Masaryk University Faculty of Arts
Department of English and American Studies
English Language and Literature
Bc. Pavlína Studená
The Daughters of Borderlands: Female Self-Development in Selected Works of Denise Chávez and Sandra Cisneros
Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis
Supervisor: Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph. D.
2019
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
…………………………………………….. Author’s signature
Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor Mgr. Martina Horáková, Ph.D. for her kind help, inspirational comments, and invaluable advice throughout the writing process. Furthermore, I would like to thank my family for their support and patience. Table of Contents
1 Introduction ...... 5
2 Contemporary Chicana Literature ...... 8
2.1 A Brief History of Chicano/a Culture ...... 8
2.2 Chicano/a Literature, Bildungsroman, and Chicana Writers ...... 12
3 Growing Up Chicana ...... 23
3.1 Between Two Cultures ...... 23
3.2 The House as a Symbol of the Socio-Economic Status ...... 30
3.3 Gender Roles and Stereotypes ...... 37
3.4 The Empowered Voice of a Chicana ...... 46
4 Conclusion ...... 55
Works Cited ...... 58
Abstract in English ...... 61
Abstract in Czech ...... 62
1 Introduction
The history of people living near the border between the United States and Mexico has been long and grievous. In 1519, Spanish conquerors led by Hernando Cortés colonized the territory where Aztec culture had thrived since the 13th century. By the end of the 16th century, the Spaniards controlled the immense territory comprised not only of today’s Mexico, but also of considerable parts of the current United States, among others
California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Besides the newcomers seeking personal enrichment in the New World, a great number of missionaries came to spread the Christian religion. As a natural result of the Spanish colonisation, Indigenous people frequently intermarried with the Spaniards, and soon the population of the colonies were dominated by their offspring, mestizos. The Indigenous culture was strongly affected by the Spanish influence, and their religious beliefs were pushed out by the expanding
Catholic Church (Brinkley 4; 11-12). In the 19th century, the Anglo-Americans annexed the territory and forced the original inhabitants out of their lands. The sudden sense of alienation in their homeland gave rise to the specific Mexican American cultural environment and Chicano culture. The word Chicano, or Chicana in the female form, became widely used in the late 1960s in connection with the Chicano Movement to refer to American citizens of Mexican origin. The Chicanos, Mexican Americans living in the borderlands between two cultural worlds, have been for a long time rejected and looked down upon by both Americans and Mexicans. While Americans see Chicanos primarily as a cheap labour force, Mexicans consider them traitors as they “mingle with Americans”
(Poniatowska 37). The Chicanos, then, experience feelings of alienation, in-betweenness, otherness and not belonging.
As Takaki points out, the situation of Mexican Americans was special due to the proximity of their homeland, which helped “reinforce their language, identity and
5 culture” (9). Unlike immigrants from other countries, Mexican Americans stayed in close contact with their cultural environment. The combination of these two cultures made it possible for a new stream of literature written by Mexican American authors to emerge.
It is called Chicano/a literature and it is very specific being a mélange of Native
American, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon heritage. The ubiquitous codeswitching between
English and Spanish is one of the features typical of Chicano/a writings. Narrative strategies, particularly the fragmented, episodic or circular structure, give the texts “a high degree of orality, connecting it with the repressed oral, pre-Colombian traditions of
Mexico” (Karafilis 67) and are often used in narratives of Chicana writers.
The process of growing up and personal transformation are recurrent topics in
Chicana literature. Eysturoy sees the central theme of contemporary Chicana fiction in the “quest for authentic female self-development” (3) which is influenced by multiple social and cultural forces. The aim of this thesis is to identify themes which play a crucial role in the coming-of-age process in Chicana Bildungsroman and Kűnstlerroman and the ways in which the discovery of one’s self is related to the creative process of writing.
Particular focus is given to the role of gender, ethnicity, and class which I believe are the key aspects shaping the female self-development in Chicana literature. For the literary analysis, two Chicana authors were chosen as case studies: Denise Chávez and Sandra
Cisneros. I selected two books of each author: The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and
Face of an Angel (1994) by Denise Chávez, and The House on Mango Street (1984) and
Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros. These novels, published between 1984 and 2002 when Chicana literature was thriving, contributed significantly to Chicana feminist discourse of the late 20th century, bringing into focus the triple marginalization of
Chicanas: due to their ethnicity, class, and gender.
6
Both authors thematize the coming-of-age process of young Chicanas and the ways in which they reconcile with their otherness and sense of unbelonging through their interest in writing. The clash of Mexican and American cultural worlds leads to the protagonists' confusion and feelings of alienation caused by their not belonging to any of these cultures. Moreover, burdened with the deeply embedded virgin/whore dichotomy based on ancient Mexican female archetypes and strengthened by the Catholic Church doctrine, Chicanas are expected to play a subordinate role in society. Nevertheless, the protagonists of the examined books yearn for the same personal freedom as men have, and desire to leave the confining patriarchal communities where their potential is often limited to the household and the family. They no longer see themselves as obedient daughters, they refuse this predestined way of life and strive to develop the empowered personal identity of their own which is symbolized not only by their desire to escape but especially by their longing for the ownership of the house of their own. The house represents their emancipation and newly established identity, space where they can be themselves and write. Through their writing, they not only speak for themselves, but they also give voice to the disempowered community of Chicanas.
7
2 Contemporary Chicana Literature
2.1 A Brief History of Chicano/a Culture
Mexican culture originates in ancient tribal Indigenous heritage. At the beginning of the 16th century, Mexico was invaded and conquered by the Spaniards. Since then, the
Spaniards mixed with the original Indigenous population and, as they were gradually settling the northern territories, also with Native Americans. In the 19th century, the
Anglos started to migrate into the Mexican territories of today’s Texas. Their expansionism and increasing demands of land resulted in driving the Mexicans out of their lands, which was accompanied by fights and violence. In order to keep the Texas territory, the Mexican government prohibited further American immigration. American settlers in Texas responded with an armed insurrection against Mexican authorities. The
Battle of the Alamo in 1836, in which a handful of Americans resisted thousands of
Mexicans and “fought gallantly to the death, sacrificing their lives so that Texas might be free” (McWilliams 222), went down in history as the heroic and glorious act for the
Americans, but at the same time the “symbol for the cowardly and villainous character of the Mexicans” (Anzaldúa 6). Consequently, after the Battle of San Jacinto on April 21,
1836, the Mexican army was defeated, Texas declared independence and its original inhabitants suddenly became foreigners in their native land (Brinkley 333). In 1846, the
USA declared war on Mexico and this armed conflict culminated in the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, according to which Mexico accepted the Rio Grande River as the new Texas border. More than half of the then area of Mexico was seized by the
United States, including California, New Mexico and a considerable part of today’s
Arizona and Nevada, together with their inhabitants. Those who decided to stay were offered U. S. citizenship or they could relocate across the new southern border to Mexico.
8
Most of them remained and American culture quickly dominated the annexed area
(Brinkley 339-42; Takaki 163). Since then, the two nations living in this area, the
Americans and the Mexicans, have lived in close contact. Nevertheless, the people who suddenly became Mexican Americans perceived themselves as strangers in their homeland. Takaki attributes the “vulnerability and powerlessness” of Mexican Americans to this “peculiar alienation” they suddenly experienced (165). They were gradually deprived of their rights as citizens as well as landowners. From the sudden loss of their land and cultural identity then arises the persisting trauma of Chicanos. Takaki points out that as “Mexicans told and retold stories about the loss of their land, they created a community of the dispossessed” (169). The Chicano/a identity self-consciousness, which is reflected in many literary works of Mexican American authors, undoubtedly originates from this traumatic historical experience.
In the 20th century, Mexicans saw America as a land of wealth and opportunities, and many of them left Mexico to escape poverty and starvation caused by the lack of job opportunities and devaluation of the currency. Although most of the Mexican immigrants in the United States worked in agriculture, a significant part of them migrated to cities where they were employed as unskilled workers for low wages, which were, however, still substantially higher than the wages in Mexico. As the men often brought their families with them, plenty of women worked in cities as cheap labour in factories.
Trapped in the Anglo-American cultural environment, Mexicans, traditionally living in communities, created the barrio1, a Mexican American milieu between the two cultures.
Takaki explains that it was important for Mexican immigrants to establish enclaves of their culture in cities where they would “not feel like aliens in a foreign land” and
1 The Spanish word barrio can be translated into English as “neighbourhood”. However, in the United States, the term barrio refers to a part of a city where Spanish-speaking people live, especially members of the working class. For Chicanos/as, barrios have been the enclaves of Mexican culture within the USA. 9 gradually there emerged a brand-new cultural identity of Mexican Americans (Takaki
307). Similarly to Takaki, Poniatowska considers the inferior status and poverty of
Mexican Americans to be the reason for the loss of their sense of belonging. The
Chicanos, excluded from the Anglo-American society, were forced to create their own subculture strengthened by developing Spanglish as their characteristic dialect
(Poniatowska 39). Nevertheless, Mexican Americans were still not accepted into
American society and their children were sent to segregated schools where they were
“trained to become obedient workers” (Takaki 303). This racial oppression reflects distinctly in many Chicano/a writings. As Madsen claims, each ethnic group has different historical experience as a racialised community within the United States and as such, they perceive racism in various ways. While African Americans interpret their experience in the historical context of slavery and Native Americans in the light of genocidal violence and dispossession, Chicanos were historically traumatised by annexation and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, when they lost a major part of their homeland (Madsen 217).
Till today, many of the Mexicans have been crossing the border in pursuit of the
American Dream, trying to escape poverty and establish a new life within the United
States. Thousands of them live in the United States illegally, belonging to “the poorest and the most exploited” who work illicitly without green cards and therefore earn less than federal minimum wages, in constant fear of deportation (Anzaldúa 12). The persisting socially and economically subordinate status of Mexican Americans together with living in the borderlands between the two cultures became a breeding ground for a new stream of literature through which Mexican American authors try to deal with their identity, self-determination, and integration into the majority society.
Although most Mexican Americans, in general, speak English, they have adopted a wide range of Spanish influence into their language and therefore their dialect is
10 recognizable as Chicano English. Fought defines Chicano English as “a non-standard variety of English, influenced by contact with Spanish, and spoken as a native dialect by both bilingual and monolingual speakers” (1). Chicano English differs from Spanglish and these two terms should not be confused. While Chicano English is a variety of English spoken as a native language, that means it is English influenced by the historical contact with Spanish, the characteristic feature of Spanglish is codeswitching - mixing words, phrases and lexical structures from English and Spanish (Fought 5). As Betz adds,
Spanglish is “currently recognized as a legitimate variety of Chicano English” (18).
Chicano English, thus, has some features typical for or borrowed from Spanish but does not necessarily include Spanish words, while Spanglish involves codeswitching between the two languages, often within a single utterance.
Chicano/a authors widely use codeswitching between English and Spanish in order to add authenticity to their writings and foreground the bilingualism of Mexican
American culture. Androne specifies that Chicano writers employ Chicano English and codeswitching between English and Spanish to “provoke culturally specific connotations, revealing the complexity of linguistically based identity politics, and therefore social relationships of power within a particular ethnic contact dialect speech community” (12).
Nevertheless, Fought argues that “codeswitching while speaking English may have a particular political and cultural significance to the older speakers, who grew up amid the charged political climate of the 1960s and 1970s” when Mexican Americans focused on civil right issues in the Chicano Movement, and it gradually vanishes amongst the younger generation (159). However, the ability of Mexican Americans to switch between both languages is an important feature of Chicano/a literature.
