “she reverts to English” (7). Her aunts’ insistence that “[t]he more she practices, the sooner she’ll be back into her native tongue” (7) indicates their belief that one actually becomes and exists in language. In “Antojos,” apart from this predominant theme of ‘cultural displacement’ via clashing bicultural/bilingual world views, the conversation between Yolanda and her female relatives and the maids hints at Álvarez’s concern for one other delicate issue; that is, ‘class conflicts,’ as scrutinized from the Latin American political prism, which is also related to the issue of language difference but this time between the elite and the poor. In its simplest terms, due to the strictly defined class hierarchies in the D.R., and by extension the entire Latin America, the ruling classes have historically inflicted their will upon the materially inferior classes which is often intertwined with racial and familial background. The sharp disparity between the cultural paradigms, especially, the language of the wealthy upper-class and the poor, is demarcated in “Antojos” through the juxtaposition of Yolanda’s rich kin, who can easily afford armed private guards and a separate nanny for each kid, and the nursemaids “who sit on stools at the far end of the patio, a phalanx of starched white uniforms” (3). In this scene, while the “starched white uniforms” metaphorically rob those modest servants of their individuality, the maids are also literally pushed to the margins. Later, when one of the aunts scolds a black uniformed old maid, the veteran servant docilely bows her head in a “gesture of pleading [… of a Renaissance …] lover who pleadeth for mercy from his beloved” (4). In another instance, the dehumanization of another maid is observed when Altagracia is summoned to serve as a walking-dictionary – a dictionary that has particularly specialized in the lexicon of the rural poor. When Altagracia is ordered by Yolanda’s aunts to explain what the Spanish word antojo signifies among the peasants, she humbly replies, “U’té que sabe” [You are

213 the one to know] (8).16 Altagracia’s response represents how the “low” classes submit everything, their natural language and lexicon included, to the authority of the ruling class. Their conversation over the meaning of antojo begins and unfolds as follows:

“Any little antojo, you must tell us!” Tía Carmen agrees. “What’s an antojo?” Yolanda asks. See! Her aunts are right. After so many years away, she is losing her Spanish. “Actually it’s not an easy word to explain.” Tía Carmen exchanges a quizzical look with the other aunts. How to put it? “An antojo is like a craving for something you have to eat.” Gabriela blows out her cheeks. “Calories.” An antojo, one of the older aunts continues, is a very old Spanish word “from before your United States was even thought of,” she adds tartly. “In fact, in the countryside, you’ll still find some campesinos [peasants] using the word in the old sense. Altagracia!” she calls to one of the maids sitting at the other end of the patio. […] The maid obeys. “In my campo [village] we say a person has an antojo when they are taken over by un santo [a spirit] who wants something.” (8)

As explicated in the above dialogue, in the Dominican lexicon antojo has two referents: It refers to something edible one craves for, but also to the possession of someone by spirits. Here, Yolanda embodies both referents. In her recent return to the D.R. after a five-year absence, she proves to be much more American(ized) than Dominican as evidenced by her cousin Lucinda’s coding her as “Miss America!” (4) when she enters the room. As such, Yolanda finds herself mired in-between two worlds; she belongs to both and yet to neither one of them. In this vein, her desire to return to the island in 1989—the current diegetic plane of the narrative—symbolizes a spiritual journey, an antojo, in search for communion not only with her natal culture but also with an unsullied past that dates back to her puberty. Hence, at the end of the discussion over the meaning of antojo Yolanda decides to take a lonely trip in the mountains of the island to look for what her “santo wants after five years” (9). Although being warned that “A woman doesn’t travel alone in this country” (9), Yolanda’s persistence to find some exotic guava fruits to satisfy her own antojo will prepare the circumstances for the ambiguous ending of the novel. As such Yolanda thinks that she will resolve her ambivalence toward her native culture by reinventing antojo to denote a nostalgic craving for her home. Yet,

116.6. Although this phrase appears only once throughout García Girls, the reader repeatedly encounters with variants of this sentence all over ¡Yo! – indicating that Álvarez has felt impelled to extend her class sensibilities into this sequel. Moreover, once Yolanda takes center stage as an anglophone writer in ¡Yo!, the close relation between lingual hybridity and identity becomes a trivial matter – enabling Álvarez to deal with other social issues.

214 during her “quasi-orientalist” drive for the guavas, the nostalgia expressed in regard to finding a pure notion of home in the uncorrupted landscape of the Dominican countryside (“This is what she has been missing all these years without really knowing that she has been missing it” [12]) is threatened by two incidents of a cross- cultural reciprocality between the U.S. and the D.R., despite the island’s untouched pastoral settings, exotic campesino huts, and the peaceful Virgin of Guadalupe shrine. The first incident occurs when Yolanda gets a flat tire off the main road and far from any help; she then panics at the sight of two male campesinos who have only intended to help her. It is at this moment of loneliness and desperation that the presence of the peasants evokes an acute anxiety in Yolanda toward the unpredictable side of her culture. Her poignant anxiety, provoked by the fear of rape or murder, actually originates in her own deep-rooted bias toward the under-class. She simply would not have feared these two men had they looked and acted as if they belonged to the upper-class like her kin: “They wear ragged work clothes stained with patches of sweat; their faces are drawn” (19). Moreover, Yolanda’s internalized prejudice surfaces more notably when she ultimately feels obliged to mention the surname of some of her “influential” relatives as a kind of social shield against those men, anticipating that the names will evoke awe and fear in those simple minds. This scene becomes more indicative of Yolanda’s ambiguous stance towards her culture as she finally finds the courage to explain how and why she ended up there. But considering herself to be an outsider, “[…] her tongue feels as if it has been stuffed in her mouth […] She has been too frightened to carry out any strategy […] Then, as if the admission itself loosens her tongue, she begins to speak, English, a few words, of apology at first, then a great flood of explanation” (19; 20). In the end, the peasants take her as an “Americana” (22). Hence, it is a grave irony that Yolanda’s instinctive survival strategy to code-switch back to English reveals her subliminal hope that her “American(ized)” self will fend for her. Such resolution is also sardonic in the sense that the whole purpose of Yolanda’s homecoming has initially been to restructure a nostalgic touch with her native identity, language and culture. The other indication to Yolanda’s shattered nostalgia occurs when she twice encounters—prior and anterior to her quest for guavas—with a billboard advertisement of a deluxe American product, Palmolive soap, on the wall of a poor old woman’s

215 hapless cantina. In her initial brush with the poster Yolanda delineates the young Palmolive model as a “creamy, blond woman [who] luxuriates under a refreshing shower, her head thrown back in seeming ecstasy, her mouth opened in a wordless cry” (14-5). After the anxious minutes with the campesinos, though, in her next brush with the poster the “creamy” skin of the model, now, “gleams a rich white,” and the model’s “wordless cry” turns into a holler “as if she is calling someone over a great distance” (23). Thus, the billboard becomes emblematic of the close affiliation between such luxurious American products and the island’s rich elite who solely has the privilege to enjoy such foreign commodities in particular and, by extension, “American” vacations, shopping-trips, education and a life style in the U.S. – just as Yolanda’s extended family do. The patent contrasts between spatial distance and closeness Yolanda feels toward the U.S.; between the old native rural woman and the relaxed Anglo model; and between the notions of privilege and deprivation concomitantly signal the cultural incursion of U.S. enterprise deep into the island’s social life after the downfall of the Trujillo regime. Within this neo-colonial context Yolanda’s forlorn yearning for her lost origins and her memories of an idealized home is entirely shattered. After all, Yolanda’s trip to her island home characterizes a search for identity and a voice which would provide her with a double vision on her liminality. Yet, her homecoming now signals the impossibility of any single perspective which can solely account for the complexity of her reality. With a “textual” return to her homeland via her García Girls, which moves backward in time and space through the memories of the four García sisters, Julia

Álvarez has tried to blur the borders between the self and the community; between the U.S. and the D.R.; between the English language and Spanish; and between the issues of mnemonic continuity and exilic rupture. As discussed earlier, in an effort to fill the void in Yolanda’s narrative the last paragraph of the final episode (“Drum” in Part III), disentangles the reverse chronological order of the narrative when Yolanda ultimately superimposes her past memories over the present act of her narration by collapsing her story into a single temporal dimension in the current diegetic plane of the narrative. That is how Álvarez resolves García Girls when Yolanda’s emergent voice finally unveils herself as the supreme architect of the entire text. On the other hand, the ambiguous stance which Yolanda posits toward the cultural paradigms of

216 her native home as well as her Americanized self at the thematic ending of the text (“Antojos” in Part I), has to be reconciled once and for all, mostly, to build a bridge between herself and her family and, by extension, her national origin.

