Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2010 In the Margins: Thresholds of Text and Identity in U.S.-Mexico Border Literature Allison E. Fagan Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Literature in English, North America Commons Recommended Citation Fagan, Allison E., "In the Margins: Thresholds of Text and Identity in U.S.-Mexico Border Literature" (2010). Dissertations. 169. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/169 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2010 Allison E Fagan LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO IN THE MARGINS: THRESHOLDS OF TEXT AND IDENTITY IN U.S.-MEXICO BORDER LITERATURE A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY ALLISON E. FAGAN CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2010 Copyright by Allison E. Fagan, 2010 All rights reserved ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all of the people who were involved in helping me through the process of writing this dissertation, truly a social text. My committee has been invaluable to me: in a course taught over the summer of 2006, Dr. Paul Jay encouraged me to explore a field of literature that was almost entirely brand new to me – border literature – and I have been lost in that world ever since. Similarly, I caught Dr. Steve Jones’s enthusiasm for textual studies, and he provided a wealth of opportunities for me to develop my own textual materialist approach to the literature. And finally, Dr. Suzanne Bost has been a source of inspiration, both in her depth of knowledge of Chicana/o literary history and in her persistent asking of the really tough questions. I will take the friendships I have developed with each of these professors, as well as the confidence they instilled in me, wherever I go. I would also like to thank all of the professors in the Department of English whom I’ve gotten to know, as well as Loyola University Chicago as a whole for providing me with the opportunity to learn and grow with them. Assistantships, the Toomey-Surtz scholarship, travel stipends, and Fourth Year Fellowship funding made it possible for me to live and work in the city I’ve always loved. But in particular, Catherine Fitzgerald, Dr. Harveen Mann, and Dr. Badia Ahad taught me to take pride in my teaching; Marcela Gallegos, Dr. Jessica Horowitz, Dr. Patricia Mooney-Melvin and Dean Samuel Attoh iii taught me to see beyond my discipline; Graduate Program Director Dr. Pamela Caughie taught me to value persistence. Thank you to my department family: Natalie Kalich, Erin Holliday-Karre, Faith Bennett, Lacey Conley, and Julia Daniel provided endless hours of laughter, commiseration, a few tears, and that weapon of all weapons, friendship. Lisa and Mike Herbeck offered their longstanding kindness, and Kate Goddard and Ryo Yamaguchi supplied such lovely meals. My immediate family – my parents, sisters, brothers, nieces, and nephews – reminded me of life outside of the dissertation, and Marty always kept me company. And finally, to my very best friend, Brian Klima, thank you is never enough. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii LIST OF FIGURES vi CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 1 Section One: Chicana/o Borderlands and the Geography of Identity 5 Section Two: The Borders of Border Texts: Textual Scholarship in/of the Margins 14 CHAPTER TWO: “A TOUCH-UP HERE AND THERE: EMBRACING BORDER TEXTUALITY IN REVISIONS OF ROLANDO HINOJOSA AND ANA CASTILLO 30 Section One: Rolando Hinojosa and The Valley 38 Section Two: Ana Castillo and Sapogonia 60 Part One: “The Most Neglected One”: Tracing the Production, Publication, And Reception of Sapogonia 60 Part Two: “Someone Who Dominates”: The Effects of Revision on Interpretation 67 CHAPTER THREE: TRANSLATING IN THE MARGINS: THE SHAPING FORCES OF THE GLOSSARY AND TYPOGRAPHY 83 Section One: “The Gloss Indeed Destroys the Text” 98 Section Two: Normalizing Spanish 128 CHAPTER FOUR: “MY BOOK HAS SEEN THE LIGHT OF DAY”: RECOVERY PROJECTS AND THEIR PARATEXTS 146 Section One: Recovering Ruiz de Burton 153 Section: Two Recovery and Translation 173 Part One: Aristeo Brito 176 Part Two: Margarita Cota-Cárdenas 185 CHAPTER FIVE: WRITING IN THE MARGINS: THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET 205 Section One: Cisneros and the Borderlands 209 Section Two: Margins as Borderlands 215 Section Three: The Margins of Mango Street 228 CHAPTER SIX: CONCLUSION 257 BIBLIOGRAPHY 272 VITA 288 v List of Figures Figure Page 1. Image of annotations in “Michigan” copy of The House on Mango Street 23 vi CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In 1981, Chicana writers Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga published This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology of essays now considered one of the