11
2.2 Chicano/a Literature, Bildungsroman, and Chicana Writers
The Chicano Movement, initiated by Chicano students and intellectuals in the
1960s, strengthened Chicano identity and self-determination by rejecting Anglo-
American culture and turning to the Indigenous heritage. Chicanos recognized and became culturally attached to the concept of Aztlán, a mythical homeland of the Aztec people as a “metaphor for a collective identity” of Chicanos and their connection with their Indian legacy (Franco 137). In this period, the first Chicano novels were published, such as Jose Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho (1959) and Tomás Rivera’s …y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971). But it was not until the late 1970s when Chicana writers began to reflect upon the Chicano Movement and “focus on microcosms within a culture, unpacking rituals in the context of inherited symbolic and social structures of subjugation” (Quintana
34). Narratives of authors such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Alicia Gaspar de
Alba, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, and Ana Castillo play a significant role in shaping the Chicana feminist discourse of the 1980s and 1990s.
Long before, however, the oral narrative tradition was an integral part of the
Chicano/a culture. It was mostly women who carried on the tradition of storytelling and the Chicana fiction is interlaced with this exceptional storytelling mastery. In the disclaimer at the beginning of her novel Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros confirms that “these stories are nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered together to make something new. I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies” (n.pag.).
Tiffany Ana López, a Mexican American scholar and editor of the anthology Growing
Up Chicano/a, remembers having “kitchen-table talks” with her grandmother, during which she listened to stories of La Llorona and other ancient myths (18). Growing out of the oral narrative tradition, Chicana literature includes principally short stories and novels
12 which are compiled of several interrelated short stories, usually connected through the same protagonist. The language of Chicana narratives is rather poetic with much said in a few words, and the narrative pattern is often kaleidoscopic rather than linear, frequently employing autobiographical voice.
Quintana defines four stages of Chicana literature development. Firstly, there was the early stage called the “literature of apology”, in which Chicana literature describes but does not dispute the traditional women’s roles as mothers and wives (Quintana 39).
These early texts are predominantly written in the first person, they reflect extensively a
“romantic nostalgia for the past” and serve to some extent as “women’s literary mediations of the ethnic consciousness of a particular time and place” (Eysturoy 33).
Secondly, the “literature of rage and opposition” demands equal rights for women, extricating themselves from traditional masculine domination. The Chicana gradually takes the lead role in the texts as a speaking subject sharing her experience (Quintana 41-
42). Eysturoy mentions the novel Victuum (1976) by Isabella Ríos, the first Chicana
Bildungsroman, as a representative of this transitional stage of Chicana literature
(Eysturoy 33-35). The “literature of struggle and identification” as Quintana calls the third stage of Chicana literature, “brings women to the forefront as productive, self- sufficient, and complex human beings in their own right” (44). Although still respecting the prevailing patriarchal tradition, it represents “the important generational shift in
Chicana narrative voice” and in this stage, Chicana literature thrives (Eysturoy 35-36).
Finally, the “literature of new vision” offers the possibility for social change and transformation. Quintana claims that whereas the previous modes relate to Chicano literature as well, this last fourth stage applies specifically to the (female) Chicana writing as it brings hope and power to Chicanas (39-48).
13
One of the particularly prominent topics in Chicana literature is coming of age and many Chicana novels can be labelled as a Bildungsroman. The term Bildungsroman, as it is used in literary theory, refers to an original German concept of a coming-of-age story, the novel of adolescence or a novel of formation, which recounts the emotional and moral development of its protagonist influenced by various factors including class, ethnicity and gender. As White points out, adolescence is actually “a product of modern civilization” which lasts several years between the childhood and adulthood, in contrast to usually a clearly defined point in so-called primitive cultures when a youngster undergoes the rites of passage and afterwards, he or she is considered an adult (5-6). In the Euro-American cultural environment, adolescents are important as carriers of social change because of their “potential to reconfigure the existing social structures and institutions to which they find themselves heir” (Millard 2). Coming-of-age stories are then stories of formation and self-development and, at the same time, stories of social protest and defiance against confining traditions.
The genre of Bildungsroman originated in the eighteen-century Germany, and traditionally it dealt with the development of a male protagonist. While male protagonists struggled to go through a series of disillusionments to reach maturity and subsequently fulfil their roles in society, female protagonists used to be considered to develop “later in life, after conventional expectations of marriage and motherhood have been fulfilled and found insufficient” (Abel et al. 7). The entirely female Bildungsroman appeared in Anglo
American literature in the 19th century, when women came to realize that the true image of women cannot be found “neither in fairy tales nor in other patriarchal texts” (Rose
211). Among the principal representatives of the genre belong Jane Eyre (1847) and
Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and
Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). Since the 20th century, female Bildungsroman
14 has expanded into writings of ethnic minorities in the United States with novels such as
Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982), or Louise
Erdrich’s The Porcupine Year (2008). Women writers managed to adjust the central idea of the Bildungsroman genre to juxtapose a quest for personal self-development with an ethnically marginalised and gender biased individual’s self-determination within a majority society.
Probably the best-known and most popular Chicano Bildungsroman is Rudolfo
Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima (1972). It was also the first Chicano novel many Mexican
Americans came across. Denise Chávez recollects that it was not until she had been in high school when she saw Anaya’s book and recognized that “anyone was writing books about my world and my reality . . . I couldn’t believe that there was a writer in New
Mexico who had written a novel” (qtd. in Ikas 52). Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima follows the chronological structure of a traditional Bildungsroman. Through his coming-of-age process, the protagonist and narrator of the story, young Antonio Márez, undergoes a series of rites of passage. On his way from childhood to adolescence, Antonio ponders over various issues such as the differences between himself and his schoolmates. He compares Catholic teaching with Ultima’s traditional beliefs and ancient pagan rituals and observes the diametrically opposite attitudes of his mother and father whose distinct expectations he is supposed to fulfil.
The first Bildungsroman written by a Chicana author was published in 1976 – it was the novel Victuum by Isabella Ríos (Eysturoy 33). Since then, the Bildungsroman genre has become particularly prominent in Chicana literature as it exemplifies the process of becoming, which is a recurrent theme in Chicana narratives. It is characteristic for Chicana fiction that many writers make use of autobiographical elements in their writings as a thorough self-analysis. They usually pay special attention to the process of
15 self-development and self-definition. As Eysturoy remarks, the struggle for self- definition occurs not only in the protagonist’s adolescence, but it can be experienced also later in life when a mature woman realizes the dissatisfying reality of her social and cultural role and tries to transform her life (3). The Chicano/a Bildungsroman depicts struggles of young Mexican Americans who face poverty, discrimination, and marginalization within the majority Anglo-American society issues which are very familiar to many of them.
In his book Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction, Millard identifies the role of the father as principal in the American Bildungsroman. He points out that the
“way in which finding a place in society is coterminous with finding a satisfactory relationship with the father” and he compares the coming-of-age story to a “drama of coming to terms with the father” (15). Although this is different in Chicana writings, the role of the father as suggested by Millard acts as a parallel to the role of the community in Chicana Bildungsroman. If the young protagonist of American Bildungsroman strives to define himself in relation to his father, the young protagonist of Chicana
Bildungsroman is in search of her place within the community, marked by incessant
“clashes of unique human possibility with the restraints of social convention” (Abel et al.
6). The system of moral and ethical values in Mexican American culture differs in some aspects (e. g. religion, a woman’s status, the role of a family) from that of the majority
American society. Besides struggling with her own coming-of-age process, a Chicana adolescent must integrate herself into these two coinciding but still different milia. As
Eysturoy adds, the “protagonist not only has to contend with this sense of ‘otherness,’ but must also deal with constricting social and cultural forces within her own particular environment in order to successfully complete her own process of self-development”
(15). The clash between the evolving self and the expected female role in the patriarchal
16 community sets up the recurring leitmotif in the Chicana Bildungsroman. Great emphasis on the protagonist within the community, fragmented or circular narrative patterns, and critique of American materialism represented by the concept of the American Dream are specific features of Chicana Bildungsroman (Karafilis 66). In her autobiography,
Cisneros explains why she opted for coming-of-age stories and why, in her opinion, they are prominent in Chicana literature: “But best of all, writing in a younger voice allowed me to speak, to name that thing without a name, that shame of being poor, of being female, of being not quite good enough, and examine where it had come from and why, so I could exchange shame for celebration” (A House of My Own 129). Through a young protagonist, Cisneros can define issues which Chicanas face, reconcile with them and subsequently negotiate the appropriate position in society.
It is not unusual in Chicana narratives that the protagonist makes use of her creativity to navigate her way through the process of transformation. In this thesis, I focus on a Chicana self-development within the more specific branch of the Bildungsroman genre, a Kűnstlerroman, sometimes called an artist’s novel2, in which a protagonist aspires to become an artist – usually a writer, but also a musician, painter, dancer, etc.
Authors often use autobiographical elements in the genre of Kűnstlerroman, too. At first, however, a Kűnstlerroman was attributed exclusively to men and depicted male protagonists, for instance, J. V. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795),
Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), and James Joyce’s autobiographical novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Although there were sporadic attempts to introduce a female protagonist with artistic ambitions during the 19th century, such as
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s novel in verse Aurora Leigh (1856), female artist’s novels
2 There exist two ways how the term Kűnstlerroman is translated into English. While some scholars prefer “artist novel”, others use in their works the form “artist’s novel”. In this thesis, I will refer to a genre of Kűnstlerroman as an “artist’s novel”. 17 emerged increasingly only at the beginning of the 20th century. The novels such as Willa
Cather’s A Song of the Lark (1915) about a talented singer, Virginia Woolf’s To the
Lighthouse (1927) which depicts the development of the painter Lily Briscoe, and Alice
Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (1971) belong to the most significant artist’s novels with a female protagonist.
Women were long denied the artistic fulfilment because, as Eysturoy reminds us, since the time immemorial the man was depicted as the creator and a woman as the object of creation. While women frequently appear in men’s Kűnstlerroman as artist’s muses, men in women’s Kűnstlerroman are more likely to represent obstacles in the protagonist’s artistic efforts (Eysturoy 22-23). It is significant that in a female Kűnstlerroman the protagonist often ends up either single or divorced, usually childless; as if a man or a family prevented her from devoting herself solely to art.
To analyse how gender, class, and ethnicity play out in a Chicana Kűnstlerroman,
I chose as case studies novels of two Chicana authors: Denise Chávez and Sandra
Cisneros. The examined writings were published between 1984 and 2002. At that time,
Chicana literature was extraordinarily popular, especially female coming-of-age novels, which dealt with issues the young Chicanas faced in their quest for identity. Female protagonists of these narratives ask: “Who am I?” and the creative process of writing helps them expose, explain, and cope with the social and cultural forces that influence their transformation into grown-up women.
Denise Chávez was born in New Mexico in 1948, and her writings are strongly influenced by her Chicana origin. Although she often sets her stories in fictional towns, they bear resemblance to real landscape, people, and culture of New Mexico, her homeland. When she was a child, her father left the family, and her mother had to raise the children and maintain the family on her own. Chávez mirrors this experience in her
18 works as well. She admits that her mother was “a great role model” who excited Chávez’s interest in women. She declares further: “I am interested in women’s issues. One of my themes is women. I am a voice for women” (qtd. in Ikas 49, 54). Chávez’s female protagonists are often either single or abandoned by a man, working and earning money, sometimes sustaining the family on their own. In her narratives, Chávez depicts women’s struggles to survive with dignity in the male-ruled world while facing racial prejudices and deep-rooted confining traditions. For the purposes of this thesis, I focus on Denise
Chávez’s books The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Face of an Angel (1994).