However, when García Girls concludes Yolanda does not attain either the wholeness or the authentic origin she has been searching for; instead what she has ended up with is only a receding memory of an unsullied home, or an unfragmented self, which she will never be able to attain. Thus, Álvarez precisely approximates Anzaldúa’s characterization of the border as “una herida abierta,” an open wound, “where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Borderlands 25). By the same token, leaving the issue of “exilic absence” to be surmounted, or in other words transformed into something auspicious in the sequel to this loosely autobiographic novel, Álvarez suspends Yolanda (María Teresa García de la Torre) in an ambiguous in-between location – “bleeding” in the sense with which Anzaldúa has saturated the term. Accordingly, Yolanda becomes a synecdoche for a “border woman,” who continually straddles the “psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands” (Anzaldúa, ibid. “Preface”). It has after all been Yolanda’s unstable border-woman status that has inflamed her craving to re(dis)cover an originary moment of stability that has been gradually receding from her grasp. Upon having established herself as a renowned “U.S. Latina” author within the literary circles of U.S. mainstream in the early 1990s with her García Girls and with the consequent appeal to her first historical fiction, Butterflies, Álvarez seems impelled to pay a textual revisit to the now-familiar García clan with a sequel six years later. In an effort to fill the void in Yolanda’s narrative, but more crucially to offer a lucidity for the equivocalness of the protagonist’s liminality, the author thus resumes her ¡Yo! from where she has left in García Girls. Accordingly, divulging another series of fifteen self-contained episodes on Yolanda, ¡Yo! not only re-presents long-familiar personages from García Girls, but also introduces additional narratives through entirely new entrants in Yolanda’s (life)story. Aside from the members of her nuclear family and Lucinda (her cousin), the reader gets acquainted for the first time with Tammy Rosen (a lesbian and Yolanda’s best friend from her psychotherapy group), Marie Beaudry (her landlady during a period of cramming to earn tenure at collage), Lou Castellucci (a former student whose story she had once plagiarized),

217 Jordan Garfield (her quondam college professor and mentor), Dexter Hays (an hipster boyfriend), Sarita Trinidad (the daughter of a devoted maid and Yolanda’s illegitimate cousin), Doug (her third husband), Corey (Doug’s daughter from his previous marriage), Consuelo (an old illiterate Dominican woman), and several peasants and other caretakers upon whose lives Yolanda had left her mark during her penning withdrawals in the D.R. Even a nameless whacky literary fan, who has seriously been obsessed with and stalked Yolanda for a long time, is let to recount his own gruesome version of her. Notwithstanding Álvarez’s deployment of the shifting point-of-view in García Girls, at the conclusion of the narrative the reader ultimately detects that the entire story has been told from Yolanda’s mouth which has consumed the voices of all the other people. Throughout ¡Yo!, the point-of-view also shifts constantly between first- and third-person viewpoints. Yet, the most remarkable narrative trait of ¡Yo! is that this time the story has been usurped from Yolanda. Having never been allowed to use the first-person narrative voice, she is now entirely deprived of the control of the storytelling process; thus, Yolanda is left at the mercy of her family and other acquaintances. Indeed, as Álvarez explains in an interview ¡Yo! is about the “revenge of the people in a writer’s life who don’t usually get to tell the story because the writer is always co-opting the experience” (Lyons & Oliver, 133). As a result, Yolanda in ¡Yo! becomes the object, or the subject matter, of other characters who provide a motley of discrepant tales about the impact that Yolanda and her perpetual hunger for telling/writing stories has always had on their lives. In fact, most of the tales in ¡Yo! relate the consequences of Yolanda’s need to tell/write stories. For instance, from her mother’s perspective Yo has always been the habitual liar in the family. Back in the D.R. the Garcías had many dreadful days after little Yo had told a story to a general about her father’s illegal gun which caused them to flee to the U.S. (“The father” in Part III). Upon arriving in the U.S., the stories Yo fabricated in her elementary school about fictional parental tortures at home alerted the social workers, almost jeopardizing their immigrant situation with the probability of deportation. (“The mother” in Part I). Yo also caused a drastic change in the course of her cousin Lucinda’s life during their boarding school years in the U.S. When Mrs. García discovered Yo’s diary, in which the García girls’ and Lucinda’s

218 flirtations and love affairs had been intricately detailed, Lucinda was figuratively deported back to the D.R., losing her chance to proceed with college education (“The cousin” in Part I). Likewise, Yo’s written research-report in a college class on the issue of acculturation deeply shattered the counterfeit image of a rich-mysterious- Hispanic-girl which Sarita, their maid’s daughter, had adopted as a social shield against the rich white majority (“The maid’s daughter” in Part I). In another context, although her college mentor, Prof. Garfield, had his own emotional indecisiveness on his sexual orientation, he had to spend languishing decades, dealing with Yo’s indecisiveness on becoming a writer or an academic (“The teacher” in Part I). However, apart from these unpleasant ramifications, Yo once helped her landlady emancipate herself from an abusive husband—who, at the time, sabotaged

Yo’s writing sessions while she was struggling to earn tenure at college—by revealing out that he was indeed a child-molester (“The landlady” in Part II). By the same token, in a creative writing class she lectured, Yo had instructed one of her students to pen down his own experiences. Thus, when the student was approved for his short stories by his classmates and teachers, those commendations supplied him with ample self-esteem to lead a pleasing future life (“The student” in Part II). During one of her annual retreats in her island country, Yo forged a story, this time, for her own benefit that her hipster boyfriend was an American journalist who sojourned there to interview her politician uncle, a candidate for the presidency at the time. In fact, it was the only way to be with her lover among her wary kin (“The suitor” in Part II). Moreover, in a writing retreat in the D.R. Yo altered the mind of an old, illiterate Dominican woman about her daughter who had illegally emigrated to the U.S. The old woman pleaded Yo to write a letter to deter her daughter from breaking her arranged-marriage to an abusive American guy. Instead, Yo persuaded the woman to change the message of her text to advise her daughter to be firm and independent against that blackmailer at any cost (“The stranger” in Part I). In another writing retreat in her native land, the idyllic scenery from Yo’s isolated, tranquilizing, and hapless penning-room ultimately ameliorated the grief-stricken mind of a caretaker’s wife whose little son had drowned in the swimming pool of the luxurious mansion where she had served for Yo’s wealthy relatives (“The caretakers” in Part II).

219 Notwithstanding her central role, Yolanda’s voice is completely absent from all of these new episodic narratives. Each of these fifteen chapters (plus the prologue chapter titled, “The sisters”) is narrated by someone else who contributes to Yolanda’s well being while describing Yo’s efforts in helping that particular person discover his or her own inner “yo,” or the “I” who lies within. Consequently, these meticulously structured personal brushes with Yo thematically clash with one another, providing every time a different facet of her personality. From their revelations Yolanda emerges as a complex figure of contradictions which, in some cases, seem irreconcilable. Yolanda is permitted to tell her own story only in the dialogues she has with the characters of each section. This technique of shifting viewpoints, which is considered the most predominant trait of Álvarez’s overall narrative strategies (besides her use of humor, code-switching between Spanish and English; and reordering fragmented stories from a female viewpoint) might fruitfully be traced in a single chapter in ¡Yo!, titled “The Wedding Guests” in Part III. “The Wedding Guests” begins with the third-person viewpoint of a minister. Domineering over the occasion the minister, in comparison to the other people, is detached from the emotional perspectives of each guest. From his uncommitted stance the minister is thus the perfect medium to offer objective insights on the people he observes. Pondering over how such disparate personages are ever going to coexist in harmony, he ruminates successively over the sweetness of Yolanda’s parents-in-law; the frustration of the groom’s teenage daughter from his previous marriage; and the cultural gap between the groom’s tranquil “American” family and Yolanda’s “clamorous clan” (216) from the D.R. The minister’s point-of-view then shifts to the “I” narration which will fluctuate consecutively from one character to another in this sequence: the soon-to-be stepdaughter; the hipster ex-boyfriend; the groom; the maid’s daughter; aunt Flor; cousin Lucinda and Yolanda’s best friend. Panoramically displaying almost all of Yolanda’s life-long acquaintances and family members through a successive rendition of brief snapshots—as if projected from the lens of a wedding camera—the carnivalesque ambiance of Yolanda’s nuptials transforms into a parade of almost all the other voices in the entire novel. Reflecting their most intimate and subjective emotions, all these characters express their own insights about Yolanda, be they pleasant or not, and after everyone

220 in the ceremony takes a turn, the narrative accomplishes a full narrative circle by returning to the third-person viewpoint of the minister. What is most crucial about this episode is that the ambiance of Yolanda’s wedding ceremony is analogous to what constitutes the very gist of the entire text; that is, in the minister’s words, “a kaleidoscope of colors, […] a quilting of lives, a collection of points of view” (216). In addition to the minister’s sentiments, Yolanda’s best friend, Tammy, also likens the atmosphere of the occasion to a painting of sundry textures and colors: “[…] pastels are staring to cluster around bright-color dresses, dark skin by fair skin; stranger’s children approach the old, beckoning tías […], bright faces this way and that, trying to figure out a resemblance in the family” (236-37). In this respect, “The Wedding Guests” represents, perhaps, the zenith of Álvarez’s expertise in employing the shifting viewpoint in order to produce a quasi-tapestry text(ure). Among various similarities with García Girls, the most notable novelistic trait of ¡Yo! is the absence of a single plot scheme; for, the arrangement of the events and personages is also episodic. But this time, Álvarez takes the reader on a straight- forward chronologic journey through Yolanda’s life in a less scrupulous manner. Thus the reader by no means feels lost or frustrated in ¡Yo! since each chapter stands alone as a well-developed story with a recognizable plot, setting and characters. Yet, in spite of its episodic nature, ¡Yo! never gives the impression of lacking a unity. In addition to various recurring events, themes and characters, Yolanda’s ubiquitous presence as the focus of each chapter fortifies the book’s novelistic coherence. Nonetheless, the sole structural difference between the two novels is that Álvarez has supplied an additional episode in ¡Yo! to serve as a prologue which merits analysis at this juncture. Offering hints on the resolution of the novel, the prologue chapter, titled “The sisters,” is a thematically as well as a structurally crucial chapter in ¡Yo!. Once the prologue chapter ends the subsequent fifteen chapters portray the cornerstones of Yolanda’s life (again in three major parts) in a linear chronological order, beginning with her childhood years in America until she becomes a grownup. Ultimately, the last chapter, titled “The father” in Part III, which exists in the same temporal dimension as the prologue, brings the narrative into full circle. Marking the present temporality of the narrative, the prologue chapter in a sense constitutes the zero-hour of the novel. Projected from Sofía’s first-person point

221 of view the nuclear members of the García family are ready to explode with the knowledge that their lives with all their most private secrets and intimate experiences have recently been “plagiarized” (7) as “raw material” (10) in Yolanda’s best-seller which has become part of the public domain. In Sofia’s words, their lives have been “losing ground to fiction” (5). In addition to their dismay, they have also become uneasy with the probability of being “exposed” (9) in Yo’s future novels. Until the publication of “that book” (3), Yolanda’s childhood zeal for telling/writing stories has oftentimes and in various contexts affected the lives of the people around her profoundly. But after the book Sofía, for instance, can no longer read a novel without contemplating its aftereffects on the author’s family (5). In addition, one other sister, Sandra, considers herself “fictionally victimized” (6). When Sandra informs Sofía that she has been artificially inseminated and is now pregnant, she forbids Sofía to announce it to Yo in an effort to protect her baby from becoming a “fictional fodder” (7). Yet, all these disturbances constitute the tip of the iceberg: Mrs. Laura García is considering suing Yo and her eldest sister, Carla, does not want to see her face ever. On Yolanda’s part, by creating “fictional doubles” (7) of her family, she has turned into a celebrity figure in the literary and academic circles albeit at the cost of estranging the dearest to her. Furthermore, the Garcías are often enraged at her newly found popularity as a celebrated “American-Dominican” writer which reinforces a deeper familial fissure: Yolanda is constantly on book tours around the country; her book is studied at various college courses; she continues to reveal the most intimate family secrets whenever she appears on television or radio interviews, and worst of all they can no longer communicate with her without her literary agent. When Laura nostalgically compares their natal and adopted countries in the episode reserved for her (the first chapter, “The mother” in Part I), the value she profoundly attaches to familial ties can vividly be discerned. Laura says:

Back on the island we lived as a clan, not what is called here the nuclear family, which already the name should be a hint that you’re asking for trouble cooping up related tempers in the small explosive chambers of each other’s attention. […] There was never any reason to clash with anyone. [italics in the text] (21-2)

Thus, it becomes more evident that Yolanda’s ultimate resolution has to be accomplished through a familial reunion, through the elimination of all kinds of

222 clashes between herself and her family. From this standpoint, Sofia, regarding Yolanda’s familial estrangement, declares that “what hurts her [Yolanda] most is to be left out of a family story” (11), in other words, to be deprived of all the little bits and pieces of fresh information about the Garcías’ present lives. On the other hand, two members of the García family seem to have isolated themselves from this pseudo-grudge against Yolanda. Sofía, as if she has undertaken the role of the family’s negotiator, never loses touch with Yolanda and ultimately concedes, “I love her and that’s the bottom line” (11). The other uninflected and nonchalant person is their father, Carlos, about whom the sole detail is that while secretly calling Yolanda from a phone booth he got mugged. Nonetheless, in the last chapter, which will be scrutinized in what follows, Carlos himself will play his part as the key character in unlocking the misconduct he had long ago displayed toward Yolanda which he deems to be the source of all of his daughter’s equivocalness. Consequently, the closing segment of the prologue chapter divulges that in defiance of their initial rancor toward Yolanda’s literary pillage, within a few months it turns out to be that the Garcías have never ceased loving and cherishing her. When they unite to celebrate the birth of Sandra’s baby, they collectively experience a moment-of-truth as they feel the great vacancy caused by Yolanda’s exclusion from that familial gathering. Sofía, thus, voices the unspoken:

Yo’s absence is why I’m feeling blue even though a healthy baby’s birth is right up there with True Love and Mami’s guava flan on my scale of happiness. […] suddenly we can feel her absence in the room as if there were a caption above the bed, along with all those blue It’s-a-boy balloons: What is missing from this picture? [italics in the text] (16-7)

Accordingly, having awakened to their antojo for Yolanda’s presence as part of the family again, Sandra, the most agitated of the sisters, gives her the call. Talking to Yolanda’s answering machine Sandra, now, victoriously becomes the only person who has ever been able to revert Yolanda’s position as the sole storyteller since “it’s my [Sandra’s] one chance to say all she wants without someone in the family cutting in with their version of the story” (18). It is from this point onward Yolanda becomes the object of all the other personages’ narratives in the fifteen upcoming stories.

223 With this sanguine ending of the prologue chapter, Part I commences and immediately carries the reader back to the 1960s – to the Garcías’ earliest immigrant days in America. Later on, Part II and Part III chronologically expatiate Yolanda’s experiences—which are, in essence, no more different than those of in García Girls hence deserve less discussion—such as her elementary and high school years; her oscillation between becoming an academic or a writer during and after her college years; her ensuing difficulty in establishing healthy affinities with men and her short- term relationships; her ultimate commitment to learning the craft of writing; her subsequent struggles to earn tenure as a scholar in an American college; her writing retreats in the D.R. and association with the indigenous people there; her longing for and anxieties about motherhood, her final marriage and fear of being a stepmother to a grownup girl; and her eventual success, albeit dubiously, in becoming a writer. At the end of García Girls, Álvarez has collapsed the past with the present into a past-present juncture; however, when she employs the same narrative strategy in ¡Yo!, suffice it to say that her thematic concern is quite the contrary. The author creates a past-present temporality, this time, not to complicate matters further for Yolanda, but to conclusively offer a calm resolution to her disturbed consciousness. It is thus imperative to scrutinize the “hidden-gun-incident,” which has previously been related concisely in García Girls, yet entirely dominates the last chapter of ¡Yo!. In fact, the hidden-gun-incident will bring the structure of the novel to a full circle and help both Yolanda and her father come to terms with their weary consciences. This concluding episode is situated in the same temporal plane as the prologue. Similar to the first and last chapters of García Girls, “The father” in ¡Yo! also depicts Yolanda in a state of extreme desperation and unresolved melancholy which seem to have stemmed from her choice to become a successful writer but at the cost of remaining childless. The issue of childlessness serves as the point of departure for the novel’s concluding chapter, since in Latin American culture, in Álvarez’s own words, “being a woman and a mother are practically synonymous” (STD 99). Because Yolanda likens her childlessness to those “women in the Bible who […] were said to save a curse on them” (294), Carlos is motivated to lift the curse with a solution also from the Bible – “The father giving his blessing” (296). Due the fact that Yolanda’s ambiguity originates in her difficulty to fully embrace her destiny

224 as a storyteller, or a woman-of-letters, Carlos recognizes that he should bestow his blessing only in “story form for Yo to believe in it” (296). He thus tries to console his daughter by telling that he is proud of her literary accomplishments and that in his eyes her books are his grandchildren. (294) For this purpose, as if he is himself a self-conscious writer editing his own fiction, Carlos selects a particular tale, “a story of my shame […] my shameful secret” (296; 302) he calls it, which pivots around the “hidden-gun-incident” back in the D.R. when Yo was still a small child. Any reader who has read García Girls before will be familiar with this story as told from Yolanda’s perspective; and if not the episode titled “The mother” in Part I of ¡Yo! will reveal more details as conveyed through Mrs. Laura García’s narration. The first version of the event does not reveal much detail, comprising no more than a few paragraphs in García Girls. There, Yolanda mentions the incident in relation to the dictator’s secret police storming into their house to snatch Carlos who had been hiding in the secret closet. Because of her parents’ subsequent reaction to the story she fabricated for the general about her father’s secret gun, Yolanda held herself responsible for jeopardizing their lives. On the other hand, when Yolanda’s mother retells the same story in ¡Yo!, the incident becomes the familial problem of the greatest magnitude; it marks the very point where the mother-daughter relationship between Laura and Yolanda undergoes a severe rupture. From that point onward both Yolanda and Laura start to suffer from a lack of trust for each other. Ultimately, the concluding chapter, “The father,” of ¡Yo! reveals Carlos’ version of the same incident. Herein, rather than blaming Yolanda, Carlos self- impeaches and holds himself responsible for the grownup Yolanda’s gloom. By expounding the event more densely, Carlos fills the missing pieces of the puzzle and sheds light on why Yolanda has become dubious about her current profession as a writer, and how her probable salvation might be achieved. The blessing that Carlos should bestow in the form of a story begins with the re-telling of the fearful details of the Trujillo regime. To make matters worse, Yolanda’s erstwhile habit of telling made-up stories once jeopardized their lives when she childishly informed a general in the dictator army about her father’s illegal rifle. On account of this incident Carlos, who was driven by the fear of the total annihilation of his family, whipped

225 Yolanda very badly with his belt. The dreadful scene conjures up the untold atrocities as endured by many Dominicans in General Trujillo’s torture chambers:

We took her into the bathroom and turned on the shower to drown out her cries. “Ay, Papi, Mami, no, por favor,” she wailed. As my wife held her, I brought down that belt over and over, now with all my strength or I could have killed her, but with enough force to leave marks on her backside and legs. It was as if I had forgotten that she was my child, my child, and all I could think was that I had to silence our betrayer. “This should teach you a lesson,” I kept saying. “You must never ever tell stories!” (307)

From Carlos’s perspective, it is this “old injunction” (296) that he must lift in order for Yolanda to embrace her destiny as a creator of fiction, a teller of stories, and a transmitter of their family legacy. Thus in the present temporality of the narrative Carlos desperately seeks to invent “[a] new ending” to that lurid story. This way, Carlos believes, Yolanda could be unburdened from the ghost of a traumatizing past. Accordingly, Carlos’s words in the last paragraph of ¡Yo! highlight the significance of Yolanda’s role as the storyteller of their family. As he engages in a rehearsal of the final portion of his story, which would perhaps be his last blessing for his daughter owing to his old age, Carlos concludes:

My daughter, the future has come and we were in such a rush to get here. We left everything behind and forgot so much. Ours is now an orphan family. My grandchildren and great grandchildren will not know the way back unless they have a story. Tell them of our journey. My Yo, embrace your destino. You have my blessing, pass it on. (309)

With this blessing in the form of a story Yolanda in ¡Yo! is finally unburdened from her haunting past when she is ultimately sanctioned and authorized by her father to be the deliverer of their family legacy – a “deliverer” in both senses of the word. Only with the assignment of such a serious mission by her father does Yolanda embrace her destiny as a woman-of-letters, a creator of fiction and the messenger of the Garcías. Therefore, the “exilic absence” of the immigrant-self is now transformed into a state of “liminal presence” through Yolanda’s exculpation and her familial and, by extension, communal reunion.

226 CONCLUSION

In the postmodern age, the boundaries that once held back diversity, otherness, and difference, whether in domestic ghettoes or through national borders policed by customs officials, have begun to break down. The Eurocentric center can no longer absorb or contain the culture of the Other as something that is threatening and dangerous [...] the Third World has imploded into the metropolis. Even the conservative national politics of containment, designed to shield ‘us’ from ‘them,’ betray the impossibility of maintaining hermetically sealed cultures.

— Henry A. Giroux, Border Crossings (1992)

Nothing happens in the “real” world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.

— Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera (1987)

The present study on U.S. Latina writing has initially been motivated in the wake of the 9/11 tragedy and its troublesome aftermath as well as by a more general concern in ethnic literatures of the United States of America. Like many subjugated minority groups in terms of “race” within the U.S. national frame, Mexican-Americans (or Chicanos) and other U.S. Latinos have a rather lengthy and robust cultural legacy from which they have drawn their artistic models and adopted various theoretical paradigms in exerting and articulating their sense of liminality in the midst of what appears to be an alien(ating) “white” culture – acronymically called the WASP society. The most distinguishing factor as to the continuation of Chicano culture and writing well into the 21st century is the fact that although the roughly 3.200-km-long U.S.-Mexican border has been under a constant quasi-militarist policing, it has never been an impediment to cultural or demographic reinforcement for Chicanos of the U.S.-Southwest owing to the deep-rootedness of the vernacular “Mexican” (folk)lore entrenched in the region. Nor have other Latino communities scattered around U.S. urban centers been “Anglicized” in quite the same way as other ethnic minorities are acculturated. Hence, Chicanos and U.S. Latinos have always been distinguished as an “un-meltable” yet adaptive community who have inherited and syncretized disparate cultural codes and societal patterns variously from Mexican, Hispanic, Native American, Latin American, Anglo-American, and even Moorish societies to establish a unique multistratified culture of their own. Moreover, while it has imparted detrimental socio-economic ramifications, the politics of ghettoization of Latinos in the

227 barrios of American metropolises has garnered many well-defined micro domains for social solidarity and cultural preservation, hence rendered by far the most jeopardizing challenge to the most “sacred” foundations upon which WASP America was founded. Evidently, the statistical data of the U.S. Census in 2000 signal that the U.S. Latino populace has been undergoing a profound demographic growth in the current decade.1 Based on such an unabated numerical rise, demographic projections envision that by the second half of the 21st century this nonuniform group (comprised 65% by Chicanos) will outnumber the Afro-Americans, especially in southwestern states, as the second largest subculture. They will not even be a minority group in the conventional sense with a subaltern status which has hitherto featured the contours of an internal colony. However, as Chapter One of the present study has scrutinized, the intellectual, political and artistic inclinations in the welter of the turbulent 1960s and 1970s boosted an intense political activism during what is called the Chicano Movement. From the “internal colony” paradigm Chicano activist-intellectuals and political leaders sought to secern themselves racially, culturally, linguistically, economically, and even territorially from the white core culture. These cultural-nationalists thus tried to and did mobilize a whole new generation of politically-motivated youth by recuperating pre-Columbian Amerindian mythology as a counter-hegemonic strategy of resistance vis-à-vis the Anglo-American ethos. Staunchly proclaiming themselves as constituting La Raza de Bronce, or the Bronze Race, in their arts, politics and even most mundane affairs, the most influential ideological and artistic tropes were informed, firstly, by their working-class origins and the barrio life; secondly, by mestizaje (their genetic fiber as the mixture of the Aztecs and the Spaniards); thirdly, by the myth of Aztlán (the primordial homeland of the Aztecs, and by extension Chicanos, which was believed to be located in the U.S.-Southwest); fourthly, by the heroic figures from “Mexican” history (such as Don Hidalgo, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, and Cuauhtémoc, the last ruler of the Aztecs, or the anonymous horde of submissive women who nonetheless battled alongside these brave men); fifthly, by the notion “Chicano” family (as a site of cultural resistance and political struggle); sixthly, by the heroic border-balladry, or th corrido, tradition (which stretched from the first border-clashes in the early 19 century

11.. See http://www.census.gov/main/www/cen2000.html (last accessed on 15 September 2009).

228 to the ultimate erection of the border in 1848); and finally, by the U.S.-Mexican border(lands) as a topographical buffer zone where the “clash of cultures” occurred. Like most anti-colonial grassroots movements, which had arisen all around the colonized sites of the globe in a few decades after World War II, Chicano supremacist leaders, too, utilized such allegoric tropes as part of their ontological struggle in forging a unique collective identity, or an imagined community, comprised by all U.S. Latinos. From a Marxist socialist critique these nationalist tropes were exhaustively employed as a liberating force against their age-old colonial and inter-colonial status with the ultimate purport of achieving an ideal democratic citizenry. Retrospectively, the influential role of the Chicano Movement in fostering—from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s—a plentiful corpus of unprecedented, albeit ideologically-engaged literary creation is now beyond question. For instance, Chapter One of this study has scrutinized Rodolfo Gonzales’ lengthy poem, “” (1967), which exalts the indigenous roots of Mexican people, and by extension Chicanos, owing to their mestizo makeup. To Gonzales, the multiplicity and richness extant in “Mexican” subjectivity have allowed Chicanos to claim and syncretize both the bloody triumph of the Spanish conquistadors and the spiritual/cultural authenticity of the ancient indigenous tribes in Mexico. Yet, in the U.S. context accommodation and assimilation, or “cultural hybridity,” correspond with legitimatizing the pillage of their lands since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. Hence, while this quasi-anthem poem proclaims an egalitarian struggle for freedom, democracy and human rights, it staunchly proclaims cultural maintenance by evoking all those allegoric tropes mentioned above to withstand the threat of culturcide hence forcing the “System” to affirm the legitimacy of Chicano identity and culture in all its authenticity. Another text analyzed in Chapter One,e Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972), is also situated against the industrial ways of a sterile (Anglo) ethos. Portraying the conundrum of a New Mexican family with their everlasting roots entrenched in the region, Anaya formulates a humanizing praxis based on indigenous philosophies, a nostalgic respect for the land, and a spiritual optimism in the harmonious wholeness of all creatures. On account of its endeavor to merge the two major ideological and artistic initiatives of the turbulent 1970s, namely, the prosaic world of indigenous

229 (Aztec) mythology vs. the social dynamics of mundane realities, Bless Me, Ultima gives cues to accomplishing such harmonious reconciliation. However, retaining and constituting a central part of the androcentric “Chicano” literary tradition, Anaya (a.k.a., the father of the “Chicano” novel) cannot but pivot around a prevailing binary-coding: “patriarchy vs. matriarchy.” As such, like Gonzales’ “I am Joaquin,” the female characters in Anaya’s best-seller are rendered voiceless, relegated to the margins, and expected to take side with the symbolic order of a male-governed ethos. This tendency to structure an eclectic and homogenous Chicano identity, culture, literary canon, language and history was patently parochial, paternalistic, didactic, essentializing and, at times, racist and always (hetero)sexist. On the other hand, the monolithically ethnocentric Chicano Movement ideology was plausibly an ineluctable phase in Chicanos’ historical continuum of racial, cultural, political and economic oppression. In the final analysis, since the boom of a Chicano “resistance” literature was mainly motivated by the reaction to the internal colonization of Chicanos, its main ideological and artistic concerns were limited to issues of racial identity, ethnic solidarity, and economic exploitation to the detriment of other vectors of subjectivity such as gender and sexuality. Consequently, with such myopic and palliative schemes the Chicano Movement soon created its own repressive apparatuses and internal divisions both in the artistic and mundane spheres. First and foremost among the stigmatized were the budding Chicana feminists, pejoratively called las vendidas, or the traitors, who were informed by the idea(l)s of mainstream feminism of the “Second Wave,” and yet excluded from the agenda of those “white” feminists whose totalizing doctrine of the sisterhood-against-sexism (with its gender-as-power motto) was also blind to the two crucial paradigms of ethnicity/“race” and class. From the early 1970s, then, Chicanas and other Latinas in the U.S. have voiced their triple-burdened status as circumscribed by the capitalist System, the logocentric Euro-American culture and its intellectual circles, and the phallocentric paradigms of their own patriarchal communities. Accordingly, as Chapter Two of the present study has delineated, early Chicana feminists and U.S. Latinas had to struggle mainly in two fronts: Firstly, they had to re-scan their own indigenous mythology and history of multiple colonizations to deconstruct the age-old binary of the “good woman vs. bad woman” as informed by

230 the archetypal figures of the “Virgin of Guadalupe vs. la Malinche (or la llorona).” Since the Chicano Movement’s androgenic bent in representing the “llorona-malinche” dyad as a trope of treason, menace and cultural erasure had ostracized Chicana feminists and lesbians, or other defiant U.S. Latinas, for that matter, these artists and intellectuals initially sought to excavate the “uncontaminated” roots of these three intricate topoi. Secondly, by forming coalitions with other racially subdued women of the U.S., early Chicana feminists tried to develop new theoretical, critical, and artistic paradigms in enunciating their own unique subordinated status both within the Chicano Movement and the Second Wave. Needless to further elaborate that another cohort of “activist” Chicanas were interested more in praxis and worldly matters (i.e., health issues, welfare rights, birth control, and labor struggles, etc.) than discursive representations of Latina femininity merely on the written page. Consequently, with the irreversible conjunctural and paradigmatic changes of epic proportions from the early 1980s onward, not only in the U.S. but in a global scale, the militant Chicano discursive realm has lost its grounds owing to the death of “grand narratives” and the waning of ethnocentric clichés and hollow shibboleths. Moreover, with the succeeding culmination of the intellectual and academic climate of Postmodernism and Poststructuralism, both of which refuse the possibility of achieving unitary, self-contained and fixed identities, such “subject-centered” and “experience-based” doctrines as hitherto essentialized by the Chicano Movement have simply become passé. Stories, critical approaches, and the organization of knowledge no longer appeal to the emancipated male-bravado (or machismo) and innocence in traditional coming-of-age representation. Hence, while the 1980s, the media-boosted “Decade of the Hispanic,” have signaled the revival of a new phase of American conservatism, otherwise called the “New Right,” the decade has indeed positioned Chicanas and other U.S. Latinas under the spotlight. In this vein, the 1981 publication of the milestone anthology titled This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Woman of Color, coedited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga, has signaled an audacious u-turn in Chicana feminist ideology. From the early 1980s onward, then, Chicanas have disputed the fiction of an exclusively male subject and the limited conceptualization of “Chicano” ethnicity promoted by the cultural-nationalist rhetoric. Their literary and critical works expand