foundational texts of U.S. third world feminism. They describe their intentions for the book as follows: “We want to express to all women – especially to white middle-class women – the experiences which divide us as feminists” (xxiii). The often ambivalent way in which the writers included in this anthology discuss serving as a bridge between the theories of white feminists and the experiences of women of color reflects a reluctant embrace of the border spaces that characterize their lives. But furthermore, the narrative of their ambivalence is made material in the story of their anthology’s struggle to stay in print. A close look at the opening of the text, particularly the 1983 edition, reveals evidence of the conflict and tensions surrounding the material text. One of the first pages of the second edition reads, in fine print halfway down the page: When Persephone Press, Inc, a white women’s press of Watertown, Massachusetts and the original publishers of Bridge, ceased operation in the Spring of 1983, this book had already gone out of print. After many months of negotiations, the co-editors were finally able to retrieve control of their book, whereupon Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press of New York agreed to republish it. The following, then, is the second edition of 1 2 This Bridge Called My Back, conceived of and produced entirely by women of color. Before readers have even read the introduction, they are presented with hints of struggle; Kayann Short explains, “There is a story here, and like all tales of struggle, it speaks of power, pain, and loss. Yet there is also pride in the words ‘conceived of and produced entirely by women of color,’ and a final sense of restitution, celebration, and homecoming” (3). The story of Anzaldúa and Moraga’s efforts to stay in print is told from the very textual margins of a collection that details the struggles for survival of women of color, reminding readers that the book they hold in front of them is part of that struggle.1 In many works of border literature, the margins or borders of the material text serve to underscore the narratives of struggle – for autonomy, civil rights, history, identity – their writers set out to tell. Textual margins, also defined as “paratexts” and “bibliographic codes,” include those material elements that make up the border between the text and the world – cover pages, prefaces, glossaries, introductions, bibliographies, typography, and even the white space of the margins – and shape our understanding of those texts. The appearance of the brief publishing history supplied at the opening of This Bridge Called My Back appears in the textual margins – along with multiple forewords, prefaces, and other epigraphic materials – and conditions our understanding of 1 And that struggle continues for Anzaldúa and Moraga’s anthology: in 2002, once again after years of being out of print, Norma Alarcón’s Third Woman Press brought out a third edition. This most recent edition appends new forewords by the editors and an updated bibliography as well as introduces visual artwork into the mix, but it also went out of print in 2008. In addition to a 1988 Spanish translation, Esta Puente, mi espalda: Voces de mujeres tercermundistas en los Estados Unidos (edited by Cherríe Moraga and Ana Castillo), a companion volume entitled This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation and edited by Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating was also published in 2002. The versions and related texts proliferate across decades as the “original” continues to fight to stay in print. 3 and expectations for the text it precedes. Sometimes the writers themselves speak from the textual margins, as when Moraga and Anzaldúa describe “retriev[ing] control of their book,” though in each of its versions and editions, they can never entirely control how or where it is marketed, sold, read, or reviewed. Just as often the borders between the text and the world are a site in which publishers and readers manipulate the meanings of narratives, selecting attractive cover pages or literally filling the margins with their own words. The literal borders of the text function as a space where the interests and desires of authors, publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers contest for control over its meaning, and in works of border literature, they serve as a site from which to explore the instability common to identity and the social lives of texts. By “social lives” I mean to invoke the work of social text theorists like D.F. McKenzie and Jerome McGann to describe the circulations throughout and interactions with the world of texts in various forms, constructed by the competing discourses, intentions, and expectations of authors, publishers, editors, critics, and readers.