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Chicana poetics: Performing desire, recasting archetypes

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Chicana poetics: Performing desire, recasting archetypes

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Content CHIC ANA POETICS:
PERFORMING DESIRE, RECASTING ARCHETYPES
By
Robbin Ann Ladd
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
December 1999
©Robbin Ann Ladd
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UMI Number: 3110953
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90007
This dissertation, written by
............................
under the direction o f hUrX.... Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of re
quirements for the degree of
D OCTORO F PHILOSOPHY
late Studies
Date November 11, 1999
DISSERTATION CQMMITTEI
.....
Chairperson
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Robbin Ladd Teresa McKenna
ABSTRACT
CHIC ANA POETICS: PERFORMING DESIRE, RECASTING ARCHETYPES
This dissertation argues that contemporary Chicana poetics in poetry,
performance, and art is changing the cultural discourse and constructs
understandings and representations of Mexican-American women. Such change has
been accomplished by recasting the juridical discourse created by the Mexican icons
of femininity, la Malinche, la Llorona, and La Virgen de Guadalupe. The study uses
the work of George Lakoff an Mark Turner on metaphor as well as Roland Barthes’ ,
Roman Jakobson’s, and Umberto Eco’s analysis of language and myth, using
semiotics, to uncover how the metaphoric content of this poetics is inscribed and
functions in archconic recastings. The claim is made for a Chicana poetics that builds
its tropes from cognitive, rather than cultural, understandings of the female body in
traditional culture in poetic performances that demonstrate Alex Preminger’s notion
of a poetics that are
Thickened into a palpable density, opacity, or texture.. .The reader is aware
of not only a words’ meaning but also of words’ bodies...(Preminger 933).
It further asserts that when such a poetics assumes a radical performative, one whose
discourse uses the conventions or citations of authority to change both what it names
and the discourse it engenders, there is real possibility for change.
The complex quality of the original and historically layered discourses
generated by these three icons is considered in short explorations of the
multicultural, multipolitical, multireligious, and multihistorical context in which each
1
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of them has operated. The ways in which rewriting/restructuring has changed the
metaphoric content o these discourses is explored in the poetry of Alma Villanueva,
Luci Corpi, Carmen Tafolla, Angela de Hoyos, Alicia Gasper de Alba, the art of
Yolanda Lopesz, Ester Hernandez and Yreina, and performance pieces by Raquel
Salinas and Taller de Arte Fronterizo. The project also suggests the kind of work
such transformations have generated particularly among Chincana lesbians such as
writer/performance artist Monica Palacios, theorists/poets Gloria Anzalduua and
Cherrie Moraga and poet Teresa Mendoza.
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To Sharon
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Dr. Cara Garcia for her help in convincing me that I could do
it word by word and for her continuing friendship. I also want to thank my
Father for believing that I would eventually get this "paper" finished. My
biggest fans, Elizabeth Cassin and my Aunt Virginia, have always been with
me and their support in this instance was no exception.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of figures............................................................................................vi
CHAPTER ONE: WHOSE DESIRE?: (DE)CONSTRUCTING
FEMALE REPRESENTATIONS THROUGH ICONIC DISCOURSE 1
Contexts of Archconic Metaphors..................................................................................................................... 5
Identities and The Recasting of Mythic Material............................................................................................ 8
“Cruising” A New Discourse........................................................................................................................... 16
Poetics of Transformation.................................................................................................................................31
Chapter Two: ARCHCONS: THE BACKSTORIES........................... 43
La Malinche.......................................................................................................................................................44
La Llorona......................................................................................................................................................... 59
La Virgen de Guadalupe...................................................................................................................................63
Chapter Three: BIRTHINGTHE PHYSICAL SELF AND THE
TEXTUAL BODY....................................................................................... 72
The Value of the Embodied Text.................................................................................................................... 76
Getting Permission to Bleed in Public............................................................................................................ 85
Portraits of the Guadalupe as..........................................................................................................................104
Chapter Four: AS BAD AS IT GETS; UNCOVERING THE EROTIC
BODY.........................................................................................................120
Power of Mythic Metalanguage.....................................................................................................................123
Restructuring the Mythic Fantasy................................................................................................................. 131
Guadalupe as Everywoman’s Body............................................................................................................... 140
La Malinche: The Text in the Mouth.............................................................................................................147
La Llorona: Corriendo con el Viento.............................................................................................................160
Chapter Five: OWNING THE DILDO, OWNING A DISCOURSE OF
POWER........................ 171
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V
The Phallus on Parade: An Early Performance............................................................................................172
Chicana Lesbian Revolution: The Banner of a New Guadalupe................................................................176
"The Object Speaks:" Moraga and Anzaldua as Theorists..........................................................................178
Mothers and Mixed Messages........................................................................................................................180
The Conundrum of Subject/Object Polarity................................................................................................. 184
The Grain of the Voice: Moraga's Querida Compafiera............................................................................. 187
Performing the Layered Erotic: Ester Hernandez’ Serigraphs................................................................... 189
Rewriting the Salacious History of Food: Palacios and Mendoza..............................................................194
WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED.................................................... 210
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TABLE OF FIGURES
Figure 1. Two panels in the series of pictograms seen in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala Manuscript show la
Malinche or Doha Marina in her role as Cartes’ translator. The small “flutes” indicate translated
speech............................................................................................................................................................52
Figure 2. Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe--Yolanda L6pez.................................................. 106
Figure 3. Victory F Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe--Yolanda Lopez.......................................................... 107
Figure 4. Margaret F. Steward: Our Lady of Guadalupe-- Yolanda Lopez....................................................107
Figure 5. Adam, the snake and Eve from Commentary On the Apocalypse of Beatus and Lidbana I ll
Figure 6. Sarcophagus of Dona Sancha..............................................................................................................112
Figure 7. Antependium with Christ in Majesty................................................................................................ 112
Figure 8. The Holy Trinity.................................................................................................................................. 114
Figure 9. Altar Screen from the Chapel of Our Lady of Talpa......................................................................114
Figure 10. La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos-a 1975 etching by Ester
Hernandez..................................................................................................................................................119
Figure 11. In these retablos healing or realization of prayer is fantasized with the saints in their places as
critical players. Top: Retablo of Bemabe H. and Catarina V., bottom: Retablo of Angela Chavez
(Durand and Massey 155 and 183.)........................................................................................................ 129
Figure 12. Surrounded by votive candles, Raquel Salinas as La Virgen addresses the male supplicants in the
first vignette of Heat Your Own (a newsprint reproduction)................................................................137
Figure 13. The Reading Room from “La Vecindad /Border Boda” Exhibition San Diego 1990................ 143
Figure 14. Homenaje a Frida Kahlo by YreinaD. Cervantez, 1978............................................................ 145
Figure 15. La Ofrenda, a serigraph by Ester Hernandez is on the front cover of the 1991 edition of Chicana
Lesbians: The Girls our Mothers Warned us About (Third Woman Press, 1991)..............................191
Figure 16. This pastel drawing by Ester Henandez appears on the back cover of the 1993 edition of The
Sexuality o f Latinos ( Third Woman Press, 1993)................................................................................ 193
Figure 17. Monica Palacios, as centerfold in the Summer 1993 issue of Viva Arts Quarterly.....................196
Figure 18. Monica Palacios, aka Caliente, aka la Llorona Loca, in a publicity photo...................................207
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1
CHAPTER ONE: WHOSE DESIRE?: (DE)CONSTRUCTING FEMALE
REPRESENTATIONS THROUGH ICONIC DISCOURSE
"The mouth is like the cunt. "
Cherrie Moraga (142)
Performance artist Raquel Salinas has attitude--on stage and off. Her
on-stage style has been described in reviews as the “same plain agitprop style
that was once brought to farmworkers on the back of a truck by Teatro
Campesino” {LA Weekly). On the stage of the Los Angeles Theatre, or during
the weekend-long presentation, Fierce Tongues, Women o f Fire at Highways
Performance Space, Salinas never loses the attitude suggested by the title of
her piece, Heat Your Own. The performance opens with Salinas robed as La
Virgen de Guadalupe standing on a box surrounded by traditional votive
candles. The audience soon becomes aware of men crawling out from under
the curtain and across the stage begging La Guadalupe for obedient wives.
Her response is to drop the robe, one of the central metaphors that structures
her iconic identity, and ask the men for something in return. Such agitprop
performance uses a central and powerful cultural representation of a perfect,
asexual woman to recast and claim a sexual woman (now standing in her
slip) who “talks back.” Salinas’ work is illustrative of Chicana poetics in
contemporary poetry, performance and the arts that is clearly changing the
cultural discourse that constructs understandings and representations of
Mexican-American women.1 Such change is accomplished by changing the
juridical discourse created by these long-standing Mexican icons of
femininity, la Malinche, la Llorona, and La Virgen de Guadalupe. This
bn this study, the general population of Americans who identify themselves as ethnically Mexican will be referred to as
Mexican-Americans. Chicana/o will be used for those who identify themselves with that political term.
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2
claim has it origins in conclusions proposed by speech act theory which
Judith Butler uses to remind us, first, that “...discursive practice ... enacts or
produces that which it names” and, second, that discourse gathers its power
and authority from “the citations that it compels” (Butler 13). The citations in
this case are powerful and persuasive female icons who contain within
themselves additional and multiple citations that have given them the power
to both produce the “idea” of women, and also to enforce that idea through a
juridical discourse grounded in iconic law. When a poetics assumes a radical
performativity, one whose discourse uses the conventions or citations of
authority to change both what it names and the discourse that it engenders,
there is real possibility for change. Butler draws from Derrida’s essay
“Signature, Event, Context” to demonstrate the necessity for what Derrida
calls “coded utterance,” or an “iterable model” of citation in order for a
“performative utterance” to have power. Whether “coded utterance,”
“model,” or “citation” in linguistics or rendered in art/performance, these
exist in that most primary combination that makes communication possible—
metaphor. Metaphor (coded utterance) makes discourse understood and gives
it power.
Beginning to engage with these issues and their implications requires
briefly contextualizing these icons (which will be done in depth in Chapter
Two). By introducing theoretical ideas from both Anglo and Chicana
perspectives, this project will explore methods for looking at ways in which
rewriting/restructuring the metaphoric content of these figures has changed
and will continue to change the internal and external expectations for and by
Mexican-American women. And, finally, this project will suggest the kind of
poetics such transformations have generated.
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3
These icons form a multi-vocal discourse that speaks out of cultural
tradition and faith. The discourse breathes through los cantares, los cuentos,
y las anecdotas which are sung, spoken, and written to fulfill the spiritual and
political desires of the Spanish, Mexican nationalist, Catholic, revolutionary,
reformist, mestizo, criollo, Mexican-American, Chicano, and North
American elements of what have become the Mejicano people. The
traditional representations of la Malinche, la Llorona, and la Virgen in
historical, folk, and religious oral and written texts display differences that
reflect this verisimilitude with discourses that are rich with complex, layered,
visual and linguistic metaphors. What these discourses have in common is a
construction of femininity in which women have no sexual agency and,
consequently, no power to make choices in social or cultural law. By cultural
law I refer to those practices considered by the cultural/social majority as
being mandated through custom (“we’ve always done things this way”) as
well as interruption of the iconic laws contained within that cultural law that
both “says and shows what it means” (Holman and Harmon 247). The
enforcers of such commonly understood cultural practices, faith and tradition,
administer and provide surveillance for what I will call cultural archconic
law. This study will refer to la Virgen, la Malinche, and la Llorona as
archcons because they embody the concepts both of archetype and icon.
Jung's notion of archetype as part of unconscious racial memory as well as
the literary use of the term to refer to an archetype as a recurring image are
characteristic of these figures, as is the notion of icon as religious symbol.
This archconic law can then be seen to construct and govern the discourse
that produces female gender roles— a cultural/religious panopticon for
women, with the effect, as Michel Foucault says in his discussion of power in
Discipline and Punish, of “inducing in the inmate (or selected group) a state
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of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning
of power” (Foucault 201). To see women as cultural inmates does not seem a
radical overstatement particularly given the ways that family and larger social
structures view girls and women as “special” and “worth watching” (in both a
protective and pejorative sense). The three archcons under consideration
operate within a doubly constructed discourse of power-one constructed by
culture and religion, the other by women themselves as they engage with and
perpetuate the discourse. 2
That la Virgen is a case in which tradition and faith have sunk deep
roots is strongly suggested by Jeanette Rodriguez’s book Our Lady o f
Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women, a
study of second-generation Mexican-American women between the ages of
23-30 (Rodriguez 128). She discovered that
Many of the women expressed a connection between Our Lady
of Guadalupe and their cultural roots, making reference either
to their Mexican tradition or to the importance of their own
history and customs, as imaged in the story or the iconography
of Our Lady of Guadalupe: the color of her skin. (133)
One of her respondents, Ruth, says, “She is a symbol, just she’s Mexican; it’s
my culture. I love her and she is part of my culture.”(134) Ruth’s statement
echos the strong motif found in the poetics that recast all three of these
archcons. This is the powerful desire to use the recasting to make change in
the cultural discourse for women while at the same time respecting and
connecting strongly to the cultural roots these archcons represent.
2 Recently the Guadalupe figure has been colonized and capitalized in popular Mexican-American and Anglo cultures in
Los Angeles and the southwest where she appears on everything from kitchen spoons to Coke caps.
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Contexts of Archconic Metaphors
While terms such as “tradition” and “faith” are unlikely terms for literary
scholarly debate, they are obviously critical in this analysis, which will
demonstrate their considerable strength and staying power. A good part of
that strength comes from the rich national, racial, and individual
historical/religious contexts which provide the medium for the growth of
traditions and faith which sustain these archcons. There is archival material
available to contextualize these archcons within historical settings, but texts,
written and/or pictorial, created contemporaneously with the events do not
exist. Rather, in the cases of all three archcons, the data has had “a life” in
religious and folk memory, or the material is hearsay or reconstructed from
memories. As two of the most powerful agencies of cultural memory and
understanding, tradition and faith provide both the frame with which these
archcons are constructed and the vehicle that contains and disseminates the
law that they embody. Our Lady o f Guadalupe in particular exemplifies the
strength that comes from the interwoven relationships of these agencies that
reinforce and strengthen popular representations. In her study, Jeanette
Rodriguez points out that “Our Lady of Guadalupe expresses a Mexican-
American woman's values of being female, a mother, brown-skinned, and a
mestiza” (48). As a result, she “is part of Mexican-American women’s
cultural milieu as well as part of their faith experience” (60).
La Virgen de Guadalupe is bom out of a spiritual/cultural /racial
crossbreeding. The story of the apparition or appearance begins in 1531 at an
Indian holy place, the shrine of Tonantzin, an Aztec earth goddess.
Guadalupe appears to an Indian, Juan Diego, a newly baptized Christian.
She is the European “Mary” figure, but she is brown. There is no written
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6
account of the story extant from that time. (Details and specific accounts of
all three archcons are presented in Chapter Two.) What kind of “sign” is this
figure? What does she represent? Can this be an erotic or sexual body when
the only parts of the body represented are the hands and face? The usual
effect is that of an asexual woman in spite of the appellation of motherhood
central to the iconography. However, while other Marian figures hold the
baby Jesus, Guadalupe isn’t seen with a child. She may or may not be
pregnant, depending on interpretations of her clothing. She is a virgin, a
mother, passive but powerful, and above all perfect. “The role models
Guadalupe manifested,” for the women interviewed by Rodriguez for her
study, “are those of good woman and perfect mother” (137).
In contrast, is the bad mother, la Llorona, the nature of whose evil
depends on where this folktale is being told and who is doing the telling.
Water is at the core of the story. La Llorona is usually near water crying for
her children that she has thrown in the river (in Mexico, her name, la
Llorona, is often translated into English as “the crier”). A version that
merges la Llorona and la Malinche is told by Alfredo Mirande and
Evangelina Enriquez in la Chicana: The Mexican- American Woman. This
version casts la Malinche in the part o f a woman who throws her son from a
balcony to protest Cortes leaving Mexico. She then “roamed endlessly
through the country side weeping” (32). This is the tale of a boogie woman
that is recounted to keep “someone” in line.
While la Malinche is frequently associated with la Llorona, she has
her own complicated story as a bad woman, one tangled in a maze of history
and linguistics. As the translator for Cortes, she is viewed as a traitor to the
Indians. As his mistress, she is a whore, which mimetically makes her the
person who prostitutes herself to the “other.” She is the part of a whole that
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stands for traitor/whore. Historically she is read as inseparable from (mated
to) the original colonizer. More contemporaneously, her traitor status makes
her complicit with American corporate capitalism’s misuse of Mexican labor,
Mexican culture, and Mexican natural resources on both sides of the border.
Another important aspect of la Malinche is her role as mother to Cortes son.
Conceived in a union without marriage, he is not only a bastard but also the
first mestizo. Much of this connotation and reputation has entered into the
Spanish language to delineate type or stereotype. A political Malinche is
someone who has been a traitor to la raza, la causa, or el movimiento. La
Malinche is also called la chingada deriving from the word chingar,
signifying “the triumph of the closed, the male, the powerful, over the open”
(Paz 78). In Chicano slang the term means simply to “fuck over” or get
“fucked up,” meaning drunk (Polkinhom 20). According to Paz “la chingada
is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived” (79). This kind of
naming both reflects and creates a juridical discourse of (hetero)sexual and
cultural polarity with men at one end as the machos, the power takers, the
“fuckers,” and women at the other as those not only violated, but complicit in
that violation by prostituting themselves. In this position women are the
objects of male sexual agency, without sexual agency themselves. The
archcon of la Malinche produces a double sexual discourse of asking for it
and getting it.
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Identities and The Recasting of Mythic Material
The complex enmeshment of these archcons in Mexican and Mexican-
American culture reflects the complicated history of their origins and the
equally complex discourse or law they have created for and about women.
These archcons exist through their stories, the myths that have created them
and their power. Such discourse produces templates for gendered
expectations. Using this discourse against itself and thereby deconstructing
the “culturally constructed body” and liberating it to “an open future of
cultural possibilities” (Butler 3)— has been and continues to be an integral part
of Chicana poetics. Rewritings, revisions, and possible subversions of these
archcons and those expectations by Chicana poets, artists, and performers are
not, however, new phenomena. Several recently published texts devote
separate chapters to “rewriting archetypes,” while in others such as
Shattering the Myth: Plays by Hispanic Women, the theme is central. Editor
Linda Feyder, in introducing the plays chosen by Denise Chavez, comments
that:
On all fronts— Hispanic culture, life in the United States, social
class, gender and race— these playwrights are battling the myths
and stereotypes that continue to circumscribe the freedom of
expression and life fulfillment for Hispanic women. Their
plays, indeed, shatter myths...creating a broader, freer space for
women’s identity and cultural development. (5)
Chapter Three of Tey Diana Rebolledo's Women Singing in the Snow, titled
“From Coatlicue to La Llorona: Literary Myths and Archetypes,” focuses
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9
completely on the rewriting of cultural myths by Chicana writers. In
introducing the material, she says that if
the existing mythology (as defined by patriarchy) is unable to
fulfill the increasing demand for women as active, energetic,
and positive figures, then the woman writer may choose myths
and archetypes, historical and cultural heroines, that are
different from the traditional ones. They may create new role
models for themselves or choose existing models but imbue
them with different (sometimes radically different) traits and
characteristics. (49)
Rebolledo goes on to illustrate this rewriting and recasting through poetry
that engages a range of mythic material from Christian, Pre-Columbian and
folk genres. Rebolledo concludes that “Chicana archetypes...have become
contemporary and remain relevant in their retelling” (81). Unlike
Rebolledo’s work, this project focuses on the issues of power and agency that
underlie both the action and the results. I hope to demonstrate that the
mechanisms and energy behind such “retellings” are the deconstruction and
(re)construction of these archcons that invests them with sexual/textual
bodies with a sexual agency that creates a discourse of power for women.
This recasting makes choice possible for women in both cultural subject and
object positions within the field of desire. The discussion asserts that sexual
agency as performed in and through creative performance makes possible a
transformational experience for the reader/audience. Such an experience can
liberate the reader/audience from the bonds of the traditional juridical
discourse embodied by the archcon through the performance of an alternative
discourse. This reconstructed iconic discourse creates a different discursive
“space” for women that reflects what is already in place and constructs fuller
“cultural possibilities.” This is a cultural space that values traditional
discourse, but simultaneously provides for responses to discourse presented
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10
by other cultures, expanded experience, and particularly higher education.
None of the Chicana work examined here intends to deconstruct traditional
culture. In most cases, the intent is to use the metaphoric understandings of
traditional culture to celebrate and foreground the bicultural, bilingual, and
highly complex cultural positions of Chicanas. At the same time, however,
the work often demands reconsideration of the position o f women within that
culture— a culture whose women are as spectacular and complicated as itself.
Early in her long poem, “La Loca de La Raza Cosmica”, poet La Chrisx
addresses those complex identities:
Soy La Mujer Chicana, una maravil La
Soy tan simple como La capirotada
and at the same time I am as complicated to understand as the
Aztec
Pyramids.
Soy La Reina de La Raza Cosmica: (al estilo Califas)...
Soy mujer
soy senorita
soy ruca loca
soy mujerona
soy Santa
soy madre
soy Ms.
Soy La India Maria
soy La Adelita
Soy Radical
soy La Revolucionaria
soy La Chicana en los picket lines
soy La Chicana en los conferences
soy La Chicana en los teatros
Soy La que hecha chingazos por su Raza
soy el grito: “Chicano Power”
soy United Farmworker Buttons
soy La Mexican flag.
(Rebolledo and Rivero, 84)
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11
The confluence of the spirit of la raza, el movimiento, and white, middle-
class feminism in the 1960s and 1970s fostered among Chicanas an
increasingly serious discontent with their positions as women within many of
those identities. They continued to encounter what Rodriguez calls “the
triple oppression of dominant society's racism and sexism, as well as her [a
Mexican-American woman’s] own culture’s sexism”(129). This poem
reflects in form, if not in content, an identity and identity crisis that had been
created in a poetic space almost a decade earlier by Rodolfo “Corky”
Gonzales in his poem, “I am Joaquin,” first published in 1967. Written in the
style of a traditional epic poem, it begins with the assertion “I am Joaquin,
...” As Joaquin, the male persona claims to represent the broad history of
Mexican people and beyond. He is:
Mejicano!
Espanol!
Latino!
Hispano!
Chicano!
or whatever I call myself
I look the same
I feel the same
I cry
and
Sing the same
I am the masses of my people and
I refuse to be absorbed.
I am Joaquin. (Joaquin 20)
La Crisx’s poem reflects an obvious relationship to “I am Joaquin,” through
its parallel structure, particularly the use of the first person and its voice.
But, significantly, La Crisx never assumes the identity for “my people,”
never takes on the patriarchal presumptions of “Joaquin’s” grandiose
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historical, political, and cultural identity. Her persona is gendered culturally
and linguistically so that La Crisx’s Las reinas locas, Las mujeres Chicanas
trabajando, to whom her poem is dedicated, “seem” to respond to the sexist
positions created by the discourse of cultural archconography and reinforced
by forms of cultural production such as “I am Joaquin.” The word “seem” is
used in the previous sentence because it “seems” critical that in cultural and
literary studies, the critic’s position and context be in view and, in fact,
considered as part of the study to avoid an “us and them” perspective. The
consequence of such a perspective is a focus in Sally Price’s book Primitive
Art in Civilized Places. She stresses that “us and them” has usually been the
“privileged perspective of white Europeans and Americans,” the “white
patron” (25) looking at the exotic, primitive other in multiple disciplines such
as ethnography, anthropology, literature, art, and history. This patron was
not only usually white, but in most cases, heterosexual and male. Keeping the
critic and the critical context in view then can possibly avoid perceptions and
ideologies that promote colonization. It also brings “the contribution [of]
contextualization ...to every experience” (Price 21). This is especially
important when the critic is outside that culture looking in, or even looking
with one foot out and one foot in. An “in-the-text,” self-reflective position
keeps the point-of-view clearer for both reader and writer and should get the
voice of colonization and appropriation out o f the pontifical closet by
creating a multivocal critical space. It should also address an important
subtextual question in this study: What is a gabacha like me doing in a place
like this? The result of this placement, as I hope to show, is to suggest a
method of reading critically across race and culture.
Understanding the nature of such multiple contexts is the first
requirement to seeing how and why these archcons— /a Virgen, la Llorona, la
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Malinche— were constructed and how those constructions were perpetuated
and embellished historically and politically. A summary of much of this
historical material constitutes Chapter Two. What becomes clear from that
survey is that these representations of women were bom of men. Such a
conclusion is neither surprising nor culturally specific, but an experience
shared by women writers across the spectrum of race, culture and sexual
preference that have examined representations of women and the
iconographic language used in such representations. Adrienne Rich considers
the position of women writers and the influence that the myths and images of
women have on all of us who are products of culture... [and who are] looking
for guides, maps, possibilities...for “her way of being in the world” in her
essay, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” In the process of
looking for those possibilities, Rich says “... she [the woman writer] comes
up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the
image of Woman in books written by men” (39). In her poem “Diving into
the Wreck” Rich’s persona goes searching for “her way of being,” but only
finds
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear. (22)
Mexican poet and essayist Rosario Castellanos perceives the construction of
mythical/idealized women as a loss of physical entity rather than a
disappearance of spirit or essence. What is bom of men for her is not a
woman, not sexed, but a “thing,” an artificial constmct. In her essay
“Woman and Her Image,” Castellanos asks the reader to imagine a woman
being praised for her beauty. “Let’s not forget,” she reminds us, “that beauty
is an ideal composed and imposed by men...which when fulfilled transforms
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the woman who possesses them [qualifications for beauty] into a
handicapped person; that is, without exaggerating...into a thing” (Castellanos
237). Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros found herself, as a young writer,
facing a similar dilemma. She addresses the issue in the poem that opens her
collection, My Wicked, Wicked Ways:
...Tell me,
how does a woman who.
A woman like me. Daughter of
a daddy with a hammer and blistered feet
he’d dip into a washtub while he ate his dinner.
A woman with no birthright in the matter.
What does a woman inherit
that tells her how
to go ? (Cisneros x)
The stories of la Malinche, la Virgen, and la Llorona “as images of
women written by men,” have failed to guide Cisneros in “how to go.” But,
she is one of the Chicana artists whose naming of sexism in her culture and
whose rediscovery of the proud, sexual Chicana body has helped to construct
a cultural/literary critical position that begins to contexualize and construct
such a guide. Historically, la Malinche's stories are told by male survivors of
the conquest in pictograms and Nahuatl, written into Spanish by the (male)
priest Sahagun. These narratives were later expanded by Leon-Portillo, and in
the twentieth century were translated directly from Nahuatl into English by
Anglo-American scholars Anderson and Dribble. Bernal Diaz, who served
with Cortez from the conquest of Cuba to the conclusion o f the conquest of
Mexico in around 1521, presents a fuller, if more subjective, account from
the Spanish point of view in the Conquest o f New Spain.
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The story of the apparition La Virgen de Guadalupe was probably first
put into writing by Spanish priest Miguel Sanchez, and in the later, frequently
quoted Nican Mopohua, written by the vicar o f the Guadalupe ermita, Luis
Laso de la Vega in 1649. Although the painter of the original pintura is still a
matter of debate, none of the possibilities is a woman. Many scholars agree
that the Indian Marcos De Aquino who is mentioned in Bernal Diaz’s
account of the conquest could have painted it.
While la Llorona is a folk tale usually told by women, the image
probably originated with Aztec priests. The earliest extant mention of a la
Llorona figure is found in the Florentine Codex: General History o f the
Things o f New Spain (ca 1540), in an account “as described by Sahagun’s
informants” (Portillo 4), as the sixth of ten bad omens foretelling the arrival
of the Spanish. In this account, the children she weeps for are the children of
Tenochtitlan.
Critical here is the fact that the iconography and the myths associated
with these three female figures appear to have their origins and been
sustained in scholarly accounts by men. This is not surprising. Women’s
access to education and thus writing, and to the fields o f history and religion
in which the majority of early narratives were produced, was practically zero.
The noted exception was Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz who, according to
translator Margaret Penden, in 1691 “composed the ‘Respuesta a Sor
Filotea,’ ...the first document in our hemisphere to defend a woman’s right to
teach, to study, and to write” (de la Cruz 1). Sor Juana uses culturally
understood gender representations to resist those very representations. In the
poem “In Reply to a Gentleman from Peru, Who sent Her Clay Vessels
While Suggesting She Would Better Be A Man,” she tells him that
...if true that I am a female,
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none substantiate that state.
I know, too, that they were wont to call wife, or
woman, in the Latin
uxor, only those who wed,
though wife or woman might be virgin.
So in my case, it is not seemly
that I be viewed as feminine, as I will never be a woman
who may as woman serve a man. (de la Cruz 21)
Unfortunately, four years after writing the “Respuesta,” she bent to the will
of the Church and turned over her writing, books, as well as her musical and
mathematical instruments. She “reaffirmed her vows, signing at least two
documents in her own blood” (de la Cruz 1). She had been silenced. Sor
Juana died during a plague at the convent in 1695. Hers is a case in which the
brilliant exception painfully proved the cultural rules for women.
“Cruising” A New Discourse
The lineage of these major female archcons is through the father. For
this discussion the physical icon (painting, sculpture, mural, etc.) and its
associated iconography as well as the oral or written narrative surrounding it
are considered contained in the word archcon. In all three cases the
representation and “the story,” or myth, are inseparable. The origins of these
narratives defy our understanding of scientific biology and gender by being
conceived, nurtured, and birthed not through the mother, but through the
father, through male texts. As in the biblical story of Eve created from
Adam’s rib, so these female archcons are created out of men. Once created
from Adam, Eve, or woman, appears to be the focus or target in a narrative
whose male subject is always moving towards it. Teresa de Lauretis sees
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such narratives as possessing what she calls “an Oedipal trajectory” based on
sexual difference. Her discussion of “mythical-textual mechanics” uses an
analysis of Freud's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex, Vladimir Propp's
Morphology o f the Folktale, and Jurij Lotman's The Origin o f Plot in the
Light o f Typology, in order to reach “a provisional conclusion” that
in its ‘making sense’ of the world, narrative endlessly
reconstructs [itself] as a two-character drama in which the
human person creates and recreates himself out of an abstract or
purely symbolic other [that he has already constructed]--the
womb, the earth, the grave, the woman, (de Lauretis 121)
In de Lauretis’analysis, the movement of narrative is always toward
“closure”--the object, the woman—and therefore, is a narrative that
recapitulates the heterosexual male story of desire. Such a model is useful to
this discussion, because it theoretically and metaphorically supports this
project’s contention that in all the original narrative underlying these three
archcons, the trajectory of desire and its object are implicitly dictated by a
male authority or subject. But, the linearity and polarity o f this model are also
seriously limited in investigating complex mythic structures, especially
poetical ones.. In the layered heritage of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans,
for instance, the male story of desire or sexual agency is culturally
constructed, powered among other things by the Western tradition of
Oedipus, Christ, the native traditions of the Jaguar and Quetzalcoatl, and by
such revolutionary heroes as Hildago, Pancho Villa, and Cesar Chavez.