231 upon the essentialized notion of “Chicano” identity embedded in the utopic nationalist discourse in ways that not only recuperate a collective ethnic consciousness, but also in ways that deconstruct the pernicious impact of patriarchy, homophobia and xenophobia which have long dominated the trajectory of what it means to be Chicano. As such, the “feminist” themes that Chicana artists and cultural theorists have issued combine the motifs they partake with their male counterparts such as cultural conflict, racial oppression, economic inequity, alienation and the search for identity. However, rather than replicating the essentialized and dichotomized subject of the nationalist agenda, Chicana feminist works have been particularly preoccupied with the hierarchical differences not only between the Anglo-American culture and its others, but also those that are endemic to their own phallocentric communities. Accordingly, such travail against multiple barriers has provided Chicanas and U.S. Latinas with what might be called a new “politics of location” to expose the arbitrary nature of categorical binaries in theorizing their own paradigms. Thus, by addressing the unequal gender relations within the U.S. Latino culture at large, Chicana feminists turned the critical lens inward, illustrating how their politics of location was crucial in rejecting the prioritization of one of the dynamics of either racism, (hetero)sexism or economic depravity. In this vein, the Chicana politics of location has fruitfully catered Chicanas a “third insight” to scrutinize how the concept of cultural (or social) identity may very well occupy contradictory, shifting, and multiple locations from where it speaks to open up new spaces for constructive critiques and form other types of solidarities. However, this does not mean that Chicanas and U.S. Latinas of the post-Chicano Movement era have ceased to be political. Nor have they abandoned their culture. On the contrary, U.S. Latina writing comprises a rigorous and committed political commentary in rejecting representations of the deadly duel between the individual and the communal. In so doing, the category of the political is reconceived in terms of those multiple vectors of identity, or sites of contestation, which are intricately connected to each other like a rhizome. The political is now represented to permeate into the spheres of individual and group experience through plural points of convergences and divergences. As such, U.S. Latina writers have foregrounded the textual space as a crossroads, or a borderlands, of multiple connections and linkages in terms of which identity and

232 community are restructured on the crisscrossing vectors of ethnicity/“race”, class, gender, and sexuality, to name the most obvious. Thus, the plural possibilities of self- identification and other alternative forms of alliances that Chicanas have sought to represent venture beyond the limited and essentialized notions of ethnic community. With that in mind, in U.S. Latina writing community is no longer defined on the basis of a binary account of ethnic difference but, rather, it is redefined as a more dynamic phenomenon with regard to its status as an assemblage of associated differences situated variously in the interplay of power, history, and culture. As such U.S. Latina writing also functions dialectically as a means for expressing their difference in such a disturbing way that the media-/academia-celebrated concepts of “pluralism” and “multiculturalism” have been radically redefined whereas these concepts have initially been imposed from above to the espousal of only the least disturbing and the most marketable aspects of difference that the “Other” represents. As such, in U.S. Latina writing the trope of the “border,” far from marking a topographical phenomenon such as the U.S.-Mexican border, is now figured as a multi-dimensional concept, signaling on the one hand the possibility of transgressing cultural, ideological and artistic boundaries that often impede women’s self- realization and women’s writing. On the other hand, as a threshold space of cultural syncretism the border in U.S. Latina writing provides fruitful examples of alternative modes of existence marked by the crisscrossing identity paradigms of ethnicity/“race,” nationality, class, gender, sexuality, language and religion, to name the most obvious. As such, the act of “border-crossing” is an apt metaphor frequently evoked to indicate a personal and often radical transformation. As a metaphor for the act of writing it also represents the heterogeneity of Latin@ identity as well as suggesting a more productive means of coming-to-terms with the pluralistic way of thinking. In this vein, as explored in Chapter Two of this study, it was mainly with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza that the “third insight,” or the new Chicana “politics of location,” has been forged by the re-conceptualization of the notion of mestizaje and the “border” trope. As a multilingual, polyphonic, and genre-defying collection of cultural theory and experimental poetry, this ubiquitous book itself transcends the spatial and physical confines of the concept of “border” and the experience of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands to transpose it into a wider spectrum

233 of cognitive fronteras to defy any essentializing logic of binary-codings pertinent to ethnicity/“race,” nationality, language, class, gender, and sexuality, etc. The “third insight” that Anzaldúa fosters in her Borderlands/La Frontera extends beyond the mere physical sphere toward broader theoretical, aesthetic, spiritual, intellectual, and psychological realms; thereby, contesting any form of essentialism, parochialism and binarism – be they dictated from above by the dominant white culture or from within the normative Chicano culture. On the other hand, Anzaldúa’s re-formulation of the genetic/generic term “mestiza,” now as a crossroads of multiple culture-transfers and culture-transitions, promotes a new revolutionary ethics and vocabulary of tolerance toward ambiguities and differences. The Western notion of the “Universal Man,” who has traditionally been sanctioned within the “dualistic ontology” of Enlightenment epistemologies, is now called into question with the postmodern understanding of a subject-in-flux who displays multiple subjectivity positions which are always in the making, always shifting from one fixed subject position to another so as to accommodate into newly rising conditions as a tactical strategy of survival. Anzaldúa names this differential, or nomadic, awareness, the “new mestiza consciousness.” In Borderlands/La Frontera she provides a four-stage pathway to achieve this consciousness. The first phase of the “new mestiza” path is called the “Rebellion” stage. Throughout this stage the mestiza confronts the hegemonic history and culture of the dominant “white” society with all its normative rules as well as the (hetero)sexist Chicano culture both of which restrict the real prospects of the mestiza. The second phase is realized in the transformation stage called the “Coatlicue State.” Evoking an inner journey toward transformation, this stage is designated to break down all the externally and self-imposed barriers that have long restricted the spiritual and intellectual faculties of the mestiza. The ultimate transformation occurs when the mestiza faces her primal fears and then starts to consider the probable changes that will validate her new existence and new ways of thinking. This new awareness, “the third insight,” comes from the mestiza’s confronting and then disrupting the “subject-object” duality of her female existence betwixt her multiple subjectivity locations. Now, the mestiza can no longer remain in her old state of being or depend on her old ways of reasoning. It is at that moment the third phase called the “Mestiza

234 Way” follows this recovery phase. In this stage, once the mestiza examines all the hitherto censored parts of herself, which indeed constitute her cultural heritage (be it ameliorative or deteriorative), she does take action by documenting the struggle in writing out her self-styled symbols, the new myths she has created, and the new perspectives she has developed. Only then the mestiza takes the first step in using this huge cultural baggage to scrutinize her existence, preparing to move to the final phase of returning to the borderlands, called the “Return” stage, as an organic intellectual to work for the common good of all. However, because the autobiographical speaking/writing subject of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera has situated her own multiple selves (both from a subject and object location) deep in the experiential realm of her subjectivity, a starkly “postmodernist” vantage point cannot gloss over her insight in its entirety. In Anzaldúa’s theorem, while the speaking subject must constantly be decentered so as not to remain fixed in one subjectivity position, it does not mean that the construction and constructedness of her subjectivity dismisses all notions of human agency, experience-based epistemologies, and most crucially the probability of social change. Since Anzaldúa has grounded her plural selves at the crossroads of various socio- cultural and socio-historical junctures of uneven power relations, she defiantly speaks in a new language that aims at the decolonization of minds and hearts in an effort, firstly, to trigger political activism and then to engage in broader politics. In the epigraphic words to this conclusion Anzaldúa’s theorem has served both as an analytical framework and a critical insight to scrutinize two U.S. Latina writers in the next two chapters of this study. The works that are considered in this study explore the issue of subjectivity on two levels: with regard to both individual and collective identities. Along this line, the present study has traced the ways in which ethnic/“racial” and gender differences are expressed in Chicana and U.S. Latina writing not only through protest and anger but also through negotiation and compromise. The methodological model in evaluating the literary works is based on an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural framework which dwells on the historical and sociological context of the writing. In so doing, this study has been informed by postcolonial (the Said-Bhabha-Spivak triumvirate) and “U.S. Third World Feminist” theories to demonstrate how Chicana and U.S.

235 Latina writing involves alternative thematic and ideological concerns and subversive narrative strategies to create a model of liminal subjectivity as well as a volatile critical lens to juxtapose the tenets of postmodernism/poststructuralism and experientially informed praxes in creating their own voices. By including in the discussion writers with different cultural backgrounds such as the Texas-born Gloria Anzaldúa, Chicago-born Sandra Cisneros, and the Dominican-American Julia Álvarez, the present study has stressed the diversity of literary forms and ideas that characterize U.S. Latina writing, which has impeded mainstream (publishing industry and academic circles) from totalizing, tokenizing, and colonizing their writing. In this vein, Chapter Three of the present study has provided an analysis of Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street in terms of both its hybrid narrative style, which blurs the boundaries between the established genres of prose and poetry, and its alternative ideological concerns. With its focus on the coming-of-age process of a little Chicana girl, Esperanza (“Hope”), in an enclosed Chicago barrio in the late 1960s, the text subverts the traditional Bildungsroman in various eminent respects. In structural terms, the non-sequential arrangement of the forty-four discrete but thematically interconnected poetic vignettes of this novel(la) of initiation deter the reader from identifying a mimetic representation of the protagonist’s day-to-day reality within a coherent spatiotemporal context, but present the reader with the performative process itself through which Esperanza comes to consciousness as a “colored” woman who gradually realizes that she is meant to be a writer to discover an autonomous subjectivity and rebuild a genuine connection to her own culture. In thematic terms, with its focus on the coming-of-age process of a little Chicana girl the text is distinguished from its Euro-American predecessors; for whereas the traditional coming-of-age process in “Western” literatures has been preoccupied with the educational journey of the young, white, heterosexual, bourgeois and male hero, who sets out outside the parameters of the repressive community only to return as a convinced citizen, Cisneros situates her little “heroine” exactly in the midst of her patriarchal community. As such her protagonist is supplied with the means to scrutinize the ideological forces that envelop not only her life but also the lives of those others in the barrio. What is most crucial, rather than presenting an individual(istic) quest for self-determination, or an isolationist escapism for personal