The Last of the Menu Girls consists of seven interrelated stories tracing the maturation of the protagonist, a Chicana girl Rocío Esquibel who aspires to become a writer. Rocío is the narrator of most of the text, although some lesser parts are narrated by other characters. The discontinuous narrative which can be read either as separate short stories or as a novel represents the “fragmentation of identity under the twin pressures of racism and sexism” (Madsen 229). Rocío tells stories from her everyday life in a Chicano barrio in an ordinary town in New Mexico during the 1960s and through her narratives contemplates her own identity comparing herself with women around her. The title story depicts seventeen-year-old Rocío as a menu girl in a hospital, which serves as an analogy of the real world. Although she is confronted with racial and gender prejudices, she gradually becomes emotionally attached to the suffering people she encounters there, which helps her understand them and at the same time better understand herself. The next part of the book deals with both Rocío’s past and future. Rocío examines her family history, history of Mexican Americans and their culture, and tries to find a role model of a woman Rocío herself wants to become. During her observations, she hears a lot of stories and she decides to collect them and rewrite the life stories of the ordinary people
19 around her. Through her writings Rocío explores herself and, at the same time, she gives a voice to neglected and unheard Chicano/a community.
The novel Face of an Angel (1994) depicts the life of Soveida Dosamantes from her childhood to maturity and her transformation into an emancipated woman. This extensive novel could be considered a family saga as well as a Kűnstlerroman. The novel is interlaced with chapters of “The Book of Service”, a kind of a handbook which Soveida writes herself as a guide for her successor. “The Book of Service” contains the lessons
Soveida has learnt during the years of working in a Mexican restaurant. Soveida compares the role of service in the restaurant and in her own life. At the same time, she observes women around her who try to find their own voice and their own place in the world of machismo and the rigid doctrine of the Catholic Church. The titles of the novel’s sections refer to the hierarchy of angels from the lowest order to the highest, that means from
Angels to Seraphim. Naming the chapters after angels’ hierarchy symbolizes both inseparable connection of Chicanos/as with the Catholic Church and the stages of understanding which the protagonist undergoes during her maturing (Naranjo-Huebl 51).
The novel starts with Soveida’s childhood, and it follows her up to her late thirties. In the course of the novel, episodes from the lives of her ancestors are narrated to make a connection between the past and the present of the women around Soveida and to acknowledge the reader with Chicano/a culture, traditions, and a daily life in a barrio.
Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago in 1954 to a working-class family of a
Mexican father and a Mexican American mother. She has six brothers, and she is the only girl. Growing up in this family constellation strongly influenced her writings (Cisneros,
A House of My Own 91). Sandra Cisneros became one of the most popular Chicana authors thanks to her first book The House on Mango Street (1984). The book is comprised of forty-four short interrelated vignettes describing the feelings and
20 observations of Esperanza Cordero, a teenage girl who longs to leave the barrio and become a writer. The narrative focuses mainly on women’s experience, their passive acceptance of subordination and loss of freedom, and on the social isolation of women imprisoned in their houses. Through telling her stories, Esperanza becomes aware of her own status as a Chicana in the socio-economic hierarchy and rejects the prescribed destiny of her female peers, which in most cases means getting married and be socially and economically dependent on the husband.
Cisneros’s novel Caramelo (2002) is narrated by Celaya “Lala” Reyes who, like the author herself, is growing up with her six brothers in a Mexican American family.
Each summer, the Reyes family cross the border between the United States and Mexico to spend summer at the grandparents’ house in Mexico City, the father’s hometown.
Constant migration between the dual identity of Chicanos/as and their existence in the borderland of two cultures is a leitmotif of the novel. The story begins with Lala’s reflections of the trips and continues with her own emotional transformation, describing at the same time transformations of other family members while crossing the border several times and finally establishing themselves in the USA. From a sharp observer of her family, Lala gradually becomes a storyteller herself. Her retelling of the Awful
Grandmother’s life story forms a story within a story and appears in a form of a mental dialogue between Lala as the writer and the Awful Grandmother as a protagonist of this part of the novel.
There are obvious similarities in the forms of Chávez’s Face of an Angel and
Cisneros’s Caramelo. Both novels integrate stories-within-stories technique. Besides
“The Book of Service”, in which Soveida hands down her life experience to her successor in the restaurant, the narrative of Face of an Angel includes also an oral history of Oralia, the elderly family servant, and Soveida’s term paper for her Chicano history class. While
21
Soveida communicates via her “Book of Service” with her successor, Lala in Caramelo leads an inner dialogue with her ancestor, the Awful Grandmother. Mediating her grandmother’s journey from childhood to old age, Lala helps the grandmother’s ghost be forgiven and cross over. The Awful Grandmother, Soledad, wants to explain and justify some of her actions by asking Lala to retell the story of her life for her. As Alumbaugh points out, Lala’s “ability to become her grandmother’s narrative surrogate depends on her understanding of the storyteller as a type of narrative coyote” (53). A coyote is a person who takes money for helping Mexicans cross the US border illegally. By using the term “narrative coyote”, Cisneros refers to two main motifs of the novel: migration and storytelling (Alumbaugh 54). Constant migration between the two cultures, American and Mexican, reinforces in young Chicanos/as bonds with their Mexican heritage but on the other hand, it contributes to their split identity.
Original narrative approaches of Chicana writers, represented in this thesis by
Sandra Cisneros and Denise Chávez, contribute to setting the agenda of Chicana feminist discourse of the late 20th century, pointing out the male-defined place of Chicana women limiting them to the house and the church, and accentuating women’s concerns in society.
Their works break the long-lasting silence of Chicanas and offer the “ultimate strategy for escape from confining traditions” (Quintana 74) as well as the revised definition of what a Chicana should be and what she really is.
22
3 Growing Up Chicana
3.1 Between Two Cultures
The quest for identity is one of the most prominent themes in Chicana literature.
Chicanas grow up in the bilingual environment formed by two interconnected cultures –
Mexican, heavily influenced by ancient Indigenous traditions, and Anglo-American majority culture. Being Chicana often involves triple marginalization, due to her race, class, and gender. Not only are Chicanas looked down upon by the majority society, but also by the Chicanos, Mexican American men. Taking the traditional patriarchal social structure into account, Chicanas are often considered as “women first, Mexican second”
(Quintana 35). Moreover, for a Chicana, being a woman is inextricable from being a member of a working-class ethnic minority and, as such, she is often despised as a third- rate person.
Although Mexican Americans are often the targets of racial discrimination themselves, they are also prejudiced towards people from other ethnic groups, and towards people from lower social classes. These biases are clearly depicted in Chicana narratives in various remarks about the skin colour, the origin, or the appropriateness of the social class. Explanations of Mexican Americans’ attitude to members of a different social or cultural background can be found, among others, in the scenes concerning the choice of a husband. In Chávez’s Face of an Angel, Soveida’s father recommends: “You should marry above yourself. If not an Italian, an Anglo. Don’t date Mexicans, they’re low class, probably will never earn much money. Don’t date anyone too dark, especially
Mexicans, never niggers, never, or chinks” (38). The father warns Soveida not only against marrying a man of colour in general, but against Mexicans in particular, and so does Soveida’s mother: “Whatever you do, don’t marry a Mexican . . . Most of them, now
23 there are exceptions, are too macho . . . Most Mexicans want the women to stay at home, thinking that’s enough. Let me tell you, that was all I ever had. It was never enough” (39).
Chávez here refers to Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Never Marry a Mexican” published in the collection of short stories Woman Hollering Creek (1991), in which the protagonist is warned against marrying a Mexican by her mother, married to a Mexican herself, with the accentuation of the fact that “she was born here in the U.S., and he was born there, and it’s not the same, you know” (Cisneros, Woman Hollering Creek 68). The Mexicans, as Cisneros shows in the short story, also have quite a complicated set of principles regarding the choice of a proper spouse. Mexicans would barely accept a Mexican girl from el otro lado, i.e. from the United States. Cisneros explains that marrying a Chicana is a marriage down for a Mexican man. Anyway, she also points out that “if he had married a white woman from el otro lado, that would’ve been different. That would’ve been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor” (69). It confirms that the tension and social class hierarchy exist not only between Anglo-Americans and Mexican Americans but also between Mexican Americans and Mexicans. Therefore, Chicanos feel somehow
“in-between”, respected neither by Americans nor by Mexicans, and thus belonging nowhere.
Feelings of alienation and unbelonging are common to most protagonists of
Chicana coming-of-age novels, frequently due to the neighbourhood they live in and from where people move “a little farther away every time people like us keep moving in”
(Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 13). Many Chicanos/as live in barrios, where their children grow up isolated from the majority society. Esperanza, the protagonist of The
House on Mango Street, notices that white Americans often hold prejudices against
Mexican Americans living in barrios: “Those who don’t know any better come into our neighborhood scared. They think we’re dangerous. They think we will attack them with
24 shiny knives. They are stupid people who are lost and got here by mistake” (Cisneros,
The House on Mango Street 28). Within the barrios, Chicanos created their own cultural environment which they leave for work and from where they send children to schools.
School is often the only place where Mexican American children mix with children from other cultural backgrounds. And it is at school where many Chicano/a children become aware of their otherness. López remembers that “something as simple as taking a piece of meat wrapped up in a tortilla to school set me apart. I read of children taking their sandwiches to school, yet never in my childhood reading experiences did I read about a child taking a tortilla” (18). For children, the food brought from their homes means one of the principal cultural distinctions they encounter.
Nevertheless, at school Mexican American children experience yet another aspect of their otherness: the language. In barrios, the Spanish language dominates, and parents usually speak to their children in Spanish, and so do the relatives. At school, however,
Mexican American children are expected to speak English. In the relatively recent past,
Chicano/a children were ridiculed for their flawed English and using Spanish was often persecuted. As Chávez recollects, her father “grew up being punished for speaking
Spanish at school” (qtd. in Ikas 49). Coming from a Spanish-speaking barrio, Mexican
American children suddenly found themselves in the world where the English culture prevails. Although in most cases the children adapt to English school environment, and
“by the second generation, speakers tend to be monolingual and do not retain fluency in the heritage language” (Fought 152-3), they often speak Spanish with their grandparents or neighbours. Many Mexican Americans therefore spontaneously switch between both languages depending on the circumstances and even if some of them are not fluent in
Spanish, they usually understand it very well (Fought 156). This incessant codeswitching is characteristic for Chicano/a literature, most of which is written in English with Spanish
25 words mixed in the text. Savin considers this specific use of language in Chicano/a writings as the “locus of encounter, clash, tension, and tentative reconciliation between the writers’ ambivalent cultural identities” (123). According to Fought’s research, some
Chicanos/as “felt that knowing Spanish was essential to their ethnic identity, while others emphasized that what matters is not speaking Spanish, but rather one’s feelings about one’s heritage” (197). However, the language, its choice and usage, is enormously important in Chicano/a search for identity and self-definition.