These combinations have their own vectors and create new ones as they
interact. They move through cultural space on dynamic trajectories creating
resonant narratives driven by an agency of mythic proportions and
subsequent power.
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Roland Barthes defines myth as “a type of speech” {Mythologies 109)
and develops that definition to include all forms of representation: cinema,
photography, discourse “...even objects will become speech, if they mean
something” (110-111). As archcons and/or myths such objects have what
Judith Butler calls “juridical power,” a power that “...inevitably produces
what it claims to represent” (Butler 2). That power produces a juridical
cultural discourse that constructs “cultural intelligible notions of identity,” in
this case expectations and gender roles for women that are acted out within
the binary nature of sex/gender and the “heterosexualization of desire”(17).
Such discourse produces templates for gendered expectations, complete with
idealized models, or icons. This study will demonstrate that Butler’s theory
of using the juridical law or discourse against itself to deconstruct the
“culturally constructed body” and liberate it to “an open future of cultural
possibilities,” has been and continues to be an integral component of Chicana
poetics.
The archcons, or cultural texts of women created in the narratives of la
Malirtche, la Virgen, and la Llorona have juridical power which “inevitably
‘produces’ what it represents” (Gender 2). Such power operates as law.
Butler bases these ideas on what seems to be an understanding of law as “a
body of rules...proceeding from formal enactment or custom, which a
community...sees as binding on its...members” {Oxford 1581). Juridical
power refers to law that, whether motivated by the unwritten laws of social
behavior or those coded by communities, has behind it the power to produce
the representations it controls. Butler uses the word “cultural” because, as she
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points out, there can be serious problems of universalizing the representations
of women.3 She says:
gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in
different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with
racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of
discursively constituted identities. As a result, it becomes
impossible to separate out “gender” from the political and
cultural intersections in which it is invariably produced and
maintained. (3)
As cultural textual bodies, the archcons being considered here exist
simultaneously as feminine templates with similarities to a more
“generalized” understanding of women, but also specifically as ideal
Mexican or Mexican-American women— asexual and erotic, lover and
mother, virgin and slut, carrier of the culture and traitor, mujer sufrida and
jefa. These are stereotypes of identity that Butler might suggest must come
under a “critique of the categories of identity that contemporary juridical
structures engender, naturalize, and immobilize” (5). In this case, they are
categories that were established hundreds of years ago and whose power is
maintained contemporaneously through faith and tradition. Jean-Fran9ois
Lyotard’s analysis of how narratives work as knowledge in the area of social
regulation makes the idea of archcons as juridical discourse clearer. He says
that
Narratives...determine criteria of competence and/or illustrate
how they are to be applied. They thus define what has the right
to be said and done in the culture in question, and since they are
themselves a part of that culture, they are legitimated by the
simple fact that they do what they do. (23)
3This notion o f universalizing is similar to the Universality Principle addressed by Price who points out the desire,
particularly by Westerners, to enlist “the Brotherhood ideology” (25) for everything from commercial ventures, to a
universal grammarian in music as well as language.
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The function of myth, the story or narrative, Lyotard says, is to “bestow
legitimacy upon social institutions” (20). And they are, in fact, the source of
“customary knowledge” (19). Such stories tell us how to behave or tell us
how we have sinned against “god” or culture if we have disobeyed the
cultural laws such narratives develop. In this discussion, the focus is on the
laws controlling the behavior of women.
Semiotics also helps us unpack the way these narratives and/or
representations work by providing a method for modeling metaphoric
resonance and dimensionality of what is being signified based on the building
of metalanguages. The way Roland Barthes uses semiotics in his analysis of
myths is especially useful. In this scheme la Malinche, la Virgen, and la
Llorona as icons or archetypes form the first order of signification in a
semiological system. But, when folded into their mythological and historical
contexts they operate as law in a discursive system of metalanguage. This
metalanguage goes beyond the second order suggested in Barthes’ illustration
{Myth Barthes 100) where the “materials of mythical speech (the language
itself, photography, painting, posters, rituals, objects, etc...) are reduced to a
pure signifying function as soon as they are caught by myth” (Barthes 99).
The final term o f the language, for example, then becomes the first term in
what Barthes calls the metalanguage. The chain of signification becomes ever
more complex as historical, political, religious, sexual/gender, and social
issues become a part of the myth. Such mythic speech becomes a metaphoric
language resonating with contextual fullness. As Terence Hawks points out,
this is a description of myth that “has many similarities” to Umberto Eco’s
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‘aesthetic Idiolect’, a special language peculiar to the work of
art, which induces in its audience a sense o f ‘cosmicity’— that is,
of endlessly moving beyond each established level of meaning
the moment it is established--of continuously transforming ‘its
denotations into new connotations.’ (Hawks 141)
In its ambiguity and plurality, the metaphoric language of art then becomes,
according to Eco, “a way of connecting ‘messages’ together, in order to
produce ‘texts’ in which the rule-breaking roles of ambiguity and self
reference are fostered” (Eco 261). These discussions support the contention
that the metaphoric language of Chicana poetics is ‘full’ of possibilities for
transformation of juridical law.
But, it can only realize these possibilities with the full knowledge that
the aesthetic, religious, and political idiolect that sustains these mythic
discourses is phallic in the way it is driven by male authority and power. This
power “writes” its desire through an agency that derives from culturally
defined sexual practice and gendered sexual roles. Who is on top is not only a
question of sexual power for Chicana artists. It has been a cognitive as well
as a physical experience resulting in cathartic moments of intra- and inter-
cultural tension as well as a metaphor for individual and cultural
colonization. In Loving in the War Years, Cherrie Moraga states that in
traditional Mexican/Chicano beliefs, “You [Chicanas] are a traitor to your
race if you do not put the man first.” Not putting the man “on top” is a
betrayal of “one's race through sex and sexual politics” (Loving 103). The
last verse of the Moraga poem “Passage” concludes
We have always bled
with our veins
and legs
open
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to forces
beyond our control. {Loving 45)
The receptivity of this “very old wound in me/between my legs” (44)
suggests literally and figuratively the kind of narrative space that recreates
male desire and exhibits both the violence and scars left by such an
inscription. This is a desire Barthes characterizes as “governed by Oedipal
logic.” 4 (140). Introducing a white, male, structural theorist into a project
focusing on the work of Chicanas could be considered fraternizing with the
“enemy.” But Barthes’ mediations on the nature of narrative desire, and the
is useful both for (de)reconstructing that textual body, but perhaps more
importantly, for considering the narrative desire implicit in these
relationships of text to writer and reader alike. Barthes uses Freud’s
interpretation o f the Oedipus myth to support his myth of reading and
writing. In Pleasure o f the Text, he contends that without the Father,
(Oedipal “logic”) there can be no narrative. He claims the
Death of the Father would deprive literature of many o f its
pleasures. If there is no longer a Father, why tell stories?
Doesn’t every narrative lead back to Oedipus...As fiction,
Oedipus was at least good for something; to make good novels,
to tell good stories. (47)
Those “good stories” are texts, or erotic bodies. The text operates for
Barthes as “a fetish object, and [for Barthes] this fetish desires me” (27).
But, the reader must “cruise,” to use Barthes’ terms, the erotic text to find the
object that desires him. It is on this body, “this textual body (corpus: the
right word)” (34), writes Barthes, that he takes his pleasure, “for the book,
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the meaning creates life” (creates the meaning 36). Barthes’analysis is useful
when considering the way the archcons of la Malinche, la Llorona, and la
Virgen were written or constructed because, first, it recapitulates the phallic
origins of the structures, second, it underlines the embodied nature of the
archcons, and, third, suggests the way they operate as fetish, that which both
is and isn’t the desired object. Indeed, Barthes almost echos Judith Butler’s
description o f juridical discourse, but by couching the relationships in
conceptual metaphors of sexuality, he grounds his discussion in a dynamics
of power that assumes heterosexual gender polarity. Within such polarity, it
can be said that life itself or the text is created by male desire for and toward
the space or object of closure. While “sexuality,” for women says Cherrie
Moraga in her essay, “A Long Line of Vendidas,” can act as “both a source
of oppression and a means of liberation, control of women begins through the
institution o f heterosexuality”( Loving Moraga 109,111). The three “texts”
being considered in this study have operated and continue to operate as the
symbols for and the mirrors of this institution in Mexican and Mexican-
American culture. Mexican feminist and poet Rosario Castellanos says that
everyone in Mexico understands that
when we utter the word woman, we refer to a creature who is
dependent upon male authority: be it her father's, her brother's,
her husband's, or her priest's. (Castellanos 261)
A case of sexual control is illustrated poignantly in Castellanos’ poem
“Kinsey Report.” In the third stanza of Section 1, the persona reports on her
married sex life:
4 Barthes sees the Oedipal nature o f the text as a reasoned and thinking one that could even be considered as scientific.
This “reason” then creates a textual body that is, for Barthes, erotic. For de Lauretis it is a movement and direction,
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At a rate I can regularly predict
my husband makes use of his rights,
or, as he likes to say, he pays the conjugal
debt. Then he turns his back on me and snores.
I always resist. Out of decency.
But then I always give in. Out o f obedience.
No, I don’t like anything special.
Anyhow I’m not supposed to like it.
Because I’m a decent woman; and he’s so gross!(l 12)
For this woman to have sexual agency or to “like anything special” is to exist
outside accepted heterosexual behavior and understood sexual roles for
women within her culture. It is not only morally indecent, but also traitorous,
because gender expectations for women are so totally enmeshed in a cultural
context in which, as Moraga explains, “sex remains the bottom line on which
she [the Chicana] proves her commitment to her race” (Moraga Loving 105).
By extension this commitment includes la familia and, of course, the
obligation to have children. The purpose of women’s sexuality in this
heterosexual economy is, in fact, to have children. Such is the cultural erotic
text whose creation and expectation is governed by Oedipal logic, a “good
story” (Barthes 47) told by the Father. Such a “good story” could tell of an
erotic Virgin who is eminently sexy, but sexless, and who, without the
vulgarity of sex, is always a Mother, a perfect one. She’s a hard act to follow.
Unlike many representations of the Virgin Mary, La Virgen de Guadalupe
does not hold the baby Jesus, but wears a cinta or maternity band around her
waist and, according to Jeanette Rodriguez, below this, “a small flower called
nagvioli.” The flower's position on “her womb verified for the Nahuatl that
something thrown or thrust. The white male wants to see the Oedipal journey as reason that creates a body, while the
white female writer feels a movement, directed and almost physical that moves towards a body it creates for itself.
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she was pregnant” (29). This text, or story, reaches closure at the womb
where she carries the holy child.
La Malinche's text doesn’t exhibit such closure. Precisely because it is
a “tragic” story of transgression from the norm, it instead exhibits several
open “wounds,” to borrow a metaphor from Angela Carter's essay, “The
Wound in the Face.” 5 As the translator for Cortes as well as Aztec and other
indigenous peoples, la Malinche is the first boca (mouth), one that takes in
and gives out language. This translating mouth is the open wound used to
tell a story that is always told by others-the trajectory or direction of the
translation belongs to the original speaker or writer. She may be the agent of
the transmission, but she never has the agency. She is trapped in a
representational form that can be read by both the colonized and the
colonizers as traitor. Sus labios (her lips) also admit Cortes as lover, her
womb receives his seed and from that womb, through those labia, comes “the
bastard,” his son, considered the first mestizo, binding the new race in the
sexual metaphors of la Malinche. Thus she is written as whore, always
“open” to receive “the word(s)” and the seeds of the “other.” She delivers
translation and her offspring, a race bom “out of wedlock,” sexually and
morally marked. This is the birthmark that, according to Octavio Paz, makes
Mexicans see themselves as “...hijos de la chingadal ” (Paz 86).
The same metaphoric language resonates powerfully for Moraga. She writes
the mouth is like a cunt. It’s as if la boca were centered on el centro del
corazon, not in the head at all. The same place where the cunt beats. (Loving
142)
^ In this essay, Carter examines how cosmetics are used on women's faces and the way they reflect the "violence your
environment inflicts on you." She sees the red mouth, an "...open wound (that) will never heal” (Nothing Sacred 10).
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While Moraga reaches the conclusion that her (Moraga’s) “mouth cannot be
controlled” (142), she also observes that “there is hardly a Chicana growing
up today who does not suffer under [la Malinche ’ s] name even if she never
hears directly of the one-time Aztec princess” (100). Even in 1983 when
Moraga’s book was published, a Chicana who opened her “lips” freely was
subject to the discourse created by la Malinche. A woman, who is “open” to
sex, or, God forbid, asks for sex, is considered “bad” or immoral. A
wonderful example is told by Carmen Tafolla in her story “Frederico y
Elfiria.” Elfiria’s husband thinks he has married a “good girl,” but becomes
concerned when she asks for and then enjoys sex. He even sends her to mis a
because he has “always heard of pos, tu sabes— desas, bad girls, y tambien of
course, de good girls...” (Alarcon The Sexuality 111), and he is definitely
confused about where Elfiria fits. In the end, he gives up responsibility for
her sexuality “pos, tu sabes, a man can only do so much all by him self’
(111). Who knows? He will take it, but in the back of his mind will she
always be a bad girl? And, in fact, does the idea of her “badness” make her
more erotic? Does the good girl/bad girl dichotomy place her on the cultural
seam, the erotic border, where ambiguity can release cultural and gender
expectations ?
Perceiving Mexican-American women as occupying the seams
between cultural discourses is crucial to the understanding o f their cultural
positions, positions that are indeed plural. The problem remains: how does
the Chicana gain power, or control o f her own desire and subsequent agency,
if the discourse of the archcons continues to construct and control patriarchal
cultural understandings of women, no matter where they place themselves.
One possible way of disrupting the established polarity is by imagining
archconic representations energized through multiple sites of desire and
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eroticism that are multivocalic and multiorgasmic. Chicana lesbianism
makes possible this reimagining through a renewed connection to the body
and desire, particularly its embrace of the ambiguity within butch and femme
roles, bisexuality, and transsexualism. In her essay “Butches, Lies, and
Feminism” collected in the book, The Persistent Desire, Jeanne Cordova
claims that “a butch is an elusive, ever-resynthesizing energy field, a lesbian
laser that knits the universes of male and female” (273). In the same
collection, Jan Brown, in “Sex, Lies, and Penetration: A Butch Finally
‘Fesses Up,” claims that as lesbian butches “we become male, but under our
own rules. We define the maleness. We invent the men we become” (414).
Positive connections to the female body and lesbianism have functioned as
teachers and liberators for Chicana lesbians. Cherrie Moraga writes that
“lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the most about
silence and oppression,” {Loving 52) and she also experiences her body and
her desire as the connection to writing/desire. In her critical essay titled
“Seduced and Abandoned: Chicanas and Lesbians in Representation,” Sue-
Ellen Case examines Moraga’s representations in her play Giving up the
Ghost, pointing out that the main character, Marisa, is “not only the Chicana
lesbian, she is the Chicana writer, who through representation can intervene
in the system as well as in her own internal composition. The wetness of
lesbian desire is her ink.” {Negotiating 100).
Teresa de Lauretis posits an intriguing question and answer for this
argument in her discussion of cinematic narrative and Hitchcock's Rebecca.
She comments:
cinema works for Oedipus. The heroine ...has to move on like
Freud’s little girl, and take her place where Oedipus will find
her awaiting him. What if, once he reached his destination, he
found that Alice didn't live there anymore? (153)
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Where does Alice live? Can she live anywhere else? In The Practice o f
Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire, de Lauretis suggests that Alice
can only be “fully resident and full of sexual agency in lesbian, or perverse
desire,” a desire in which the “female body in herself and in other women”
gets reinscribed through the fetish” (231). Her analysis is based on a reading
of
Freud’s theory [that] contains or implies, if by negation and
ambiguity, a notion of perverse desire, where perverse means
not pathological but rather non-heterosexual or non-normative
heterosexual, (xii)
The poetics discussed in this study o f Chicana female artists likewise involve
an embrace of both these categories. The definition of “non-normative” in
such a context can also include heterosexual women writers recasting their
desire, as de Lauretis says, in the “marketplace of desire” but not as
commodities. If the (re)constructions of archcons within this Chicana poetics
deconstruct the “law” or juridical discourse for women and they also
construct a female fetish, one “in which desire is no longer attached to a
privileged object or dependent on the phallus as its privileged signifier, but
able to move on to other images and objects” (de Lauretis 223 after Bersani
and Dutoit), objects that can “perform” in a scenario of female desire
providing sexual agency. The notion o f performance or “acting” is significant
in that it operates semiotically as the means to subjectivity. It also has a
powerful metaphoric connection to both sexual agency and the creative act,
which, in turn, are grounded in conceptual understandings of spiritual
experience. So, it is semiotically and metaphorically powerful and multiple.
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When we pull the thread of fetish we see how interconnected this weave can
be.
A cultural poetics constructing a female fetish seems particularly
pertinent to this study because of the possibilities it presents for a
transformative performance that moves out of the discourse of law into a
discourse of sexual subjectivity that manifests itself as choice. Instead of
constructing a playing field of desire that only allows for an “us and them”
positionality, it makes multiple subject/object positions possible, power
through sexual agency. Ami Reiger, in her unpublished dissertation, suggests
in an analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman that the cake-woman
eaten by the main character, Marian, is the fetish that “not only displaces
male-directed desire, but also becomes the culminating object in a series of
women’s bodies and their displacement. ...Thus, Marian can be seen as
having widened her range of sexuality from a narrow focus on male
affiliation in marriage and conventional heterosexuality to an exploration of
autonomous desire as figured in her autoerotic eating as well as the
possibility of female-female eroticism” (148) Likewise, de Lauretis makes it
clear in her analysis that “...in the case (of) the fetish...the object always
functions in desire as a sign, since it stands in for a lost object” (230).
According to de Lauretis:
the object of perverse desire— the wished-for object whose
absence is represented in the fetish— stands for something that
never existed in perception...an entirely fantasmatic object ...In
lesbian perverse desire...the fantasmatic object is the female
body itself, whose original loss in a female subject
corresponds...to the narcissistic wound that the loss of the penis
represents for the male subject. (231)
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The sign discussed by de Lauretis is the woman's body and/or objects
representing the women’s body, as I propose it is for all female subjects who
are influenced by the juridical discourse of La Virgen de Guadalupe, la
Malinche, and la Llorona. These archcons are much like the textual fetishes
described by Barthes, but in a way that means they can be engaged in a
liberatory manner by Chicanas. The fetish is a “stand in,”creating a sign that
both is and is not what it represents. Where can Chicanas engage the fetish?
Where’s the action? According to Barthes, it all happens at the edge or gap.
Using as an example the redistribution o f language which he claims “is
always achieved by cutting,” Barthes contrasts the good, “obedient,
conformist, plagiarizing edge” to the edge that is “ready to assume any
contours” {Pleasure 6). He makes the point that “neither culture nor its
destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them which becomes so” (7).
Cultural erotics then occurs at the seam, or at the border. The border, like the
seam, presents as a gap or opening that suggests the possibility of a third
position beyond American/Mexican, Spanish/English, male/female, and
feminism/ machoism. One could say that Chicanas in Los Angeles can, in a
literal sense, cruise Whittier Boulevard, Brooklyn Avenue (Cesar Chavez
Boulevard),and Avenue 42, or performance spaces like the Mark Taper
Forum, Plaza de la Raza, Highways, or Beyond Baroque for the erotic
connection to a textual body and the possibility of transformation. Like many
other urban locations in the West and Southwest, these are cultural
borderlands, those spaces or places where two cultures find themselves on the
seam between what is on either side and what might be. This seam is what
Rafael Perez-Torres calls “a region in which possibilities and potentialities
abound for new subject formations, new cultural formations, new political
formations” {Movements 12). Here we are “living in a state of psychic
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unrest,”6 according to Gloria Anzaldua, “in a Borderland, [where] poets write
and artists create” (73). It is at that edge of cultures or even of realities as
most people understand them, where the shaman lives, where the
erotic/ecstatic is possible, where transformation can happen.
Poetics of Transformation
Anzaldua articulates a pathway through this complex model using Aztec
ideology and spirituality. In her essay, “ Tlilli, Tlapalli, The Path o f the Red
and Black Ink”— the title refers to the colors that symbolize escritura y
sabidurla (writing and wisdom)— she discusses the Aztec belief in
communication with the Divine “through metaphor and symbol.” Anzaldua
claims the creative act has transformative power. She describes the process
of creative activity as shamanistic, particularly “the ability of story (prose and
poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or
someone else. ...The writer, as shape-changer, is a nahual, a shaman.”
{Borderlands 66) As shaman, the writer invokes this power “through [a]
performance ritual” of the work. The act of creation is also physical for
Anzaldua, a “sensuous act” that
requires a blood sacrifice. For only through the pulling of flesh,
can the human soul be transformed. For images, words, and
stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from
the human body. {Borderlands 75)
Words and images arise from the shaman’s body and from an ecstatic or
6 This borderland existence can be thought of as living in a state o f ambiguity, but one that will not resolve into cultural
stereotypes.
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orgasmic consciousness, a going out of the body experience, that connects
the shaman to other realms of consciousness and existence. The work
created both is and is not of the shaman, so it can act as a fetish permitting a
performance that transforms. Anzaldua says she “trances” to “create stories”
in her head that are “projected in the inner screen” (69) of her mind. While
she is writing, “the spirit of the words moving in the body is as concrete as
flesh and as palpable; the hunger to create is as substantial as fingers and
hand” (71). “When I write,” she says, “I feel like I’m carving bone”—
creating a fetish for the spirit, for the soul out of “Aztecan blood sacrifices”
(75). The work’s transformative power comes from an ecstatic or shamanistic
experience through the body, the blood of human sacrifice, the bleeding
plumes of the fingers. Anzaldua’s metaphoric blood becomes the blood of
birth, but for Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, it is blood “...without the
birth.” It is “virgin” blood, uncompromised by conception. In her
poem,“Down There,” Cisneros says she can
dab my fingers
or a swipe of tampax
in my inkwell
and write a poem across the wall.
“A Poem o f Womanhood”
Now wouldn’t that be something?
Words writ in blood. But no,
not blood at all, I told you
If blood is thicker than water, then
menstruation is thicker than brother
hood. And the way
it metamorphosizes! Dazzles. ...
This poem suggests the possibility of enacting womanhood and conception
outside the juridical law of culture and its mandated heterosexuality. With
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menstrual blood, the rejected blood o f the womb, the poem itself performs
the culturally unthinkable, performable of the secret female body.
For Ana Castillo, the shamanistic or spiritual views coalese in “Un
Tapiz,” an essay in a collection examining Xicanisma. In this particular piece
she “invents” a new kind of poetics, a conscienticizedpoetics, which “takes
on everything and everyone at one€\M assacre 171). Books that she believes
are part of this new poetics are Anzaldua’s Borderland/La Frontera: The
New Mestizo, Moraga’s Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca paso por sus
labios, and her own novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters. In her analysis,
Castillo concludes that Anzaldua sees the physical and spiritual as
inseparable, while Moraga approaches the spiritual through the physical.
Castillo writes,
She sees her religious indoctrination inextricably tied to her
sexuality, stating, “Simply put, if the spirit and sex have been
linked to our oppression, then they must also be linked in the
strategy toward our liberation” (177).
One of those strategies is tied to techniques of linguistic representation,
raising the question: how does one [Chicana(s)] (re)construct archcons that
are so deeply a part of the cultural grain? And, further, how are these changes
to be made without losing the patina of the culture? It is useful to turn again
to Moraga because she addresses this issue, as usual, head-on. In the essay,
“La Guera,” she engages the issue of the women’s movement and the
connection/non-connection “between women of different backgrounds and
sexual orientations” in that movement and its failure to address the serious
issues of oppression. Moraga insists that “the word ‘oppression’ has lost its
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34
power.” She says “...we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry” {Loving 54).7
Later in the same essay, she claims one of the fears for women is
to see how we have taken the values of our oppressor into our
hearts and turned them against ourselves and one another. We
are afraid to admit how deeply “the man’s” words have been
ingrained in us (57).
“Man” in this context can be read as a statement about the white race and the
male gender. But it is also an adjective describing a kind of language or even
syntax, “man’s words,” that which Barthes sees as having an Oedipal
“logic.” The referent for these “words,” in Moraga’s analysis, is rhetoric.
Rhetoric, with origins in the fifth century, is a method (frequently called an
art) of constructing a rigorous, structured argument intimately tied to logic
and grammar (OED 2335). The aims are eloquence and persuasion.
Logically, it found one of its perfect positions in law, in juridical discourse
where the Aristotelian concept o f rhetoric provides the ethical and moral
underpinning with its understanding that:
rhetoric ...[is] a manner of effectively organizing material for
the presentation of truth [my emphasis], for an appeal to the
intellect through speech, and... [is] distinct from POETICS, a
manner of composition presenting ideas emotionally and
imaginatively. (Homan & Harmon 428)
By linking rhetoric with truth and the unquestioned notion that truth is
possible, this definition supports a hierarchical method of looking at the
world, one in which Oedipal logic is always “on top.” This position, as well
as rhetoric’s historical association with empty oratory (Socrates once noted
that rhetoric was “the art of making great matters small and small things
7 This essay appeared in This Bridge Called My Back:Writing by Radical Women of Color, published in 1981.
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great.” (428)), makes it unsurprising that in Moraga’s eyes “rhetoric wasn’t
getting the job done.” How do you name the oppressor and rename the
oppressed in the oppressor’s language? Or, more poetically, how can you
change cultural discourse if you are stuck on the back of the train heading for
“truth” on tracks built by the train master? Moraga suggests that the solution
lies in poetics -- that addressing questions of oppressions and change is “the
job of poetry.”
Poetic language uses tropes, or figurative language, to sculpt meanings
that resonate rather than articulate, so that ideas and representations can be
multiple or multi-dimensional rather than singular and rigid. The New
Princeton Encyclopedia o f Poetry and Poetics defines metaphor as “a trope,
or figurative expression, in which a word or phrase is shifted from its normal
uses to a context where it evokes new meanings” (760). From Aristotle to
the Russian formalists, from semioticians to deconstructionists, there has
been disagreement about what constitutes poetics, especially around the
issues of “truth” and the cognitive science of language versus the verbal art
or aesthetics of poetics. In this study I make a claim for a Chicana poetics
that builds its tropes from cognitive understandings of the female body in
traditional culture in poetic performances that illustrate Alex Preminger’s
definition of a poetics which is
thickened into a palpable density, opacity, or texture.... The
reader is aware not only of a word’s meaning but also of word’s
bodies, the symbols becoming concretized objects in their own
right, things to be felt, valued and understood. (Preminger 933)
The word “concretized,” however, makes this definition problematic because
it limits a symbol’s ability to move, change, deconstruct, or become fluid in
the sense that Barthes means when he speaks of the potential of creating a
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new metalanguage. But the ideas of symbols becoming concretized come
from Hegel by way of formalist, New Criticism exponent, John Crowe
Ransom, where “the work itself,” concretized in its structure is the only thing
to be considered. What seems most useful in this definition is the notion of a
thickening and density of language, signs so “loaded” that they sometimes
resonate in a cultural space that seems too “bright” to contain and
simultaneously articulate them. Structuralist/formalist Roman Jakobson was
one of the critical voices whose ideas began to take apart the linguistic notion
of words as concretized symbols. For him, “the function of poetry is to point
out that the sign is not identical with its referent” (Erlich 181). Poetic
language for Jakobson and other formalists “resides in the poet’s distinctive
use of language....”
Poetic language ...becomes [in Jakobson’s linguistic theory] a
kind of specially intensified language in which signifiers act as
signifieds and which operates through it own internal laws,
appropriate to and reflective of its own nature. (214)
While poetry or poeticalness is part of all uses of languages in Jakobson’s
theory, “Poetry... represents almost the construction of a different kind of
language” (Hawkes 81).
Jakobson’s theory is that the study of literature leads to the study of
language, inevitably bringing one to semiotics and breaking up the path of
concrete meaning. Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics, particularly as
interpreted by Roland Barthes, free language, especially poetic language, to
resonate more completely in a signifying system. Barthes’ analysis of the
relation between the signifier and the sign— signifier empty and sign full—
seems especially relevant in examing how a poetics may be played out within
a fairly conscripted cultural understanding. According to Barthes, the sign is
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filled with signification generated though the writer’s or artist’s intent and
“society’s conventional modes and channels.” He expands his ideas to
consider myth and the way it operates as a sign in the first system and “a
mere signifier in the second” (131). As Hawkes explains, Barthes’ notion of
myth is not necessarily reflective of classical mythology, but rather of the
“system of images and beliefs which a society constructs...to sustain and
authenticate its sense of its own being” (131). So myth operates as a sign in
the first order, but gets emptied to become a signifier in the second. Barthes
takes this idea and applies it to the traditional terms “denotation” and
“connotation”. He uses the “science of signs,” semiotics, to describe
poetic/aesthetic language or signs, a language of connotation, based on first
order and second order signifying systems. Emptying and filling the second
order, or mythic, signs in the cultural signifying systems have generated and
sustained the archcons of la Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and la
Llorona. These are the same poetic methods that seem significant in
considering the recasting of these mythic discourses in a distinctive Chicana
poetics.
Semiotics and formalism are also helpful when considering the
relationship of the body to poetic or figurative language. All the senses of
the body are engaged in the process of semiosis, or producing and receiving
signs. According to Jakobson “the most socialized, abundant and pertinent
sign systems in human society are based on sight and hearing” (Hawkes 135).