236 acquisitiveness, the all-inclusive tone in the ending of the text emphasizes that the major thrust of the book’s ideological message rests on a community-oriented introspection. Therefore, in contrast to the classical bildung dictum to focus exclusively on a single protagonist, through Esperanza’s observant eye, the text gives voices to almost all the barrio people. In this way the author revises the classical Bildungsroman formula which forfeits the ordeals and voices of other characters to privilege only the protagonist’s line of progress toward a unified selfhood. When Esperanza finally decides and declares, “They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out,” she does prove to bear the capacity to become an organic intellectual in the Gramscian sense with the responsibility of working for the common good of her people. In Chapter Four of this study, Dominican-American author Julia Álvarez’s two loosely autobiographical novels have been analyzed to illustrate the extent to which the corpus of Chicana writing has served as a creative and theoretical source of inspiration for other U.S. Latinas whose cultural, filial or national origins lie in such Latin American countries as Puerto Rico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic. Receiving literary and academic recognition from the early 1990s onward, U.S. Latina writers such as Julia Álvarez, who dwell within a myriad of borderlands between a WASP-dominated ethos and their own idiosyncratic cultural codes, have contributed to the Border Literature proper which now acts both as a creative and a curative endeavor to heal the traumatic ruptures of their diasporic lives as they surmount a variety of cultural, national, and lingual borders. Accordingly, the story of the García family in Álvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and its sequel ¡Yo!, thus focuses on the power of the act of narration in surmounting the protagonist’s, Yolanda’s, ambiguous state of liminality mired between her natal culture and her adopted American home, between her past and her future, between her Spanish and English, and so on. Álvarez’s preoccupation with the issues of assimilation/alienation through lingual hybridity; fragmented identity crises through cultural hybridity; racial/sexual/social apartheid in a patriarchal society; and in return, recreating a personal/communal/national through a female point of view can be traced in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. However, the deeply ambiguous stance that Yolanda assumes toward her cultural

237 liminality at the thematic ending of the novel needs to be reconciled once and for all. Having been engaged in a dynamical tension between pursuing an exilic life and an ongoing yearning for repatriation, when Yolanda, now, in her late thirties, decides to return to her island home to reunite with her extended family for peace of mind, she finds out rather distressingly that she is lost in-between two languages and two cultures. Seeking relief from her confused feelings of cultural displacement and lingual estrangement, Yolanda proves to be uneasy with her liminal social location. After all, Yolanda’s trip to her island home characterizes a search for identity and a voice which would provide her with a double vision on her liminality. Yet, her homecoming signals the impossibility of any single perspective which can solely account for the complexity of her reality. Taking off from this ambiguous resolution, ¡Yo! offers how Yo(landa) finally comes to terms with her liminality through the creative act of story telling/writing. After all, ¡Yo! opens with the clues on how the protagonist has become a popular “U.S. Latina” author. Yet, because Yolanda has “apprehended” the lives of her family and her life-long acquaintances as raw material for her first novel, she was repelled for revealing their most intimate secrets. To fill the void and emancipate herself from the feeling of guilt Yolanda feels obliged to give them their own voices in an attempt to receive forgiveness, but more significantly, confirmation and acceptance by all those people who, in one way or another, have been involved in her life. At the cost of becoming objectified Yolanda in the end gains recognition and acceptance from those people, and most crucially from her father, Carlos García. The concluding segment of ¡Yo! is particularly critical because Yolanda is ultimately granted a blessing and authorized by her father to be the messenger of their family thus to transmit their story far into the future which would otherwise be forgotten. There are undoubtedly a lot more Latina writers each of whom deserves voluminous discussion extrinsic to the designated scope of the present study which does not attempt to exhaustively feature all U.S. Latina writers. Accordingly, the organizational selection has been purported to present as wide a spectrum of themes and subjectivities as possible for a feasible analysis of U.S. Latina writing. Considering the humanistic value of literature and of literary studies proper across spatial and temporal borders; and thus, by way of implementing a literary-critical

238 scrutiny at U.S. Latina writing, this study has utilized the concepts of border, border- crossings, cultural mestizaje and hybrid forms of representation to promote a new understanding on racial difference, ethnic diversity, multiplicity, and contradictions as a means to reinforce particular forms of resistance to dominant social hierarchies constructed within postmodern globalizing cultural conditions. After all, the present study has aimed to be a modest transatlantic contribution on behalf of those bereaved peoples of a polarized world in urgent need of a tolerance for dissimilarities, contradictions, and ambivalences. †

† For the two past decades or so there has been a rapidly growing interest in American ethnic, or minority, studies in Turkey – particularly, in African American culture, criticism, and literature as well as in Native Americans. Today various “American Studies” departments at major Turkish universities have already incorporated ethnic American writers into their curricula. In that respect, mainstream publishing houses are also featuring, for instance, the novels of the now-canonical Toni Morrison and other renowned ethnic American authors in Turkish. By now, that interest in African American authors has been gradually directed to Chican@, Latin@ and Border Studies. For instance, Turkish readers, who have been relishing the translated works of Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, and are now familiar with Américo Paredes’s With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Úl tima (1972), or Julia Álvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies (1994). Additionally, peered journals such as JAST (Dokuz Eylül University, İzmir), Interactions (Ege University, İzmir), and LITERA (İstanbul University, İstanbul) are releasing special issues or individual articles on Chican@ and Latin@ Studies. Moreover, the institution where I am situated, the Department of American Culture and Literature at Istanbul University, has already enriched its syllabus with “compulsory” courses on Chican@/Latin@/Border and African American Studies. Nevertheless, the present study is, to the best of my knowledge, the first project undertaken as a Ph.D dissertation in Turkey on Chicano letters and Chicana feminist thought. September, 2009.

239 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acuña, Rodolfo F. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos [1972]. 3rd edition. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Adams, Kate. “Northamerican Silences: History, Identity, and Whiteness in the Poetry of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, and .” Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism. Eds. Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. 130-45.

Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-vision through Malintzin /or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object” [1981]. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. Expanded and revised 3rd edition. Ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Berkeley: Third Woman, 2002. 202-11.

———. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” 1988. Cultural Critique 13 (1989): 57-87.

———. “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo- American Feminism.” Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990a. 356-69.

———. “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman.” Cultural Studies 4, no. 3 (1990b): 248-56.

Alurista (Alberto Baltazar Urista Heredia). “The Chicano Cultural Revolution.” De Colores 1, no. 1 (1973): 22-33.

———. “Cultural Nationalism and Xicano Literature During the Decade of 1965- 1975.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi- Ethnic Literature of the United States 8, no. 2 (1981): 22-34.

Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1991.

———. In the Time of the Butterflies [1994]. New York: Plume Penguin, 1995.

———. ¡Yo! New York: Plume Penguin, 1997.

240 ———. In the Name of Salomé [2000]. New York: Plume Penguin, 2001.

———. Something to Declare [1998]. New York: Plume Penguin, 1999.

———. “Afterword: Coming Home to Homecoming,” Homecoming: New and Collected Poems. New York: Plume Penguin, 1996. 117-20.

Anaya, Rudolfo A. Bless Me, Ultima [1972]. New York: Warner Books, 1999.

——— and Francisco A. Lomelí. “Preface.” Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland [1989]. Ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [1981]. 2nd edition. London and NY: Verso, 1991.

Anzaldúa, Gloria Evangelina. “Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color [1981]. Expanded and revised 3rd edition. Ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Berkeley: Third Woman, 2002. 183-94.

———. “La Prieta” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color [1981]. Expanded and revised 3rd edition. Ed. Cherríe L. Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa. Berkeley: Third Woman, 2002. 220-33.

———. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza [1987]. 3rd edition. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2007.

———. “Border Crossings.” Trivia: A Journal of Ideas 14 (1989): 46-51.

———. “Haciendo caras, una entrada: An Introduction.” Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. xv-xxviii.

———. “Border Arte: , El Lugar de la Frontera.” La Frontera/The Border: Art About the Mexico/United States Border Experience. Ed. Natasha Bonilla Martínez. Trans. Gwendolyn Gómez. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza and The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993. 107-114.

Aparicio, Frances R. “On Sub-versive Signifiers: U.S. Latina/o Writers Tropicalize English.” American Literature 66, no. 4 (1994): 795-801.

241 Aquino, María Pilar, et. al., eds. “Introduction.” A Reader in Latina Feminist Theology: Religion and Justice. Ed. María P. Aquino, Daisy L. Machado, Jeanette Rodríguez. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2002. i-xx

Aranda, Pilar E. Rodríguez. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” The Americas Review 19, no. 1 (1990): 64-80.

Beth Bagby, “El Teatro Campesino: Interviews with Luis Valdez.” The Tulane Drama Review 11, no .4 (1967): 70-80.

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination [1981].Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Beltran, Christina. “Patrolling Borders: Hybrids, Hierarchies and the Challenge of Mestizaje.” Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2004): 595-607.

Beverly, John. “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative)” [1989]. De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 91-114.

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales [1976]. London & New York: Penguin Books, 1991.

Bhabha, Homi K. “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi K. Bhabha. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. 291-321.

———. “The World and the Home.” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 141-153.

———. The Location of Culture. London & New York: Routledge, 1994.

Binder, Wolfgang, ed. “Sandra Cisneros: Chicago, Illinois, January 28, 1982.” Partial Autobiographies: Interviews with Twenty Chicano Poets. Erlangen: Verlag, Palm & Enke, 1985. 54-74.

Braendlin, Bonnie H. “Bildung in Ethnic Women Writers.” Denver Quarterly 17, no. 4 (1983): 75-87.

Bruce-Novoa, Juan. “Introduction.” Chicano Authors, Inquiry by Interview. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1980. 3-33.

242 ———. “Charting the Space of Chicano Literature” [1980]; “Hispanic Literatures in the United States” [1982]; “Chicano Literary Production, 1960-1980” [1985]; “Canonical and Non-Canonical Texts” [1986]; “Spanish-language Loyalty and Literature.” Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature Theory and History. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press, 1990. 114-24; 25- 32; 75-90; 132-45; 41-51.

———. Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1982.

Burke John F. Mestizo Democracy: The Politics of Crossing Borders. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 2002.

Burkhart, Louise M. “The Cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico.” South and Meso-American Native Spirituality: From the Cult of the Feathered Serpent to the Theology of Liberation. Ed. Gary H. Gossen. New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1993. 198–227.

Calderón, Héctor and José David Saldívar. “Editors’ Introduction: Criticism in the Borderlands.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 1-10.