In her novel Caramelo, Cisneros uses the choice of the language to emphasize the attitude of her characters. While Cisneros translates most of the Spanish words spoken by
Lala into English, she leaves the Spanish of Soledad (the Awful Grandmother) untranslated. Alumbaugh argues that Cisneros employs this codeswitching to create
“Lala’s migratory narrative voice as one that necessarily crosses linguistic boundaries in order to represent the reality of her bilingual and multicultural family” (60). Lala has been raised on the other side, and although her English is still interlaced with Spanish words, she already considers English to be her main language. On the other hand, Soledad’s
Spanish as “her beloved first language, represents her identity as a Mexican born in
Mexico” (Alumbaugh 60). For Lala’s grandmother Soledad, Spanish is the only option how to express herself naturally. The young generation of Chicanos/as growing up in the
United States strive to assimilate and thus, they gradually abandon Spanish in everyday communication among themselves, as Lala explains: “we don’t use that language with kids, we only use it with grown-ups” (Cisneros, Caramelo 23). Fought confirms that in the Chicano community as a whole “the value of Spanish is not high enough to prevent generational language loss for children of parents who were born in the USA” (157).
Spanish is therefore gradually suppressed among the young generation of Mexican
26
Americans, for they prefer English as the “language of higher prestige” (Fought 158) and leave Spanish in barrios with their parents and grandparents.
This approach to languages and their ethnic significance is recognizable in other examined narratives, too. In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza clearly prefers
English and only speaks Spanish when quoting other characters. Betz argues that both the author and her character “claim themselves in English in order to flourish as writers and independent women” (18). While Spanish is connected with the family or with the characters who are inclined to keep the traditional way of life, the progressive and independent characters, usually the narrators, express themselves in English. Esperanza, for instance, attributes positive connotations to her name in English and negative to the meaning of her name in Spanish: “In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color” (Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 10). While the English word “hope” is a plain translation of the Spanish word esperanza, talking about the Spanish meaning of her name, Esperanza refers to the Spanish verb esperar, which primarily means is “to wait” in English. Betz suggests that Esperanza intentionally gives the example of her own name, as her given name represents her ancestral tradition, the “foundation to a person’s identity”, albeit Esperanza refuses it through her rejection of the Spanish meaning of her name (19). Betz argues further that by preferring the English meaning of her name, Esperanza “dismisses her Hispanic ethnicity” (19). Karafilis, on the other hand, argues that considering only the English or only the Spanish meaning of Esperanza’s name, “only half of the protagonist’s identity is revealed. It is when the two definitions are amalgamated, incorporating both the English and Spanish meanings, that the complete, complex process of development for the protagonist becomes clear” (69). In the choice of the protagonist’s name, which has different meanings in English and
27
Spanish, Cisneros emphasises the in-betweenness of Chicanas torn between the dominant
American and traditional Mexican culture, and at the same time their bilingual and bicultural identity.
Spanish is regarded as the inferior language in Chávez’s Face of an Angel, too.
Soveida mentions that her father “spoke Spanish only when he had to, or because he needed something from someone lesser than himself” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 116). In
The Last of the Menu Girls, Spanish appears to a large extent in the last short story
“Compadre”, virtually always untranslated. Chávez employs also other techniques typical for Chicana narratives in The Last of the Menu Girls, such as past/present reflections, contrasts of internal monologues and dialogues, and alternation of the linear and episodic mode of storytelling (Quintana 104). By means of these narrative strategies, in The Last of the Menu Girls, Chávez continues in Chicana oral tradition of storytelling and testimonies, even if she uses codeswitching between English and Spanish slightly more sporadically here.
Language and its choice are crucial for defining the young Chicanos/as ethnically.
Fought argues that although there exists an association “between speaking Spanish and ethnic identity” (201), some Chicano English speakers “felt their Spanish was inadequate in some way” (197), especially in cases that they Spanish was not their preferred language. Rather than Spanish itself, codeswitching is associated with Chicano/a ethnic identity and through their use of codeswitching Chicanos/as are easily ethnically identifiable. Young Mexican Americans have to face what Fought calls the
“assimilation/ethnic pride dichotomy” (202) and by their choice of using either English or Spanish, they express their attitude. Generally speaking, those who struggle to assimilate would rather speak English and either avoid Spanish at all or use it only
28 occasionally via codeswitching or in communication with the grandparents and relatives, if necessary.
In the male-dominated Chicano society, women struggle to balance between their traditionally subordinate role with various limitations and setting their new emancipated identity in the modern world. At the same time, living in the American environment, they contend with their biculturalism and bilingualism and are often confused about their identity that needs to be reconstructed. Young Chicanas’ quest for identity is one of the key elements which influence their coming of age. Yet, as Eysturoy points out, the “ethnic context is a crucial component of the developmental process” (26). Although Chicanas consider themselves Americans and prefer using English, they are still afraid of being refused by the Mexican part of their cultural environment. They feel a “fear of going home. And of not being taken in. We’re afraid of being abandoned by the mother, the culture, la Raza, for being unacceptable, faulty, damaged” (Anzaldúa 20). The theme of leaving and returning is used as well in Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, in which
Esperanza longs to leave Mango Street because, as she says: “I don’t belong. I don’t ever want to come from here” (106). Anyway, she is reminded that even if she succeeds to leave, she “must remember to come back for the others. A circle” (105). As well as the novel The House on Mango Street ends virtually where it began, also Esperanza realizes that she will have to return. Karafilis suggests that in Esperanza’s inability to abandon
Mango Street, Cisneros “reinforces the importance of community and returning to the neigborhood that helped to shape her as a Chicana growing up in American society” (68).
Esperanza thus returns metaphorically to Mango Street which means that she finally accepts the Mexican part of her origin and integrates it into her transformed self.
29
3.2 The House as a Symbol of the Socio-Economic Status
A house is particularly important in Chicano/a literature as the “master metaphor for the construction of identity” (Kaup 363). For a Chicana, a house can be a symbol of both prison and freedom. Either she spends most of the time confined to a house, taking care of a household and a family, watching the world from the window and longing to join the people outside, or she manages to leave the deep-rooted patriarchal traditions and starts to live on her own. In her autobiography A House of My Own, Sandra Cisneros makes a list of three things which empowered her: “I was creating. I had my own money.
And, I had a house of my own. This to me was power” (27). In her writings, Cisneros often refers to Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own, especially by accentuating the necessity of removing inequalities between men and women. Cisneros agrees with Woolf that only by extricating themselves from male supremacy, both socially and economically, women are able to emancipate. Indeed, Cisneros in her writings attaches particular importance to the house and its symbolic power in a Chicana’s life and her ability to rectify her social status. In this case, a house where she would live on her own is a symbol of power and emancipation.
In The House on Mango Street, owning a house means to Esperanza fulfilling the desired American Dream. As house owners, her family would move upwards the social ladder, and they would become more respected citizens not looked down upon by majority any more. Although the house on Mango Street where Esperanza lives, actually belongs to her family, it does not meet Esperanza’s expectations and she is ashamed of it.
She realizes her shame when she takes notice how a nun from her school reacts when
Esperanza tells her where she lives: “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.
30
There. I lived there” (Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 5). Cisneros uses the house in a barrio and its apparent shabbiness to construct Esperanza’s racial, ethnic, and class identity in the United States as a “poor, urban, migratory, and ethnically and racially marked ‘other’” (Alumbaugh 57). As Betz points out, Esperanza’s humiliation is even more painful, because she is asked by a nun, a person who is supposed to have “neither possessions nor wealth, so for a woman of that stature to pity the little girl’s lifestyle is patronizing” (20). Esperanza sees the run-down house in which she lives as a “symbol of the shame” and “an emblem of the oppressive socio-economic situation” which she wants to escape (Eysturoy 92). Eysturoy argues further that “by rejecting the house of her parents she rejects a structure that threatens her sense of self” (93) and that Esperanza’s search for a new house means, in fact, her search for “a viable self” (Eysturoy 93). Her house should be very different from the male-dominated houses on Mango Street, in which the women are confined and imprisoned within the domestic sphere and only allowed to watch the world through the windows.
Esperanza hopes that one day she will live in a house she “could point to”
(Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 5), which means that she desires a house which would be in harmony with her own self-perception. As Quintana suggests, a house means the “metaphor for success” and living in a house which is considered unworthy somehow confirms the subordinate cultural and social position of Chicanos/as (66). For immigrants, who often have to live in communities, owning one’s own home symbolises
“individualism, isolationism, a space for exclusion, and the consolidation of the patriarchal, nuclear family” (Karafilis 69-70) and therefore approximating their social status to Americans, their lifestyle, and their consumerism. Following the pervasive vision of the American Dream, the immigrants wish and hope that:
31
one day we would move into a house, a real house that would be ours for always
so we wouldn’t have to move each year. And our house would have running
water and pipes that worked. And inside it would have real stairs, not hallway
stairs, but stairs inside like the houses on T.V. And we’d have a basement and at
least three washrooms so when we took a bath we wouldn’t have to tell
everybody. Our house would be white with trees around it, a great big yard and
grass growing without a fence. (Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 4)
Esperanza’s yearning for a proper and respectable house as she describes above can be therefore understood as due recognition of her as a proper and respectable member of
American society as she perceives it, according to her rather naïve images of a stereotypical American middle-class way of life. Karafilis adds that Esperanza’s emphasizing of the missing fence “calls on the collectivity of traditional Mexican households” (70) which is in stark contrast to the privacy of middle-class American houses. Nevertheless, in the course of her narration, Esperanza notices that maybe it is not bricks and mortar what makes a woman a fully-fledged member of society.
Esperanza observes the lives of women on Mango Street, such as Mamacita who moved to the United States with her husband in his pursuit of a better-paid job. Mamacita does not leave the house because she does not speak English, so she spends her days sitting by the window, homesick, and listening to Spanish radio. Rafaela’s husband is so jealous that he locks her in the house and all she can do is leaning out the window. Sally got married very early to escape from her abusive father, and despite she has “her house now, her pillowcases and plates” (101), she is not happy. As she is not allowed to leave the house without her husband’s permission, she spends her days looking “at all the things they own: the towels and the toaster, the alarm clock and the drapes. She likes looking at the walls, at how neatly their corners meet” (102) because she is denied even to look out
32 the window, the main distraction available for the women on Mango Street. The experience of women who “looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow” (Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 11) seems to be rather common for Chicanas because the image of women “confined within the frame of a window” (Karafilis 66) appear repeatedly throughout the novel. By telling stories of women imprisoned in the houses on Mango Street Esperanza realizes that a house itself cannot solve problems of social inferiority and that she has to escape the
Mango Street to extricate herself from patriarchal supremacy.
It is also worth noticing that Esperanza desires a house of her own, therefore she identifies owning a house with personal independence and emancipation: “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 purple petunias. My books and my stories” (Cisneros,
The House on Mango Street 108). By owning her own house Esperanza expresses a rebellion and protest against the traditional patriarchal structure of Chicano/a society.
Again, Cisneros refers to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own where Woolf appeals that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” (6). A room or a house of one’s own symbolizes privacy, free time, financial independence, and personal freedom which men often take for granted but for which women in Woolf's times, as well as Chicanas in the 20th century, yearn. Esperanza thus longs for a house of her own not only as for a place to live in but also metaphorically as space where she could be alone and write.