He goes on to categorize them aligning the auditory with “symbolic” and
sight as “iconic.” But, finally, it is the body that forms the baseline. It is by
the body or through the body using “technological extensions,” that signs are
produced. But they are signs that are not exclusive to poetry, so the symbolic
and iconic cannot necessarily be called “poetic language,” unless such
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“aesthetic functions ” (Jakobson’s term) of language “subvert our
expectations” or, as Hawkes determines from his examples, “prove
disturbing” (140). For Umberto Eco this happens when such signifiers
exhibit a high degree of ambiguity. He says, “ambiguity must be defined as a
mode of violating the rules of the code” (Eco 262). The result, in effect, is to
construct another code, a code particular to art, that endlessly generates
meanings and breaks codes, moving from denotation to connotation, an
activity much like Barthes’ filling and emptying signs and signifiers. And,
art, like myth, Hawks stresses, “represents not the mere ‘embroidery’ of
reality, but a way of knowing it, of coping with it, and of changing if ’ [my
emphasis] (143). In Cherrie Moraga’s simile, “the mouth is like the cunt”
(Loving 142), the signs that comprise her poetic conceit are obviously
produced from her conceptual experience of herself, her body, and by
extension, other female bodies. In this discussion I will engage the argument
of simile versus metaphor, which goes back to Aristotle. Whether a simile is
“less than” a metaphor or comes from “fancy” rather than the higher order of
“imagination,” or whether, as the New Critics later claim, a metaphor is a
compressed simile, doesn’t seem crucial to this discussion. What is important
is to look at both kinds of figurative language, or tropes, as poetic language,
not only capable of changing understandings by subverting expectations, but
also through performance, of being culturally transformative. Useful in
subsequent chapters that examine particular works is work by George Lakoff
in linguistics, Mark Turner in English, and Mark Johnson in philosophy.
They consider the ways we construct and relate to our world through
metaphor. While such work has serious ramifications for understanding
political, social, and cultural issues, the paradigms they offer allow us to look
at poetry through a different lens.
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Moraga’s figure or “turn,” quoted above, demonstrates first what
Lakoff and Johnson call “orientational metaphors” with “experiential bases.”
This is Moraga’s experience of her own body, not that of what other
feminists are called the “patriarchal mother.” This experience is undeniably
subversive because female genitals or female sex is, for good women and
girls, culturally “unspeakable.” The simile is incompatible with the culturally
understood “up is good and down is bad” comparison. The mouth is up,
almost at the top of the head, while the genitals are “down there.” In almost
all cultures, Lakoff points out, up is good, down is bad; rational is up and
good, but the emotional is down and bad. While work is still being done to
understand the actual experiential basis, what is known is that the metaphor is
“linked via an experiential base” (Lakoff and Johnson 20). The violent and
subversive nature of the trope’s language is also clear in the choice of the
word “cunt,” because of its regular usage as a derogatory term used against
women. The simile is also highly ambiguous. Both the mouth and cunt can
be read as sexual organs, or both as betrayers or the betrayed. Do we hear the
resonance of la Malinche the translator/concubine or betrayer/whore? Does
the very ambiguity change how we read the reality being suggested? The
fact that this figurative or poetic language comes from a woman’s body-- not
just the surface constructions of “female beauty,” but the actual body
suggests the possibility of a change in understanding or knowledge about that
body. Maria Teresa Marrero addresses the cultural problematics that
Chicanas or Latinas experience in relation to their bodies. In her unpublished
dissertation, Self-representation in Chicana and Latino/a Theater and
Performance Art, she writes that
Latina dramatic characters are portrayed as perceiving their
bodies in relationship to attitudes formed within the family.
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The mother is in the role of what Susan Rubin Suleiman calls
‘the patriarchal mother.’ This authority is not determined by
the presence of a dominant male but by the Mother's notions
about how a woman ‘ought to be’ in order to appeal to a
categorical, non-specific Male. (65)
The woman writing about the relationship of mouth to cunt is not responding
to family attitudes based on “how a woman ought to be.” Moraga’s simile is
produced out of the sexual body, or the knowledge of an “authentic” female
sexuality, thereby subverting accepted cultural constructions and
consequently cultural metaphoric understandings of women. The writer
does “violence to the language” by choosing a male derogatory term for
female genitalia, and by using it herself, simultaneously wipes off the smut
and delivers the violent connotation.8 Moraga’s poetic language comes from
her conceptual understanding of her body and her willingness to take the risk
of not only “seeing” her body and sexual understandings outside cultural
norms for women, but also of constructing her figurative language around
that understanding. As Lakoff and Turner point out,
basic conceptual metaphors are part o f the common conceptual
apparatus shared by members of a culture. We usually
understand them in terms of common experiences. And they are
widely conventionalized in language. (Lakoff 51)
Poets can choose to use them in this way, or expand and
condense them by
stepjping] outside of the ordinary ways we think
metaphorically...to destabilize them and thus reveal their
inadequacies for making sense or reality. (51)
8Changing the context in which a term is used and so redefining it or changing its affect through usage is similar to what
frequently happens in “street language.” For example, the words “bitch” or “bitching” are derogatory terms used for
women that connote loose women, whores, and breeders. They were taken up by young people in United States and
used by men as well as women about women to mean “cool,” great, neat, outstanding, and so forth.
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They can also use these basic conceptual metaphors to present through
metaphoric language new realities that reveal different conceptual
experiences of the world. The experience that Moraga presents in the line
“the mouth is like the cunt” suggests a new, profoundly subversive reality.
The line resonates with the lines of another poem in the same volume, “The
Voices of the Fallers:”
Listen.
Put your ear deep
down
through the opening
of my throat and
listen. {Loving 2)
The new reality is the request to listen, not just to female desire, but to
brown, lesbian desire. The metaphor insists that you listen at that physical
place where lesbian desire is both felt, is consummated, and is spoken.
Female sexual agency in this poetic idiom is not located outside the body,
attached to someone else or dependent on someone else’s desire, but
inside...and can be heard, if you listen.
The ways in which poetic “language” in Chicana poetry, performance
art, and the plastic arts, are being used to recast Mexican-American cultural
archcons, thereby reconstructing the female and transforming woman’s
cultural discourse are the primary concerns of this project. In Chapter Two
these archcons are contextualized and historized to demonstrate their
construction in tradition and faith. Chapter Three analyzes Chicana work
coming from the 60’ and 70’s that insists on the necessity of the female body
as the subject and metaphoric reality for production of desire, children, and
texts. The chapter focuses on Alma Villanueva’s “Mother, May I,” Yolanda
Lopez’s triptych on the Virgin o f Guadalupe and Ester Hernandez’ La Virgen
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de Guadalupe Defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos . Chapter Four
considers more recent, contemporary material in which la Malinche and la
Llorona archcons are literally and self-consciously recast, particularly in
work by Luci Corpi, Carmen Tafolla, Angela de Hoyos, Alicia Gaspar de
Alba, Cordelia Candelaria, artist Yreina D. Cervantez, and performance
pieces La Boda by Taller de Arte Fronterizo and Heat Your Own by Raquel
Salinas. The analysis will focus on the use of metaphoric language to subvert
traditional cultural understanding and the possibility of that “new”
understanding creating a discourse of female fetishism that articulates female
sexual agency. Chapter Five concentrates on Chicana lesbians beginning
with Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua whose work both theoretical and
artistic construct a ground against which the work of Terry Mendoza and
Monica Palacios plays out provocatively. Here the combination of the
archcons as female fetish and lesbian desire appear to provide dramatic
opportunities to demonstrate female sexual agency and Chicana cultural
transformations of female representations.
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43
CHAPTER TWO: ARCHCONS: THE BACKSTORIES
I was the object of worship
of all my country.
...The popular superstition
reached such a pitch
that they adored as a goddess
the idol they had made with their own hands.
Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz
La Malinche, la Llorona, y La Virgen de Guadalupe cuentan los
cuentos de las mujeres. Their stories and iconography are the
representational garments of Mexican and Mexican-American women,
woven by men, worn by women. The complex weave is multilingual,
multicultural, and multireligious, expressing indigenous, pre-Columbian,
Spanish, and Catholic religious practices; Spanish, mestizo, Anglo, North
American Indian, indigenous, and pre-Columbian culture; and the social
politics of criollo, mestizo, indio, Anglo, as well as Spanish, relationships.
These encounters and practices have been facilitated, translated, and
documented through pictograms, Nahuatl and other indigenous languages,
and Spanish and English. While the combinations of influences and their
reflections represent cultural aggregates, what the discourses have in
common are that men have told the stories9 and that the objects of the stories
are women. Women have served to keep the political, social, and religious
needs of men and the church viable, to ensure that love of country remains
tied to the church, and to ensure that women accept the burden of their
bodies, marriage, birth, and betrayal as a “natural” part of their experience.
This chapter will provide a condensed account of the historical and cultural
9 In Spanish, where nouns are gendered, cuento is male. An interesting curiosity is that the second meaning according
to the Velaquez Spanish and English Dictionary is “butt-end of a pike.”
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44
context for la Malinche, la Llorona, y La Virgen de Guadalupe in order to
provide the backstories against which contemporary Chicana poetics have
recast these three female archcons. Only la Malinche has a historical origin
and exists as oral and written history. She is present today in that historical
context as the good and bad woman and as a linguistic presence very much
alive in modem Spanish parlance. La Llorona is the bad and suffering
mother. Hers is a myth with a genealogy that reaches back to the Aztecs or
earlier and returns to the present with versions that reflect contempory times,
places, and social cultures. This bad mother is also considered a bruja or
witch, as opposed to a curandera or healer. Children are told if they do not go
to bed, she will come and get them; the story is similar, but very different, to
English versions of the “boogeyman” or, in this case, the“boogeywoman.” Of
all three archcons, La Virgen de Guadalupe has a charisma which carries
across religious, historical, political, cultural/social, and geographic lines. In
her image, whether “painted” on what is considered the original tilma of
Juan Diego, or on home altars, retablos, bottle caps, or Chevies, she is
represented as a powerful, perfect, asexual woman and mother.
La Malinche
The myth o f la Malinche has been created and recreated from a history
remembered and retold in oral and then written traditions. The earliest
version of this la Malinche cuento is carried into our present historical
narrative through the conduit of several languages, primarily Nahuatl
pictograms, written Nahuatl, and Spanish. La Malinche has always been a
representation existing through translation as a sign with a signified and
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45
signifier that depend on how she is positioned in these narratives, the
construction of the narratives themselves, and the context within which those
constructions take place. The one consistency in the discourses created by
los cuentos de la Malinche is the embodiment in la Malinche of perceived
power (for good and/or evil). The discourses are most frequently
characterized by polarized representations such as: Indian whore/Indian
noblewoman, sexual temptress/sexual object, traitor/captive, war
counselor/dupe, mother of the race/bad mother, and la lengua/la oreja (the
tongue/the ear).
La Malinche as la lengua/la oreja seems to be the representation
typical of the earliest extant texts, particularly the Florentine Codex or
General History o f the Things o f New Spain written by Fray Bernardino de
Sahagun1 0 . Finished about 38 years after the conquest, it was originally
written in Nahuatl from oral and pictographic narratives1 1 provided to Fray de
Sahagun by native informants. Pictographs now available are not Sahagun's
originals, but copies of facsimiles by Paso y Troncoso made by Genaro
Lopez (completed in 1894). Versions of Sahagun's earlier drafts and revisions
are known as the Madrid Codices. According to Arthur J.O. Anderson and
Charles E. Drabble in a 1955 translation of the Codex from the Nahuatl to
1 1 1 The Florentine Codex, according to the original translator, Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, was written in Tlatilulco
(Anderson & Dribble 1). Sahagun was one of the earliest Europeans to record the history of the Mexican indigenous
world. This work was done after the conquest and based on oral interviews as well as codices and pictoglyphics
(Cypress 15). In her book, La Malinche in Mexican Literature, Sandra Messinger Cypress sees the Malinche figure
existing as a sign that “functions as a continually enlarging palimpsest o f Mexican cultural identity”(15). While in many
ways this seems an apt metaphor, palimpsest usually suggets an awareness o f the erasure o f narrative. In the case o f
Malinche I would suggest that the operation o f contemporary translation acted more like a “delete key” than an erasure,
frequently implying a sign unburdened by the dusty political and contextual fingerprints o f others.
11 He was provided with 10-12 native elderly informants conversant in aboriginal practices and beliefsand given
information in the form o f paintings which they explained verbally. Four Latin scholars wrote the explanations near the
paintings in Nahuatl.
Notes by Drabble and Anderson indicate that the pictorial material changed its role as the manuscript was modified.
As the Nahuatl text became more standardized, there was less dependence on pictograms with the result that
pictographic material in The Florentine Codex become illustrative of text rather than the pictorial source of texts
(Introduction 20).
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46
English, The Florentine and Madrid Codices are considered the best sources
of their kind (xx).
La Malinche makes her initial appearance in the final volume (XII,
“The Conquest”) of the Florentine Codex. Unfortunately, the 1955
translation was published without using the drawings to illustrate the text.
Rather, they have been grouped together in separate sections. This, plus the
consistent translation of Malintzin (Nahuatl) into Marina (the Spanish
baptismal name given Malintzin) suggests a bias on the part of the
translators. The valorizing of linguistic text over pictorial text and the
leaning toward the Euro-political/religious and away from the “other”
Indio/pagan/exotic imply editorial bias.1 2 The issue of naming also suggests
trading on particular representations in order to “spin” historical accounts. In
La Malinche in Mexican Literature, Sandra Messinger Cypress retells the
story told in Bernal Diaz’ recollection of The Conquest o f New Spain. As
Diaz remembers, the Indians referred to Cortes himself as El Malinche.
They called Cortes Malinche. The reason why he received this
name was that Dona Marina was always with him, especially
when he was visited by ambassadors or Caciques, and she
always spoke to them in the Mexican language, so they gave
Cortes the name o f ‘Marina’s Captain’, which was shortened to
Malinche. (27)
Malinche in this story names both ends of such polarities as man/woman,
conquer/conquered, lengua/boca, agent/object, and so on, collapsing them
12 Because the translation was in part sponsored by the University o f Utah and the School of American Research and
published by the University o f Utah Press, and because one o f the authors carries a well-known Utah Mormon surname
(Anderson), one has to question how that context influenced the translation.
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47
linguistically into one. It is unclear how “Marina’s Captain” is shortened to
Malinche and Diaz offers no further explanation. The rest of Diaz’ story
does, however, support Cortes’ position as “Marina’s Captain.”
This linguistic androgyny does reappear in the dance of the voladores,
or flying acrobats from the tribes of the Sierra Madre Oriental. Traditionally
this dance uses four flyers, but the Otomi usually use six, including a man-
woman Malinche. As performed in Mexico, the multicultural dance, Los
Matachines (its traditions have origins in Moorish Spain, Catholic Spain,
Catholic Mexico, indigenous Mexico, as well as the American Southwest),
includes the character la Malinche who is represented by a boy dressed as a
girl. More interesting than this rather unremarkable theatrical cross-dressing
is the nature of that dress as seen in New Mexican versions of the dance.
Originally, a part of Spanish drama, Los Matachines dramatizes the expulsion
of the Moors from Spain in the 12th century. According to Bobbie Salinas-
Norman in Indo-Hispanic Folk Art Traditions,
The conquistados' updated renderings of the matachines
introduced la Malinche as a symbol of purity--the Virgin Mary,
to emphasize the superiority of Christianity over paganism. (9)
La Malinche’ s traditional southwestern costume is a white Holy Communion
dress. In this dance she becomes Dona Marina, the symbol of the conquered,
baptized Indian— the “other” made “white” through the sacraments of the
church. The Spanish name does suggest a relationship with Cortes and the
Aztecs quite different than that found in the Florentine Codex. In the Lienzo
de Tlaxcala, begun around 1550, La Malinche appears a number o f times. No
original manuscript exists and there are obvious stylistic differences in the
various copies, but what remains consistent is Dona Marina’s position beside
Cortes rather than between Cortes and the Aztecs, or Moctezuma. In an 18th
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48
century copy, she is seen walking beside his horse during the battle of
Cholula. In another more complex drawing she is engaging in her role as
translator. The page is divided in two with the Aztecs on one side and the
Spanish on the other. Dona Marina stands on the Spanish side.
These early “texts” demonstrate the claim, which Cypress works out in
detail, that “for each reader la Malinche is a textual sign loaded with
presuppositions that influence the reader’s relationship with the sign and its
text”(5). This, of course, is the way of all texts. They are created out of the
writer’s/translator’s context and are recreated by the performer, the
reader/translator, and/or critic. The degree of agency within these
relationships is based on real or perceived power. Malinzin’s initial
representations in the Florentine Codex seem to include multiple positions as
hearer-speaker / writer-translator. As hearer-speaker she engages in a
performance of text. As translator she rewrites and performs again. Such a
representation appears to have control of discourse in “real time.” But
whereas such control usually implies power, la Malinche has no agency, no
defined subject position; she is acted on and her acting as translator depends
on being acted upon. The only measure of agency comes from her potential
to nuance the translation.
She makes her first appearance in the Florentine Codex in Chapter
Nine as the translator for the Spaniards where a messenger announces her to
Moctezuma:
And it was told, discovered, shown, set forth, announced, and
given as assurance to Moctezuma that a woman of our people
here, was bringing them (the Spaniards) here and interpreted
(for them). Her name (was) Marina; Teticpac (was her home).
There at the coast they had first come upon and taken her. (25)
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In the opening strains of this story she is initially characterized in multiple
subject positions. Is she a loyal citizen bringing the enemy into the fold and
providing linguistic weapons? Is she a citizen of another village and tribe,
and as such does she have any loyalty to the Aztecs whose cruelty and policy
of extreme tributes have winnowed down their friends and backers? She has
been given to Cortes as a slave, so that anything she does for him she does
from that position. Within these representations she always remains the
object acted on by those in perceived power. In the pictogram, she stands in
the middle, between two Indians and Cortes. On both sides, gestures are
made towards her, linguistically trapping her between the colonizer and the
indigenous. She appears physically bigger than either the Indians or Cortes,
and her stance and gestures--that is her body language— convey “confidence.”
This same poise is evident in the pictogram that accompanies Chapter
Sixteen. Although she was said to be bigger than Cortes, her size and stance
may be more a reflection of the artist’s notion of her central function in that
part o f the story than her literal size. In the first meeting between Cortes and
Moctezuma, the “flutes” which indicate conversation show language going
into her ears from Cortes and out of her mouth to Moctezuma. The
accompanying narrative makes this interpretation:
when Moctezuma had ended his address, which he had directed
to the Marquis, Marina explained and interpreted for him. And
when the Marquis had heard Moctezuma’s words, then he
spoke to Marina. (42)
The Marquis (Cortes) doesn’t (can’t) speak directly to Moctezuma, but only
to or through la Malinche to Moctezuma. She is the medium of transmission.
In Chapter Eighteen the Spaniards, having entered Mexico, or
Tenochtitlan, for the first time, proceed to enter “Moctezuma’s own store
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50
house...a place called Totocalco.” Here “they scattered, bustling everywhere,
as if greedy and covetous”(47). They take all the gold and other precious
goods, tear off “the rulers’ attire” and toss “all the precious feathers” into a
pile in the courtyard.
Then Marina [was] summoned, and ordered, called, all the
noblemen. She got upon the rooftop, on a parapet. She said:
O Mexicans, come hither! The Spaniards have suffered great
fatigue. Bring here food, fresh water, and all which is needed.
For they are already tired and exhausted; they are in need; they
are spent and in want. Why do you not wish to come? It
appeareth that you are angered. (47)
Is she surprised that they appear angry? Or is she translating for Cortes? The
pictogram shows speech flutes going down from the parapet from la
Malinche to an Aztec nobleman. Cortes stands with her, his hands reaching
out to her and she points to Cortes as she speaks (see Figure 1). A plausible
reading is that Cortes is curious about the reason for their anger. After all,
they are only barbarians and should expect to have their belongings savaged.
But, the problem is the position in which this places la Malinche. Because
certainly if she is really surprised at their anger, she has identified against the
Aztecs in a way which could be interpreted as traitorous. Because the Aztecs
were always at war with other tribes to gain human and material tribute, it is
also possible that la Malinche, if a member of another tribe would not have
necessarily been predisposed to be friendly towards Cortes’ enemy.
Pictograms in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala Manuscript show la Malinche in
a physical relationship to Cortes that suggests support for such a reading.
These representations, however, are compromised by their nature as copies.
This work exists only through facsimiles, many of which have been lost.
Cypress’ study reproduces four of the drawings that are held by the Archer
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51
M. Huntington Art Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin. In these
copies (the style of which suggests they were all done by the same hand), la
Malinche is shown next to, or by the side of, Cortes. In one particular scene
Cortes stands between la Malinche and Moctezuma. On the la Malinche side
and behind her are the Spanish troops and their horses. In another facsimile
of this manuscript, la Malinche is shown next to Cortes and his horse during
the battle of Cholula. An eighteenth century copyist point of view has
constructed representations that quite literally show la Malinche taking “a
side” with the “other.” To be by the side of Cortes is metonymically to be on
the side of Spain which is, in turn, to be a traitor to Mexico.
It is quite likely that this point of view derives from the vision o f the
conquest and la Malinche presented by Bernal Diaz in The Conquest o f New
Spain. In this narrative, begun around 1562, when Diaz was in his seventies,
and completed with a final note when he was 84, he recounts his version of
the conquest in which he was a significant participant and of which he was
the last survivor. Diaz not only gives la Malinche a “side,” that of the
Spanish, he fills out the Nahuatl representations. In his hands, she becomes a
woman whose role in the conquest was invaluable. He characterizes her as a
woman who “possessed such manly valor that...she betrayed no weakness but
a courage greater than that of a woman” (Diaz xx). She is also the woman
who, as consort to Cortes, produces the first mestizo. In Diaz’s reading, she is
also, as in the dance of the voladores, a man/woman
Her image as betrayer seems to have its origins in the events unfolding
when the Indians of Cholula launched their plot against the Spanish during
Cortes’ first march to Tenochtitlan (Mexico). Diaz tells of la Malinche taking
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52
m i & m n
M .
o) to) (o ) (o) < i
I
Figure 1. Two panels in the series of pictograms seen in the Lienzo de
Tlaxcala Manuscript show la Malinche or Dona Marina in her role as Cortes’
translator. The small “flutes” indicate translated speech.
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53
the role of spy and pretending compliance with an old Cholulan woman. The
woman assures la Malinche that marriage with her son is a sure escape from
death. Pretending interest in these plans, la Malinche discovers the plot to
kill the Spaniards. She rejects the marriage offer and warns Cortes of the
ambush plans. He turns those plans back on the Cholulans, and in his account
Diaz reports that Doha Marina was right beside Cortes, translating his speech
which ended with the proclamation that “such treachery should not go
unpunished, and that they must die for their crime” (199). The troops then
shot into the packed courtyard, killing many Cholulan Indians. As Cypress
points out, because the Indians were not all one people, the notion of betrayal
would have depended on tribal alliances. Cypress suggests that la M alinche’ s
more significant action is her rejection of an Indian suitor:
Her renunciation of an Indian male is perhaps the most serious
of the charges that cling to her image; it becomes a metaphoric
act signifying the repudiation of the native in favor of the
foreign. Her role as mistress to Cortes and her marriage to Juan
Jaramillo provide further substantiation of the paradigmatic
behavior called malinchismo today. (35)
Rejection of a tribal alliance “clings” to her image and is later driven
home by a developing nationalism that, in its desire to shake itself free of
Spain, looks back at Mexico’s pre-Hispanic Indian past for its roots. Her sin
was mating with Spain. In rejecting her own indigenous people, la Malinche
gets “fucked” when she becomes a useful pawn in colonial politics, and later
a political token in the nationalists’ quest for separation from Spain in the
nineteenth century. The result is her entanglement in a patriarchal,
heterosexual, and political discourse that both constructs and reflects the
signs, woman/land and man/conquest. Cypress notes that immediately
following the Mexican War of Independence there was “a need to incorporate
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54
the pre-Hispanic past into a concept of national identity and national cultural
patterns” (42). The 1826 anonymously published novel Xicotencatl (or
Jicotencal) began that cultural archeology.
Cypress claims that this “work offers the first known presentation of la
Malinche in the post independence period”(44). Such a representation makes
two critical moves. First, by calling her only Dona Marina, she is
Europeanized and, second, by taking away “one of the major functions of
Dona Marina as la lengua” (45), it rips out her tongue. Europeanized, she
becomes, according to Cypress, both the snake and Eve in a dual negative
role which allows her to “instigate evil” and allows that evil “to enter
paradise” (49). Her sexuality is the critically negative component that links
these roles— temptress and la chingada, or the “fucked one.” This sexuality
is “clearly not supported by the Spanish chronicles,” according to Cypress
(55). Dona Marina's pregnancy by Cortes with the mestizo child is
considered proof of her sexual deceit m Xicotencatl. “Her negative role,”
says Cypress, “is underlined by the juxtaposing of Dona Marina against
Teutila, the good Indian woman who “embodies the virtuous and saintly
woman, the representation of the Virgin of Guadalupe” (55).1 3
The picture presented in what is called Mexico’s first novel,
Xicotencatl, is of la Malinche as the evil one, la Chingada. Although of
unknown authorship, its popularity can be extrapolated by its use in colonial
cities such as Puebla as the basis for numerous playwriting contests in the
early 1800s (Cypress 41). The plots of these plays continued the novel’s
Marina’s sexual positions relative to the snake of Adam and Eve place her in highly contradictory positions. In Indian
mythology the snake is a “positive symbol of Quetzalcoatl,”(l 85) and the skirt o f Coatlicue, the Great Goddess is made
o f snakes. As Eve in the Judeo-Christian tradition she is responsible for getting the Indians “thrown out of paradise” or
Mexico. Motherhood is a positive image for the Virgin, but for La Chingada it can be seen as a symbol for carrying “a
bad seed,"one tainted by the European.
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55
trope of Dona Marina as the “negative foil to the Indian Teutila” (44).
Octavio Paz will mirror this literary representation almost 150 years later in
constructing his paradigm of the Mexican character. He appears to have
taken his lead from his grandfather, Ireneo Paz, who wrote many novels
based on historical themes. Two of Ireneo Paz’s novels based on the
conquest, Amor y Suplicio and Dona Marina, present the conquest in terms of
love and sex. The elder Paz’s metaphor for the conquest was that of a sexual
encounter. Cypress reads this as a nationalist attempt to bring the Indian and
Spanish elements together. La Malinche becomes “the key subtext for
female-male relations in Mexico”(70). It is the culturally underwritten
heterosexual and macho love story that makes the trope work in a nationalist
reading. By giving la Malinche the role of Mother of the Mexican people,
Paz raises her onto the dais of goddess, but this “sacredness as the mother of
the Mexican people” (77) will be denied by his grandson, Octavio. Ireneo
Paz concentrates on la Malinche’ s positive qualities, thus creating a persona
who “exhibits modesty and sexual restraint,” a representation that follows
that established by Bernal Diaz. Cortes, however, is “portrayed as sexually
active” (78). The theme of overriding love and sexuality between these two
figures from different cultures is repeated in novels, drama, poetry, and the
plastic arts into the twentieth century. In time the la Malinche
characterization becomes increasingly negative; she is a metaphor for Mexico
as a paradise violated, the concubine or whore of the Spanish, the Mexican
“Eve” who sells out paradise and produces the love-child or bastard mestizo.
(The ambiguity o f identity in this figure forms an analogue to what might be
considered a border schizophrenia for men and women dealing with their
Mexican/ American national, sexual, and cultural identities.) It took a native
(grand)son to drive the negative representation o f la Malinche not only into
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the national but also into the international consciousness of the Mexican
character.
In his book of essays, The Labyrinth o f Solitude, Octavio Paz is
considered by many to be a kind of Malinche, in his work as both translator
and traitor to Mexico and its people. He deftly uses linguistics to consider a
cultural/ historical/political grito that both celebrates and denigrates. It is a
grito or shout that, according to Paz, is “a phrase we use when anger, joy or
enthusiasm cause us to exalt our condition as Mexicans: Viva Mexico, hijos
de la chingada! ”(74). He translates Chingada as “one of the Mexican
representations of Maternity” and then engages in linguistic politics to define
her as “fucked” or violated, by a man because, Paz says, “the verb (chingar)
is masculine” (77). Since only the feminine can receive the violence,
according to Paz, la Malinche is “the symbol of this violation” (86). Paz’s
interpretation o f her representation not only implicates all Mexican women,
but comes to signify a feminized Mexico that no longer translates into a land
supporting her people, but a whore for the masculine “other” (America and
American companies) that penetrates her borders. Certainly by the time this
collection of essays was written in 1961, la Malinche had no redeeming
qualities. This is an Eve who “bites” forbidden fruit and sells out. What is
most crucial for this study is not Paz’s analysis or even his conclusions,
which generally support this study's understanding of the juridical discourse
for women that la Malinche represents. (Rather it is the way that Paz's
discussion has been reified by critics such as Jose Limon, who refers to Paz
as “the foremost analyst” of “key Mexican symbols” and this particular essay
as “authoritative and validating”) (Limon, 401). Sandra Cypress uncovers
the problem when she refers to Paz's “masculine perspective,” but she
doesn’t examine the issue in any depth and, in fact, calls her disagreement
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with Paz only a “modification.” The issue? In a patriarchal society, such as
the one Cortes represents, and the Indian society la Malinche was bom into
would the actions she performed have been voluntary? Other questions also
suggest themselves. Why must Mexico be feminized to be violated? Are
rape and the possession of a vagina the only ways to be violated? Is this
linguistic polarization necessary? By keeping the metaphor heterosexual, Paz
concretizes those polarities. But to engage with the other possibilities, such as
male/male sexual intercourse, someone has to be penetrated, and “to be
penetrated” is, as Leo Bersani stresses in his article, Is the Rectum a Grave, is
“to abdicate power” (Bersani 212). The aim is clearly power, whether the
penetration is done with a penis, a bullet, or the dollar. To be sodomized or
taken through vaginal intercourse renders the woman, the man, and the
country powerless.
The relationship of power to la Malinche is dramatically illustrated in
Jose Clemente Orozco's mural in the National Preparatory School in Mexico
City. The most striking part of the image is the absolute contrast in color--
Cortes is the quintessential white man with his great white arm reaching out
across la Malinche’ s dark submissive/passive body. Both are naked, but only
la Malinche has a secondary sexual characteristic visible, her left breast with
its one large dark brown nipple. Their right hands are clasped together. Critic
Benjamin Keen sees the Cortes posture as protective: “The conqueror, a
superb figure of a man, extends a protective hand toward a thoroughly Indian
la Malinche, and their union clearly represents the union of Spanish and
Indian elements”( Keen 531). This la Malinche is protected, perhaps, but that
protection includes domination by this superior white man and results in the
la Malinche figure filling a secondary position. Her second-class ranking is
revealed by the postures of the figures, the white/dark contrast in skin (in the
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Anglo European Christian world light is heaven bound and dark moves
toward the lower realms), and the sexual passiveness of the la Malinche
figure. In this second position she can be read as the sexual object that is
prevented from having any agency through the patriarchal or colonizer’s
“protection.” The representations of Paz and Orozco are both informed by
this perspective.