Candelaria, Cordelia Chávez. Chicano Poetry: A Critical Introduction. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1986.

Castillo, Ana. Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma [1994]. New York: Plume, 1995.

Chabrám-Dernersesian, Angie. “I Throw Punches for My Race, but I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chica-nos (Girl, Us)/Chicanas—into the Movement Script.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. London & New York: Routledge, 1992. 81-95.

Chávez, Ernesto. ¡Mi Raza Primero! Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Cisneros, Sandra. The House on Mango Street [1984]. New York: Vintage, 1991.

———. “Living as a Writer: Choice and Circumstance.” Revista Mujeres 3, no. 2 (1986): 68-72.

243 ———. “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession,” “Notes to a Young(er) Writer,” “Do You Know Me? I Wrote The House on Mango Street.” The Americas Review 15, no. 4 (1987): 69-73; 74-76; 77-79.

———. “Only Daughter,” Glamour (Nov. 1990): 256-258.

———. “Women Hollering Creek” [1991]. Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories. London: Bloomsbury, 2004. 43-56.

———. “Loose Woman” [1994]. Vintage Cisneros. New York: Vintage, 2004. 138-40.

———. “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.” Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe. Ed. Ana Castillo. New York: Riverhead, 1996. 46-51.

———. “By Way of Explanation” [1987]. My Wicked, Wicked Ways. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

———. Caramelo, or Puro Cuento: A Novel. New York: Vintage, 2002.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa” [1975]. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (1976): 875-93.

Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 302-38.

Contreras, Sheila Marie. Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.

Córdova, Teresa. “Roots and Resistance: The Emergent Writings of Twenty Years of Chicana Feminist Struggle.” Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Sociology. Ed. Félix Padilla Padilla, Nicolas Kanellos, and Claudio Esteva-Fabregat. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press. 1993. 175-202.

Cotera, Martha P. “Our Feminist Heritage” [1977]; “Feminism As We See It” [1977]; “Among the Feminists: Racist Classist Issues” [1977]; “Feminism: The Chicano and Anglo Versions, A Historical Analysis” [1980]. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 41-4.; 202-3; 213-20; 223-31.

Jussawalla, Feroza and Reed Way Dasenbrock, eds. “Sandra Cisneros.” Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. 286-306.

De Lauretis, Teresa. Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987.

244 Del Castillo, Adelaida R. “Malintzín Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective” [1974]. Essays on la Mujer. Ed. Rosa Martínez Cruz and Rosaura Sánchez. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Chicano Studies Center Publications, 1977. 124-49.

Del Castillo, Richard Griswold. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987.

“El Plan de Delano” [1966]. The Chicanos: Life and Struggles of the Mexican Minority in the United States [1971]. Gilberto López y Rivas. New York: Monthly Review, 1973. 107-10.

“El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán” [1969]. Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. [1989]. Ed. Rodolfo Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. 1-5.

Eysturoy, Annie O. Daughters of Self Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Erlick, June Carolyn. “Why Latin@s?@ A Note from the Editor.” DRCLAS News (Spring 2000): 4.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth [1961]. Trans. Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Flores, Juan and George Yúdice. “Living Borders/Buscando America: Languages of Latino Self-formation” Social Text 8, no. 2 (1990): 57-84.

Fought, Carmen. Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave, 2003.

Frankson, Marie Stewart. “Chicano Literature for Young Adults: An Annotated Bibliography.” The English Journal 79, no. 1 (1990): 30-8.

Fregoso, Rosa Linda. meXicana Encounters: The Making of Social Identities on the Borderlands. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2003.

Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]. Trans. and Ed. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1961.

245 Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden and Carlos Fuentes. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux Inc., 1985.

———. “Interview with Bill Moyers.” A World of Ideas: Conversations with Thoughtful Men and Women about American Life Today and the Ideas Shaping our Future. Ed. Betty Sue Flowers. New York: Doubleday, 1989. 506-13.

García, Alma M. “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970-1980.” Gender and Society 3, no. 2 (1989): 217-38.

———. “Introduction.” Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 1-16.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.m New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Giroux, Henry A. Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and the Politics of Education [1992]. 2nd edition. London & New York: Routledge, 2005.

Gómez-Peña, Guillermo. “The Multicultural Paradigm: An Open Letter to the National Art Community.” High Performance 12, no. 3 (1989): 18-27.

Gómez-Quiñones, Juan. Chicano Politics: Reality and Promise, 1940-1990. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1990.

Gonzales, Rodolfo (“Corky”). I Am Joaquín / Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem. [1967]. New York: Bantam Books, 1972.

Hall, Calvin S. A Primer of Freudian Psychology. New York: Mentor, 1954.

Harlow, Barbara. Resistance Literature. New York: Metheun, 1987.

Harries, Elizabeth Wanning. “Women’s Autobiography and Fairy Tales.” Fairy Tales and Feminism.m Ed. Donald Haase. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. 99-111.

Herrera-Sobek, María. The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990.

———. “Josephina Niggli: A Border Writer and Precursor of Chicano/a Literature” (Introduction to Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village [1945]). Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. xv-xxix.

246 ———. “The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction.” Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature. Ed. María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. 245-256.

Hicks, Emily D. Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Hoffman, Joan M. “‘She Wants to be Called Yolanda Now’: Identity, Language, and the Third Sister in How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe 23, no. 1 (1998): 21-27.

Ikas, Karin “Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa” [1999]. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. 3rd edition. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2007. 227-246.

James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. New York: Scribner’s, 1962.

Jameson, Frederic. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

———. “Modernism and Imperialism” [1988]. Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. 43-68.

———. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London and New York: Verso, 1991.

JanMohamed, Abdul R. and David Lloyd. “Introduction: Minority Discourse – What Is to Be Done?” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 5-17.

Karafilis, Maria. “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the Bildungsroman in Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 31, no. 2 (1998): 63-78.

Kaplan, Caren. “Resisting Autobiography: Out-Law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects.” De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography. Ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. 115-38.

Keating, AnaLouise. Women Reading, Women Writing: Self-Invention in , Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde. : Temple University Press, 1996.

247 Kellner, Robert. The Real Mother Goose. New York: Checkerboard Press, 1989.

Kevane, Bridget and Juanita Heredia. “A Home in the Heart: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” Latina Self-Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. 45-57.

———. “Citizen of the World: An Interview with Julia Alvarez.” Latina Self- Portraits: Interviews with Contemporary Women Writers. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. 19-32.

Klein, Dianne. “Coming of Age Novels by Rudolfo Anaya and Sandra Cisneros.” English Journal 81, no. 5 (1992): 21-26.

Lafaye, Jacques. Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813 [1974]. Trans. Benjamin Keen. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1976.

Leal, Luis. “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective” [1973]. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 18-30.

———. “In Search of Aztlán” [1981]. Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland. [1989]. Ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. 6-13.

León-Portilla, Miguel. The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico [1959]. Trans. Lysander Kemp. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Limón, José Eduardo. Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992.

Longeaux y Vásquez, Enriqueta. “The Woman of La Raza” [1972]. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 29-31.

López, Sonia A. “The Role of The Chicana within the Student Movement” [1977]. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 100-6.

Lugones, María C. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 2, no. 2 (1987): 3-19.

248 Lyons, Bonnie and Bill Oliver. “Julia Alvarez: A Clean Windshield.” Passion and Craft: Conversations with Notable Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. 128-44.

Malakoff, Marguerite and Kenji Hakuta. “Translation Skills and Metalinguistic Awareness in Bilinguals.” Language Processing in Bilingual Children. Ed. Ellen Bialystok. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 141- 66.

Mayock, Ellen C. “The Bicultural Construction of Self in Cisneros, Alvarez, and Santiago.” Bilingual Review/Revista Bilingüe 23, no. 3 (1998): 223-229.

Melville, Margarita B., ed. Twice a Minority: Mexican American Women. St. Louis, MO: C.V. Mosby, 1980.

McCracken, Ellen. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street: Community- Oriented Introspection and the Demystification of Patriarchal Violence.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Ed. Asuncion Horno Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 62-71.

———. New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

———. “Postmodern Ethnicity in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo.” Journal of American Studies Turkey (JAST) 12 (2000): 3-12.

McKenna, Teresa. “On Chicano Poetry and the Political Age: Corridos as Social Drama.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 181-202.

Mignolo, Walter D. “Linguistic Maps, Literary Geographies, and Cultural Landscapes: Languages, Languaging, and (Trans)nationalism.” Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 2 (1996): 181-96.

Mirandé, Alfredo. “The Chicano Family: A Reanalysis of Conflicting Views.” Journal of Marriage and the Family 39, no .4 (1977): 747-56.

Mohanty, Satya P. “The Epistemic Status of Cultural Identity: On Beloved and the Postcolonial Condition.” Cultural Critique 24 (1993): 41-80.

Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory [1985]. 2nd edition. London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

249 Montejano, David, ed. Chicano Politics and Society in the Late Twentieth Century. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Moraga, Cherríe L. Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios. Boston: South End, 1983.

———. The Last Generation: Prose and Poetry. Boston: South End, 1993.

Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture London: Verso, 1987.

Moya, Paula M. L. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2002.

Mujcinovic, Fatima. “Multiple Articulations of Exile in US Latina Literature.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 28, no. 4 (2003): 167-86.

Muñoz, Carlos, Jr. Youth, Identity, Power: The Chicano Movement. London: Verso, 1989.

Neate, Wilson D. “Unwelcome Remainders, Welcome Reminders.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 19, no. 2 (1994): 17-34.

Nieto-Gómez, Anna. “La Feminista” [1974]; “Sexism in the Movimiento” [1976]. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 86-91; 97-9.

Niggli, Josephina. Mexican Village [1945]. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

Neumaier, Diane. “Judy Baca: Our People Are The Internal Exiles.” Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 256-70.

Oboler, Suzanne. “So Far From God, So Close to the United States: The Roots of Hispanic Homogenization” [1995]. Challenging Fronteras: Structuring Latina and Latino Lives in the U.S. Ed. Mary Romero, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, and Vilma Ortiz. London & NY: Routledge, 1997. 31-54.

250 Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Malgorzata. The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

Olivares, Julián. “Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street and the Poetics of Space” [1985]. Chicana Creativity and Criticism: New Frontiers in American Literature. Ed. María Herrera-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. 233-244.