In Cisneros’s Caramelo, Lala, too, complains about her family’s house. Just as
Esperanza, she relates the condition of the house to the family’s socioeconomic status, and she finds their house “washed-up, rotten, rusted, falling apart. Shipwrecked. That’s what we are. A huge galleon made up of this and that stranded on land” (306). The
33 comparison of Lala’s family house to the desired American suburban house, perceived by many immigrants as a benchmark of living standard, reinforces Lala’s feelings of inferiority within the American society. She longs to escape her economically, ethnically and racially marked otherness which she perceives through observing the houses in various barrios where the Reyes family has ever lived in: “I’ve wanted nothing more my whole life than to get out of here” (301). As it is not possible for Lala to leave the barrio yet, she makes use of her reading passion as a “cheap ticket out of here” (Cisneros,
Caramelo 332), although she takes negatively especially the lack of privacy: “There’s never anywhere we’ve lived that’s had enough bedrooms for all of us . . . we’ve slept head to foot on bunk beds, on couches, on twin beds, on double beds, on cots, and on rollaways shoved in every room except the kitchen” (Cisneros, Caramelo 301). Not having her own private space, Lala desires a room of her own, where she would read and be alone with her thoughts. Meanwhile, she has to make do with the small hiding place within the crowded house, as she describes: “I’ve pushed two chairs next to the space heater in the dining room, and this is where I’m trying to read a book on Cleopatra. I’ve got no privacy to hear my own thoughts in this stupid house, but I can hear everyone else’s” (Cisneros, Caramelo 332). As Alumbaugh points out, Lala’s “lack of privacy and longing for her own room . . . paradoxically create her migratory narrative ability” (58).
The troublesome living conditions make it possible for Lala to learn to actually hear the stories of people around her and take the role of a “narrative coyote” (Alumbaugh 59), who listens to the people’s stories, retells them, and thus provides a “guided tour” of these people’s lives. Later, this ability enables Lala to listen to, understand, and retell the Awful
Grandmother’s story.
In Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls, the house also represents a metaphor of a family and of the traditional way of life. In a symbolic way, the house also
34 illustrates a generation gap between Rocío and her mother. Rocío is angry with the house and with all the memories of the past it stands for, asking her mother: “Let me clean it up, throw things away . . . it’s crowded and dusty and dark, and . . . I wish this house would burn down! I just wish it would burn down so we could start all over again” (140). Rocío’s mother, on the contrary, considers the house full of souvenirs of the past to be the heart of the family: “I love this house, your daddy built this house, you were born here, and we’ve lived here ever since . . . it’s full of us, our things . . . you will not curse my house”
(Chávez, The Last of the Menu Girls 140). As Eysturoy suggests, this is the point when
Rocío understands that her mother is a woman, too, “with a past, with dreams and desires of her own” (115) and she begins secretly to search the house and its closets to get to know more about her mother.
When Rocío compares her life with the lives of the women around her, she notices that a lot of them are suffering, both physically and emotionally. Influenced by her work in the hospital, she connects womanhood with suffering and rejects sharing the same fate:
“I want to be someone else, somewhere else, someone important and responsible and sexy” (34). Rocío, therefore, desires to leave her house as a metaphor of her mother’s destiny, as well as the barrio which symbolizes the whole society with all its unjust patriarchal rules and traditions which prevent women from fulfilling their potentials.
In her adolescent fantasies, Rocío dreams about the Grey Room and the Blue
Room, where she could live an alternative life. Rocío recounts, that in the Grey Room, she met the Keeper of the Room who “wanted to make the room smaller, but I said, no .
. . Now the room is white and blue and mine, alone” (Chávez, The Last of the Menu Girls
84). When Rocío metaphorically resists the restriction of her space and thus also of her freedom, she is rewarded by her own Blue Room, which symbolizes the control over her own life. In her dream Blue Room everything is possible, she can even fly. The Blue
35
Room stands for a parallel of a woman’s life minus confining traditions and restrictions.
Rocío explains to her younger sister that “everybody has their own rooms, their own house” (93) and therefore everybody is or should be responsible for one’s own life.
The protagonists’ desire for their own house has an interesting factor in common: they insist the house should be “theirs” only. Indeed, their longing for their own house in perfectly understandable because as many immigrants, they too want to reach the admired
American Dream represented by living in one’s own comfortable and pretty house. On the other hand, however, the house symbolises their personal space, where they could be themselves, without incessant control of their behaviour. In their own “house”, the protagonists could breathe freely, organize their lives without being dependent on their families and relatives, they could make decisions of their own, things which are impossible neither in a father’s nor in a husband’s house. They do not want to spend their lives confined in their fathers’ and husbands’ houses any more. The symbol of the house illustrates metaphorically that the protagonists are not willing to perpetuate the confining patriarchal traditions where a woman is assigned solely to the domestic sphere which is, nevertheless, mainly controlled by a man.
36
3.3 Gender Roles and Stereotypes
In order to understand current representations of Chicanas in literature, it is necessary to examine briefly the historical and cultural female archetypes. In Chicano/a culture, which draws from Aztec and Mexican roots, there appear three main female archetypes which are recurring in Chicano/a narratives: La Virgen de Guadalupe, La
Llorona and La Malinche.
The cult of La Virgen de Guadalupe, a Latino version of the Virgin Mary, one of the most important Catholic symbols, is very strong in Mexican and Chicano/a culture.
Takaki attributes this deep sentimental attachment to La Virgen the Guadalupe to the fact that although imported to their culture by the Catholic Church, “their Virgin Mary was
Mexican: many paintings and statues represented her as dark in complexion” (308) and therefore they could easily identify with her, she was one of them. According to Anzaldúa,
La Virgen de Guadalupe is a “synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered” and, at the same time, the “symbol of ethnic identity and of the tolerance for ambiguity” (30). On the other hand, the cult of La Virgen de Guadalupe and her immaculate conception continues to
“constrain or limit the lives and the possibilities of Mexicanas and Chicanas” (Calafell
15) by setting a role model with unattainable standards through worshipping both purity and motherhood at the same time, and by allowing and justifying women to be placed in a subordinate position to men.
A different role to the virgin archetype is played by La Malinche, also known as la Chingada, an offensive name which could be translated to English as “the whore”. The character of La Malinche, a major negative feminine archetype in Latino culture, is based on a real person living in the 16th century. La Malinche, Malintzin or Doña Marina, was an Indigenous woman who became first a translator, but later also a mistress of Hernando
37
Cortés and as such played a significant role in the defeat of the Aztecs. It is said that she sold her own people to Spaniards and since then she has represented a symbol of betrayal in Mexican culture and “Chicanas in particular are likened to her by males who see them consorting with Anglos or accepting Anglo cultural patterns” (Cypess 2; 138).
Birmingham-Pokorny accentuates the fact that although La Malinche was at first seen as a positive figure, a mother of a new race, gradually she has been looked upon with scorn as an incarnation of a “myriad of very negative historical, political, cultural, sexual, religious, and psychological connotations” (121). Despite the fact that both Mexican and
Chicana women writers consider La Malinche a “symbol of the tensions, contradictions, and oppression inherent in their own sexual, racial, and ethnic identity” (Cypess 4) and as such La Malinche appears frequently in their narratives, the negative image of La
Malinche persists within the culture. Lately, there have appeared numerous efforts to justify La Malinche and accept the significant role she played in Mexican history.
Candelaria, for instance, points out that intelligent, initiative, and strong-minded La
Malinche embodies such personal characteristics that “defied traditional social expectations of a woman’s role” (6) and the damaged reputation of La Malinche should, therefore, be revised, as these characteristics are often associated with Mexican American women “unfettered by traditional restraints against activist public achievement”
(Candelaria 6). In an effort to reform the image of women and their role in society,
Chicana authors try to “resurrect the figure of La Malinche as both a model of inspiration rather than condemnation and also as a link between two cultures” (Birmingham-Pokorny
134). In the figure of La Malinche, they have found an allegory to the double language and cultural identity of themselves.
The third female archetype in Latino culture is La Llorona, the Weeping Woman.
In the heat of passion, the mythical character of La Llorona murdered her own children
38 either as an act of revenge for her lover’s adultery or in order to be with him. Shortly thereafter she regrets it and roams around the riverbanks and brooks in search for her dead children, sometimes carrying a knife, always wailing. As Anzaldúa explains, “wailing is the Indian, Mexican and Chicana woman’s feeble protest when she has no other recourse”
(33). Besides the failed mother, La Llorona represents what Chávez calls a “sexual phantom” who serves as a deterrent example of female depravity (Face of an Angel 49).
The story of La Llorona has been told to “generation after generation of Mexicans and
Chicanas/os to frighten children as well as to continue to demonize Mexicanas and
Chicanas who embrace and display sexuality” (Calafell 14). La Llorona thus symbolizes both an immoral woman and a bad mother.
All the three female archetypal figures, La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona express fear of female sexuality. While La Virgen de Guadalupe is, despite her motherhood, worshipped because of her virginity, La Malinche and La
Llorona are both demonized, used as evidence of women’s betrayal, vice, and weakness.
All the three figures are, however, deeply embedded in Mexican and Mexican American culture. As Gloria Anzaldúa explains, the Chicanos/as have three mythical or spiritual mothers, but the “true identity of all three has been subverted – Guadalupe to make us docile and enduring, la Chingada to make us ashamed of our Indian side, and la Llorona to make us long-suffering people” (31). An incessant contest between the symbolism of
La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche, known as a virgin/whore dichotomy, is a recurrent theme in Mexican and Mexican American culture and as such, it contributes to maintaining the traditional patriarchal hierarchy. If La Virgen de Guadalupe represents the cardinal desirable female virtues such as virginity, submissiveness and motherhood, then La Malinche personifies the evil and feared female sexuality. As Rose argues, “it is men who alienate women from each other, who foster rivalry, who create polar images
39 like madonna and whore, good mother and wicked stepmother” (220). Women, then, have to negotiate their positions between these two extremes of an immaculate saint and a whore; a good mother or an evil woman.
The virgin/whore dichotomy clearly symbolizes the rejection of female sexuality and contributes to the persisting subordinate status of women in Chicano culture. The male-centred Catholic Church, a dominant religious authority for the Chicanos, greatly conduces to female subservience to males. As Chávez reminds, “most saints are male, except the unfortunate heretofore mentioned limbless, sightless, wombless, or sexless”
(Face of an Angel 56). The crucial importance which the Catholic Church attaches to repression of female sexuality is a powerful tool to control women’s lives. As Anzaldúa suggests, the woman is feared by the Catholic Church because of her evident connection to nature, due to her period and to her ability to create a new life, and being “carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected. Protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other” (17). However, the alleged protection means in fact strengthening of the male supremacy and keeps women in their strictly defined roles.
While some Chicana authors, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, reject Catholicism due to its rigid oppressive legacy, others, such as Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Helena Maria
Viramontes, and Denise Chávez, adopt a conciliatory attitude and accept the “important role Catholicism plays in their ethnic identity and choose instead to critique, subvert, revise, and/or reinterpret Catholicism to better serve their creative purposes and values”
(Naranjo-Huebl 52). For instance, after the initial denial of La Virgen de Guadalupe of the Roman Catholic Church, Cisneros adopted the revised version of “Guadalupe the sex goddess, a goddess who makes me feel good about my sexual power, my sexual energy”
(Cisneros, A House of My Own 165). Chávez, on the other hand, suggests Marianismo as a counterpart of machismo and developing a more private relationship with La Virgen de
40
Guadalupe as an alternative how to apply Catholic religion into everyday life, avoiding its oppressive and patriarchal doctrines (Quintana 101).