“The Malinche-Cortes paradigm,” says Cypress, “remains the most
powerful configuration of sociosexual relations in Mexico.” This paradigm,
however, hasn’t remained in Mexico. It has traveled across political borders
into the United States where a significant portion of the North American
southwest and California is populated by indigenous “Mexicans” as well as
by a border population and later immigrants. (Most of this territory was
Mexico until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed in 1848, which
made the Rio Grande the southern border of Texas and ceded California and
New Mexico to the United States.) Twentieth-century North American and
even British writers have produced historical romances, romantic novelas,
novels, and even poetry based on this paradigm o f la Malinche as
colonizer/seducer and the sexual temptress and/or the sexually available
object (Mexico, paradise, Eden), the brown “other”-th e erotic exotic.1 4 It is a
literary brush which well may have painted the stereotypical representations
that found their way into early and even later representations of Mexican and
Mexican-American women in American popular culture.
14 The following list is typical (but not exhaustive) o f the books that illustrate not only a dominant cultural fascination
with the primitive “other,” but also part of the cultural cross-talk to which the British, Americans, Mexican-Americans
and Chicano/as are exposed. Among these texts are Malinche (Dona Marina) by Haniel Long, 1939; Cortes The
Conqueror by Elizabeth Cannon Porter, 1944; Malinche or Farewell to Myths, by Hilde Kruger, 1948; The Golden
Princess by Alexander Baron,1954; Cortez and Marina, by Edison Marshall, 1963; Malinche and Cortes by Margaret
Shedd, 1971; and La Chingada by Jane Lewis Brandt, 1979.
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La Llorona
Some critics and ethnographers have been lured into connecting la
Malinche and la Llorona. And, no doubt the two archcons do exhibit
similarities, particularly in their relationship to children. Don Martin, the
mestizo child that la Malinche bears Cortes, was taken from her and raised
in Spain. Hence, as Sandra Cypress explains,
The image of La Llorona, or weeping woman, at one point
became conflated with the image of La Malinche because [both
images] share a sadness relating to lost children. In popular
mythology La Malinche serves as a synecdoche for all Indian
women who lament the fate of their progeny bom to the
Spanish conquistadors. (7)
Certainly a connection could also be drawn, especially in folk tales, between
these two women judged as “bad.” But there are other significant differences
that preclude that relationship being characterized as “conflated.”
The first difference is the mythic origins of each. La Malinche’ s story
arises out of a historical context. In other words, we have some records that
lead us to believe, rather strongly, that a particular woman lived who
translated for, had sexual relations with, and bore a child to Cortes. In
contrast, la Llorona is a tale, a purely fictional representation. For the most
part she has existed only in the oral narratives of Mexican culture. If she has
a birthplace, it is in the bad omens, or evil omens, or wonders (depending on
which codex is being examined and which group of natives is telling the
story) that were reportedly seen two years before the Spanish arrived on the
east coast of Mexico. What remains constant in the la Llorona story is its
basic structure. For the natives la Llorona is the sixth bad omen. In
Sahagun’s account they tell him
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the people heard a weeping woman night after night. She
passed by in the middle of the night, wailing and crying out in a
loud voice: ‘My children, we must flee far away from this city!’
At other times she cried: ‘My children, where shall I take you?’
(Leon-Portillo 6)
According to Leon-Portillo, the Tlaxcalans were allies of the Spanish so it is
not surprising that Diego Munoz Camargo's account in The Historia de
Tlaxcala takes up the Christian tradition and calls the omens wonders. The
sixth wonder was that:
the people heard in the night the voice of a weeping woman,
she sobbed and sighed and drowned herself in her tears. This
woman cried: ‘O my sons, we are lost...!’ Or she cried: ‘O my
sons, where can I hide you...?’ (10)
This omen, or wonder, could very well be directly related to Cihuacoatl, “an
ancient earth goddess, who wept and cried out in the night,” according to
Leon-Portillo. He also strongly suggests Cihuacoatl as "the antecedent of the
la Llorona... who is still heard in rural Mexico” (12). Alfredo Mirande and
Evangelina Enriquez present an excellent compact summary of la Llorona's
evolution, citing an even earlier mention by Sahagun of wild beasts, or
women, whose cries in the night were considered ill omens. They use the
work of Alfonso Caso to flesh out her connection to Cihuacoatl, who
sanctified women who died in childbirth:
On days of the calendar dedicated to these women, they
descended to the earth wailing and moaning in the night air.
They appeared at crossroads and were considered ill omens that
could prove fatal to women and young children. (Mirande 31)
During the colonial period all of these witches and beasts were
condensed into one woman, la Llorona. She left the crossroads and came
into the streets of Mexico City, “emitting penetrating and prolonged moans”
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(32). Wearing a white veil, she was associated with crimes of passion. She
flew across the rooftops into the cemeteries, and “entered, became
submerged, and finally disappeared beneath the waters of a nearby lake”
(32). Whether an oracle, a mother, or a widow, she is first and always a
woman who doesn’t measure up, a woman who has “strayed from her proper
role as mother, wife, mistress, lover, or patriot” (33).
In most contemporary versions of the folktale, the children (not just
sons) are already lost, and the woman has killed them herself, usually by
drowning them. In most versions of the tale she is dressed in white and
wanders the riverbanks at night calling and crying for the children.1 5 Instead
of being an oracle of bad things to come, she has become the bad thing, the
bad mother. Mirande and Enriquez cite a California version of the story in
which the children are killed so the woman can live her wild life (33).
Because the narrative contains the deed, as well as explicit and implicit
warnings about behavior, it can function simultaneously as a cautionary tale
and an exemplum— women are bad, they are capable of doing bad things to
children, here is what they can do and here is what this particular woman did.
This story in its many guises is alive and well today in Mexico in the United
States among many Mexican-Americans.1 6 The details reflect women’s
positions relative to issues o f urbanization, poverty, class and power. In 24
percent of the cases surveyed in South Texas, poverty is the reason given for
la Llorona killing the children. Ed Walraven, in a 1991 Western Folklore
15In his painting “The Revolution,” painted in 1946, Manuel Rodriguez Lozan, represents the women o f Mexico
weeping for their dead as seven women dressed in white veils standing in the night against a stark landscape. One group
cries with their hands raised toward heaven, on the other side hands are dropped in anguish, and between them a woman
holds a dead warrior, a Christ, in her lap and kisses his wounds (stigmata).
*^The story also exists with slight variations in other Latin American countries. I took an informal survey in two class of
approximately 60 adults in one Torrance English as a Second Language class that revealed students from Mexico as well
as other Latin American countries were familiar with the story and had heard it from mothers or grandmothers when
they were children.
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article, “Evidence for a Developing Variant of la Llorona,” explains that, as
the Hispanic population moves to the cities, the bad mother in the story will
reflect the real conditions in which mothers find themselves. This la Llorona
might leave her babies in dumpsters and then cry for them at the city landfill.
Samples of urban la Llorona stories demonstrate the ways in which place and
class have an impact upon basic representation. For example, the city forms
both backdrop and foreground for a series of la Llorona stories examined by
Bess Lomax Hawes in a 1968 article titled “La Llorona in Juvenile Hall.” La
Llorona tales were the largest segment in a group of ghost tales told by
inmates of Las Palmas School for Girls operated by the County of Los
Angeles. Most of the tellers were Mexican-American girls and the majority
of the ghosts were identified as la Llorona. Sightings were in urban
locations these girls knew or within Juvenile Hall itself. La Llorona
was seen in Griffith Park, Elysian Park, Calabasas, Canoga Park, Calvary and
Evergreen Cemetery. Rose V., 15, at the time, and bom in Mexico, relates
that:
La Llorona has long hair and walks around crying. I heard
from the counselors at Juvie that she had two kids that she
drowned because they were bad. She drowned them in Tijuana.
She attacks bad kids in Juvie. They say this is true. (Hawes
162)
Another la Llorona story is drawn directly from the barrio experience of
Debbie R in Los Angeles:
She had two kids who she threw in the L. A. River and killed.
She would never have peace, so she killed herself. She looks
for her kids in hospitals, Juvenile Hall, and any place there are
pregnant girls. Around water she tries to get children away
from girls. (165)
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In each case, la Llorona’ s narrative reflects the history and circumstances of
the teller or group of tellers, but those specifics of place and class are hung on
an armature that maintains the story’s underlying shape of a bad woman who
kills her children. La Malinche’ s character and representation as woman also
has an internal integrity. She is fixed (perhaps trapped, even imprisoned), in a
historical context consistently open to political and cultural interpretation and
in a linguistic miasma that produces poisonous gender relations. Because la
Malinche’ s role, like la Malinche herself, is about interpretation, and
translation, the metaphoric use of la Malinche as traitor and thus killer of
Indians doesn’t translate directly into the la Llorona figure. Because of the
construction o f these archcons the discourse is clearly different—la Malinche
enters the discourse initially through the tongue and the ear; she is penetrated
and penetrates linguistically. La Llorona comes into discourse as a bad
mother who gives birth to the children of the country through her open
wound, the vagina, only to kill them or scare them to death. What is common
to the backstories of both women is the expression of their history and
character through their bodies, the bodies of “bad women.”
La Virgen de Guadalupe
In contrast to la Malinche and la Llorona, la Virgen has little body, but lots
of raiment. Yet, with only head and hands, she has a more exciting history as
an image than most real flesh and blood heroines. The nature of the
archcon’s heroism, along with the heroism she engenders, is witnessed to in a
private context by individuals and families. Conversely the image operates
publicly and historically in political and service organizations in
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communities, states, and nations throughout the world. While she has no
authenticated place of origin, the story of her appearance to Juan Diego on
the hill of Tepeyac in 1531 is not only commonplace but “scripture” among
Mexicans and Mexican-Americans of all ages. She is nonsexual, without a
body; she is a virgin and yet she has, in addition to Jesus, many children, the
faithful of the world. Examining what la Virgen is not, can, like the spaces
around a drawing, reveal what she is. First, of course, she “exists” in a vision.
The first two written versions of the apparitions, or visions were
written by criollos Miguel Sanchez and Luis Laso de la Vega 1 7 and appeared
in 1648 and 1649. The account of the apparitions on which most modem
versions are based was written in Nahuatl by de la Vega, the vicar of
Guadalupe and published in 1649. It is known by the words, Nican mopohua
(“Here is recounted”). In this account (seriously truncated in this telling),
recent convert Nahua Juan Diego passes by Tepeyac hill on his way to
Tlatelolco for mass and his Catholic instruction. On the top of the hill he sees
the vision of a woman who identifies herself as the Virgin Mary. She asks
him to go to the bishop of Mexico and tell him she wants a church dedicated
to her built on the site. He goes to Juan de Zumarraga, the first bishop of
Mexico, with his story, but the bishop does not believe him. Juan returns to
Tepeyac with the news and is told by the Virgin to try again. On this second
try, the bishop asks Juan for a sign to prove the truth of what he says. He
does not return to Tepeyac the following day because his uncle, Juan
Bernardino, is dying and wants Diego to fetch a priest. He tries to avoid the
hill and thus the Virgin on his journey to get the priest, but she finds him. She
17 Croillos are of European stock but bom in the New World. They were “disdained by Penninsulars, exclusded from
topmost positions o f local government, and fettered by what they regarded as second-class citizenship.... Known as the
‘son’s of the land’ in the sixteenth century 9they later called) themselves indianos and americanos (Poole 1)
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tells him not to worry; his uncle is well. Diego asks for a sign. The Virgin
tells him to go to the top of the hill where “he [will] find ‘every kind of
precious Spanish flower’ in a place where flowers did not grow and at a time
when they would be out of season.” (Poole 27) He places the flowers he has
picked in his cloak (tilma) and returns to the bishop. In Zumarraga's presence
only, he opens the tilma. The flowers fall to floor (leaving behind in the
tilma, a portrait o f the Virgin). Weeping and apologies from the bishop
follow, with a promise to build the chapel. In this version of the story the
Virgin appears to Juan’s uncle and tells him that the chapel will be called
“the ever Virgin Saint Mary of Guadalupe” (28).
This apparition story is generally considered the “Indian” version
while the Sanchez account is bonded “to criollo identity” (100). Poole bases
his conclusions about the two versions, for the most part, on style, citing the
poetry of the Nahuatl version. The “terms of endearment” used for Diego
such as “my son,” and “my child,” and the Virgin’s reference to herself as
“your loving mother” (Rodriguez 31) support the hypothesis of the Indian
identity of the Vega version. Rodriguez reads both the image and the text as
codices whose symbols relate Guadalupe to Aztec divinity basing his reading
on the research of Clodomir Siller-Acuna, a contemporary theologian and
anthropologist who combines anthropology with work as a priest among
indigenous peoples of Mexico (36). Siller-Acuna uses the symbols and
myths of the Indians to construct a representation of la Virgen that reflects an
Indian consciousness. Typical of his analysis is the moment in the story
when Diego hears music and looks to the east:
The Nahuatl believed that life came from the east, where the
sun rises, and it is from this direction that Our Lady of
Guadalupe speaks. ...When a priest climbed up to the temple
dedicated to the sun, he looked to the east, with the west at his
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back. As a result, because of the explicit mention of the
placement, Mount Tepeyac is represented as a symbolic base
for a temple. The hill was the ancient site of the Nahuatl mother
goddess, Tonantzin. (39)
Explanations that lend themselves to less subjective interpretation
include Indian cultural/religious connections to the place where the
apparitions were reported to have taken place. Tepeyac was known in Indian
mythology as the home, or shrine, of Tonantzin, “our lady.” Tonantzin was
also called Cihuacoatl, “wife of the Serpent., .two faces of the primary
creative principle” (Lafaye 215). As the goddess of fertility and the mother-
goddess, Cihuacoatl held a powerful place in the indiginous pantheon. Her
power and the consequent reluctance by Indians to set her aside for a new
“lady” is reflected in Fray Bernardino de Sahagun’s report. He says, “Now
that the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe has been built, the Indians also
call her Tonantzin” (qtd Lafaye 216). He pointed out to other church
authorities that even when there were other churches offering Guadalupe
devotions, Indians from all over Mexico came to Tepeyac to express their
devotion to Guadalupe/Tonantzin. Whatever their motivations for this
devotion, thousands of Indians came to Tepeyac and were baptized into the
Spanish Catholic Church. They came to the hill of Tepeyac because “her”
home was here and her image was here, at least from around 1555/56.
The apparition story published in 1648 and attributed to Miguel
Sanchez is the narrative used to reflect a Criollo ("native sons”of Mexican)
version of the virgin. It is in this account that la Virgen begins being dressed
in the mantle o f Mexican nationalism. The story itself follows the basic plot
of the Nican mopohua, but, according to Poole, Sanchez, speaking more as a
hagiographer than as historian, engages in an exegesis of Revelation 12 to
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bolster his interpretation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as the woman of the
apocalypse (106). The scripture from the King James version of the Bible,
Revelation 12:1 reads “And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a
woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head
a crown o f twelve stars.” Jaime Cuadrello, in his introduction to La Reina de
Las Americas, makes the point that this imagery was used to “highlight the
Virgin’s definitive participation in the spiritual conquest of New Spain’s
natives: as the biblical story, where the Eagle Woman defeated the seven
headed beast, so in her American apparition she was able to drive away the
demon o f idolatry” (13). This connection to the Apocalyptic version may
have been designed to separate her from the Guadalupe of Estremadura in
Spain who was associated with the conquistadors as a symbol of Hispanic
Christianity. Legend has it that the bells of The Church of Our Lady of
Guadalupe in Estremadura could be heard by Cortes as he grew up in a
nearby town in Spain. This Guadalupe is a small, carved statue of very dark
wood which gives her complexion a much darker hue than that of the
Mexican Guadalupe. She holds in her arms an equally dark Jesus. They are
dressed identically in elaborate red robes decorated in gold and both wear
gold crowns. In contrast, the Mexican Guadalupe wears clothing described
“as simple... depicting] that worn by Mary of the Holy Land” (Dunnington
13).
Sanchez used the baroque language, instead of the poetry of Nahuatl,
the criollo interpretations, “downplaying of the Indian aspect of the
story”when he took what Poole calls an exclusively Indian story and
“appropriated it for the criollos” (107). The image of la Virgen, in all its
variations, played a leading role in separating the Estremadura and the
Tepeyac Guadalupes. It is the image of La Virgen de Guadalupe that has had
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the greatest influence in making Our Lady of Guadalupe a “universal”
devotion, establishing a Marian cult in New Spain, and embeding her forever
in the Mexican national consciousness. The image on the tilma is not
detailed in either the Vega or Sanchez apparition story. La Virgen de
Guadalupe’ s appearance is as full of contradictions as is the nature of her
devotions. The original image in the ermita, dating from around 1555 to
1556, was a painting supposedly made by an Indian named Marcos de
Aquino. In 1566 “Alonso de Villaseca donated a silver and copper statue of
the Virgin,” (Poole 216) which was later melted down, according to the story,
and made into candelabra. A cult grew up around this likeness until it was
replaced by the present image, which may or may not be the Aquino painting,
in the 17th century. Investigations, including infrared photography, agree
that the painting, which hangs above the altar in the new basilica, is the work
of several hands.1 8 Whether any one of those hands is described as “divine”
depends on who is looking. Jeanette Rodriguez, a theologian at the Institute
for Theological Studies at Seattle University, identifies herself to the reader
o f her book, Our Lady o f Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among
Mexican-American Women as a person writing with “faith.” She sees the
story of the apparition and the image as being “the foundation of Mexican
Christianity and...a connection between indigenous and Spanish cultures”
(45). She comes to these conclusions through a close reading of the image
and the story as codices that “spoke to the Nahuatl people in the sixteenth
century and still speak to twentieth-century people” (30). Her reading of the
face, for instance, is based on the belief that for Indians the face held clues to
the inner person, thus she interprets this face as compassionate. What is clear
18Behind and below the altar (out o f sight to those attending services) is a moving sidewalk, which moves devotees and
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is that it was not a European face. Rodriguez’ s expert on infrared
photography is inclined to take a mas y menos position. He reports,
according to Rodriguez, that
The expression suddenly appears reverent yet joyous, Indian yet
European, olive-skinned yet white of hue. It is a face that
intermingles the Christianity of Byzantine Europe with the
overpowering naturalism of New World Indian. (Rodriguez 24)
The “dark virgin” is a woman of many colors, but the skin color that has been
accepted through tradition and faith is of a “brown virgin”- a mestizo virgin,
a Mexican virgin, a Mexican Eve sent by God to anoint this land, this
paradise and to empower and unite its people.
Carried off the altar and into the streets, la Virgen mixes the political
with the spiritual and, indeed, throughout Mexican history she has become
the rallying point behind the causes of nationalism and later in the United
States for la raza. The pastiche of spiritual, cultural, ethnic, and national
identities was integrated in 1810 by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla as he
carried the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe as a banner into the Mexican
war of independence from Spain. The slogan for freedom became “Long live
our Lady of Guadalupe! Long live Independence!” (Smith 202). In a painting
representing this act, artist-architect Juan O'Gorman shows Hidalgo leading a
crowd of people of diverse classes and ethnicities. With one fist doubled up
and the other carrying a proclamation he shouts while the banner of
Guadalupe waves over and behind him. The banner and the demand were
only changed slightly 150 years later as Cesar Chavez led Chicano farm
workers behind the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe con el grito, “Viva la
raza. ”
tourists along as they view the image of la Virgen. The moving sidewalk effectively discourages lengthy visits.
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In the end, La Virgen de Guadalupe doesn’t appear to require much
written history and authentication. The “real” story, individually and
collectively, is embedded in tradition and faith-what is passed on and what is
believed. The representation has clearly been created and decoded to meet
various needs. The result is that at the absolute level of origins, La Virgen de
Guadalupe is bom out of a need to have the support of a powerful religious
“Mother” behind certain political and cultural desires so that the sanction of
religious, papal, approval— the holy stamp of God--will legitimize certain
behaviors. She is the approving mother, the good mother. She is always on
hand to help and support. Even though she is a mother, she is a nonsexual
mother. This is a woman whose body is wrapped in the material of culture.
Remove those garments and she may disappear.
The material of culture does not let go easily, however, as each of
these archcons demonstrates. Patriarchal Mexican culture has not only held
onto the discourses they represent for women, but strengthened them through
a constant reinforcing and reenacting of images and ideology to meet the
political and economic needs of a society in which clearly women function as
capital. The only way to break that cycle is to reconstruct the archcons on
which it depends. The opportunity for such re-evolution comes to Chicanas
from their position on the geographic, literary, cultural, political, religious,
and artistic border. From this position poets, performance artists, and artists
have begun to see and see again and see differently la Malinche, la Llorona,
and la Virgen. Such female artists write out o f their own bodies and find la
Virgen exists inside them as holy, perfect and culturally productive. Chicana
performers also discover the erotic/sexual body in la Virgin. They reveal the
poetry and strength of la Malinche and her good body, a body that produces.
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And, la Llorona becomes the goodnight threat that is recast not as a lament
for what is lost, or a fear, but as a powerful healing force.
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CHAPTER THREE: BIRTHINGTHE PHYSICAL SELF AND THE
TEXTUAL BODY
and when she, the Goddess,
asks you what you see,
you must answer: I see the
freedom. She isn’t pleased
or displeased—she’s been
expecting you forever.
She knows what
you had
to do
to love
your
self,
from “Sassy”
Alma Villanueva
In 1967 the Chicano press, Quinto Sol in Berkeley, published Volume
1, Number 1, of the quarterly journal, El Grito. Its masthead declared in
boldface print that it was “owned by Chicanos” and “self-determined,” It
boasted of its “reputation of publishing the best of quality Chicano social
science, history, short stories, drama, poetry, art, satire, placing it at the
forefront of the articulation of issues and contemporary thought” (El Grito
85). In addition to the performances of Teatro Campesino, organized by Luis
Valdez in Delano, California in 1965, as part of the farm workers’ struggle
and the publication of Alurista’s Floricanto en Aztlan in 1971, this was one
of the first independent forums for Chicano critical and literary expression.
Two years after its founding, El Grito devoted an entire issue to literature,
short stories, and poetry by Chicanos. While that was something to celebrate,
men were the only contributors to that issue. It wasn’t until four years later,
in 1973, that women’s voices were heard in the journal. Titled Chicanas en
la literatura y el arte/Chicanas in Literature and Art, edited by Estela
Portillo, the issue presented Chicanas creating work in the genres of poetry,
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prose, drama, and art (Sanchez 3). Contents included poetry and a play from
contributing editor Estela Portillo, art by Lydia Rede Madrid, and poetry
from a number of writers (most not actively publishing today) including
Ramona Gonzalez, Minerva Lopez Capels, Lorenza Calvillo Schmidt, and
Isabel Flores. The publication in El Grito turned out to be an overture for
Chicanas who have increasingly made their specific, frequently irreconcilable
assertive messages heard within and outside the community.1 9
A poem that appears in that issue, “Como Duele,”by Adaljiza Sosa-
Riddell2 0 articulates one of the central issues facing Chicana artists (El Grito
61). The persona acknowledges the man, “Ese, vato, I saw you today.” She
saw him “en Santa Barbara, Sanfra / and everywhere else.” He was a:
...Chicano chulo,
eagle on your jacket,
y ‘camales y camalas’
y ‘Que Viva la Raza.’
But where were you when
I was looking for myself?
She knows he has been where the “Man,” the white man, and all his
“pendejadas,” or stupidity, have sent the “chulo”—universities and wars. He
wasn’t around to provide a ground to help her find herself:
I heard from many rucos that you
would never make it.
You would hold me back;
19Today more women than men are being seen, heard, and read in a variety of venues both culturally specific and multi
ethnic. Organizations present a variety o f Chicana writers, artists, and performance artists. And, some Chicana writers
are being published by major non-specialty, non-ethnic houses. A division of Random House and Knopf has published
Sandra Cisneros. Ana Castillo has been published by Doubleday. The Norton Anthology o f Literature by Women, Second
Edition, however, presents only one Chicana poet, Loma Dee Cervantes, while The Norton Anthology o f Poetry, Fourth
Edition, presents no Chicanas.
29 As Rebolledo and Rivero point out in Infinite Divisions (footnote 213), authorship of this poem has “consistently and
erroneously been attributed to Lorenza Calvillo-Craig” (Lorenza Calvillo Schmidt in the original) because o f a printing
error that resulted in the poem appearing in two pieces on two different pages.
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From What?
From what we are today?
“Y QUE VIVA”
Pinche, como duele ser Malinche.
The persona grieves at being typed la Malinche, the “fucked one” and the
traitor. Worse, it is a position that seems inescapable:
Malinche, pinche,
forever with me;
I was bom out of you,
I walk beside you,
bear my children with you
for sure, I’ll die
alone with you.
The only salvation from this endless grief/hurt is “that sometimes, /
you are el hijo de la Malinche, too.” For the male, being connected to la
Malinche is only a sometime thing, a sometime thing always engaged with in
the special category of son. Sons walk under a different sky. Gender makes
a significant difference in the way family members are treated. This
traditional understanding of gender roles and relationships influences the
ways individuals in actual social and family settings are perceived in relation
to cultural archcons. Remembering her days at home, writer Cherrie Moraga
says that in her house “cocks” were “all that seemed to arbitrarily set us [her
brother and his friends] apart from each other and put me in the position of
the servant and they, the served” {Loving 92). Her brother was a son. In this
position he gets “the best of both worlds.” The woman’s world is that of la
Malinche, who is “forever with me” because she is la Malinch. {El Grito 61,
76). The Chicano, as the son, is “sometimes” “fucked” or used/colonized by
the white race, but while the woman shares this position, she is also la
chingada in relation to Chicano/Mexicano males. And she is a traitor to her
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race by “allowing” herself to be fucked by whites in the case of interracial
relationships, both heterosexual and homosexual. There is no way out; she is
culturally “done” both conceptually and non-conceptually—pinche (asshole
or cunt) if she does, pinche if she doesn’t. This realization of women’s
seemingly irrevocable identification with a cultural iconography that
constructs Chicanas as negative physical/sexual objects resonates in the work
of the all-Chicana issue of El Grito. It is also a poetics that begins to call
attention to the female body as a source of and resource for an identity. As
Norma Alarcon says about Alma Villanueva’s book Bloodroot, published
four years after that 1973 special issue of El Grito, Chicana poetics are about
“a rejection of self-loathing”(Chicana’s 183) and an affirmation of the
Chicana body as the means to transformative poetics and politics. This
chapter will briefly historize this movement and present a close reading of
Alma Villanueva’s poem, “Mother, May I,” a seminal work in Chicana
literary gender and body politics. The reading is intended to demonstrate
how the poetics uncover a positive physical self through a metaphoric
Chicana body that produces children and text through its own blood—an
umbilical cord to culture and change. It will also show how this process of
physical validation internalizes an individualized and powerful Virgen de
Guadalupe iconography. This reading is followed by an examination o f the
body and its position inside and outside the archconography of la Virgen in
1970’s paintings by Yolanda Lopez and Ester Hernandez. The analysis will
examine how the presence of the physical body as part o f their representation
of la Virgen changes the reading of the archcon.
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The Value of the Embodied Text
The movement from self-loathing to self-loving requires a
simultaneous evocation and valuation of the Chicana body/text. First, the
female writer/ body must release or separate herself from the existing
juridical discourse in order to write her own erotic text—a text in which
female desire is the subject. The calling forth o f the “I” as writer o f that
body/text is the necessary process in the (re)conceptualized understanding of
the body as valued subject rather than used object, as it moves into language
and metaphor. Linguist George Lakoff asserts that metaphor has its roots in
our conceptual understanding of ourselves, spatially and culturally. He points
out that if every experience is essentially cultural, then “we can still make
the distinction between experiences that are ‘more’ physical, such as standing
up, and those that are ‘more’ cultural, such as participating in a wedding...”
(and Johnson 57). Moving this example into terms more reflective of the
cultural understandings in this study could find us considering the ‘more’
physical of a masturbatory female orgasm and the more “cultural” of giving
young women vibrators as part of a coming of age ceremony. This requires,
first, (re)cognition o f female desire as active and, then, the movement from
self-loathing into a positive, erotic body image. Such a movement must
come from an individuated first person, as opposed to a culturally
stereotypical female identification as a bad and suffering mother, virgin, or
slut—the juridical discourse that has governed the cultural understanding of
Chicana women as constructed in the culture’s major archcons. It is more
than pulling free from the cultural/religious power contained by these great
myths of oppressed femininity. Because of the cultural values they maintain,
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this is a process of discovering the materials that will be used to rework the
myths.
Beginning with the 1973 issue of El Grito, Chicana work from the
mid- to late 1970’s articulated the need for women to separate from cultural
understandings of gender and to discover and affirm the body and the female
erotic self. These were always border discourses that negotiated racial,
social, and gender issues on the borders of biculturalism, bilingualism, the
political borders of classism, as well as the physical/political border, la
frontera, between Mexico and the United States. While 1970 feminism
raised important issues for Chicanas, it was primarily a white middle class
movement. In the introduction to her book, Contemporary Chicana Poetry: A
Critical Approach to an Emerging Literature, Marta Sanchez points out that
“Chicanas learned that certain items on their agenda (such as the struggle
against racism and the crusade for bilingual and bicultural education) were
not among the priorities of white women” (Sanchez 5). Even though
Chicanas also felt sexual oppressions, “the affirmation of a feminine identity
...seemed incompatible in many ways with the struggle for racial and social
justice” (5). The women who were confronting this layered and culturally
thorny issue were what Sanchez calls “Chicana intellectuals.” Her use of the
term makes it interchangeable with other labels in the same discussion such
as “Chicana writers,” “Chicana activists,” and “Chicanas.” But those women
who identified themselves as Chicana writers were, in fact, usually women
associated with universities as students, professors, and instructors in the late
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1960’s and 1970s.2 1 The desire to heighten cultural awareness promoted an
active Chicano arts movement of which these Chicana writers/ intellectuals
became a major and critically active part. However, their relationships to
universities and education in departments overwhelmingly composed of
white males advocating teaching the Euroamerican literary canon cannot be
overlooked in considering the layered context in which Chicanas were
producing work. The journal, El Grito, demonstrates some of the subtle
connections. Published by Quinto Sol Publications, El Grito was headed by
Octavio Romano, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
This intellectual/institutional relationship can be heard and seen especially in
the echoes of forms, materials, and even themes in the work it included for
publication. But while these may have been used as methods for expressing
ideas or to provide stepping-stones to other ideas, or armatures on which
other artists might build, the texts, the artistic constructs themselves,
consistently reflect cultural Chicano/a negotiations gender, race, and politics.