———. “Entering The House on Mango Street.” Teaching American Ethnic Literatures: Nineteen Essays. Ed. John R. Maitino and David R. Peck. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. 209-235.

Orozco, Cynthia. “Sexism in Chicano Studies and the Community” [1986]. Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings. Ed. Alma M. García. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. 265-69.

Orozco, Febe Portillo. “A Bibliography of Hispanic Literature.” The English Journal 71, no. 7 (1982): 58-62.

Ortega, Eliana and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. “At the Threshold of the Unnamed: Latina Literary Discourse in the Eighties.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Eds. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott & Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 2-23.

Ortiz Cofer, Judith. “Arrival.” Barrios and Borderlands: Cultures of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1994. 329.

Padilla, Genaro M. “Myth and Comparative Cultural Nationalism: The Ideological Uses of Aztlán.” Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland [1989]. Ed. Rodolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. 111-34.

———. “Imprisoned Narrative? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women’s Autobiography.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José

David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 43-60.

———. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography. Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 1993.

Paredes, Américo. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1958.

251 ———. “The Mexican Corrido: Its Rise and Fall.” Madstones and Twisters. Ed. Mody Boatright, Wilson M. Hudson, and Allen Maxwell. Austin and Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist University Press, 1958. 91-105.

———. “The Folk Base of Chicano Literature” [1964]. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical E ssays. Ed. Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra- Frausto. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 4-17.

Paredes, Raymund A. “The Evolution of Chicano Literature.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 5, no. 2 (1978): 71-110.

———. “The Evolution of Chicano Literature” [1978]. Three American Literatures: Essays in Chicano, Native American, and Asian-American Literature for Teachers of American Literature. Ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr. New York: Modern Language Association, 1982. 33-79.

———. “Mexican American Authors and the American Dream.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 8, no. 4 (1981): 71-80.

Parker, Janet and Julie Stanton, eds. Mythology: Myths, Legends, & Fantasies. Edison: NJ, Wellfleet Press, 2004.

Paz, Octavio. The Labyrinth of Solitude and Other Writings. Trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos & Rachel Phillips Belash. New York: Grove Press, 1985.

Perez, Dominio Renee. There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2008.

Pérez, Emma Marie. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1999.

———. “Gloria Anzaldúa: La Gran Nueva Mestiza Theorist, Writer, Activist- Scholar.” NWSA Journal 17, no. 2 (2005): 1-10.

Pérez-Torrez, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Pesquera, Beatriz M. and Denise A. Segura. “There is No Going Back: Chicanas and Feminism.” Chicana Critical Issues. Ed. Norma Alarcón et al. Berkeley: Third Woman, 1993. 95-116.

252 Pina, Michael. “The Archaic, Historical and Mythicized Dimensions of Aztlán.” Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland [1989]. Ed. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomelí. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1991. 14-48.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London & New York: Routledge, 1992.

Quintana, Alvina E. Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

Raymond, Joseph. “Mexican Proverbs.” Western Folklore 12, no. 4 (1953): 249-56.

Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1995.

———. “The Politics of Poetics: Or, What Am I, a Critic, Doing in This Text Anyhow?” [1987]. Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. Ed. Gloria E. Anzaldúa. San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990. 346-55.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1976.

———. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” [1979]. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5, no. 4 (1980): 631-60.

Rivera, Tomás. …y no se lo tragó la tierra [1971] / …And the Earth Did Not Devour Him [1987]. Trans. Evangelina Vigil-Piñón. Houston, TX: Arte Público, 1992.

———. “Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature” [1971]. Tomás Rivera: The Complete Works. Ed. Julián Olivares. Houston, TX: Arte Público, 1991. 325-37.

Rodriguez, Andrea. “Trujillo en Dos Novellas Latino Americanas.” MA Thesis. Connecticut: Central Connecticut State University (July 2003).

Rojas, Lourdes. “Latinas at the Crossroads: An Affirmation of Life in Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales’ Getting Home Alive.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 166- 77.

253 Rosaldo, Renato. “Fables of the Fallen Guy.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 84-93.

Rosario-Sievert, Heather. “Conversation with Julia Alvarez.” Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 54 (1997a): 31-7.

Reuman, Ann E. “Coming into Play: An Interview with Gloria Anzaldúa.” 1995. MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 25, no. 2 (2000): 3-45.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Goddesses and the Divine Feminine: A Western Religious History. Ewing, NJ: University of California Press, 2005.

Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile.” Granta 13 (1984): 159-72.

———. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors” [1987]. Critical Inquiry 15, no. 2 (1988): 205-25.

Saldaña-Portillo, Joefina. “Who’s the Indian in Aztlán? Re-Writing Mestizaje, Indianism, and Chicanismo from the Lacandón.” The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Ed. Ileana Rodríguez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. 402-23.

Saldívar, José David. “Towards a Chicano Poetics: The Making of the Chicano Subject, 1969-1982.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 1, no. 2 (1986): 10-17.

———. “Chicano Border Narratives as Cultural Critique.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 167-80.

Saldívar, Ramón. “A Dialectic of Difference: Towards a Theory of Chicano Novel.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 6, no. 3 (1979): 73-92.

———. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Saldívar-Hull, Sonia. “Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics.” Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano

254 Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Ed. Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. 203-20.

———. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

Sandoval, Chéla N. J. “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World.” Genders 10 (1991): 1-24.

Satz, Martha. “Returning to One’s House: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” Southwest Review 82, no. 2 (1997): 166-185.

Sánchez, Roasura. Chicano Discourse: Socio-Historic Perspectives. Rowley: Newsbury, 1983.

Seator, Lynette. “Emplumada: Chicana Rites-of-Passage.” MELUS: The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 11, no. 2 (1984): 23-38.

Segura, Denise A. “Challenging the Chicano Text: Toward a More Inclusive Contemporary Causa.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 2 (2001): 541-50.

Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.

Sommers, Joseph. “From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Applications to a Chicano Literary Text” [1977]. Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1979. 31-40.

Suárez, Mario. “El Hoyo”; “Señor Garza.”Arizona Quarterly 3, no. 2 (1947): 112- 15; 115-21.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “The Rani of Sirmur.” Europe and Its Others. Ed. F. Barker, vol.1. Essex: University of Essex Press, 1985. 147.

———. “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.” In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Methuen, 1987. 197-221.

Stefanko, Jacqueline. “New Ways of Telling: Latinas’ Narratives of Exile and Return.” FFrontiersrontiers: JJournalournal ooff Woman Studies 17, no. 2 (1996): 50-69.

255 Trujillo, Carla. “Fear and Loathing in the Chicano Community.” Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. Ed. Carla Trujillo. Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1991. 186-94.

Valdez, Luis. “Notes on Chicano Theater” [1970]. The Chicanos: Life and Struggles of the Mexican Minority in the United States [1971]. Gilberto López y Rivas. New York: Monthly Review, 1973. 143-48.

Valdés, Maria Elena de. “The Critical Reception of Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street.” Gender, Self, and Society: Proceedings of the IV International Conference on the Hispanic Cultures of the United States. Ed. Renate von Bardeleben. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993. 287−30.

Villarreal, José Antonio. Pocho [1959]. New York: Anchor Books, 1989.

Viramontes, Helena María. “‘Nopalitos’: The Making of Fiction.” Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Ed. Asuncion Horno Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 33-38.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego, CA: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983.

Wolf, Eric R. “The Virgin of Guadalupe: A Mexican National Symbol.” The Journal of American Folklore 71, no. 279 (1958): 34-9.

Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. “Rasquachismo: A Chicano Sensibility” [1988]. Chicano Art, Resistance and Affirmation: An Interpretive Exhibition of the , 1965-1985. Ed. Richard Griswold del Castillo, Teresa McKenna, and Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano. Los Angeles: Wight Art Gallery, UCLA, 1991. 155-62.

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference,’ and the Non-Unitary Subject.” Cultural Critique 28 (1994): 5-28.

Zamora, Bernice. “So Not to Be Mottled” [1976]. Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature. Ed. Tey D. Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero. Tucson, AZ: The University of Arizona Press, 1993. 78.

Zinn, Maxine Baca. “Political Familisim: Toward Sex Role Equality in Chicano Families.” Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research 6, no. 1 (1975): 13-26.

256 İrfan Cenk Yay AKADEMİK ÖZGEÇMİŞ

Lisans: İstanbul Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölümü, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı. (1997-2001)

Yüksek Lisans: İstanbul Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Anabilim Dalı, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı. (2001-2003) Tez Başlığı: “Structuring the Black Identity: From Object to Subject” Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Ayşe Erbora

Doktora: İstanbul Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Anabilim Dalı, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Bilim Dalı. (2003-2009) Tez Başlığı: “Texts on the Borders: U.S. Latina Writing” Tez Danışmanı: Prof. Dr. Ayşe Erbora

Yayınlanmış Makaleler:

▪ “Afrika’nın Hermes’i, Yeni Dünya’nın Maymunu.” COGITO. Sayı: 40. İstanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2004: 9-12.

▪ “The Discourse of Orientalism as a Mechanism of Western Hegemony.” LITERA: Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölüm Dergisi, Cilt:17. İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Basımevi, 2005: 211-21.

▪ “Poetry of Harlem Renaissance at the Crossroads of Heritage and Tradition.” LITERA: Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölüm Dergisi, Cilt:18. İstanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Basımevi, 2006: 55-82.

Sunulan Bildiriler:

▪ “Corridos on the Border, Borders in the Corridos.” İstanbul Üniversitesi, Edebiyat Fakültesi, Amerikan Kültürü ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı’nın düzenlediği 1. Uluslararası "Literature and Music" Semineri – 07.11.2008.

Çalışma ve İlgi Alanları:

▪ Sömürgecilik Sonrası Yazın ve Çalışmaları ▪ Latin Amerika Kökenli Amerikan Azınlık Kültürü ve Yazını ▪ Afrika Kökenli Amerikan Azınlık Kültürü ve Yazını ▪ Kızılderili Kültürü ve Yazını ▪ Edebiyat, Sinema ve Kültür Kuramları

Bildiği Yabancı Diller:

▪ İngilizce ▪ İspanyolca

257