According to Christian ideology, a woman is predestined to be a mother and “only the nun can escape motherhood. Women are made to feel total failures if they don’t marry and have children” (Anzaldúa 17). A woman is supposed to be submissive, humble, selfless, sacrificing herself in favour of the male, and, above all, she is expected to remain a virgin until she marries. Such a woman is considered a good woman and worthy of respect. The patriarchal hierarchy identifies femininity with the “carnal body and so women must be protected against the power of their own sexuality” (Madsen 217). Not only is women’s sexual behaviour strictly supervised and regulated by the family, it is controlled also by the Catholic Church which worships the cult of purity and forbids birth control. Therefore, as Eysturoy suggests, female “sexual subjugation plays a central role and stands as a metaphor for patriarchal violation of female identity that foreshadows a distinct female Bildungs course” (68). Indeed, sexual abuse often means a critical point in a girl’s life when she becomes aware of her sexuality for the first time. As White notices in her book Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction, “almost all novels of female adolescence from 1920 to the present . . . include scenes of male sexual harassment or violence” (175). This is not an exception in the examined narratives, either.
Cisneros describes the irreversible change which happens with a girl when she becomes sexually mature as a painful loss of a carefree time in the imaginary country of girlhood:
She doesn’t look in mirrors. She isn’t aware of being watched. Not aware of her
body causing men to look at her yet. There isn’t the sense of the female body’s
volatility, its rude weight, the nuisance of dragging it about. There isn’t the world
to bully you with it, bludgeon you, condemn you to a life sentence of fear. It’s the
time when you look at a young girl and notice she is at her ugliest, but at the same,
41
at her happiest. She is a being as close to a spirit as a spirit. Then that red Rubicon.
The never going back there. To that country, I mean. (Cisneros, Caramelo 433-4)
Lala defines the carefree time before puberty and before realizing her own sexuality as the time when “girls forget they have bodies” and likens puberty to the “red Rio Bravo you have to carry yourself over” (Cisneros, Caramelo 433). Yet, once she finds herself on the other side, there is no way back. A girl is heading towards the motherhood and she is metaphorically dispossessed of her own body which becomes a tool for reproduction, controlled by males. Denise Chávez tries to turn women’s attention to regaining control of their bodies: “One of the messages of Face of an Angel is that women need to serve themselves. They should not deny their own sexuality. It is important that they respect their own bodies and their own selves” (qtd. in Ikas 54). In other words, the passive role of a woman as a mother should be altered by a more active, self-confident one.
As Poniatowska explains, in the patriarchal Mexican American social organisation, there is a huge gap between a man’s and a woman’s potential and social status. The society sets strict guidelines on how women should behave, and the sex roles are “established since birth: machito, little man, mujercita, little doll. Man’s potential is enormous, woman’s potential doesn’t exist” (43). In the society based on patriarchal traditions presuming the inferior status of women, women were regarded primarily sexual objects and/or subjects to the maltreatment of men, which was broadly tolerated. In one of the particularly forceful scenes of Face of an Angel, Chávez depicts the grandfather pondering the future of his granddaughters: “He knew what awaited these little girls. He wished there was something he could do. But there was nothing” (Chávez, Face of an
Angel 32). Moreover, Chicana mothers unconsciously “nurtured in their daughters a feeling of worthlessness, of self-hatred for what it means to be a woman and a Chicana”
(Poniatowska 43). Following the female ideal which is impossible to reach, Chicanas
42 struggle to be accepted in their roles of mothers and housewives which, nevertheless, are not always fulfilling.
Within the Chicano family structure, too, women and their behaviour are under strict control. Madsen points to the importance of masculinity in the Chicano culture by the fact that “Chicanos invented the term ‘machismo’ – and femininity is defined in opposition to these dominant images of masculine gender identity” (217). Therefore, in the past, the female roles were defined sexually. In her book Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldúa complains that a Chicana used to have “only three directions she could turn: to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a mother” (17). Nevertheless, there has opened the fourth choice recently, and nowadays a Chicana can gain education and career and due to her own income, she can become independent on a man both socially and economically.
In fact, Mexican American women were predominantly oppressed not by white men, but primarily by Mexican American men. As Anzaldúa explains, Chicanas had to obey the cultural imperative that a woman should remain “faceless and voiceless” (23).
This is confirmed in Esperanza’s note that “the Mexicans don’t like their women strong”
(Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 10). In Face of an Angel, Soveida disdains patriarchy and attributed it to humiliation Mexican Americans experienced many times in the course of history: “Who is the macho man but our father, our brother, our husband, our cousin, our friend? They’ve lost their dignity. To feel powerful, they must oppress others” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 317). And their women accepted the rules. Soveida’s mother, although divorced, still serves her ex-husband and does his laundry, as “she was his wife in her eyes, in the family’s eyes, and in the eyes of God. No divorce could change that” (51). Women were confined in their homes to perpetual servitude to their husbands and families with little possibilities of self-fulfilment.
43
In Chicana narratives, La Familia plays a prominent role. There are often several generations living together or in close contact, and the grandparents, uncles, aunts and godparents provide the children with lots of stories, experience and tradition which inevitably influence a child’s perception of their identity. Family members usually share their lives and, in general, do many things together and are socially, emotionally and sometimes economically dependent on one another. This inseparability of one’s life from the extended family, especially strong in Mexican culture, and the role of the family as
“a double-edged knife” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 32) is one of the recurrent motifs in
Chicana fiction. On one hand, the family represents a loving environment, on the other hand, it is often a barrier which prevents a Chicana from freedom and independence.
Quintana gives an idea of how the roles in the family are distributed between a mother and a father: while a mother is perceived as the “homemaker”, responsible for day-to-day tasks around the household, a father serves as the “family mediator between our public and private worlds” (4). Men generally spend more time outside, while women are supposed to remain home taking care of the household and family. The ability to sustain the family is such important for some men, that they prevent their wives from working even if the family is struggling with financial difficulties: “What! A wife of mine work? Don’t offend me” (Cisneros, Caramelo 289). In her autobiographical book A
House of My Own, Cisneros admits that she became a writer “thanks to a mother who was unhappy being a mother” and compares her to “a prisoner-of-war mother banging on the bars of her cell all her life” (291). Because going to work was unthinkable for the mother of seven children, she “searched for escape routes from her prison and found them in museums, the park, and the public library” (Cisneros, A House of My Own 291). This insistence on the traditional gender roles of breadwinner and homemaker make it even
44 more difficult for women to work and be financially independent, for a working woman substantially degrades her husband’s authority.
There is a significant difference in male and female attitudes to a woman’s role in a family. While the father still sees the traditional family arrangement with a man as a breadwinner and a woman keeping house as the best option and advises Soveida to “get married, let him play the bills, you have kids, stay at home and raise them” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 39), he already realizes the necessity to have a backup plan and therefore he encourages her to “learn to type. It’s very important for a woman to know how to type. If anything goes wrong, you can always find a job as a secretary” (39). The mother, on the other hand, urges Soveida not to rely on a man to support her because “those days are gone. Always have your own money. Don’t depend on any man to ration it out to you. Be yourself, do what you have to do, do what you love, and share with him, each of you doing your part” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 40). The mother’s conviction results from her unsuccessful marriage and her experience as a single parent and mirrors the life experience of the author’s own mother. Denise Chávez explains: “My main character in
Face of an Angel, Soveida, is trying to work against patterns of generational behavior.
She wants to change the way things are done. I think we can educate and heal through writing, certainly” (qtd. in Ikas 58). Anzaldúa, too, suggests that Mexican American women have a choice: “to feel a victim where someone else is in control and therefore responsible and to blame (being a victim and transferring the blame on culture, mother, father, ex-lover, friend, absolves me of responsibility), or to feel strong, and, for the most part, in control” (21). In Face of an Angel, Soveida asks: “How long can we carry these burdens? At once I knew the answer. If we want, forever” (Chávez, Face of an Angel
127). This, too, implies the conviction that nowadays a woman herself is responsible for her life and thus has a choice.
45
3.4 The Empowered Voice of a Chicana
Chicana authors often pick out motifs of a limited number of possibilities and injustice of patriarchal hierarchy as themes of their writings. The protagonists struggle to break free from social, economic, and cultural oppression and fulfil their aspirations.
Elena Poniatowska tries to explain these aspects of Chicana literature by comparing
Chicana writers with their Mexican counterparts. According to her observations, there is a significant difference in class and social status. While Mexican women writers are often members of the middle class, Chicana authors come from the working class and therefore, for the Chicanas, writing is a “means to overcome their social situation. It is the confrontation of two classes” (Poniatowska 47). Most of the Mexicans who left to settle in the United States came from the middle class as it was essential to have at least some money to set out for the journey. In the United States, however, they belong to lower social classes, rarely getting better than poorly paid unskilled jobs. Chicana authors offer a view of the life of a multigenerational working-class community and through telling their stories and stories of other women from their community they encourage other
Chicanas to attempt to shift the direction of their lives and extricate themselves from incessant ethnic, racial, class, and gender oppression. In his foreword to Growing Up
Chicano/a anthology, Rudolfo Anaya points out: “As more and more Chicanas write they influence not only the content of the literature but also the culture itself. If literature is a liberating experience, then the voice of the Chicana writer in our culture is one of the most influential in helping to shape and change the cultural ways” (8). For Chicanas, writing thus represents a tool to reflect on the class, maybe even a model of how to move upward on a social ladder.
Chicana narratives often have a woman at its centre, and follow her life story from adolescence to maturity, which is one of the essential features of a Bildungsroman. In
46 addition to that, many protagonists attempt in their own writings to elaborate on the attitude to the traditional organization of Chicano/a society, represented in the first place by women, especially their mothers and grandmothers. Anzaldúa sums up these efforts by saying: “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” (59). Through their protagonists, the authors express their own desire to break free from the confining traditions and claim themselves equal and fully-fledged members of society. The writings of feminist Chicana authors “reconfigure Chicana silence and invisibility into recognition and empowerment” (Quintana 94). Young Chicanas, the daughters in particular, are the bearers of reconstructing the Chicana identity as they refused predetermined submission and proclaimed themselves emancipated women.
The form of an artist’s novel, a Kűnstlerroman, is a popular narrative of the daughter in Chicana literature. The daughter becomes an artist, often a writer, who extricates from the expectations of the society she is expected to fulfil, and often also reveals and continues in thwarted talents of her mother, which the mother was not able to elaborate on herself. One of the most important roles in both Bildungsroman and
Kűnstlerroman genres is played by a mentor who helps the protagonist understand the importance and significance of the tests and worries he or she undergoes and shows him or her the way. During their coming-of-age process, also young Chicanas search for their role models, especially among the women around. In Face of an Angel, such a role model for Soveida represents Oralia, her grandmother’s old maid, a personification of ancient wisdom, “whose legacy will enable Soveida to complete her journey” (Naranjo-Huebl
65). Soveida listens to Oralia’s stories and uses them as a personal database of oral history of Chicanas, which she later retells, and part of it also uses in the paper for her Chicano
47 studies. In The Last of the Menu Girls, Rocío occupies herself with choosing a role model thoroughly, considering several women and rejecting each of them one by one because
“something seemed to be lacking in each of them” (62) until “caught a glimpse of someone strong, full of great beauty, powerful, clear words and acts . . . Who was that woman? Myself” (63). Rocío realizes that it is her older sister whose life she inspected and observed as “the mirror image of my growing older. To see her, was to see my mother and my grandmother, and now myself” (Chávez, The Last of the Menu Girls 62-3). Both protagonists, Soveida as well as Rocío, come to realize that the “strong bonds between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters are what grants her strength” (Naranjo-Huebl 66) and that each of them forms an inseparable part of her family.