Bernice Zamora, who received her doctorate from Stanford, is a good
example. Many of her poems use Eurocentric forms to express Chicana
issues. One frequently quoted example is “Sonnet, freely Adapted,”
Zamora’s version o f Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116.” The Zamora version
speaks from a woman’s point of view instead of a man’s (Zamora 10). As
21 While the term Chicano is used in multiple ways and in different areas, Rudolfo Acufia provides one of the most
common etymologies. He explains that the term Chicano as used today actually comes out o f the California Mexican -
American student movement which, following a conference at the University o f California at Santa Barbara, became the
organization, El Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MECHA). The term taken by the students evolved from a
“pejorative term applied to lower-class Mexicans,” but they “had always used it playfully to refer to each other”
(Occupied 338). However, as El Libro de Calo: The Dictionary o f Chicano Slang points out, “some Mexican-
Americans still find it an uncomfortable term” (El Libro 18). In this discussion and those that follow, I will use the term
Chicano/a when individuals are self-identified as such and Mexican-American when referring to anyone who is not so
self-identified.
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Nancy Vogeley writes in the introduction to the 1994 volume of Releasing
Serpents, Zamora uses the
sonnet pattern and the Elizabethan English.. .to [address]
Shakespeare and the tropes of literature that have imposed
themselves perniciously on human lives (11).
Taking on the form and the language, she turns Shakespeare’s poem about
love into a rebuke of masculinity, a rejection of the machismo that finds men
“Within the rings of bloody gloves and games.” The heterosexuality of the
culture has made her a “weary woman” who “Wears well the compass of gay
boys and men.” Her experience of love is not the kind Shakespeare promotes
as “ ...an every-fixed mark, / that looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
Instead it is exhausting and leaves the women “ ...worn, rebuked, and spent”
(56). Zamora assumes the forms of Shakespeare to express dissatisfaction
with every form of desire his verse immortalizes.
Many feminists have suggested that to take up the pen is to take up the
phallus, the power to engage desire. For contemporary Chicanas like Zamora
it is not the instrument but the medium. Taking up the pen is about taking up
the women’s blood as ink—blood that evokes both with its desire and power
of gestation and production. The metaphors of pen and ink used to suggest
engagement with desire, power, and writing also require a metaphorical
desire for self, as well as a metaphorical release from the male body that
holds them in objectivity. Pat Mora’s poem, “Senora X No More” (Mora
1991), resonates with the idea that taking up the pen, to write, is to be
realized. While on the surface the poem addresses literacy and second
language acquisition, the subtext suggests the power o f taking up the phallus,
if reluctantly. Here the persona sits inside a discourse whose law keeps her
“Straight as a nun.../My fingers foolish before paper and pen.” In Senora X’s
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cultural understanding, the only women exempt from the juridical discourse
of la Malinche and la Llorona are the religious. They mime the La Virgen de
Guadalupe, disembodied and asexual, occupying positions whose protection
prevents them from desiring themselves. As the brides of Christ, the erotic
life of the female religious is expected to be contained and redirected into the
spiritual, not the physical.22 So, Senora X sits without a connection to her
body, unable to physically interact with the tools of textual production, in this
case paper and pen. Her fingers are a synecdoche for the body, “are foolish,”
or without sense or judgment. Senora X has a female mentor, a teacher, who
encourages and helps her experience that body when she “bends over me,
gently squeezes / my shoulders, the squeeze I give my sons.” She is being
encouraged, urged the way boys are mentored. The teacher opens the
persona’s hand “...with a pen like I pry open / the lips of a stubborn
grandchild. / My hand cramps around the thin hardness.” Once the pen is in
her hand, she’s hard to stop:
I carve my crooked name, and again at night
until my hand and arm are sore,
I carve my crooked name,
my name (Communion 15).
22 When seventeenth century Mexican poet and religious Sor Juana In6s de la Cruz “took up the pen” she was, at first,
considered a phenomenon, and later a problem as the positions she adopted became increasingly antithetical to the
Spanish Church, particularly poems on the rights o f women, and erotic love poems. Among the many examples is the
poem with the rather longish title, “Arguing that there are Inconsistencies Between Men’s Tastes and their Censure
when they Accuse Women of What they Themselves do Cause.” She makes this point in twelve stanzas, none of which
is calculated to please the several hierarchies o f men who controlled her fate. They hardly needed go beyond the second
stanza which reads:
If you seek the love of women to win
With ardor beyond compare,
Why require them to be good,
When ‘tis you who urge their sin? (Flores 21)
One can only speculate on the pressures which this work produced and which may have caused her to recant her poetry
and essays before she died in a local epidemic.
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What is exciting in this stanza is the verb “I carve.” The reader hears that
determined sculptor pushing against the surface of the paper, making
indentations as she presses hard to create her “name.” She carves and carves
until the body is “sore,” having carved itself into being.
Realizing the self through the body also requires both a literal and
figurative change in the culturally approved heterosexual subject/object
positions. For Chicanas it is the discourse of la Malinche that creates and
supports those positions. Critic Norma Alarcon calls it the “male myth of
Malintzin” (184). According to Alarcon, the myth contains the following
sexual possibilities:
woman is sexually passive...open to potential use by men
whether it be seduction or rape. The possible use is double-
edged: That is, the use of her as pawn may be intracultural—
‘amongst us guys,’ or intercultural, which means if we are not
using her then ‘they’ must be using her. Since woman is seen
as highly pawnable, nothing she does is perceived as choice.
Because Malintzin aided Cortes in the Conquest of the New
World, she is seen as concretizing woman’s sexual weakness
and interchangeability, always open to sexual exploitation.
(184)
While this particular telling genders the myth as male, its deeply
embedded position within Mexican culture appears to have made it a
discourse that has also constructed women’s notions of themselves—a female
double-edged sword, cutting both ways for women, as cultural law and the lie
of lived experience. Lorna Dee Cervantes uses this schizophrenic character of
the la Malinche archcon to change the persona’s position in her poem, “Baby
you cramp my style,” first published in the Summer 1977 issue of El Fuego
de Aztlan. Here she uses the sexual power of la Malinche and the power of
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woman/Malinche as controller of language, as translator, to get out from
under the male myth. The speaker exclaims,
You cramp my style, baby
when you roll on top of me
shouting, “Viva La Raza”
at the top of your prick. (39).
These first three lines resonate with the multiple cultural issues
surrounding gender and race. Foregrounded is the problem of being cramped,
of not having “space” to be herself, to engage in her “style,” or an authentic
way of being in the world outside the pressures of competing for sexual favor
when her body is literally controlled by the male. He controls her “style,” her
understanding of “La Raza,” with the language, hence the power, that he
“writes” at the “top of [his] your prick.” Is she successful in keeping this
male from rolling on her or in rolling him off? She doesn’t say outright, but
certainly suggests it at the end of the poem when she says, “Come on
Malinche / Gimme some more.” This challenges the archcon, whom she has
empowered as an ally. The persona adapts the culturally encoded discourse of
la Malinche to demonstrate her ability to use the power of that sexual
discourse in throwing off what Alarcon calls “male consciousness.” She can
then claim her own “style,” her own body, her sexual agency. For Gloria
Anzaldua this “overthrowing” project is critical to “healing o f our psyches.”
It is foremost ”a feminist one,” she says in her 1987 essay “Towards a New
Consciousness.” For her, “As long as los hombres think they have to chingar
mujeres each other to be men, as long as men are taught they are superior and
therefore culturally favored over la mujer, as long as to be a vieja is a thing
of derision, there can be no real healing of our psyches.” (84)
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Being the inferior rather than the superior, the “bottom” rather than the
“top,” makes the experience of having agency, sexual or otherwise,
practically impossible. Throwing off the body that holds you in objectivity
has cultural implications that go beyond the real and metaphorical
heterosexual missionary positions. In other words, it’s not so easy.
Separating the way “male consciousness” is constructed by, and constructs,
Mexican and Mexican-American culture is like eating a pomegranate without
eating the seeds. Cherrie Moraga puts it bluntly: “You are a traitor to your
race if you do not put the man first” {Loving in... 103). For a Chicana to
claim her own body and consequently her own desire requires struggling out
from under the male and risking cultural censure—internally and externally.
As Moraga points out, many Chicana feminists have been cobbled with the
“alongside-our-man-knee-jerk-phenomenon” in their fear of “criticizing el
hombre. ” She is clear about how difficult it is to unravel the relationships:
It is true that some men hate women even in their desire for
them. And some men oppress the very women they love. But
unlike the racist, they allow the object of their contempt to
share the table with them. The hatred they feel for women does
not translate into separatism. It is more insidiously intra-
cultural, like class antagonism. But different, because it lives
and breathes in the flesh and blood of our families, even in the
name of love. (108)
One way to eradicate the label of traitor is to claim positions outside
this cultural discourse Through a reworking of the iconography that
constructs that discourse the Chicana can cause the language or terms that
oppresses her to resonate differently. Among the Chicana artists who
attempted to do that in the mid- and late 1970’s were poet Alma Villanueva
in her poem “Mother, May I?” and artist Yolanda Lopez in her triptych
“Victoria F Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe; Margaret F. Steward: Our Lady
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of Guadalupe; and Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin o f Guadalupe.” These
women give birth to texts using metaphoric language that resonates
differently and simultaneously claim their bodies through embodying the
disembodied, asexual Virgen de Guadalupe, Reina y Madre de Mexico,
(Zeron-Medina 105) as la Virgen expresses through the reinas y madres of
their own familial experience. That is to say that by being seen as internal to
women, la Virgen becomes embodied and an integral part of the creative or
“birthing” process. Lopez and Villanueva’s figurative virgin births are
birthings of themselves physically and poetically/creatively. Artist Ester
Hernandez takes that birth of the physical and gives it some “kick,” in her
etching, La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los
Xicanos2 3
23 Short authorial comments will appear occasionally as footnotes in this chapter and the next two as a method of
experimenting with keeping the critical context in view. In my performance as a white Anglo critic, I am not attempting
to pass as either a Chicana, the frequently encountered omniscient voice o f academia, or “the writer,” although this voice
has a particular nudging insistence as theoretical perspective enter the text. But to leave out these perspectives, even
when they are Anglo and/or male is, it seems to me, to deprive myself of important tools. It is especially invigorating to
use these resources, not necessarily against themselves, but frequently to take them to places they wouldn t Otherwise
have gone. However, as I work through a reading of this and other Chicana work I am ^passing” as a Chicana, a subject
position I must take on in order to do the work. What I bring to this position is an evolving sense of self as woman and
other that informs it Once married, I bring “wife” and heterosexuality to my position, but not mother. I am, of course, a
daughter, but also a sister to brothers, not sisters. I’m an aunt and a beloved, loving granddaughter, but never a
grandmother. As a lesbian, I bring homoerotics to my position. I am an eager and accepted stepmother and
grandmother to my partner’s daughters and grandchildren. A middle-aged, post-menopausal returning student/academic,
I was often “other” in graduate school and frequently found myself used as the token lesbian. As a poet, my own
ongoing birth experiences are also physical and textual.
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85
Getting Permission to Bleed in Public
The poem, “Mother, May I?,” was published in 1978, one year after
Villanueva’s other autobiographically based books of poetry, Bloodroot and
Poems won the 1977 first prize in poetry at University of California, Irvine.
“Mother, May I?” describes the experiences a Chicana woman, “coming” to
herself as child, mother, daughter, and granddaughter, in order, finally, to
give birth to her(real)self as a desiring body. In Contemporary Chicana
Poetry, Marta Sanchez presents a summary of Mother, May I?. She breaks
the poem into three parts, arguing that Parts I and II are causative and
narrative while Part III is metaphoric. Much of this reading of the poem
echoes Sanchez’s understanding o f birthing as its central metaphor
that motivate [s] the protagonist in her quest for self-definition:
her drive to birth herself as a woman and a person and her drive
to create her poem. (Sanchez 42)
But while necessarily engaging the poem in a linear way, this
exploration will simultaneously try to expand on Sanchez’s reading to
uncover the ways in which the birth of the persona’s erotic and desiring body
and Villanueva’s erotic and desiring body of work construct a metaphorical
understanding of a complex world throughout the poem. The work is
linguistically multi-dimensional because of the ways its signs, built by its
metaphors, contain dynamic meanings or understanding through a constant
filling and emptying. This is not to say that there isn’t an implicit stated
historical narrative to which these births are attached and through which they
emerge, but rather to stress that it is the conversion of its core metaphoric
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understanding, “life is a journey,” to “life is a process,” that gives that
narrative its own “thick” metaphoric quality. Villanueva’s poem is framed
by what is at stake. “Mother, May I?” is both the title of the poem and the
title of the last stanza, number 29, which ends with the question “...all / 1 ask
is / may / 1 play?” The question, “Mother, May I?,” is the name of and
critical question in an age-old child’s game. The child asks a person
designated “mother” if he or she can take a particular physical action (giant
steps, baby steps, twirl around). The “mother” grants the action, but in order
to act the child must preface the request with, Mother, May I? or she/he is
“out.” The last person “in” becomes the mother for the next game. In this
poem, the request for permission to play names the game. At stake is rebirth
of the physical and textual body by a persona who insists on playing “with a
capital P” (120).
The persona wants permission from the Mother, but that mother
resonates in multiples, as birth mother, as grandmother, as reina y madre de
Mexico, la nuestra senora, La Virgen de Guadalupe and the goddess
Tonantzin who is identified with, in some traditions replaced by, la Virgen.
The name, Tonantzin, according to Stafford Poole, C.M., “is the reverential
form of ‘our mother’ (Poole 78).”24 In turn, Tonantzin is often identified
with Coatlicue, the Great Goddess, the mother of the gods. She is the one
from whom all life is bom and to whom all life must return in the endless
cycle of rebirth and death2 5 (Markman 221). And, finally there are the
24 The conflation of Tonantzin with the Spanish virgin has eliminated many o f the creative characteristics o f the ancient
goddess. As Maria Elena de Valdes explains “the image o f the pre-Spanish Tonantzin is that of woman as creator,
creator of life on her terms, not as a carrier used to produce heirs for patrilineal descent... .The sexuality o f this creative
woman is an expression of her body, not a commodity to be sold in the marketplace (Shattered Mirror 10).”
25Because Villanueva comes to her work with two traditions— the Western/European and the Mestizo, it’s not surprising
to hear these echoes of Aztec mythology as well as those of Wordsworth, Whitman, and Anne Sexton in the subtext of
this poem.
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persona’s peers, the other “mothers” with whom she plays the game asking,
“ Mother, May I? ” All are separate and all are contained within the persona,
the supplicant who appeals for this permission to engage in the total “play” of
life. She appeals to the spiritual, the traditional and the present, past, and
future discourses of woman/ mother for a rebirth into a physical body that
gets to play life’s “game.”
The “I” that opens the poem is a child, an innocent, whose ability to
see “lights sprayed off / burst o ff’ her “...hands/...fingers/... fingertips...”
recalls the aura of la Virgen and Wordsworth’s notion that we come into the
world
...trailing clouds of glory...
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (64-66)
Here childhood innocence is, first, manifested by a fascination with the body
and, second, an apparent connection of that body, via the aura effects or
“lights spray off... her hands,” to the cultural and spiritual discourse of the
virgin. The connection is not just an outside one. She says, “I squinted my
eyes at them / lights sprayed off.” The persona produces the phenomena
within herself and outside herself:
I squinted my eyes at
everything in this manner
and everything had joy
on it, in it, it was
my secret. ( “Mother” 87)
Here, unlike Wordsworth, she creates the lights; they do not come trailing
behind her. This suggests an internalized discourse, a discourse whose
cultural complexity is implicit in the connection of the lights to the aura, or
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sunrays out of which the image of Guadalupe emerges. There is also a direct
symbolic connection between these rays and Aztec divinity, according to
theologian Jeannette Rodriguez. She notes in her exegesis of the image of the
virgin that, “the rays of the sun express the presence of the sun god,
Quetzalcoatl,” (29) or the Plumed Serpent26 of the red and the black, of
wisdom and writing. Only one other person in this poem, the grandmother,
la abuela, traditionally keeper of culture and its stories, sees the rays, or
lights. The persona knows the grandmother knows by the way the lights
transform the grandmother physically. The lights also come from the
grandmother’s physical body and she is changed as “she looked at things...
and her face would shine, lights
all over, coming out of
her tiniest wrinkles;
she became a young girl. (87)
At both ends of the generational spectrum, then, there is a “conversation”
between the “real time” physical body and an internalized mytho-
cultural/religio-cultural presence. But, we also learn that “there were things
that could not/shine lights, we/avoided these. “These things had no joy” (87)
and, in fact, are dead. When they are dead, the persona “can’t feel....” them
(87). Without a psychically and physically animated body, there is no joy, no
lights, no life.
What is definitely not dead in this first stanza, however, is the body of the
persona as innocent child, particularly those “unspoken” parts of the body,
for this child is completely at ease with her genitalia and excretory functions.
The “air feels good between” her legs and she loves “...to put (her) dolly’s
hand / there / and make her tickle me...” (88). For the pre-socialized child
26 According to Rafael Perez-Torres Quetzalcoatl translates in Nahuatl as “Precious-Feather Snake” (179).
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there is no “down there” or prohibited bodily activity. Interaction with her
own body is a positive experience. She perceives her bowel movements as
birthing, productive experiences. She knows from listening to her mother
that “when you make things...you have to push it out / hard. I do that... (89).”
The results are sometimes pretty and “...it even smells / good to me...(89).”
Interacting with the process makes it even more interesting so she swallows
her small rubber doll and has “a baby in my poop.” Her fall from physical
grace and innocence comes with grandma’s discovery of the “dolly in the
poop game.” Grandmother’s threat o f the doll growing and taking up all the
room in the child’s body stops the behavior and
she made me wear long pants
under my dresses so she
would know the wind
couldn’t smell me.
and then I learned how
to hide. (90)
As the body goes into hiding, the process of cultural, linguistic, and sexual
socialization of the female begins. Hiding her own innocent sexuality, the
narrator begins to discover the eros of her Mother, whose beauty and
sexuality involves smelling good and putting “perfume on her panties,”
smooth legs, and “...lots of boyfriends. / lots.” She was always beautiful / for
them (90)” When the persona sleeps with the mother, she gets to play and
“we pretend, I’m the mother.” The child wants to be in the physical position
of mother, the producing position. The importance of that physical producing
position is underlined by the persona’s fear of losing herself in dreaming.
Losing that physical self is a danger for the dreamer because she fears she
might not come back. To dream is to fly
and when I flew [grandmother] always
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woke me gently— so the soul
and the body will stay. (91)
For Villanueva the soul, spirit, or muse requires the body to live, to produce
or give birth to the text. In the last segment of Stanza 3, titled “Dreaming,”
she experiences the split in which the spirit sees the body
and I didn’t want to come
back. I thought she
was disgusting, she
had to eat and everything, she
was stuck. I
wasn’t I came
back anyway and then she
stood up and looked in the mirror
and scared me
to life. (92-93)
While a separated muse perceives the physical body as “stuck” and
disgusting, the muse nevertheless needs a body to create life. And, she needs
not just any body, but specifically a mother’s body. It is almost as if the
child’s desire for the mother is to re-enter her, to kiss her “on the lips with
my / mouth open...”. She says
I ask
I wish
to be closer to you than lips or lipstick
or skin
I wish
to kiss
your womb. (93).
The child wants to connect to its origins through the mother’s body and
create the possibility of production through that body. In this erotic, but safe
place, play is possible—play that is about imagination and the telling of
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stories, where “the pretend place / is bed.” In the first of two stanzas titled
“Playing,” the game is one of being children who “laugh and laugh...and no
one’s / the mother...(94).” This creative game joined by the word “playing”
between the two stanzas segues into a game in which she is someone’s
mother, now actually able to play the game of producing “a body” and,
perhaps, “a text.”
Still a child, the persona in the second half of Part I continues to focus
on the physical; this time, however, she experiences her body not as a
creative producer, but as an object. She is both subject to desire from outside
herself and betrayed by it. In spite of this, the desire to control her destiny is
strong. When a nun hits her hands with a ruler, she hits the nun back, and
runs to grandma, the keeper of Mexican culture who protects her body from
further humiliation by this representative of the Euro-Hispanic church. This
episode is followed by an encounter with a beautiful, bilingual nun, a figure
who resonates with Guadalupe representations, who
sat in the dark on the other
side of the cage, the metal was black
and cold and beautiful, it had flowers
and when she came and sat and spoke
her voice was very warm, she
said she came from Mexico. (95)
The persona feels a bond with this Mexican nun, imagining that she too is
assertive and in control of her life. She says, “I / bet she didn’t let them
shave her head.” This is followed by the recollection of
this boy who was
very bad sat behind me
and he put his fingers in my nalgas
when we prayed and when I turned
and stared at him, he’d
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smell them and smile. (95)
The persona is not outraged, although she says he is very bad. He obviously
likes the way her body smells. What might have been read here as an
innocent, erotic communion between the spirit and the body is spoiled when
the boy whispers the last line, “they all have bald heads.” The Old Testament
says a person can’t be strong without hair so one way to keep people
powerless or in servitude is to take away their hair. In Judges, Chapter 16,
Delilah asks Sampson where his “great strength lieth.” Daily she pressess
him on this matter until
he told her all his heart, and said unto her, There hath not come
a razor upon mine head; for I have been a Nazarite unto God
from my mother’s womb: if I be shaven, then my strength will
go from me, and I shall become as any man. (Judg. 16:16)
Indeed, among the Laws of Righteousness listed in Leviticus is the
admonition that “they shall not make baldness upon their head” (Lev. 21:5).
The child’s sexual abuse by an adult male is less benign. It becomes a lesson
in controlling the body as well as separating from it. No matter what the
abuser does, she “wouldn’t cry” and finally, she
knew
he’d kill me. and
he touched me all over
and I lay there
and I didn’t care
and I know he could kill me if
he wanted to.
and I didn’t care anymore.
and when he let me go I didn’t run.
I walked. (98)
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Not only is she emotionally able to separate herself from what is happening
to her body (as one does in dreaming), she makes the decision to remove her
body from the possibilities of such sexual objectification. Such a decision
comes from her realization that the female body always has “to do the dirty /
work.” The solution: “ ...I decided to become a boy.” Changing genders
changes her physical relationship to the world. She can climb, fight, and hate.
She ignores her body. She starts her menstrual period on the top of a building
under construction and while she “knew it was special, / ...[she] ignored it.”
As Part I ends, so does the persona’s childhood and her connection to the
physical presence of her origins and culture. Mother gives her away,
Grandma is given away and finally dies. At the funeral, the child drops
“...one rose / into the hole” saying “they didn’t know the rose / was me”
(101). This moment connects her again to la Virgen whose veracity was
proven by roses and for whom roses are always, through the connection to
Nahuatl beliefs, signs of truth and divinity. (Rodriguez 37) It connects her to
herself, a woman, who “is like a rose,” the persona says in the poem’s
Epilogue. There is also a connection between her and other women and
culture through mamacita. It is the moment that “dressed up in my new
shoes/and a skirt and a red shirt” (101), she gives up being a boy. “They
didn’t know,” but she knows,“the rose / was me.”
In Part II, “they” find out “I’m a girl” (103). Before that discovery, she
tries to hide the physical self. She sleeps day and night, she doesn’t talk and
she doesn’t eat. In spite of the fact that
my eyes are yellow.
my gums bleed.
I cannot roam
and play. They
found out.
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I’m a girl, they
expose themselves, they
follow me. they
do not leave me
alone. (103-104)
There doesn’t seem to be a way to escape from her body. No matter how
emaciated and sick, she is a girl and “they” feel compelled to “follow” her.
She does discover one boy whom she sees as different. The two children eat,
love, make love, and finally create a child together. There is a matter-of-
factness and innocence to this experience as
gently, dreaming, softly, child to child,
we love
on rooftops, doorways, parks, alley,
we love, the
boy and I. and
a child blooms
inside me. (104)
The lovers are too young to marry and the persona finds herself “alone
again,” but not completely: “I am alone again, but / a fullness starts.” Her
body and the body it is producing keep each other company. This is not an
imaginary companion, but a real, physical being. She speaks to it, and
we sleep together.
Your tiny foot
moves, one side to
the other,
we lay together
at night (could I
keep you
inside
me forever?), little
comfort, tiny foot. (105-106)
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The doctors and nurses, won’t let her body just “be” in this process of
birthing. They believe in pain “and their knives and needles / hurt me. I / give
birth dreaming” (107). The birth of the child takes place where the body and
the soul/muse can be separate. As in childhood dreams, she can see the
physical process but at the same time separate herself from it. It allows the
body to release what it has produced, to let the baby go and come into the
world painlessly. The next baby (now she is married to the “boy/man”) is
also released in the dream state, but this time she calls it a trick: “But I trick
them. / 1 give birth dreaming”(108). By dreaming these births, she has
subverted “their” power over her body and maintained control of the birthing
process. Birth o f a third child is followed by a soliloquy on birthing as the
“...way to trick / the dead.” and “...the way to trick / the living. By
/dreaming.” And, finally, she sounds a warning to the poet/persona: “watch
out, Alma, you / don’t trick / yourself’ (109). The danger in flying or
dreaming, as she warned us earlier, “is coming back.” If you don’t keep your
eyes closed as you return to the physical pain of reality, your body will split
from your soul/muse.
Such a split of the whole self also seems to occur to the degree that the
persona exists in another kind of dream, a daydream. It is a dream about
existing inside the gender role costumes culture sews for women. For the
persona, the act of living in a world that dresses her to its liking, is the
beginning of silence and a time when “a loneliness grew” (109). She looks
to name the nature of that loneliness in the eyes of husband and children, in
the supermarkets, and even
in the oven.
I looked for it
in the dustpan.
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I looked for it
in the sink
in the tv.
in the washing machine,
in the car.
in the streets,
in the cracks
of my linoleum. I polished
an emptiness
grew
that no think
could fill. I think
I hungered for myself. (110)
The loneliness, the emptiness, is for her self: the rose, the self she left in the
grave with mamacita. She and her husband search for the grave, marked
only with the number 13 21. She cries at the grave and without her knowledge
a seed spilled out
and my mouth
ate it. I think
that’s when the rose took root. (Ill)
This non-genital, non-sexual conception echoes the conception of
Huitzilopochtli by Coatlicue, the goddess of rebirth and death. Much like the
persona in “Mother, May I,” Coatlicue is doing penance when this
conception occurs. She is sweeping. When sweeping, a ball of feathers falls
on her. She picks them up and put them in her bosom. A portion of the myth
as translated from the Nahuatl by Miguel Leon Portilla repeats the legend:
When she finished sweeping,
she looked for her feathers
22 When a family can’t afford to buy a head stone, or doesn’t wish to, the gravesite is marked with a number.
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97
she had put in her bosom,
but she found nothing there.
At that moment Coatlicue was with child.
(Markman 382)
The child bom was not only considered the “divine embodiment of the
warrior,” but also “the symbolic mediation between the worlds of spirit and
matter” (381). The Indian legend resonates at this point in the poem
suggesting that not only will this be a rebirth of self, but a self that can
mediate between the body and the spirit/muse. Soon after swallowing the
seed, and leaving her husband, she hears “...a voice, distant / and small, but /
she heard it” (111). She opened her mouth slightly “...and a word spilled out.
The word / was ‘I’” (112). Unlike her first bom, to whom she spoke while it
was still in the womb, this voice speaks to her. It tells her in different ways
(pleading, teasing, taunting, and simply), “I am here” The physical body
provides the rich medium in which the rose, as the symbol of the powerful,
spiritual, unpenetrated Mother/Muse, can grow. With the seed provided
herself alone, “I” will be bom.
In Part III of this poem, “I” gestates, as the persona engages in the
physical experience of motherhood through the growing bodies of her
children and a dead friend’s children that she takes in. They “all / moved / to
the country” and in Part III, Verse 23, the persona, the children, and “her
friend’s husband,” are interwoven into the physical fecundity and changing
seasons of “Mother Nature.” They moved
to the daffodils
in spring
to the naked ladies
in fall
to the full creek
in winter
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98
to the tall com
in summer. (113)
Moving in these seasons, “to the turn / to the turn / of the seasons” (114), she
turns to “Her Myth (of creation).” As if in tune with the external turning
universe, her internal turning is coming to term, a physical and spiritual
interior maturation where “it was dark, so dark” and these frightening
...dark figures
with bleeding bodies
and staring eyes
with voiceless mouths
came to me
and I lay flat
with fear
till I realized they
were me. the dead. (115)
The dead parts of her, the parts she has discarded, the body that doesn’t
respond to the physical abuse she has experienced, come to visit, but once
she realizes what they are, a light blinds her to that sight. She is forced by the
light to close her eyes. In the dreaming/flying moments in Part I of the poem,
keeping the eyes open causes the body and soul to separate. Now, forced
closed, the eyes reveal the total self:
I was not old.
I was not young.
“I am here.”
I said. (115)
This self is not afraid to take charge of her body. When she is diagnosed
with what the reader assumes is cancer, she tells the “doctor (who wanted her
/ womb) ‘I’m not going to die!’” She will hold onto all of her body and be in
charge of it.
...she was angry, so
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99
the man, the doctor
and death
got scared
and left.
Like an angry goddess, her anger frightens death and man but, as she tells us
in the next stanza, titled “Life Cycle,” she carries, she “juggles” both birth
and death. This intimacy with life and death and the interwoven
mother/daughter/grandmother relationships related in the following stanzas
suggest connections to the goddesses in the Aztec pantheon and, in turn, their
connection to the Euro-Indian, ultimate mestiza, La Virgert de Guadalupe.