It is significant that the mothers, who are usually the “first and therefore most impressive image of adult womanhood” (Rose 221) are usually those to whom daughters oppose and whose roles they reject. Poniatowska reveals ambiguous relationships of
Chicana mothers and daughters which rises from the patriarchal heritage of the traditional
Mexican society:
The Chicanas are still bent over under the weight of their mother’s misfortune, or
the memory of their mother’s misfortune, their Mamacita who is also the Virgin
of Guadalupe, the Malinche who gave herself to Cortés, the Llorona who weeps
for her dead children . . . The Chicanas love and rebel against their devoted mother
who fears her husband and accepts his beatings. Never in any literature have there
been so many references to the Malinche. (Poniatowska 48)
The daughters in Chicana narratives do not want to share their mother’s fate, they do not want to stand in the “shoes of someone who has stood all her life in line waiting for better things to come” (Chávez, The Last of the Menu Girls 79). Similarly, in Cisneros’s The
House on Mango Street, Esperanza refuses the prescribed destiny when comparing herself
48 with her grandmother stating that “I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window” (Cisneros, The House on Mango Street 11). Both Rocío and
Esperanza perceive their mothers and grandmothers as representatives of traditional cultural values of Mexican American society, which they are not willing to share. Denise
Chávez says: “Think about the long line of mothers, and the mothers of the mothers. The daughters want the best for their daughters and granddaughters . . . they are women who struggle to find the best way, the best path, for their daughters or granddaughters and for their family” (qtd. in Ikas 54). Nevertheless, the mothers and grandmothers are, in the daughters’ and granddaughters’ eyes, the women who failed. They do not want to follow them and be passively caught in a “lasso, symbol of marriage” (Chávez, The Last of the
Menu Girls 90). Soveida’s mother, who experienced a failed marriage and despite being divorced is still doing laundry for her ex-husband, serves here as a deterrent example which should warn her daughter against playing “the same damn role that your mother played . . . bowing to all the men who come into your life and then scraping up their crusty filth and saying thank you, sir” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 53). Although Soveida’s mother was rebellious enough to get divorced and become independent, she failed in abandoning the traditionally expected female role of serving a man.
In the process of becoming a writer, the protagonists of both Chávez’s and
Cisneros’s narratives are encouraged by the women around them. In Face of an Angel,
Soveida is brought to the idea of writing by her grandmother Lupita who tells her that
“everyone has a story, your mamá has a story, your daddy has a story, even you have a story to tell. Tell it while you can, while you have the strength, because when you get to be my age, the telling gets harder” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 4). Soveida was also encouraged to retell stories by Oralia, her grandmother’s long-term maid who teaches
Soveida about the past and memories: “Promise me, Soveida, that you’ll listen to the
49 stories women tell you. They are the ones you should remember. Otherwise, how will you ever expect to understand the human heart?” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 137). As Androne notices, Oralia serves here as the “vital connection between the past, present, and future, a physical manifestation of ethnic cultural memory” (91). Through her and her stories,
Soveida understands the importance of her role of a writer and storyteller as the connection between both the silenced women of her community and the Chicano community as such, and the necessity of giving them the voice to be finally heard. Soveida explains: “I speak for them now. Mother. Father. Brother. Sister. Cousin. Uncle. Aunt.
Husband. Lover. Their memories are mine. That sweet telling mine. Mine the ash. It’s a long story” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 4). By retelling the stories of her family, Soveida comes to realize her own connection to her ancestors.
In The House on Mango Street, Esperanza also expresses her inclination to
Chicana tradition of storytelling: “I like to tell stories. I tell them inside my head . . . I make a story for my life, for each step my brown shoe takes” (Cisneros, The House on
Mango Street 109). Esperanza recounts reading her poem to her Aunt Lupe, once an active woman and a swimmer, who due to unfortunate spinal injury ended up confined to bed and therefore she fully realizes the meaning of freedom. Aunt Lupe tells Esperanza:
“You just remember to keep writing, Esperanza. You must keep writing. It will keep you free, and I said yes, but at that time I didn’t know what she meant” (61). Although
Esperanza initially does not understand what could writing mean to her, gradually she realizes that telling stories helps her to reconcile herself to her otherness.
In Caramelo, Lala likens herself to a “photographer walking along the beach with the tripod camera on my shoulder asking, —¿Un recuerdo? A souvenir? A memory?”
(Cisneros, Caramelo 4). Faithful to the Chicana tradition of storytelling, Lala tells the story of her family, collecting and keeping “souvenirs” and memories, which she then
50 retells. Writing “breaks the bonds of religious and cultural oppression, not only using the word to press forward in the process of self-identification but at the same time providing an unappreciated form of self-representation of the ‘other’” (Quintana 51).
In Face of an Angel, Soveida writes her “Book of Service” not only as a guidebook for the next waitresses but also out of her desire for “transcending through art the mundane and often static condition of her own and others’ lives” (Richter 278). Soveida puts in contrast the tough reality of her life with the narratives about the women around her and with a rather romantic family saga of her ancestors and their arrival to New
Mexico. In her essay for a Chicano history class she takes at the university, Soveida writes: “In the past, our men had power, and their women couldn’t speak. When they did, it was with the Malinche voice, called the voice of the betrayer . . . Who wrote the words that would betray all women? Men. And who allowed that betrayal? Women. Who perpetuated that betrayal? Mothers” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 317). Soveida blames the women, particularly the mothers for preserving the subordinate position of women in
Chicano society. She accuses the Chicana mothers of treating the sons better than the daughters and by her writing, she tries to explore and understand the reasons for such behaviour. Besides compiling essays for her university course and writing “The Book of
Service”, Soveida records the oral history of one of her mentors, her grandmother’s elderly maid Oralia, who despite living in the modern world, “still has a window on the ancestral one. She is a bridge between cultures, languages, and beliefs” (306). Soveida tries to record the narratives she is told, the stories of her family as well as the story of her own life to prevent sharing the fate of her female ancestors who stay unheard: “My grandmother’s voice was rarely heard, it was a whisper, a moan. Who heard? My mother’s voice cried out in rage and pain. Who heard? My voice is strong. It is breath. New Life.
Song. Who hears?” (Chávez, Face of an Angel, n.pag.)
51
Despite all Soveida’s efforts to be heard and transformed through her writing,
Richter is sceptical of her attempts, because the “romantic longing for the transcendence of time through art and the apprehension of something of permanent value is always elusive and, finally, impossible” (280). Nevertheless, through her attempts to write,
Soveida is able to organize her thoughts and opinions, to understand better the world she lives in and also to escape temporarily the harsh reality of her life. Oralia encourages
Soveida to record her memories by reminding that “unless you heal yourself of memories when you are alive, there is no telling what death will bring” and that if a woman has no one to talk to, “she has that hunchback full of worries that she’s carried alone through her sad life” (Chávez, Face of an Angel, 136). Through her writing, Soveida challenges the silence of the Chicanas’ lives and encourages her successors as well as other women to continue with the story. Soveida tells stories in order to understand people and their behaviour, and her writing helps her discover that all of them are just ordinary people with their virtues and vices: “Now that I am older I can allow myself to look at my family as people. People like myself with hunger and hope. People with failings” (3). In telling the stories, Soveida is transformed.
At the end of The Last of the Menu Girls, Rocío returns home as a writer who writes “about people. New Mexico. You know, everything” (190). It is Rocío’s mother who encourages her to write and who brings her attention to the importance of one’s family and of the community. Rocío’s mother appeals:
I say, Rocío, just write about this little street of ours, it’s only one block long, but
there’s so many stories. Too many stories! And then I thought to myself, but why
write about this street . . . Why not just write about 325? That’s our house! Write
about 325 and that will take the rest of your life . . . and don’t forget me! I could
52
have my own book . . . You don’t have to go anywhere. Not down the street. Not
even out of this house. There’s stories, plenty of them all around. (190)
As a grown-up woman, Rocío makes a symbolic return to her street and her house to recollect and retell the stories of her childhood and the story makes a circle: “Going back is going forward” (75). When Rocío returns home as a grown-up woman and a writer, she is finally able to find “her identity as a woman, as a Chicana and as a writer within the
Chicano community” (Eysturoy 128). The ending of Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls conveys a similar message as Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street. Both protagonists,
Rocío and Esperanza, refuse at first sharing the fate of their mothers, aunts, and grandmothers, they long to escape their houses and their barrios, but eventually, they realize that through their writings they can give a “voice” to long silenced Chicana women.
For Chicanas, there exist three main factors which influence their position in society. These are gender, ethnicity, and class. Besides these factors, however, Chicanas are struggling with biculturalism and living in-between the two cultural worlds. As
Cypess reminds, “La Raza and the gringo culture of North America are the two opposing forces that influence the Chicanas’ perspective” (142). Nevertheless, the youngest generation of Mexican Americans yearns to divest themselves of their otherness and hyphenated identity. They want to assimilate and “desire to find a place among the
Anglos” (Poniatowska 46). The generation gap between Chicano/a parents and children is enormous. Poniatowska attributes the significant difference between Chicano parents and children to the fact, that although living in the United States, Mexican parents
“continue thinking the same way they would in Mexico, and their patterns of conduct have not changed, while their children want to be considered Anglos” (49). In many
Chicana narratives, the protagonists’ relationship with their Mexican identity is often
53 metaphorically represented by the symbol of tortilla. The older generation repeatedly tries to pass their art of tortilla-making to the young, together with their way of life. Young
Chicanas, however, are not interested in learning how to make tortillas or tamales anymore when they can buy them ready-made. In Face of an Angel, Soveida refuses to learn how to prepare traditional Mexican food: “Who cares about making tamales? . . .
We’re Americans” (Chávez, Face of an Angel 139). By refusing their parent’s traditional way of life, young Chicanas clearly express aiming to become fully-fledged members of
American society where they can finally get rid of their otherness. As Karafilis suggests, the generation of young Chicanas represent “two different cultures coming together in an egalitarian way to form a third – no hyphenation, no subordination is involved” (71).
There is no doubt that the Chicana feminist narratives of the 1980s and 1990s contributed substantially to the fact that the Chicanas “discovered their sexuality, accepted it, they pushed aside their mothers who had slowed down the pace . . . they won over class and racial prejudices, social and economic segregation and even won over their own poor feelings of self-esteem” (Poniatowska 44). To conclude with the words of Tiffany Ana
López, speaking on behalf of Chicana readers: “For many of us, literature was our salvation. It taught us about ourselves and told us what others would not. It was the permission we needed to realize our dreams” (20).
54
4 Conclusion
Chicana literature has grown out of the Mexican tradition of storytelling but it is equally related to Anglo-American culture. Although the first Chicana writers emerged as late as in the 1970s, their narratives gained much attention and popularity not only within the Mexican American community but also internationally. Chicana literature clearly articulates concerns for women: their everyday experience, their various social roles, their position in the community as well as in the wider society. It draws attention to the inferior position of women within the patriarchal structures and encourages them to gain full control of their lives. Narratives of female growth and empowerment draw on ancient Aztec and Mexican myths and fairy tales and have been handed down from generation to generation by the oral tradition of storytelling. In their coming-of-age stories, Chicana authors continue in this tradition. Denise Chávez and Sandra Cisneros represent those Chicana feminist writers of the late 20th century who focus on the ways in which creativity, especially writing, can contribute to the process of self-development and empowerment of young Chicanas. Coming of age and quest for identity are indeed prominent topics of Chicana literature. The purpose of this thesis was to identify the themes which are crucial in female self-development as depicted in Chicana narratives.
Denise Chávez’s books The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Face of an Angel (1994), and The House on Mango Street (1984) and Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros were analysed in order to show how ethnicity, class, and gender, which were identified as the major aspects shaping young Chicanas’ self-development, intersect in Chicana
Bildungsroman, particularly in Chicana Kűnstlerroman, the artist’s novel.
The protagonists of the examined narratives have to cope with their ethnic, socio- economic, and gender otherness, which significantly influences their everyday lives in the United States. During their growing up, they become aware of their ethnically marked
55 otherness which distinguishes them from the majority society. They experience confusion resulting from their bilingual and bicultural Mexican American environment. Realising, exploring, and finally accepting their Mexican heritage is one of the most important tasks the protagonists face. Another challenge for growing-up Chicanas is their socio-economic status. They often come from very poor barrios where they live in the community of working-class Mexican Americans. The protagonists admire the American lifestyle and yearn to live the American Dream, symbolised in this case by the ownership of a decent house. They reject their crowded, shabby housings and dream about owning a house of their own. This image represents not only material possession, but it also symbolises personal freedom and independence. Growing up in traditionally patriarchal families, in which the roles of women have been often restricted to taking care of the household and the children, and women’s social lives have been limited to the frames of their windows and church pews, young Chicanas have to negotiate their position in society.
Both Chávez and Cisneros employ in their narratives the character of a coming- of-age writer, whose path to become a writer originates in her distressing position of living in the borderlands, between two cultural worlds, and her feelings of alienation and unbelonging to any of the cultures. These characters speak not only for themselves but also for the disempowered community of Chicanas. In The House on Mango Street, the character of Esperanza not only tells her own story, but she also gives voice to the Chicana women in her neighbourhood, who are confined in houses on Mango Street and cannot speak for themselves. Similarly, in The Last of the Menu Girls, Rocío focuses in her writings on the lives of the marginalized community of ordinary people around her. Her writing empowers her to become an emancipated woman and speak not only for herself but also for her culture. Lala in Caramelo retells the story of her Mexican grandmother and thus interconnects her own life in the United States with her Mexican origin. By
56 depicting her frequent travels to Mexico and back to the United States, Lala illustrates the double identity and feelings of not belonging which Chicanos/as experience. In Face of an Angel, besides retelling her family history, Soveida writes several literary works such as the “Book of Service” and essays for her university course on Chicano history. Her writing makes her reflect on her Mexican American identity, accept her Mexican heritage and, in the end, better understand the women around her. All of the protagonists,
Esperanza, Rocío, Lala, and Soveida are exceptional observers and witnesses of ordinary lives of their families and close neighbourhood. Encouraged by an adult who plays the role of their mentor, they then retell their stories and the stories of their community in order to share their painful and confusing experience of social and ethnical otherness, strengthened by their inferior gender status. At the same time, their writing helps them analyse and therefore better understand themselves, gain control over their lives, find their place in society and reconcile with their Mexican heritage.
Although the Chicana coming-of-age stories were thriving in the late 20th century, the new generation of Chicana writers follows up with the narratives of female self- development. For instance, Erika L. Sánchez (born 1984), a poet and writer, daughter of
Mexican immigrants, published the coming-of-age novel I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican
Daughter in 2017. Julia, a fifteen-year-old protagonist who lives in a barrio in Chicago and longs to become a writer, shares a similar experience with the protagonists of
Chávez’s and Cisneros’s novels. Similarly to Esperanza, Rocío, Lala, and Soveida, Julia has to face the triple marginalization due to her ethnicity, class, and gender and strives for empowerment through the creative process of writing. This contemporary example demonstrates that the themes of female self-development and empowerment, the quest for identity, reconciliation with their Mexican heritage, and negotiating the position in society are still popular issues for Chicana writers.
57
Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth, et al., editors. The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development. UP of
New England, 1983.
Alumbaugh, Heather. “Narrative Coyotes: Migration and Narrative Voice in Sandra
Cisneros's Caramelo.” MELUS, vol. 35, no. 1, 2010, pp. 53–75. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/40587210.
Anaya, Rudolfo. Foreword. Growing Up Chicano/a, edited by Tiffany A. López, Avon
Books, 1993, pp. 5-10.
Androne, Helane. Ritual Structures in Chicana Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
Betz, Regina M. “Chicana ‘Belonging’ in Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango
Street.” Rocky Mountain Review, vol. 66, 2012, pp. 18–33. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/rockmounrevi.66.18.
Birmingham-Pokorny, Elba D. “La Malinche: A Feminist Perspective on Otherness in
Mexican and Chicano Literature.” Confluencia, vol. 11, no. 2, 1996, pp. 120–
136. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27922368.
Brinkley, Alan. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People. 4th
ed., vol. 1, McGraw-Hill, 2004, 2 vols.
Calafell, Bernadette M. “In Our Own Image?!: A Rhetorical Criticism of ‘Latina’
Magazine.” Voces: A Journal of Chicana/Latina Studies, vol. 3, no. 1/2, 2001,
pp. 12–46. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23013255.
Candelaria, Cordelia. “La Malinche, Feminist Prototype.” Frontiers: A Journal of
Women Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1980, pp. 1–6. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/3346027.
Chávez, Denise. Face of an Angel. Warner Books, 1995.
58
---. The Last of the Menu Girls. Arte Público Press, 1986.
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo. Vintage Books, 2003.
---. A House of My Own: Stories from My Life. Vintage Books, 2016.
---. The House on Mango Street. Vintage Books, 2009.
---. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Vintage Books 1991
Cypess, Sandra M. La Malinche in Mexican Literature: From History to Myth. U of
Texas P, 2000.
Eysturoy, Annie O. Daughters of Self-Creation: The Contemporary Chicana Novel.
U of New Mexico P, 1996.
Fought, Carmen. Chicano English in Context. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Franco, Dean J. Ethnic American Literature: Comparing Chicano, Jewish, and African
American Writing. U of Virginia P, 2006.
Ikas, Karin R. Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers. U of Nevada P,
2002, pp. 47-65.
Karafilis, Maria. “Crossing the Borders of Genre: Revisions of the ‘Bildungsroman’ in
Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Jamaica Kincaid's Annie
John.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 31, no.
2, 1998, pp. 63–78. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1315091.
Kaup, Monika. “The Architecture of Ethnicity in Chicano Literature.” American
Literature, vol. 69, no. 2, 1997, pp. 361–397. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/2928275.
López, Tiffany Ana, editor. Growing Up Chicano/a. Avon Books, 1993.
Madsen, Deborah L. Feminist Theory and Literary Practice. Pluto Press, 2000.
59
McWilliams, Perry. “The Alamo Story: From Fact to Fable.” Journal of the Folklore
Institute, vol. 15, no. 3, 1978, pp. 221–233. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/3813977.
Millard, Kenneth. Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh
UP, 2007.
Naranjo-Huebl, Linda. “Faith, Hope and Service in Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel.”
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, vol. 61, no. 1, 2007, pp.
51–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20058143.
Poniatowska, Elena. “Mexicanas and Chicanas.” MELUS, vol. 21, no. 3, 1996, pp. 35–
51. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/467974.
Quintana, Alvina E. Home Girls: Chicana Literary Voices. Temple UP, 1996.
Richter, Francine K. Ramsey. “Romantic Women and La Lucha: Denise Chavez’s Face
of an Angel.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 4, 1999, pp. 277–289. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/23532833.
Rose, Ellen C. "Through the Looking Glass: When Women Tell Fairy Tales." The
Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, UP of
New England, 1983, pp. 209-227.
Savin, Ada. “A Bridge Over the Americas: Mexican American Literature.” Bilingual
Review / La Revista Bilingüe, vol. 20, no. 2, 1995, pp. 122–127. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/25745269.
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Revised ed.,
Back Bay Books, 2008.
White, Barbara A. Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction.
Greenwood Press, 1985.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own. Penguin Books, 2000.
60
Abstract in English
The aim of this thesis is to examine the role of gender, ethnicity, and class as the crucial social and cultural forces which influence female self-development in Chicana literature of the late 20th century. For the analysis were chosen two books by two prominent Chicana authors: The Last of the Menu Girls (1986) and Face of an Angel
(1994) by Denise Chávez, and The House on Mango Street (1984) and Caramelo (2002) by Sandra Cisneros.
The objective of the first part of the thesis is to provide a brief introduction to the historical background of Chicano/a culture. It focuses on the most important events in
Mexican American history and their social and cultural impact on Chicanos. The second part of the thesis outlines the development of genres of Bildungsroman and its sub-genre
Kűnstlerroman and explains the considerable significance they have in Chicana literature.
The third part of the thesis is divided into four subchapters. The first three provide a detailed analysis of ethnicity, class, and gender as the crucial aspects which cause marginalization of Chicanas and therefore strongly influence their self-development.
Each of these factors is set into context and its importance is thoroughly explained and supported by citations from the wide range of primary and secondary sources. The fourth subchapter focuses on the ways in which the creative process of writing plays out in protagonists’ quest for identity, and how it can be helpful in their reconciliation with their ethnic, class, and gender otherness. It also indicates the shift in the protagonists’ self- perception, acceptance their ancient heritage, and points out the importance of their writings for the Chicana community in general.
61
Abstract in Czech
Práce se zabývá klíčovými sociálními a kulturními aspekty, které ovlivňují osobnostní rozvoj ženské hrdinky v chicanské literatuře konce 20. století. Zásadní roli v psychickém dozrávání protagonistek hrají genderové, etnické a socioekonomické faktory. Pro podrobnou analýzu těchto faktorů opakovaně se vyskytujících v mexicko- americké literatuře byla zvolena díla dvou významných chicanských spisovatelek: The
Last of the Menu Girls (1986) a Face of an Angel (1994) autorky Denise Chávez, a The
House on Mango Street (1984) a Caramelo (2002) Sandry Cisneros.
První část práce si klade za cíl poskytnout stručný přehled hlavních událostí mexicko-americké historie, jejichž důsledky byla chicanská kultura ve velké míře ovlivněna. Ve druhé části práce je nastíněn vývoj literárních žánrů Bildungsroman a
Kűnstlerroman a jejich významná role v chicanské literatuře. Třetí část práce je rozdělena do čtyř kapitol, z nichž v prvních třech kapitolách je detailně prozkoumán a analyzován vliv etnické, socioekonomické a genderové příslušnosti jako zásadních faktorů, které mají za následek marginalizaci mexicko-amerických mladých žen, a tedy výrazně ovlivňují jejich osobnostní rozvoj. Každý z těchto faktorů je zasazen do kulturně-historického kontextu a jeho význam je podrobně vysvětlen za použití řady primárních a sekundárních zdrojů. Čtvrtá kapitola se pak zaměřuje na to, jaký význam má pro hrdinky zkoumaných románů kreativní proces literární tvorby v hledání vlastní identity a jak vlastní psaní může napomoci ve vyrovnání se s etnickými, socioekonomickými a genderovými odlišnostmi.
Tato kapitola také naznačuje u hlavních ženských postav myšlenkový posun ve vnímání sebe sama a přijetí jejich starobylé kulturní tradice čerpající z mexického a aztéckého odkazu. V závěru práce je zdůrazněn význam jejich literární tvorby nejen pro hrdinky samotné, ale také pro celou chicanskou komunitu.
62