As she juggles death on one side and birth on the other, the persona recalls
the image of Coatlicue, whose nature is described as one that “granted
everything with her generous hands and took it all back with her implacable
claws” (Markham 221). This “giver and taker” is an aspect of the great
goddess Cihuacoatl, whose name means “snake woman” and is called by
historian Willard Gingerich the “Terrible Mother.” She is simultaneously the
“guarantor of fertility and receiver o f human sacrifices” (217)28. Tonantzin,
whose principal place of worship, Tepeyac, was the sight of Juan Diego’s
vision of Guadalupe, is closely identified with Cihuacoatl. In his analysis,
ethnohistorian Jacques Lafaye points out that in Fray Bernardino de
Sahagun’s first book of Historia General, he “devotes the first chapter to
Tonantzin because he considers her the most important of all.” Lafaye then
quotes from that chapter in which Sahagun asserts that, “The first of these
28Cihuac6atl’s song is sung in agricultural images that appear today as metaphors for heterosexuality. In the translation
from the Nahuatl by Willard Gingerich, she sings of the “...maize-ear /... supported by the timbrilled staff and
“His cactus shaft, his glory;
Let him fill me, He
my Prince, Mixcoatl, Aya.”
Gingerich, however, suggests that being filled is a “reference to her insatiable appetite for sacrificial victims” (Markham
217).
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100
goddesses was called Cihuacoatl, which means wife of the Serpent; they also
called her Tonantzin, which means our mother” (Lafaye 211). Lafaye then
references Jacques Soustelle’s study, La Pensee cosmologique des anciens
Mesicans, in which he demonstrates that there “is ‘a reciprocal imprication’
or overlap of the different aspects of the mother goddess (213).” It seems not
too great a leap then to conclude that in the poem’s stanzas “Myth of
Creation” and “Life Cycle,” the persona creates herself as the physical carrier
of the spirit of Guadalupe and her multiple resonances. In the stanza “The
Proof,” she makes it quite clear saying
I’ve shrunk down
and kissed
my womb
and heard my heart. (117)
She knows her fullness as physical woman and spirit. To birth herself she
embraces her physical womb and listens to the spirit, the Guadalupe. She
realizes herself by creating her own game and becoming her own mother, the
mother that gives permission. While becoming requires the spirit, it cannot
live without the body, the womb. The birthing o f “I” with its origins in the
body:
...is bloodstained. I
gave it to you, as my
mother to me, as her
mother to her
and it is thick with
blood, with life
and we are thick with each other. (118)
For the speaker then, a lifeline is a bloody thread passed along among
women. This thread, in addition to carrying the blood of fertility, the means
to production, also ties women together in the common experience of the
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101
“curse” and the blesssing childbirth this “bloody thread makes possible.”
Thread is also a metaphor that suggests, in many cultures, the domestic
sphere of women where weaving and sewing were opportunities to tell
secrets and instruct daughters. Acknowledging this connection and
subsequent commitments, she gives permission (“Mother, May I? Yes, you
May.”) to her daughter to play and
become your
own mother
and spin your own lovely
thread. (119)
The “I” at the end of this poem is sure that what she desires is to “play,” to
participate; she is a woman who has “learned the ropes.” One of the critical
lessons is that “men come / and go....”. Her story, the story, is about women
...because men don’t have time
to, because
men move
on, because
men haven’t learned
how to
listen, to
speak as
women; so
the thread, the story
connects
between women. (122)
Women are roses that “when a man opens a woman, she / is like a rose,she /
“will never close / again, / ever” (123). The inner Guadalupe is no longer
virgin, but has become a
bastard rose,
a wild rose,
colors gone mad.
a rupture of thorns.
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But
you must not pluck it.
you must recognize
a magic rose
when
you see it. (123)
This rose is both the physical and spiritual, it is the physical/spiritual woman
full of the physical/spiritual rose. The combination is “magic,” a rose that can
carry the bloody thread of physical birth and the rose containing the muse
who produces the poem. The vision in which the Guadalupe produces the
miracle of the roses clings to her iconography and veneration. Roses are an
integral part of the annual Feast of the Guadalupe and often appear as
decorative borders in Guadalupe retablos. In a contemporary mural on
Guadalupe Street in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Muralist Alexander Rokoffhas
La Virgen raised on an altar of fantastic rose blooms (Dunnington 52-53).
The metaphor of the rose works as a metalanguage in Villanueva’s poem. It
is simultanously filled with the cultural understandings of the rose connected
to la virgen and a meaning constructed inside the poem of girl/woman, her
sexuality and desire. In Part I the poems the persona insists on speaking of
the culturally unspoken physical in order to find herself. Grandmother may
put her in long pants “so she / would know the wind / couldn’t smell... ” her,
but she must smell herself and, like the smell of her mother she finds “she
smelled good” (90). The body in this poem is not only good, but also
necessary to physical and creative production. Cultural understanding of
woman must go beyond the virginal beauty of the unopened “bud” to woman
as an open flower, wild and magic. The Guadalupe here is internalized spirit
or muse, and operates inseparable from smell and blood. She is shaped by the
individual body that carries la virgen inside, instead of existing outside the
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103
body as archconical template. Villanueva’s vision doesn’t completely
refigure la Virgen, but changing the point of view from external to internal,
gives la Virgen flesh and blood and, most importantly, honors the flesh and
blood that holds her.
The body that finally gets to play in “Mother, May I?” is presented in
the narrative or storytelling style that is so much a part of Chicana poetics. As
this body moves from childhood innocence to the wisdom of maturity, from
grandmother, mother, and daughter, it reflects the textual form as well as the
border sensibility that recalls the heroic corrido as well as the ballads of
Whitman. Like the corrido, Villanueva’s poem is a story of a cultural hero
and her adventure of self-discovery, an individual discovery, but one that
emcompasses the possiblities of Chicanas. At the same time, it is a “Song of
Herself,” an ordinary woman claiming, as Whitman does
One’s self I sign, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word democratic, the word En-Mass.
(Whitman 3)
Like a song or a corrido, “Mother, May I ?” presents a narrative, a story. But
the metaphoric cultural resonances get constructed by and in a body that is
multi-dimensional and can’t reference the foot without the leg. The reader
can’t engage with this poetic body and expect a straight head-to-toe
experience. It must be read from beginning to end as a linear activity but the
total experience is non-linear. It is multi-directional and multi-dimensional.
The curtain rises on a child and her abuela and drops with the conception and
realization of a self. The grandmother embodies cultural memory. Maria
Marrero, in her unpublished dissertation, states that cultural memory extends
“from religious practice to articulation of culture as expressed through the
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104
body of Latina women.” It is also the articulation of that culture re-membered
or reconstruction on the “site of cultural memory”2 9 (Marrero 46).
Portraits of the Guadalupe as...
This (re)membering through the body, as well as the interweaving of
the bodies of mothers, grandmothers, and daughters, has a visual counterpart
in the now practically iconic 1978 triptych by San Francisco Bay area artist
Yolanda Lopez. In “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe,”
“Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe” and “Margaret F. Steward: Our
Lady o f Guadalupe” (Figures 1,2,3) Lopez presents the grandmother, the
mother, and the artist/daughter /granddaughter as the Virgin of Guadalupe.
These portraits are part of a body of work reflecting Lopez’s on-going
response and examination of cultural conflict that began when she was a
teenager in the late 1960s (CARA 137). Artist and writer, Amalia Mesa-
Bains, writing about El Mundo Femenino in the catalog for the 1985
Interpretive Exhibition o f the Chicano Art Movement, 1965-1985, comments
that “early experience with cultural conflict, anglo discrimination, and even
adolescent conflict...sets the stage...to redefine the feminine in a feminist
context” (137). In what Mesa-Bains calls this “landmark Guadalupe series,”
the icon of the Virgin, “is appropriated from the institutional patriarchies of
the Catholic Church and the Mexican State, and also taken out of the sanctity
of the Mexican traditional home altar” (Mesa-Bains). Lopez’s feminist
29 Physical memory is a concept borrowed from dance, where movement is learned through the process of practice with
the physical body. Marrero quotes from sociologist Paul Connerton who says in How Societies Remember, that “images
o f the past and recollected knowledge o f the past are conveyed and sustained by ritual performances and that
performative memory is body memory”(Marrero 136).
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105
sensibility is tied to cultural memory to “critique...traditional Mexican
women’s roles and religious oppression (137).”
In the three panels of the triptych, those of the artist, her mother and her
grandmother fill the usual figuration of Guadalupe. Within the series we are
constantly aware that these images both are and are not the culturally
understood Guadalupe whose traditional symbols identify her both as
spiritual/religious icon and as political rallying call in Mexico and the United
States. In both countries, as we have already seen in Chapter Two, her banner
has led the way in political and economic conflicts as diverse as the Mexican
Revolution and the farmworkers struggle in California in the 1960s. Lopez’s
series of portraits calls viewers to yet a different revolution, one that,
according to Mesa-Bains, has as its goal “breaking the bonds of Guadalupe
and setting her free” (137). In the process, Mesa-Bains argues that Lopez
constructs a new identity for Mexican-American women. Such an assessment
seems uncontestable, given the fact that the work has been an essential part of
a process in Chicana poetics required to transform the discourse of
Guadalupe. In this case, as in the case of “Mother, May I?,” that process
requires putting literal and cultural flesh on the passive, dis(embodied) figure
of la Virgen in order to create an erotic image (text) that the Mexican-
American/Chicana viewer /listener/audience can take “pleasure” in or desire
for her(selves). She can desire and take pleasure in the physical self and
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106
Figure 2. Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe-Yolanda Lopez
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107
Figure 3. Victory F Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe-Yolanda Lopez
Figure 4. Margaret F. Steward: Our Lady of Guadalupe-- Yolanda Lopez
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108
realize sexual agency as well as the resulting identity, action, and freedom to
which Mesa-Bains points in her analysis.
Although theologian Jeanette Rodriguez’s analysis of this particular
image is obviously colored by her own context as a Mexican-American, a
theologian, a Catholic, and a lay minister and inevitably influenced choice of
informants, it is useful in considering contemporary Mexican-American
relationships to la Virgen and how that relationship impacts the ways they
value themselves as women. In the foreword to her book, Lady o f
Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-American Women,
Father Virgilio Elizondo refers to Rodiguez as “engaged in the ministry of
theologizing” (xi). Rodiguez’s conclusions are based on a sample of young
Mexican-American mothers who are practicing Catholics and high school
graduates. In the survey, most of the women articulated a traditional concept
and relationship to la Virgen. Rodriguez concludes that the image “expresses
a Mexican-American woman’s values of being female, a mother, brown
skinned, and mestiza.” These have all been traditionally culturally-accepted,
positive images for women. Neither Rodriguez, nor the women in her study,
mention the image’s less positive subtexts such as passivity, or an appearance
of racial and cultural otherness in an Anglo world. Her findings support an
understanding of the traditional Guadalupe as empowering for Mexican
women: “The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is a symbol of power for a
population in a seemingly powerless situation. Unlike the dominant culture’s
traditional equation o f power with action, for the Mexican-American woman
prayer is power” (121). And, she continues, that image traditionally
compensates for those times when “a woman feels herself lacking”(48). The
importance and power of cultural images such as the Guadalupe is stressed
by historian Margaret Miles. “Contemporary culture minimizes the
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109
importance of images in shaping a person’s values and self-image,” she says,
but, in fact, “values and longings are shaped by ‘the visual objects of one’s
habitual attention’” (qtd Rodriguez 48).
Lopez insists on a different habit in a re-imagined image of the
Guadalupe who is a sexual female, a non-virginal mother, a free and enabled
mestiza. Creating an artistic “performance” by embodying “real” Mexican-
American women as the Guadalupe gives la Virgen the flesh and consequent
sexual/fecundity of these and all women. These women, in turn, can be
imagined to assume the spirituality and power of the traditional cultural/
political/ religious Guadalupe archcon as her iconography is internalized. In a
short personal interview I conducted with Lopez, she recalled that beginning
the first drawing (which was “Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of
Guadalupe”) was frightening because of the highly felt religious and cultural
tradition the Guadalupe represented. “Remember,” she reminded me, “this
was 1978.” At that time, the archcon was still firmly ensconced in its
traditional cultural place. She had not yet become as common a means of
and object for cultural criticism. Lopez remembers that the day she finished
the three pieces, alone in her studio, she felt “like I went through a door, [it
was] like breaking your mother’s best dish and then waiting for the
consequences” (Lopez).
One of those consequences has been the iconization of Lopez’s work
in the Chicana community, particularly the “Portrait” Like the traditional
Guadalupe, it has been a banner. She appears on journal covers and
illustrates a number of anthologies of poetry and literature. For example, the
“Portrait” provided the visual centerpiece and was the underlying metaphor
for the Los Angeles three day festival of art events and education discussion
by and about Latinas, titled “Fierce Tongues”, sponsored by Highways
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110
Performance Space in February 1994. O f course, the Lopez version of
Guadalupe will probably never reach the dubious heights of popular art as
has the traditional la Virgen. The latter is omnipresent in Spanish- speaking
neighborhoods on public murals, as part of the outdoor advertising for
carnicerias and larger mercados30, on indoor and outdoor altars, air brushed
in deep enamels on cars, T-shirts, and tire covers. More recently she is found
in the marketplace of kitsch as earrings, tattoos, kitchen spoons, and even
mood rings. The real body insisted on in Lopez’s “The Portrait...” triptych,
however, still finds itself most comfortable in the rooms, galleries, and
performance spaces of academia and Chicana arts.
The triptych connects Chicana artists to an extensive cultural and
historical aesthetic. Working in thirds has undisputed spiritual connections.
The triptych is a common device in religious art of the great cathedrals of
Europe and later in the decorative art of those spaces in the Western
Hemisphere, especially where explorers and conquerors carried on their
business behind the flags of Spain’s political Catholicism. The question of
aesthetic use of spatial thirds and their deployment in religious art appears to
be a “chicken and the egg” question. Christianity, grounded in the trinity of
father, son, and Holy Ghost, has provided endless triad themes. An early
Spanish medieval (ca. 1000), illustration in the Commentary on the
Apocalypse ofBeatus ofLiebana (Figure 5) called “Adam and Eve,” consists
of one of the most well known threesomes, Adam, the snake, and Eve, each
occupying one-third of the manuscript page (Reilly 157). One long side of
the twelfth century “Sarcophagus of Dona Sancha” (Figure 6) demonstrates
30 In Los Angeles it is reported that storeowners are asking artists to paint the Guadalupe on storefronts as a protection
from gang markings. It seems that gang members are reluctant to marie la Virgen.
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8 I : fol. iS. A dam and Eve
Figure 5. Adam, the snake and Eve from Commentary On the Apocalypse of
Beatus and Liebana
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112
Figure 6. Sarcophagus of Dona Sancha
W M .
Figure 7. Antependium with Christ in Majesty
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113
triads within a triptych. In the center are two angels holding up a nude
figure, at one end are three clerics performing a rite, and at the other three
women. One of the most common religious uses of the triptych is at the
church altar in the form of altar pieces, screens, and the arrangement of holy
figures such at Mary, the Christ and Joseph. Also from twelfth century
Spain, is the “Antependium with Christ in Majesty” (Figure 6). This
antependium, or frontal, used to decorate the front of the altar presents the
frequent theme of Christ in the center with six apostles in each of the lateral
compartments (169). A better known altarpiece is Hans Memling’s
“Triptych: The Adoration of the Magi” (ca. 1450) owned by Charles V
(Myers 79). The spirit of the triptych, along with its aesthetic, moved into
Mexico, including that part o f Mexico that is now the United States. In the
cities, particularly the colonial cities such as Puebla, Morelia, and, of course,
Mexico City, church art in the major cathedrals could be transferred to
cathedrals in Spain and other European cities with scarcely a cultural shock.
Church art in other parts of Mexico, however, while it entertained many of
the same devices, assumed an original character influenced by native Indians
and the “untrained” artist. As a result the retablos, santos, and altarpieces of
New Mexico for instance while frequently exhibiting tripartite themes, also
reflect native aesthetics in the artistic execution.
Typical is “The Holy Trinity” (Figure 8) by either Pedro Antonio
Frequis or Truchas Master (ca 1749) in which the father, son, and Holy Ghost
appear as three (individual heads) in one (body) (Fane 122). In the 1851
“Altar Screen from the Chapel of Our Lady of Talpa” (Figure 9), in a family
chapel near Talpa, New Mexico, Las Tres Divinas Personas, join a gallery of
santos in a charming two story triptych. Las Tres are the second story center
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Figure 8. The Holy Trinity
Figure 9. Altar Screen from the Chapel o f Our Lady o f Talpa
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115
over Nuestro Padre Jesus. On their left are La Pura y Limpia Conception
and Nuestra Senora de los Dolores and on their right Nuestro Padre San
Francisco and Nuestra Senora de la Soledad.
The tripartite execution of religious ideologies on altar screens as well
as in the placement of holy figures in the nave as a triplet are deeply
inscribed in cultural memory. Lopez’s choice of the triptych thus has a
cultural/spiritual resonance within an historical context that “plays” for
Chicana viewers. As W.J.T. Mitchell reminds us, we are always looking at
images though a “purposive and acculturated imagination.” Pictorial
representations are set against our own systems of representations (Mitchell
42). The way in which that acculturated vision encounters the secularized
version is a critical part of the way Lopez’s piece performs.3 1 Positioned
inside this particular acculturation is La Virgen de Guadalupe whose
existence in the Mexican and Mexican-American cultural imagination is as
embedded, yet more accessible or obvious than the religious implications
raised by the triptych. At the same time, the archcons implications are also
denser due to the extent and reach o f its Aztec, Catholic, political and
community relationships (see Chapter 2). In his discussion of Nelson
Goodman’s Languages o f Art, Mitchell cites Goodman’s claim that
nonlinguistic systems differ from images because of the “density...of the
symbol system” (qtd 67). Not unlike the resonance of poetry, “the image is
syntactically and semantically dense in that no mark may be isolated...its
meaning depends rather on its relations with all the other marks in a dense,
continuous field (67). And many o f such “marks” can be found in Lopez’s
triptych. The star-studded robe, the aura/rays of sun, the angel, its
31 For most Chicana viewers this response is more than likely subliminal or non-articulated.
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116
red/white/green wings, and even a version of the cinta or maternity band—all
these iconic marks are echoed in the paintings. What isn’t there is la Virgen
as she is traditionally perceived. For this is la Virgen made flesh, made
woman, made Lopez. The three generational virgins of Lopez’ Guadalupes
are embodied Guadalupes, real beyond the archcons becoming in these
paintings the grandmother, mother, and artist herself made holy. Does the
virgin get embodied or is the “normal” woman sanctified? Both. The
juridical discourse that claims women must reach for the perfection of the
archcon, and the
religious discourse that claims the female saint or archcon has no body, and
hence no physical desire, are recast in the portraits. They suggest, as Alma
Villanueva does in “Mother, May I?” that women always have “lights
sprayed o ff’ (Villanueva 87), that the power o f the Guadalupe is in the
physical women, and that the power of the productive body of women is in
the archcon. These women-Guadalupes are not passive, with eyes downcast
and hands in prayer. The grandmother comes the closest with her hands in
her lap, sitting on the cape. But, a closer look reveals a knife and a
snakeskin. She has skinned the snake of the Republic or Coatlicue. She
holds an eviscerated vlbora, an empty Coatlicue/ Tonantzin/ Guadalupe. The
skin is according to Gloria Anzaldua, a “desexed Guadalupe, taking...the
serpent/sexuality, out of her” (Borderlands 27). The rays behind her closely
resemble reproductions of the framed “tilma” in the Basilica, while those
behind her daughter, the artist’s mother, are hot, like fire. The mother works
at a sewing machine making the starry cape and using the skin o f the Snake
Goddess as a pincushion. Margaret F. Steward is not using a home sewing
machine; this is an industrial machine. Margaret Steward is a “virgin” who
works to support her family. In the final painting the artist comes running
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117
out of the picture towards the viewer. Her aura is similar to su abuela, in
color, except it’s bigger; it fills the frame. The figures in the triptych move
away from traditional culture generationally, but then return in a way that
significantly changes the discourse, and instead of abandoning the dense
cultural symbolism, use it to create a different grammar. For example, both
the artist and her grandmother wear a cinta, as a belt, not a maternity band.
In one hand the artist holds the cape, flowing behind her, in the other, she has
the snake by the throat, full bodied, full blooded and under her control.
Her dress blows up around her legs to reveal the top of her thigh and well-
formed, muscled legs. She has physical power, cultural power, and religious
power.
The physical power o f Lopez’s “Portrait of the Artist” literally comes
out of the la virgen’ s aura in Ester Hernandez’s 1975 etching, La Virgen de
Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de losXicanos (Figure 10). In this
social and political statement, Hernandez not only embodies la Virgen, but
also gives her attitude. Dressed in karate whites she’s executing a perfect
roundhouse kick. The maternity band has been transformed a black belt.
Even the angel that supports the quarter-moon is mad. Here the Guadalupe is
also embodied as every black belt Chicana, but this time she moves outside
her sacred place and reaches into the world, as it were, to defend her people.
The intent seems to be for the archcon to have not only body, but also
agency. The next step is the next kick and it requires putting down the foot
that is kicking in order to come around with the other foot. It’s an action
requiring that she leave her sacred space. Perhaps she will take Villanueva’s
“lights” with her and when “she, the Goddess, / asks her [you] what you
see.../ answer: I see the / freedom...”
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Secularizing the archcon by embodying it and, instead of erasing its
significant symbology, recasting it as part of the everyday life of that body is
a critical part of these pieces. The created works become cultural
performances that ignite transformative cultural understandings. They
subvert archcons by valorizing the female body and simultaneously engaging
with the dense spiritual, cultural and political passion that the archcon
contains.
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119
Figure 10. La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los
Xicanos— a 1975 etching by Ester Hernandez
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CHAPTER FOUR: AS BAD AS IT GETS; UNCOVERING THE EROTIC
BODY
This is me she is carrying.
I am a baby.
She does not know
I will turn out bad.
Sandra Cisneros
Isn’t a bad girl almost like a boy?
Maxine Hong Kingston
La Virgen de Guadalupe is too good for anyone’s measure except
when using the yardsticks of saints and angels. Her “goodness” is contained
in the image and the discourse the image engenders. Like the other archcons
considered in this study, la Malinche and la Llorona, la Virgen can fill or
play roles in different cultural positions simultaneously. For example, at any
given time she can be folk myth and spiritual icon. Each of these provide an
understanding of female “good,” coupled with cosmic or spiritual power
within an historical construct that delivers a cultural worldview. The terms
archetype and icon have been conflated in my term “archcon,” as I have
already explained, to describe the multivalent properties of these constructs;
for like archetypes they are recurring images and would seem to behave
according to Jung’s definition as modes of preserving racial memory. As
icons they either function as religious symbols, or are connected to religious
symbols, in order to “say and show what they mean” (Holman 247). They
also meet the criteria for myths in the way that they are contrived to explain
supernatural or cosmic events, which are then seen as "natural." This
mythical function is particularly provocative because of the way that myth is
often described as a means of understanding or interpreting reality. This
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chapter begins by interrogating the ways archetypes, icons, and myths or
archcons, are stabilized, particularly the way those considered in this study
have worked to concretize a cultural discourse about women. This discussion
is followed by a close examination of Chicana work that attempts to
“uncover” representations of these archcons that “slip away” from cultural
stereotypes. Instead of asexual virgins and bad women, these images present
embodied, erotic women claiming their sexual agency to produce their lives
and their texts, becoming as fully “bad” as they can be.
Perhaps this is a place to revisit the issue of using “Anglo” theory in
discussions of “other” cultural materials and the concern that such a move
can be interpreted as colonizing, or as Sally Price puts it in her book,
Primitive Art in Civilized Places, as setting up binary of “us and them” (5).
This danger is one that ethnographers have wrestled with for some time.
James Clifford approaches it by seeing a similarity between the work of the
ethnographer and the literary critic. In fact, he says “this comparison is
increasingly commonplace ...specifically with the traditional critic, who sees
the task at hand as locating the unruly meanings of a text in a single coherent
intention” (Clifford 40). Because “there is no neutral standpoint in the
power-laden field of discursive positioning, in a shifting matrix of
relationships, of I V and ‘you’s’”(42), the discourse of the ethnographer and
the critic must be dialogic. It needs to contain “me,” “us,” “they,” and “it.”
Multiple cultural discourses must be involved in the conversation with the
objects, art, literature, and performances being considered. In this study, it is
crucial that those discourses include Chicanas, both as theorists and as
writers, whose work provides theoretical perspectives, as well as other
Chicanos (as) and Mexicans. They comment on my comments and on each
other. Ours must be a conversation creating multi-dimensional ways to think
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about culturally embedded ideas and unravel them, in order to discover where
the issues of power and agency reside in cultural representations. Such
conversations acknowledge that criticism, as well as the objects or
phenomena considered, do not exist on a “plane,” but rather in complex
dimensional relationships to themselves and each other.
In this spirit sociologist Emil Durkheim suggests another way of
imagining the relationship of what I am calling archcon to myth. He
describes myth as representing “a projection of social and cultural patterns
upward onto a superhuman level that sanctions and stabilizes the secular
ideology” (Holman 317). La Virgen de Guadalupe has sanctioned Mexican
and Mexican-American patterns or templates for women as perfect and
asexual. At the same time, the ideology of women as “bad” sexual
temptresses and mothers who throw children away has been stabilized by the
historical myth of la Malinche and the related folk myth o f la Llorona. How
stabilized and sanctioned this ideology has become is neatly demonstrated by
Octavio Paz in his essay “The Sons of La Malinche” (See Chapter 2). In this
famous piece, Paz begins in cultural linguistics with the verb chingar and the
motto, “Viva Mexico, hijos de La chingada” (Paz 86). He works with this
grito to demonstrate the way being “fucked over,” a traitor, and a “sell out”
(a woman) leads to the stabilizing of the la Malinche archetype. In this case,
the myth is embedded in the language and images of not just the feminized
traitor, but also la Llorona and her comadre, la mujer sufrida (suffering
mother).
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Power of Mythic Metalanguage
As mythic go(o)dness, the construction of La Virgen de Guadalupe is also
stabilized linguistically. Roland Barthes’ semiological lens views myth as a
system constructed in language (oral and written as well as the language of
images and performance), which then constructs a metalanguage or discourse
which describes both itself and the language that constructed it. Barthes
claims in “Myth Today,” that these two kinds of speech-“a linguistic
system,” and the “myth itself, which I shall call metalanguage” {Mythologies
115)-- become the language-object, or the myth itself. In other words, the
meaning of la Virgen is already there, “as a total of linguistic signs, the myth
has it own value, it belongs to a history” (117). The first inclination is to call
the myth a sign, but Barthes suggests using as the third semiotic term,
“signification” because of myth’s double function, a function that seems
pertinent to this discussion. For Barthes, myth both “points out and notifies,
it makes us understand something and it imposes it on us” (117). Thus we
can understand la Virgen operating semiologically as a myth that both makes
the law and provides surveillance for the law, in this case the law addressing
the “nature” and position of women. La Virgen also constructs a supernatural
or cosmic juridical discourse that operates to explain or adjudicate between
individuals and/or families, and “natural” or preternatural events such as
sickness, accidents, war, miscarriages, and childlessness. In both roles, she is
obviously perceived as powerful.
In her position as a saint (representing the Catholic Marian as well as
the Indian Tonantzin traditions), she exemplifies the perfect woman and a
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powerful popular religious figure. The participants in Jeanette Rodriguez’s
study, Our Lady o f Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican-
American Women, reported that the “role models Guadalupe manifests...are
those of good woman and perfect mother.” However, as Rodriguez points
out, while “they appreciate] or valu[e] these characteristics,” they feel
“incapable of measuring up to them” (137), especially if they respond to then-
own sexual desire. The kinds of virginal goodness the traditional Guadalupe
presents seems to make it impossible for many Chicanas to have a positive,
guilt-free, erotic life. There is clearly ambivalence between the discourse
presented by la Virgen and the understood reality of life. In Ana Castillo’s
experience, it was not acceptable to think about, or look at, or even roll your
eyes at the idea of sex or sexuality; it was “bad” and children, especially
girls, were taught this lesson early. As she recalls, her childhood was one
where children were “indoctrinated to believe in a great many sexually
repressive tales.” It is also a culture where “the husband who is so fixed on
his wife as a holy virgin mother ...will not permit her to express her sexual
desire without seeing her as a ‘whore’ and suspecting her of betrayal.”
(Castillo “La Macha” 142) Castillo brings to mind Carmen Tafolla’s story,
"Federico y Elfiria," discussed in Chapter One in which “bad” girls are
desirable girls, but they are not the girls men marry. Federico thinks he has
married a good girl, but what is he to think when she likes sex? Somewhere
la Virgen’ s surveillance has failed.3 2
32 This belief crosses cultures. My experience as an Anglo, with little in the way o f spiritual life provided by family,
was that sex was bad. At age six I was living on a military base. My young male friends and I spent weeks stealing
lumber from the annex being built for the new base hospital and used it to build a club. The purpose of the club was to
play doctor. Since I was the only girl in the “gang,” hindsight tells me the reason for the club was to play doctor on me.
O f course, we were discovered. My Mother put me in a hot bath and scrubbed my skin raw. I got it, sex was bad and I
was bad. It was well known in my various high schools that you did not have sex. Girls that had sex were not good
girls. In Anglo high schools in the late 50’s and 60’s, the story still existed that boys play with “bad” girls and married
“good” girls.
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The power of myth rests in the narratives or stories making claims for
the mythic or archconic. In the case of la Virgen, the story of Juan Diego, the
roses, and the tilma, as we have seen, has its roots in historical and religious
texts created years after the supposed event. The double power of the
spiritual and the historical narratives embedded in this story has spawned
other political and personal narratives that attest to the power of Guadalupe.
Repeatedly in her study, Rodriguez finds that based on their own experience
her informants view Guadalupe as powerful. She is seen as someone who
“can intercede on the part of the believer to God” (Rodriguez 135). Most of
the women feel that if they ask a favor of “Our Lady of Guadalupe, by
lighting a candle, by saying a prayer to her, she will, in fact, deliver what
they are asking for.” Rodriguez goes on to develop the idea that for them
“This relationship with Our Lady of Guadalupe— and thus, with God— is a
means of empowerment” (139). Her power and the sense of power she
imparts provoke individual or family narratives that are “imagined” in order
to thank the Guadalupe for a particular favor. These, in turn, provide
additional “case histories,” if you will, that both substantiate and increase the
power of the mythic metalanguage.3 3
While there may be a significant distance perceived between what is
expected and what the women in Rodriguez’s study “experienced as a
33 As an Anglo critic dealing with Catholic materials, particularly Mexican Catholic materials, I am a cultural outsider.
My social /religious history comes out of a European Protestant tradition. That tradition expunged from itself the rituals
o f Catholicism and became even more austere on the new Calvinist American frontiers. This was fertile ground for even
less ritualistic traditions such as those of the Quakers and Mennonites. In these sects, spiritual ceremony appears not
only to have required less in the way of decorative arts, but reflects an austere religious ideology stressing simple gifts.
Moraga says in her poem “Winter of Oppression, 1982,” “that Protestantism, [is] The white people’s religion (Loving
73). My heritage takes a rather baroque turn as ancestors joined Mormon pioneers to settle the desert of the Great Salt
Lake. They built temples with gothic spires, designed elaborate rituals for marriage and baptism o f the dead, complete
with gold encrusted baptismal font. My Uncle was called by the church to spend several years away from his family to
build the Los Angeles Mormon Temple. While Mormonism does not suit me, I have always been attracted to religious
ceremonies that involved ritual and performance. I once belong to a church group that required wearing robes and
secret rings. W e were all teenage virgin brides o f Christ.
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deficiency,” the myth itself is seldom seen as failing in its role as mediator
between the physical and the religious life.3 4 This experience is attested to by
the small pictorial fantasies (the event as imagined) that demonstrate the role
La Virgen de Guadalupe (as well as other saints) played in the daily life of
Mexican families in Mexico and in the American Southwest around the turn
of the century. One only need view the hundreds of ex-votos (also called
retablos) thanking her, in addition to a group of other Marian icons important
to migrants,3 5 for saving them from accidents or illness to understand the
ways la Virgen is intertwined in the lives of Mexicans and Mexican-
Americans. In their illuminating book, Miracles on the Border: Retablos o f
Mexican Migrants to the United States, Jorge Durand and Douglas Massey
explain that retablos are
a catharsis, a personal testimony, a confession, an expression
of gratitude or remorse that would otherwise be difficult to
articulate publicly. (Durand 62)3 6
Migrants who had special problems in an alien society used this
centuries-old practice of engaging with familiar icons to help them make
sense of “disjointed experiences of life in a foreign society” (63). A typical
ex-voto is the oil on metal drawing of Bemabe H. and Catarina V. Floating
over their heads are Christ Crucified, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Virgin
34She is not perceived as failing because those stories are not told. The stories that are told are told to reinforce the
mythic quality of La Virgen. Stories without successful outcomes contradict the myth and create insecurity in an
insecure world.
35 One o f the most common in this hagiography o f virgin images is La Virgen de San Juan, the mother o f migrants.
3^ Terminology for this work is not used consistently, especially retablo and ex-voto. Gloria Fraser Giffords in her
book, Mexican Folk Retablos, clearly distinguishes retablos as “painting of religious images on sheet o f tin, typical of
central Mexican in the nineteenth century.” Ex-votos, on the other hand, are the story paintings which, according to
Giffords, “commemorate the recovery of the donor from some grave danger. Often called ‘miracle paintings,’ the nature
o f the paintings changed as the custom was abandoned by the wealthy and taken up by lower classes. The practice was
started by the wealthy as early as the colonial period when the work was done on canvas. By the time it became a ‘folk’
tradition, most ex-votos were painted on tin. They were a public offering...placed in Mexican churches as soon as they
were built” (143). Although the practice o f making ex-votos has practically disappeared, the occasional ex-voto still
appears.
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of San Juan. Dated 1944, the printing at the bottom attests to the illness of
cramps, confinement in “un sanatorio ” in Nebraska for days, and finally
recovery (155). Christ and the two Marian images are, of course, being both
credited and thanked for this recovery (see Figure 11). Thousands of these
ex-votos created a Marian liturgy, or sacred miracle story, across New
Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and, to some extent, Arizona.
They also created a sociological study, according to author and Curator
Gloria Gifford. “An examination of all the ex-votos in any one shrine or
church would produce a fascinating record of the people’s hopes and fears,
their thoughts, lives, and experiences, a record more honest than the fullest
statistical study” (Giffords 147). Anita Brenner’s 1929 book, Idols Behind
Altars, which Gifford cites, places a more poetic slant on their roles as
historical documents; to Brenner, the ex-voto in Mexico “is a moving record
of a nation, a stethoscopic measure of its heart” (147). The same is true of
ex-votos produced in the United States, except these experiences of the heart
are not national, but of the border, a “nation” unto itself. While the ex-voto
practice is not widespread today, “it continues to be produced in a small
way” (146). In many of the narratives the supplicant sees herself or himself in
prayer near a sickbed with the saint who is being thanked floating overhead.
Interestingly, in those ex-votos involving war, the supplicant may not even
have been present, but the scene is imagined and inscribed with great detail.
These imagined scenarios both are and are not the “real thing.” They are
representational fantasies that can operate as fetishes in that they are not the
thing or experience itself, but demonstrate it or stand in for it, and, through
the interaction with the individuals involved as performers or audience for
the performance, create an empowering discourse. In these scenarios, the
discourse centers on the power of the Santos y Cristo to perform miracles or
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128
rescues. La Virgen de Guadalupe manifests a similar power, but unlike the
other religious figures depicted in ex-votos, she also embodies a
cultural/social discourse of power that produces a version/vision of women
too good to be true. The Guadalupe myth as a discourse for women does not
explain natural behavior or events, but rather presents or demonstrates what
could be called a preternatural behavior for women. Durkheim describes
myths in this type of case as demonstrating a “social and cultural” pattern
that is itself superhuman. These are myths so woven into cultural
understandings that they require more than just a new story to incite change.
They require listeners (readers), an audience, prepared to hear and willing to
engage with a persona through reader or actor performances. This audience
must be willing to be overcome by a culturally transformational experience, a
fantasy that through retelling, recasts the myth as an archconic fetish that
may then stand in for the Chicana as sexual, and as a sexual subject— creating
a metalanguage that is as bad as it can get.
Understanding the construction of that metalanguage and how it
works in archconic cultural discourse requires examining fantasy and its
various incarnations and interpretations, beginning with some basic linguistic
definitions and then moving on to, but definitely not staying with, Freud. In
what has become a pivotal article in the cinematic theory of spectatorship,
Jean LaPlanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis begin by presenting the German
“everyday” definition of fantasy (phantasiej “as the term used to denote the
imagination...the imaginary world and its contents, the imaginings or
fantasies into which the poet or the neurotic so willingly withdraws.” Here
the spectators exist in their own fantasy world where they can, if you will,
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129
/ p A M O S -G RA'ilAS A LA .5 ANTISI M A . \ IfHGEN' DE. SA&
., F - N ^ W l f M # „ * (HAVI! ■ • A t ON it cu t N il UN ,C H OKE‘V 9 « ‘
w r A w a s m
Figure 11. In these retablos healing or realization of prayer is fantasized with
the saints in their places as critical players. Top: Retablo of Bernabe H. and
Catarina V., bottom: Retablo of Angela Chavez (Durand and Massey 155 and
183.)
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130
Here, in this apparently self-centered enjoyment, as in the
deepest fantasy, in this discourse no longer addressed to
anyone, all distinction between subject and object has been lost.
... By placing the origin of fantasy in the autoerotic, we have
shown the connection between fantasy and desire. (26)
He also concludes that fantasy is not the object of desire, “but its setting.”
Furthermore, within this setting, subject positions are not definite or defined.
LaPlanche contends that while the subject is “always present in the fantasy,
[it] may be so in a desubjectivized form” (26). For LaPlanche there is no
separation between conscious and unconscious fantasies, but there is a
“relationship and profound continuity between various fantasy scenarios--the
stage-setting of desire— ranging from the daydream to the fantasies recovered
or reconstructed by analytic investigation”(29).
Feminist cinema theorists such as Judith Mayne, Constance Penley,
and Teresa de Lauretis have all understood LaPlanche’s concept o f fantasy as
the setting, or as de Lauretis calls it, “the mise-en-scene, or structuring of
desire,” and the further notion o f an unstable subjectivity as useful theoretical
tools in addressing cinematic issues o f spectatorship and representation.
Citing an essay by Elizabeth Cowie, De Lauretis claims [LaPlanche/Pontalis
theory] “plugs into the public realm via the link of creative writing to
daydreaming suggested by Freud” (de Lauretis 126). This expansion from
private to public fantasy makes the further connection to cinema
straightforward in its role as a “dominant apparatus of representation.” That
singular world of fantasy on the “screen-in-our-heads” is, of course, available
for the cost of a ticket at the local AMC complex. The relationship of the
conscious daydream or fantasy to the broader context of art within which
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131
creative writing, art, and performance has a place, with its natural and
necessary connection to public, social, and cultural fantasy, provides an
illuminating context for re-imagining cultural archcons or myths and their
relationship to the public imagination. In other words, fantasy can help to
uncover the ways Chicanas recast cultural archcons in order to value
themselves and their bodies as women. The perception of self-love, or to use
LaPlanche’s term, the autoerotic that exists within the realm of fantasy and
its correllative, art, thus allows the subject/object distinction to be ambiguous
and creates space for the possibility of sexual agency. These dynamics
suggest the possibility for the relationship between the work and its creator to
become a performance that can be transformative for the spectator.
Restructuring the Mythic Fantasy
Transforming the image, as well as the audience or spectator, requires
moving the fantasy into a representational form that gives it a new structure,
but simultaneously contextualizes the fantasy in ways that provide enough of
the cultural/social dynamic to engage spectators. Action on both sides of the
proscenium,37 if you will, thus depends on the metaphorical structuring of the
images and the ways in which those images resonate with the individual
receiving the material. What is meant by image? The answer is not found in
a simple definition. The discussion is both ancient and modem, ranging
across disciplines from linguistics to optical computer technology to
philosophy. In contemporary theory, Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “world
37 Performance art often takes place in front of the proscenium on the forestate. A perfomace “space is not constructed
to keep audience and spectators separate. This changes the dynamic, placing spectators inside and outside the fantasy.
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132
as a text,” is a good place to begin. His notion of the world as a “system of
hieroglyphics” can mean, according to W J.T. Mitchell, that there
is no foundation for the sign, no way of stopping the endless chain of
signification. This realization can lead us to a perception o f the mise en
abime, a nauseating void of signifiers in which a nihilistic abandonment to
free play and arbitrary will seems the only appropriate strategy. Or it can
lead to a sense that our signs, and thus our world, are a product of human
action and understanding, that although our modes of knowledge and
representation may be “arbitrary” and “conventional,” they are constituents
of the forms of life, the practices and traditions within which we must make
epistemological, ethical, and political choices. (Mitchell 29)
The traditional world of Mexican-American archcons and that of
contemporary Chicana artists’ revisions of those archcons seems most
responsive to Derrida’s interpretation of the world as text. Mitchell’s
understanding provides a theoretical base for the complex resonance or
signification at the core of both the archcons and the images used to recast
them. The web of cultural, religious, political, and historical
significants/signifiers can produce a dense incestuous weave of meaning
whose text requires understanding those “practices and traditions.” In his
analysis of Nelson Goodman’s Languages o f Art, Mitchell criticizes
Goodman’s use of “density of the symbol system” to describe the difference
between nonlinguistic systems and languages (67). However, “dense” and
“resonant” appear to be kissing linguistic cousins. In his theory of notation,
Mitchell paraphrases Goodman’s example of density as opposed to
differentiation. The example is one of a marked versus an unmarked
thermometer. In the graduated thermometer every “position o f mercury is
given a determinate position” and the reading is made by rounding off to the
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133
closest determinate position. In the ungraduated thermometer, “everything is
relational and approximate” and every point or place counts (67). In this way
an “image is syntactically and semantically dense in that no mark may be
isolated as a unique, distinctive character...nor can it be assigned a unique
reference or ‘compliant.’ Its meaning depends rather on its relations with all
the other marks in a dense continuous field” (67). While Mitchell is explicitly
dealing with notation in this discussion, he could easily be discussing poetry,
especially those metaphors whose meanings grow or resonate depending on
their interaction with other metaphors, images in the field, or signified by the
term or linguistic image.
Raquel Salinas’ performance of Heat your Own demonstrates a fantasy
whose dense or resonating images recast the Guadalupe archcon as a Chicana
subject. This Chicana literally steps out of the discourse of the perfect
asexual woman into the body of a woman with her own sexual and social
desires. In Act I, the lights go up on a woman whose costume displays
iconography that instantly identifies her as La Virgen de Guadalupe (Figure
12). Laid out in front of her are over a dozen tall glass votive candles. This
setting evokes for the audience a church or similar devotional space. Male
supplicants come onto the stage from behind the curtain, left and right.
Crawling across the stage toward the virgin, they are praying “for obedient
wives.” This notion of female obedience to the male is as familiar to these
spectators as the devotional space. Cherrie Moraga shares her experience of
this understood obedience. She describes an experience of being asked by her
brother to
‘.bring us something to drink.’ ‘Get it yourself, pig,’ I thought,
but held those words from ever forming inside my mouth...to
refuse him would have brought her [my mother] into the house
with a scene. (Moraga 91)
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134
Her brother’s white friend is embarrassed; he knows Anglo girls “would
never have succumbed to such a task” (91). The broader consequences of
succumbing to obedience and its antithesis— the degree to which women, on
stage and off, subvert cultural roles— is described by Yvonne Yarbro-
Bejarano in her analysis of Moraga’s play, Giving Up the Ghost. She
describes the play as exploring “the ways in which Chicanas, both lesbian
and heterosexual, have internalized their culture’s concepts of sexuality”
(Case 99). Moraga sees this internalization as as “a commitment to her race:
Because heterosexism— the Chicana’s commitment to the
Chicano male— is proof of her fidelity to her people, the
Chicana feminist attempting to critique the sexism in the
Chicano community is certainly between a personal rock and a
political hard place. (Moraga 105)
Likewise in the Salinas performance, the men crawling towards Guadalupe in
Act I operate within a fantasy structured around cultural “knowns,” conscious
or unconscious, about heterosexism and the relationships between men and
women in Mexican-American culture. The object of the crawling men’s
affection and attention is la Virgen. The Virgen de Guadalupe, of course, is
the layered metaphor for mother/woman/perfection as well as Maria/
Tonantzin, and national/racial protector. She has power in all these areas,
which makes her a problematic protector for women. As perfect mother and
woman, she projects an impossible model, one that Chicanas consistently
find themselves unable to emulate. As protector of the race and nation, she
can support or advocate male violence and male political activity, activity
that, as we have seen, Moraga claims control female sexuality.
Simultaneously she is an archcon for the Chicana /Mexican-American
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135
woman. One the one hand, as Jeanette Rodriguez explains in her analysis of
material gathered for Our Lady o f Guadalupe, that la Virgen embodies the
idea of “a Mexican-American woman— despite enduring the triple oppression
of the dominant society’s racism and sexism, as well as her own culture’s
sexism— can have a sense of belonging in a world where she may be isolated
and alone”(Rodriguez 129). For this woman, Guadalupe is also seen as “a
resource, a coping mechanism for those who have no other resources” (129).
She is the mestiza Maria. For the majority of the Chicana spectators in the
Los Angeles Theatre Center for the October 1995 production of Heat Your
Own, Salinas’ metaphors and deep images resonated in these ways, in
addition to the ways dictated by individual audience members’ devotional
practices and family oral histories.
What is the audience response to the request: “Give us obedient
wives?” Laughter and muffled comment.3 8 The mise-en-scene is dark and
serious, a chapel. There is laughter, but not loud or raucous, a little sotto voce
, maybe held in and escaping, but there. The connection between spectator
and performance is made in this fantasy through cultural context.
The spectators respond to the cultural cues. Their relationship to the
performance fantasy was even more apparent at a January 1994 performance.
During a three-day festival of art events and educational discussion by and
about Latinas called Fierce Tongues/Women o f Fire, held at Highways
Performance Space in Santa Monica, Salinas performed only a portion o f the
piece, but to a “knowing” audience. For in this performance the program
38 Heat Your Own was the LA Weekly “Performance Pick o f theWeek” fore October 20-26,1999. In spite o f the LA
Weekly promotion, the audience for the perfomance I attended appeared to be largely Latina,
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136
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137
Figure 12. Surrounded by votive candles, Raquel Salinas as La Virgen
addresses the male supplicants in the first vignette of Heat Your Own (a
newsprint reproduction).
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138
notes make its intent explicit by telling spectators that “the work portrays the
abuse of women entrenched in the numerous cultural platitudes of a Latina’s
world.” In both performances, however, the piece plays out de Lauretis’
conclusion concerning spectorial fantasy (here I substitute the word
“performance” for “film” in her analysis):
I am saying that when it comes to engaging the spectator’s
fantasy and identification, a [performance piece’s] effects are
neither structural...nor totally structured by the [performance]
(by its fantasy, narration, or form); rather, they are contingent
on the spectator’s subjectivity and subjecthood (which are
themselves, to some extent, already structured but also open to
restructuration [my emphasis](/Vacr/ce 130).
The next movement in Salinas’ piece begins that restructuring. La Virgen
responds to the men by opening her sacred blue robe to reveal an embodied
“virgin, ” a sexy woman dressed in a short silk slip. Opening her hands as if
to bestow a blessing, she asks the men what they can offer her in return for
their desired “obedient wives.” But, this “Lupe” knows the score,
understands that Chicanas need more than prayer to get respect. The
“revealed” virgin suggests the possibility o f Chicana agency, including
sexual agency, and provides an ideological structure for the following
sections of the piece. A sweatshop seamstress is abused and cheated by her
boss. A student’s teacher refuses to pronounce her name correctly. A
teenager has a baby because her mother will not let her have an abortion.
And last, a Chicana lawyer comes home to a Mr. Macho husband after
defending a woman abused by her doctor. In this final scenario the female
lawyer, in the spirit of the “new Lupe,” throws the tortillas at her husband
and says, “heat your own.” The audience stands up and cheers. For a
moment, maybe more, they are transformed. The transformative power of
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139
such performances is shamanistic, because of, as Gloria Anzaldua puts it,
“the ability of story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the
listener into something or someone else. The writer, as shape-changer, is a
nahual, a shaman” (66).
In Salinas’ production, the critical transformative moment is the
opening of the sacred robes in the first vignette to uncover la Virgen as a
woman with a body. Now the male supplicants find themselves begging not
in front of an asexual sainted archcon, but a body with sexual markers much
like those of the women from whom they are asking obedience. With these
markers, she is also a woman, and it is as if they are now asking la Virgen for
obedience. Discourses have been turned around. Is she or isn't she? Like the
persona in Alma Villanueva’s “Mother, May I”, this woman’s body is a site
that both contains or embodies production and unfolds or creates. Such
shamanistic dualism is passed down from woman to woman. We have seen,
in Chapter Three’s analysis of “Mother, May I?,” Alma Villanueva calls this
site a thread, a thread that is stained with the blood of women who have spun
the thread into their own creations. She tells her daughter that it is now her
turn to
go and play,
become your
own mother
and spin your own lovely
thread. (“Mother, May I?” 42-46)
This is the thread of the umbilical chord, the physical connection to life and
the body. Anzaldua goes directly to the metaphorical bone to articulate a
similar connection to the body. “When I write it feels like I’m carving bone,”
she claims. “My soul makes itself through the creative act. It is constantly
remaking and giving birth to itself through my body” (Anzaldua 73). This is
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140
a body which creates with her “own lips” and can ask, “What will you do for
me?”
Guadalupe as Everywoman’s Body
If Villanueva internalizes Guadalupe to sanctify the body, and if
Salinas uncovers the Guadalupe to reveal a body, then the Taller de Arte
Fronterizo ’ s piece, La Border Boda, puts the body on the Guadalupe.
Members of El Taller are part of a multicultural women's group, Las
Comadres, active in the U.S. border region around San Diego and Tijuana.
La Border Boda has existed as both a performance piece and an interactive
exhibit in La Frontera/The Border, a collaboration between the Centro
Cultural de la Raza and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego (see
Figure 13). It later appeared at the Bridge Center for Contemporary Art in El
Paso, Texas as part of a similar border exhibit. The exhibit in San Diego was
called the The Reading Room, a part of the larger work, “ La Vecindad!
Border Boda.” Set up in a comer of the gallery, the exhibit covers the lower
part of the wall in each direction with two oversized versions of the
“ffeeway-sign family,” a family group holding hands and running across the
freeway. These signs are common on Southern California freeways warning
drivers of night crossings by immigrants from “across the border.” In each
comer hangs a copy o f the sign. One is a simple copy of the actual sign, the
other uses the same silhouettes but as skeletons in the style of those used for
Dia de los Muertos. Above each set of posters is a mantle displaying small
art works. Six feet away from the comer of the wall is a reading table with
journals and photographs documenting Las Comadres work, particularly the
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141
work on this “piece.”3 9 However, commanding the installation, appearing to
stand at the head of the table when viewed from the other end, is a life-sized
Guadalupe aura. There is no head, only a cutout. A mirror hangs in front of
the aura. When a spectator steps into the cutout, the mirror reflects her back
to herself. The spectator has entered the art and become the Guadalupe.
Margaret Waller, professor of English at UC Riverside and Comadre
member, feels that this Virgen de Guadalupe is “one of the most striking
pieces, and a crucial prop/metaphor in Border boda” (Waller 76). Where
Villanueva made the body sacred by internalizing la Virgen, and Salinas
finds the body inside la Virgen, las Comadres make la Virgen a space that
any body can enter making the sacred corporeal and the corporeal, sacred.
What the group has attempted to achieve, says Waller, is to bring “spectators
into part of a spectacle” with the goal of “destabilizing subject/object
relationships” (Waller 75). In her unpublished dissertation, historian Maria
Marrero suggests the implications of those relationships:
The image Las Comadres create is based on the Oriental
principle of the “empty middle.” Here La Virgen de Guadalupe
is deprived of a literal body.... Since the space is empty, it
suggests any woman can occupy it by positioning herself
there.... The iconography of filling in the sacred with the body
of an “ordinary” woman is a powerful one.... it places woman
toward the sacred, as the sacred shifts into the human. The
Virgin, taken out of the institutional patriarchies of the Catholic
Church and the Mexican government, and also taken out of the
sanctity of the Mexican traditional home altar, becomes an
appropriated icon. (Marrero 85-86)
Certainly, she is appropriated, but she is also recast in this exhibit as an
Everywoman fantasy of being both corporeal body and sacred body, of
39I spent so long reading at the table that a museum guest asked if I was part of the exhibit.
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142
having a “sacred” discourse that values not only the idealized, perfect woman
but also the ordinary woman’s body. The power of participating in the
performance, I would suggest, comes from the transformative power inherent
in spectators perceiving themselves to be part of the creative act, part of what
Anzaldua calls the “blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the
pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed” (Anzaldua 75). In
becoming part of the fantasy, spectators enter that space of desire and, as
Waller points out, since the object/subject position is not grounded, the
possibility is opened for them to act as agent or subject in the “desiring
field.” The mirror suspended in front of the aura allows the participant to be
simultaneously subject and object of her own gaze. It recalls LaPlanche’s
idea of the ideal “of auto-eroticism [as] lips that kiss themselves” where in
“this apparently self-centered enjoyment, as in the deepest fantasy, ...all
distinction between subject and object has been lost” (LaPlanche 26). Who is
looking here and who’s being looked at depends less on cultural discourse
than on individual desire.
A similar representation particularly in the use of mirroring to displace
subject/object dichotomy and a displacement of Guadalupe is developed in
Yreina D. Cervantez’ 1978 painting, Homenaje a Frida Kahlo (see Figure
14). This homage to Kahlo is as, could be expected, a painting of Kahlo, most
of whose paintings were self-portraits. However, because it is a homage to
one of the world’s foremost self-portraitists, it is also a self-portrait, a close-
up portrait of Cervantez' head, held in Kahlo’s hand like a mirror. The
iconography also suggests it is a homage to La Virgen as she expresses her
attributes through Kahlo. Kahlo is rendered naked except for a
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143
V]
; • • i
, .♦ '.V jrs tC '^ M h. I*'
Figure 13. The Reading Room from “La Vecindad /Border Boda” Exhibition
San Diego 1990.
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144
bleeding neck scarf imprinted with the words “ Diego.” Her right hand is on
her open belly in which two babies are seen to nestle. Surrounding Kahlo’s
head and shoulders is the Guadalupe aura, the Aztec sun. She is sitting
sidesaddle on a jaguar, considered by the Olmec people as a guardian spirit
and creator of humans and she is surrounded by lilies made famous in her
husband Diego Rivera’s 1925 painting, Dia de La Flor. Diego, with the body
of a frog, sits at her feet rolling his eyes up and slightly sideways to see her.4 0
With its visual quotations and layered, dense metaphors, this painting invites
many readings. Like Guadalupe, the aura connects the Kahlo figure to the
vigor o f the Aztec sun, and to the fecundity of the Aztec goddess with her
large breasts and children being nurtured in her womb. This is not the
withered and sickly body of Kahlo, the woman who lives in art and history,
but rather a physically vital woman who could stomp the life out that frog in
a minute. This Kahlo is also a spiritual woman, a soul of two cultures.
Riding the god of the indigenous, she is carried into the scene or supported in
the scene by the Aztec Jaguar, the giver of life, while wearing the aura of the
Guadalupe, the Catholic holy mother, Tonantzin, and the Aztec sun. She
holds the artist or the reflection of the artist in her hand and looks out at her
and/or us as if to say, “Yes, you are part of this and in your eyes I am part of
you. I am the subject, you are my subject, I am the subject of this painting,
the artist is the subject, the spectator is the subject in this complex fantasy.”
40 Diego was bom in Guanajuato, Gto., Mexico, where the legend about la ram , or the frog plays an important role.
Statues of la ra m are seen throughout the city. A museum is maintained in Diego’s childhood home.
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Figure 14. Homenaje a Frida Kahlo by YreinaD. Cervantez, 1978.
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146
In this layered mise-en-scene of desire, subject positions are multiple. The
only possible object position is la rana. Diego is trapped in a feminine noun
or persona. Kahlo as the creator/Guadalupe figure is the shaman or shape
changer that can make transformation possible, but she does not return
Diego’s gaze. Guadalupe, as Kahlo, is substantially embodied and
sexualized with a subject position that gives her clear sexual agency. The
deeper homage then is the way the fantasy changes the story or myth of
Kahlo. Instead of being physically compromised or at the mercy of her body,
she is here strong, with her babies, her body, and her art intact. The only
blood is that dripping from the neck ribbon that names Diego.
Changing the story to destablize the myth and thus change the
metalanguage so that the myth “speaks” differently is a common tactic of
Chicana artists, especially when concerned with the archcon of la Malinche.
This archcon, whose myth has been internalized for Chicanos/as, carries the
understanding of women not only as putas and chingadas but simultaneously
as victims and survivors. La Malinche is tainted by her willing collaboration
with the “other,” and as such she carries the stigma of death, which Maria
Herrera-Sobek claims is connected to the Western concept of Eve as an “evil,
tainted woman. Eve and la Malinche became inexorably intertwined,
reinforcing each other in the Mexican national consciousness” (Corrido 54).
This kind of melding is not surprising in a culture whose consciousness is
influenced by both a Eurocentric, Catholic ideology and a pantheon of
indigenous gods and goddesses. The Eve, Malinche, and Aztec Coatlicue
connection is as credible as the Eve/Malinche connection. Like many of the
Aztec gods and goddess, Coatlicue did not disappear with the Spanish
Catholic conquest; she simply lowered her voice and quietly insinuated
herself into conquistador and then colonial culture. As the goddess “of the
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147
‘Serpent Skirt’ and ‘Devourer of Wastes’” (Anton in Sobek 56) she is the
perfect complement to the other two icons of the feminine.
La Malinche: The Text in the Mouth
In the Mexican and Mexican-American corrido and other traditional
folk song variants these archcons have historically been given expression
through the actions of women who betray their men, cause brothers to shoot
one another, and lure others to their deaths. In Herrera-Sobek’s analysis, the
women depicted in the corrido continue the discourse of the negative la
Maliche archcon, and, as she points out,
the songs actually illuminate the ideological constructs on
which these images are based: they are socializing agents
designed to instruct, coerce, and frighten rebellious and unruly
young women into “proper” behavior. (72)
That these corrido characters provide instruction is in keeping with the
connection of la Malinche to language. As an historical figure, she was
reported to be Cortes’ translator, a keeper of tongues, without whom,
according to chronicler Bernal Diaz, “we could not have understood the
language of New Spain and Mexico” (Diaz 87). Such acts of interpretation
are also a part of Chicana poetics as writers “shift consciously from one
language to another, from one culture to another” (Rebolledo 193). The
Chicana is placed in the obvious position of storyteller, the carrier of culture,
a position traditionally held by la abuela, la bruja, la corridista, and el poeta.
These women are the positive side of la Malinche, la lengua, or the tongue,
the flesh in the mouth that literally and figuratively creates the story and puts
it in the mouth of others. This erotic metaphor for writing reflects the
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148
thinking of Cherrie Moraga who expounds on this connection in Loving In
the War Years:
Simply put, if the spirit and sex have been linked in our
oppression, then they must also be linked in the strategy toward
our liberation. (132)
There is also a la Malinche connection between sexuality and race. As
we have seen, her betrayal of race through sexual intimacy with Cortes
signifies an act of colonization by the white man and hence an act of betrayal
by la Malinche. A combination of white/man and Indian/woman creates a
racial/gender dichotomy that is emblematic in colonized/colonizer dichotomy
that reinforces powerful/powerless dyad. Moraga explains how these
dichotomies are reflected in the lives of Chicanas: “The Chicana’s sexual
commitment to the Chicano male— is proof of her fidelity to her people”
(105). To betray your sexual role, to expose a sexual identity as non
heterosexual, is to betray your race. But the Malinche story has also become,
for Chicana artists, an allegory about taking action and becoming the agents,
or translators of their own sexuality.
In Carmen Tafolla’s poem, “La Malinche”, the persona, la Malinche,
tells her story very much in the style of a corrido, a “song” that traditionally
provides a narration of heroic events. This poem is a first-person heroic
“herstory,” which retells the events of la Malinche’ s encounter with Cortes.
In this version, her own agency, actions, dreams, and visions bring about the
birth of another race. The Malinche envisioned by Tafolla is not a woman
violated, but a woman with vision. The speaker first identifies herself: “Yo
soy La Malinche.” This is the only Spanish line in the poem and obviously a
direct echo of Corky Gonzales’ poem “Yo soy Joaquin : An Epic Poem”
cited in Chapter One’s discussion of the poem “La Loca de La Raza Comica”
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149
by La Crisx. The Gonzales poem is one about conquest, blood, and despair.
It promises in the end that the people represented by Joaquin, a man, “shall
endure.” Tafolla’s intent here is to delineate what at first seems the
traditional iconic persona of la Malinche. However instead of being “Lost in
a world of confusion” and retreating “...to the safety within the/Circle of
life.../ MI RAZA (Gonzales 2), Tafolla’s persona sees and acts on the dream
of “la raza.” As the poem unfolds, instead of being “la Chingada” she is the
creator, the maker of “another world.../la raza” (Rebolledo 199). People who
simply endure are at the object end of someone’s “stick.” Tafolla’s persona
is intent on acting, not enduring. Borrowing from Gonzales is a way to
engage with a culturally understood notion o f the epic and then to write it
differently.
“La Malinche” begins the story at the beginning, with her naming
as“Malintzin Tenepal” by her own Indian people,
the Spaniards called me Dona Marina
I came to be known as Malinche
and Malinche came to mean traitor.
They called me - chingada.
“La Malinche” (Rebolledo 198-199)
The second verse carries the history forward to the arrival of Cortes. Now the
point-of-view becomes clear. The speaker is not addressing history buffs, the
Mexican people, or even the mother who has sold la Malinche into slavery.
She says, “And you came. / My dear Heman Cortes...” She speaks to her
former lover and employer. What he brought she says, ironicalley, was his
“‘civilization,’” but while he began
..to play a god, “...I began to dream...
I saw
and I acted.”
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I saw our world
And I saw yours
And I saw—
another. (19-22)
She imagines or fantasizes a world beyond the worlds she knows. At the next
stage of her history, she sings of three worlds. However, no one else can see
her vision, especially not Cortes. By the third stanza, the burning of the great
city of Tenochtitlan, she is no longer concerned about the other two worlds,
because while
My homeland ached within me
(...I saw another)
Another world—
A world yet to be bom... (42-45)
That world is bom through “(my sweet / mestizo New World child).”
With the birth the persona claims to have been “immortalized Chingada!”
The “New World child” is taken away to be raised in Spain and she tells
Cortes, “You still didn’t see. / You still didn’t see.” Immortalized as a traitor,
she now sees herself in “history” where they will “call me/Chingada.” At the
end she tells Cortes and by extension all colonizers of Chicanos/as, that she
was “not a traitor to [herjself:”
I saw a dream
and I reached it.
Another world..........
la raza.
la raaaaa-zaaaa... (58-62)
Tafolla does not change the content or action of the traditional story, only the
psychology motivating the character in that story. Rather than the obedient,
crafty, knowing, exotic pagan, and erotic “other” crafted out of tales by Diaz
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and others, this la Malinche sees her role as the future, creator of another
race. This is the fantasy within the poem’s fantasy. This character is the
subject o f her own life; she knows what is going on. “They [the other Indians
and probably the conquistadors] could not imagine me dealing on a
level/with you--so they said I was raped, used,” (198). However, she “saw
our world” (199). What is important to this la Malinche is not how others see
her, but how she sees herself. She does not need the mirror of history or
cultural archconography to validate her own mission. That validation come
from the mirror of self and as the poem holds it up for la Malinche, it holds it
up for the spectator/reader.
Like a corrido, this poem is meant to be performed, sung or spoken.
Not that it doesn't get performed in a one-on-one interaction with a single
reader, but poetry is an art whose most dynamic life emerges when it comes
off the page.4 1 In her essay, “Someone is Writing a Poem,” Adrienne Rich
sees poetry staged and talks about the “theatre of the poem” (What Is 87).
She is interested in stanzas, lines, line shapes and lengths, the way the poem
sits on the page, the length o f words and the way all this fits into the phrasing
and breath of a reader. For Rich a poem is a field shaped by space and time
in which the work is performed. The archcon of la Malinche appears on such
a stage, and in the performance of that rewritten character, it operates in a
theatre within a mise-en-scene of fantasy and desire that makes possible a
transformation. In the same essay, Rich quotes painter and poet Michele
Gibbs in her discussion of being “responsive and responsible to materials,
41 In places like Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Diego, Austin, El Paso, Houston, Tempe, and Denver, Chicana poetry
readings are regular events. At readings at the Cultura Latina bookstore in Long Beach, the audience often overflows the
shop onto the sidewalk and adjacent coffee shop. Events often get underway late while shop owners rig outside
speakers.
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152
yourself as artist, and community” (53). Gibbs says her sense of poetry’s
social relationships is that
the most integrative social power contained in words is
liberated in performance....For me, it is the activist & spoken
element which follows on the contemplative act of composition
which is most capable of vitalizing folks. (53)
The nature or style of that spoken performance can control the
experience of transformation. Tafolla’s poem is a monologue in which the
archcon la Malinche reaches inside of the mythic structure circumscribing
her story to reveal her experience of its events, thus changing the direction of
centuries of historical, cultural, and political “spin.” It is a one-woman “you
are there,” experience. However, an audible act of speech is not required for
an experience of performance to transpire between the reader and writer.
The pleasure of reading, according to Barthes, “occurs at the seam--where
two edges come together [this is]...the moment of orgasm, of bliss. ...Neither
culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them” {Pleasure
6,7). At this edge, the suggestion of a “gap” is the moment when something
exciting is perceived to be possible, when something forbidden, because it is
hidden, might be revealed. Marie Maclean, in her discussion of narrative
performance, talks about this relationship in terms of both context and
partners. She says (with less erotics but more clarity than Barthes),
Performatives are verbal forms which have not only meaning,
but also effect. They are always context-dependent, since they
rely on shared convention and shared obligation between the
partners in the verbal act. It is no good warning people who are
no longer prepared to consider your warning a valid
performance, as the boy who cried wolf discovered. (22)
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She continues saying that “just as the libidinal investment of the theatre
spectator is enormous, so too is that of the individual reader” (35).
In this vein, one might say that in Lucha Corpi’s poem, “Marina,” has
many seams in its poetic garment, many places where narrative content
seduces the Chicana reader, “cruises the reader” (4), to create a site of bliss, a
scene of desire. The significant seam, or fantasy point of desire in
“Marina,” is the meeting point of historical and spiritual contexts in the first
three stanzas, and where the desire to recast the self as la Malinche or Marina
is actualized in the final stanza.
Corpi uses a third-person narrator to construct the scene of spiritual
and religious desire in “Marina.” The metaphoric language that structures the
mise-en-scene in these spiritual fantasies or poetic imaginings resonates with
the feel of the earth, the sound of the wind, the smell of incense and blood.
All are metaphors that describe exercises of faith in indigenous and
occasionally Catholic spiritual ritual. The first three parts of Corpi’s four-
part poem lament the outcomes for “Marina Mother,” “Marina Virgin,” and
[Marina] “The Devil’s Daughter.” Part IV, “She (Marina Distant)”
constructs a resurrection or rebirth. The multiple seams that bring the
Chicana into the text are Indian, Spanish/Catholic, and shared
cultural/historical understandings of conversely la Malinche and “not” la
Malinche, although these names are never mentioned in the text. The persona
exists inside the poem as only a pronoun, as “she” or “her.” The referent is
the particular cultural understanding of the Marina in these subtitles. Keeping
“her” named in the tradition of Spanish culture maintains cultural
connotations that have a positive Spanish lineage and reflect her Indian
royalty more than her Mexican heritage as la Chingada. This allows a
“reader in the know,” especially a Chicana reader, to rejoice in the death of
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154
the “whore,” the “damned,” and the “Devil’s Daughter” and rejoice in her
rebirth as a child of the “earth and sun.” It is a recasting with suggestions of
indigenous connections of the earth mother Tonantzin and the aura of the sun
behind the Guadalupe. Corpi may also play upon Bernal Diaz’ account of la
Malinche as noble and righteous. According to Sandra Cypress, “Diaz
configures the sign ‘Dona Marina’ as filled culturally with the attributes of a
worthy Spanish mother” (Cypress 31).
In the first section, Christian and Nahuatl metaphors come together as
Corpi describes a birth from “the softest clay” that has “...dried under the
sun.” These images speak to Nahuatl belief that la Malinche’ s name was
written with the Christian “blood of a tender lamb” (Rebolledo & Rivera
196). This Christian blood is then used to write her name “on the bark of
that tree/as old as they.” Tey Diana Rebolledo interprets this as writing “to
the sacred parchment, to the codices of the tribe” (Women Singing Rebolledo
67). She also reminds us that this “was no ordinary woman, since ordinary
women did not have their names entered on anything”(67). Bom a mystic, a
curandera or bruja, la Malinche waits “for the owl’s song/that would never
come.” The poem then laments her sexual victimization (66) as she is “sold—
/from hand to hand, night to night. Her womb [is] sacked of its fruit,” and her
only child grows up and calls “her ‘whore.’” No one loves her. The poem
persona claims that “you no longer loved her, the elders denied her.” What is
the referent for “you”? The second person plural is compounded by plural
meanings — the two communities, Catholic and Nahuatl, “Marina’s Mother”
and Cortes. Tey Rebolledo sees the title “Marina Mother” as undermining
“the negative images that others (not the author) have of Marina” (66). The
title sets up a metaphoric understanding of goodness and godliness (Maria
Mother) that makes the treatment and characterization of this woman
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155
problematic. This contradiction creates the seam or fantasy place of desire
which pulls the reader into the fantasy scenario, as well as into the lament for
this particular woman and all the “others” so culturally characterized.
In Part II, “The Marina Virgin,” the narrator tells us that “she” only
becomes Christian “because she loved you,” a “you” that can be understood
here as Cortes and by extension, Quetzalcoatl whom the Indians believed
Cortes to be when he first arrived. Tonantzin-Quetzalcoatl were “the
dominant expressions of the universal creative principle,” according to
Jacques Lafaye and “from pre-Columbian times they appear linked together
as the two faces, male and female, of the primary creative principle”
{Quetzalcoatl 214). She sees “you” in the “bleeding man” on the cross. She
is not engaging with Jesus as a figure of Christian trinity, but rather with “her
secret and mourning memory o f” (197) another man, another deity,
Quetzalcoatl. Marina makes all the right Christian moves, washing “away
her sins / with holy water” but covers her skin to hide the mark o f race which
“had been damned.” While wrapped in this Christian “cover-up,” she returns
to her Nahuatl practices, burying her “thin soul” in “the moist black earth of
your life ( which can be read as her life or, by extension her body, the
Nahuatl life, the life of Quetzalcoatl). Marina moves freely between these
several practices, her various cloaks of identity creating multiple seams or
gaps. In this performance, the erotics of culture and spirit play a game of
“hide and seek” inside and across these seams of desire. Who plants the seed
or soul? Who nurtures the soul? “She planted it,” says the persona, giving
this spiritually/racially cross-dressed virgin the tools with which to till the
garden o f the soul. Her regret is that she has to “play,” or pass, in order to
exist (a radically different use of the metaphor than Alma Villanueva in
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156
“Mother, May I?, whose persona needed to play in order to fully become her
own person)..
The last stanza laments the loss of self, of the native and the spiritual
powers of her indigenous life. The Catholic Church will not allow this
spiritual cross-dressing. When she dies, the figure of the native is only a
ghost. Like the third wonder that foretold the coming of the Spanish,
lightning struck in the north,
and on the new stone altar the incense burned
all night long. Her mystic pulsing
is silenced, the ancient idol
shattered, her name
devoured by the wind in one deep growl (3. 1-6)
As Rebolledo suggests, the Church associates the native with the witch or
bruja (Women 67). The Judaeo-Christian God admonishes that one can
have no other Gods before him. There is little tolerance in this tradition for
multiples or overlays, or for also/ands. The passing of native spirituality is
mourned by indigenous peoples and others culturally connected to
indigenous practice. However, the lament is moderated by the possibility that
“little remained” of her name, of this native religion and pantheon. Perhaps,
the persona suggests, it is “Only a half-germinated seed.”
Stanza IV presents the possibility of her resurrection as “a flower,” “a
sorrowful child,” “a pool of fresh water,” or even “a tropical night.”
Somehow, in some form, that “ancestral memory,” the “She (Marina
Distant)” of the title will be seen in the distance crossing “the bridge,” the
border or seam between races, ethnicities, God and Goddess, Christian and
native, and male and female. She does not bear a child, but like the Earth
Goddess, her hands are full of the stuff of regeneration, “earth and sun”(197).
If she holds the earth and the sun, she controls the means for survival. She is
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neither Marina Mother, Marina Virgin, or The Devil’s Daughter. They have
disappeared. Those cultural understandings of bad mother, duplicitous
virgin, and witch have been lamented. Now the poet delivers an original
“she,” a border person. The naming is left to the reader, an action which
pulls the audience or reader into the performance in much the same way that
la Guadalupe in Border Boda destabilizes perceived object/subject relations
by allowing any(body) to be la Virgen. The poem ends with “she” holding in
“her hands...earth and sun,” metaphors for inner and outer, creating what
Foucault would call a discourse of power which puts “her” in both positions.
“It [power] speaks, and that is the rule.” (History o f Sexuality 83) She who
was once known as la Malinche is buried, and “you” are resurrected.
Angela de Hoyos presents a la Malinche who articulates more earthly
concerns regarding her relationship with Cortes, and whose representations
generate metaphors for race and colonization issues, in her poem, “La
Malinche a Cortez y Vice Versa/ La Malinche to Cortez and Vice Versa.”
One of the first things we need to know about this poem is that it is always
presented in both Spanish and English. Printing formats required that the two
versions always straddle the seam of the book. This presents the poem on a
linguistic border and across a physical border, the positions that reflect the
role of la Malinche as translator. The borderland is also, of course, the place
increasingly viewed in Chicana writing not as a “between place,” but rather a
new place, a place where subjects can be both/and. In this poem, “both/and”
or “inner/outer” are figured in the linguistic space and in the soliloquies of
the speakers. The meanings created in the words of the poem are reflected
and mediated in the way the poem is set on the page bilingually and
physically. The monologues have an unmistakable feel of Robert Browning
in the psychological insight they provide and in the not so “tongue-in-cheek”
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deviousness and duplicity they reveal about the speakers (Norton 1234).
Browning’s Fra Lippo Lippi and de Hoyo’s “He” (understood as Cortes from
the title) share a similar ease at playing fast and loose with the truth. De
Hoyos’ persona is no less adept. As the first speaker, she asks for Cortes’
name “so it can beautify [her]” (Rebolledo 201). She never asks for love or
marriage directly, but rather the certain notoriety that will come if his name is
engraved
...right here, next to mine in the sand.
I’m yours and I want the whole world
to know it. (3-5).
O f course, Cortes sees no need for “superfluous adornments. / 1 love you and
that’s enough,” he replies. In his aside, the next stanza, de Hoyos presents
him talking to himself “between parenthesis,” unmasking the less
magnanimous side of this persona:
...It’s unbecoming
for a white man
o f my noble stature
to marry
a simple slave, hrrmpp! (12-16)
This “hrrmpp!” echoes the sounds of Browning and the arrogance of his
personas. But, “she” is complicit in this behavior. By lying and leading him
to believe that she indeed fulfills his culturally understood stereotype of
woman as both stupid and unrealistic, she (placing tongue firmly in cheek)
says,
I know that you love me
and forgive my stupidity. It’s that
we women always dream of the impossible. (21-23)
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Going on she begins to berate him as an “insipid gringo” who only sees her
as “a pound of flesh” that he can “sell [me] at your whim / ungrateful white
man...!!!” The poem ends “Etcetera, etcetera” suggesting there is no way out
of the denial and falsehood existing between genders or metonymically
between cultures. There is no finding the truth about this relationship here; it
lies somewhere between what is never spoken. What is spoken is woman, la
Malinche, who acts out the cultural archcon or paradigm of the traitor, saying
one thing, thinking another.
The way the poem lies down next to itself in Spanish and English
creates a critical gap that keeps the context schizophrenic, existing
simultaneously on both sides of the border. The resulting linguistic
performance resists absolutes because of the slippage of signs between
languages, while the bilingual audience engages with the work through a
metalanguage that requires metaphoric engagement in and across both
languages. That it is published in both languages is not a whim. De Hoyos is
said to be a “verbal wizard” who regularly expands “beyond the linguistic
limits of the monolingual writer” (Fernandez 67). She writes at a site of
pleasure where two linguistic edges come together. It is the Bartheian
moment of “turning a mistake into a save— the moment o f orgasm, of bliss”
{Pleasure 7). That moment of bliss is available to the bilingual reader, the
translator, the storyteller, the writer, the la Malinche who takes on agency
con la lengua. “She” can tell and she can read the story on both sides of the
page, where the real story both is and isn’t, resulting in a text that acts as a
fetish object that both is and isn’t her desire. As the representative o f that
desire, it “cruises,” as Barthes would say, the reader. In her poem “Right in
One Language,” Carmen Tafolla’s persona expands on this idea:
There are 2 many carinos to be
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created
to stay within the lines,
2 many times
when I want to tell you:
There is room
here
for two
tongues
inside this
kiss. (Fernandez 174-176)
So whose kiss is it? As one writer with “two tongues,” Tafolla brings us
back to the notion of writing bilingually as a form of autoerotic fantasy— a
fantasy created by the individual to give pleasure where the distinction
between subject and object has been lost. “The ideal,” to repeat LaPlanche,
“one might say, of auto-eroticism is ‘lips that kiss themselves”’ (LaPlanche
26).
La Llorona: Corriendo con el Viento
The archonic life of la Llorona has always existed bilingually in a
multicultural context. Often said to be connected to la Malinche, this figure
may also have roots in European folk narratives of witch and woman who
kills children.4 2 Jose Limon points to the analysis by Americo Paredes who
concludes that la Llorona has “deep roots in Mexican tradition because it was
grafted on an Indian legend cycle about a “supernatural woman who seduces
men when they are alone on the roads or working in the fields, often killing
42 The story o f Hansel and Gretal is among the most well known European folktales with an evil woman that preys on
children.
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them” (Limon 408). As with all folk tales, the “real” story depends on the
teller and listeners, and both can be identified as informants in their
relationship to this tale. (See Chapter Two for details.) What seems common
to most versions of the story is that la Llorona comes out of nowhere. She
“appears,” or “is seen.” This magical quality, among others, is part of her
identification as a witch or bruja. Limon sees the progression o f the story as
“passing from betrayed grieving mother to frightening phantasm” (417).
Tellers of the tale give her the power to perform whatever evil the teller feels
will be most persuasive to the children. While she may also mourn her
children who have either been taken from her and drowned, or whom she has
drowned to save from the anguish they will experience in the world, she is
also said to “get” children who are not in bed on time or chase children who
have the misfortune to come upon her or to whom she appears. La Llorona
kills her children to save them and scares children to make them good. In
this dual guise she can move from la mujer surfrida4 3 to mythical female
with magical pow ers-a female whose dreadful deed displaces the family, the
institution that preserves heterosexism and sexism and that, as Moraga points
out, is “infused like blood into the veins of the Chicano. At all costs, La
familia must be preserved” {Loving 110). As a powerful female mythological
figure, she echos the discourse of another bad woman, la Malinche, but la
Llorona is connected to the supernatural. According to Mirande and
Enriquez, she does not meet “the natural” cultural expectations of female
behavior. “All versions,” they say,
43A friend from Columbia, whose cultural experience did not include la Llorona, translates her name as “cry baby”
which certainly puts a different spin on her character. In this position she not only suffers, but also receives a linguistic
put down for her behavior.
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consistently present her as a female who strayed from her proper role as
mother, wife, mistress, lover, or patriot.... Whether she is enticingly seductive
or a terrifying figure, La Llorona persists as the image of a woman who
willingly or unwillingly fails to comply with feminine imperatives. As such,
a moral light is cast on her, and she again reflects a cultural heritage that is
relentless in its expectations of feminine roles. {La Chicana 33)
All those roles have names, metaphors that call her by what she is said
to do. She is named and, metonymically, women are labeled, by her
perceived behavior. In her poem, “La Llorona,” originally published by West
End Press in 1985, Naomi Quinonez uses naming to reveal the “Llorona
within,” seeing her as the
all-giving and all-loving
the all-forgiving part of my being
that is negated.
La madre bendita
La mujer fuerte
La puta madre
La soldadera
La india amorosa
La mujer dolorosa. (Rebolledo 218-219)
Quinonez’s poem goes on to say that “La Llorona, the feminine / haunts us if
we fear her, ” but we must understand that mothers know they are bringing
children into a world that “may destroy them / and will kill them,” and so
may themselves, like la Llorona, sacrifice their children “to haunt the weak
and comfort the living.” She names this mother “La mujer sagrada/ the
defiled woman.” The poem is a plea to the reader to see the “bad woman”
differently, to internalize not just that feminine discourse that “haunts us if
we fear her,” but to respect her “vulnerability /and draw from her strength.”
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However, she remains that “bad woman,” the one who, Mirande and
Enriquez remind us, does not meet cultural expectations. She may not live up
to these expectations, but the woman, la Llorona, has not only strength, but
power— power to disrupt the patriarchal familia. La Llorona can tap into the
blood of the Chicano through the blood of the Chicana that births the children
and the stories. This pluma sangre, connects the bodies of Alma Villanueva
in “Witches’ Blood” and Gloria Anzaldua in “My Black Angelos. ” In these
poems they write la Llorona in and out of themselves, their bodies, in an
erotic relationship that transforms the la Llorona discourse of cultural female
failure into one that is as “bad” as it gets.4 4 For each of these poets, the
fantasy or scene of desire is the poet’s own body, the site of a transformative
relationship with self both as and not as la Llorona, la bruja, the witch, the
power of the blood. In both of these poetic performances, this archcon’s
discourse isn’t rewritten, but reconsidered and redefined against a ground of
women’s experience, instead of the culture’s idea of that experience. In
addition, it seems that a particular attribute of the archcon, la Llorona as
witch, is selected as the site where power and possibilities for agency make it
the site most likely to be “cruised” by the reader/spectator.
The soft whisper of “Una mujer vaga en la noche” quickly becomes a
cry “for the dead child” and then a “ grito ” that “splinters the night” in Gloria
Anzaldua’s poem, “My Black Angelos” (Anzaldua Borderlands 184). The
screamer begins tracking the persona who “stink(s) of carrion,” the smell of
flesh tracked like a hound on the trail, is a body giving off its pheromone of
44 The meaning of “bad” here is turned around in the manner of 90’s popular and rap music in which “bad” was really
“hot” or good.
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desire (Lewis 19).4 5 The “black Angelos are coming for her, “La bruja con
las unas largas. ” The angel at her doorstep is not there to carry the poem’s
persona up to heaven, but to enter her. First, she must groom the persona,
prepare her and display the intimate relationship that bonds them. As this
grooming process unfolds, La bruja’ s relation to indigenous
Mayan/Toltec/Aztec roots is revealed, especially the part of her that is the
snake tongue of the “Snake Woman,” Cihuacoatl, Serpent Woman, ancient
Aztec goddess of the earth, of war and birth, patron of midwives, and
antecedent of la Llorona ” (Anzaldua 33). It is that tongue that she uses to
pick
the meat stuck between my teeth
with her snake tongue
sucks the smoked lint from my lungs
with her long black nails
plucks lice from my hair.
This relationship is so close that La bruja does not need to enter through a
natural body opening, she simply “crawls into” her “spine.” The process of
entering is almost a merger, erasing the subject/object distinction. In her
essay “Entering Into the Serpent,” Anzaldua describes entering into the
serpent as an experience of becoming. She says:
Like the ancient Olmecs, I know Earth is a coiled Serpent.
Forty years it has taken me to enter into the Serpent, to
acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to
assimilate the animal body, the animal soul. (Anzaldua
Borderlands 26)
45 Jn the Chapter called “A Fear o f Pheromones” Thomas describes pheromones as “small, simple molecules, active in
extremely small concentrations. Eight or ten carbon atoms in a chain are all that are needed to generate precise,
unequivocal directions about all kinds o f matters” (18).
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Entering the serpent is to enter the body, the sexual body. Later in the same
essay in a discussion of the ways in which indigenous religious icons and
rituals have been destroyed or reidentified, Anzaldua claims:
After the Conquest, the Spaniards and their Church continued
to split Tonantsin/ Guadalupe. They desexed Guadalupe, taking
Coatlalopeuh, the serpent /sexuality, out of her.” (27)
In “My Black Angelos ” the persona becomes embodied and sexualized by
taking la Llorona under her skin, where desire often seems to crawl and make
us itch.4 6 The persona sees “her eyes opening and closing, / shining under
my skin in the dark.” Now a part of the persona, la bruja begins to whirl her
bones, “twirling until they’re hollow reeds.” These bones become
instruments, poetic pipes from the poet’s body, to tell the story of
una mujer vaga en La noche
anda errante con las almas de los muertos. (184)
As such la Llorona becomes part of everywoman, no longer necessarily evil,
but as part of all “black Angelos ” who
sweep through the street
con el viento corremos
[who] roam with the souls of the dead. (185)
In this poem the patina o f Anzaldua’s la Llorona consists of layers of
mujers, of brujas, of almas, of angelos, and los muertos— the saints, the myth,
the witches, the dead, and the women. They run together, literally and
metaphorically. There is also an intriguing bit of word-play based on sound
and dependent on performance. The word Angelo and the word anhelo share
46 Anzaldua believes that Cihuacoatl, the Serpent Woman, is an antecedent o f La Llorona and, that “she (the serpent), is
the symbol of the dark sexual drive the chthonic (underworld), the feminine, the serpentine movement of sexuality, of
creativity, the basis o f all energy and life” (35).
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a similar pronunciation. The first means angel, the second, desire. In the
form of the black angel, the bruja, could easily “slip” into the linguistic site
o f anhelo, linguistically become a place of desire and desiring. The black
angel stalks the woman, whose “stink” reveals her desire to be desired. Both
are desired and desiring creating ambiguous subject/object positions that are
acted on and through the body. The sound of poetry played on the bones of
the body is produced from this union. In her essay, “77/7//, Tlapalli: /The
Path of the Red and Black Ink,” Anzaldua says that for stories to have
transformative power they must “arise from the human body— flesh and
bone”— that there is a requirement for a “blood sacrifice” {Borderlands 75).
By accepting into the self the qualities of la Llorona, the persona can become
her own site of desire, the site of creativity. La Llorona and her
personification as bruja is not the bad woman, the bad mother, but rather she
is the force or energy of desire, the grito of orgasm that conceives the poet.
As such she releases the persona, who with la Llorona can say, “ el viento
corremos “ (185) (we ride the wind) instead of remaining shackled to her
cultural roles.
Alma Villanueva’s persona in “Mother, May I?” does not need to be
entered by “La bruja con las unas largas ” (184), she is already una bruja— a
woman bom that way. While Anzaldua’s poem suggests leaving the self open
to the power of la Llorona, Villanueva always looks to the body for power.
She writes in her poem “Witches’ Blood,” originally published by Place of
Herons Press in 1982, of the pride, value, and power of menstrual blood.
This power, she says, is a
...secret
wrapped in ancient tongues
spoken by men...
who
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made elaborate rituals
secret chants and extolled the cycles,
calling woman unclean4 7
while men have killed for “blood to flow” and
roamed the earth to find
the patience of pregnancy
the joy of birth—
the renewal of blood. (219-220)
The “renewal” is where Villanueva captures the idea of birthing the self.
There is always a fresh supply of blood to provide the birthing ground, the
site of desire, for both the child and the creative product. If this means she is
La Llorona, so be it. As Villanueva writes in “Mother, May I,” “birthing /
(yourself) is / no easy task” {Planet 112). But the woman’s body is in control
of this process. She is both subject and object. She is the agent of her birth
as powerful woman and powerful writer, and “witches blood” is the means to
that end.4 8 The persona disdains the discourses brought by naming. She
throws out the challenge,
call me witch
call me hag
call me sorceress
call me mad
47 Metaphors in biology that describe female reproductive organs have perpetuated the notion of “unclean.” Medically,
menstruation is described as the ‘debris’ o f the uterine lining. An illustration that accompanies a widely used medical
text shows menstruation as a chaotic disintegration of the form, matching the many texts which describe it as ‘ceasing,’
‘dying,’ ‘losing,’ ‘denuding,’ and ‘expelling.’ These are not neutral terms, but ones that convey failure and dissolution.”
(Martin 411)
48 In biology and medical texts, eggs are described metaphorically as passive and sperm as active.
Also because postmodern discussions regarding issues of agency are most often focused on rewriting or reconsidering
Freud’s notion o f lack and the fetish, it would be productive to consider what is missing in men— the blood and related
production o f women. Such a lack can be understood as a hidden and very powerful secondary sex characteristic,
especially in the way it relates to producing children and texts. If that “witches blood” is a metaphor for the attributes of
la Virgen, la Malinche, and la Llorona, they become fetishes for female power and productivity.
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call me woman
do not call me goddess.
I don’t want the position.
The blood stains the thread that each generation of women takes from the
previous and weaves together those women and their stories. As we have
seen, in one of the last poems in the “Mother, May I?” series the persona tells
her daughter,
bcome your
own mother
and spin your own lovely
thread. (119)
This return to the body and a sexuality that suggests female agency rewrites
the discourse of the goddess as woman/witch, the Serpent Woman, or la
Llorona, where, according Anzaldua, the serpent mouth, “guarded by rows of
dangerous teeth, a sort of vagina dentate,” is considered by the Olmecs “the
most sacred place on earth, a place of refuge, the creative womb from which
all things were bom and to which all things return” (Anzaldua 34). She can
“spin” her own “Lovely/thread” in that vagina/mouth and be both a mother to
herself, nurturing and protective, and the mother that “spins” her own
productions. Woman contains all these discourses, once they are rewritten
with positive connotations.
In ”Mi Reflejo,”( Rebolledo Infinite Divisions 268) Lydia Camarillo
creates a poetic performance in which all the archcons form her persona. In
this bilingual poem, the persona looks in the mirror and asks each vision that
she sees, “Who goes there?” “Don’t you recognize me?” and later in each
verse “?Ya no te ACUERDAS de mi? ” In answer to the first question, the
mirror recites what has been done to her to create the culturally accepted
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discourse-what she has been seen as. In answer to the second question, the
reflection tells the “real story.” Each reflection joins with the next. La
Malinche joins Sor Juana, who joins Frida Kahlo, who joins La Virgen de
Guadalupe, who finally joins woman. She then sees herself as a reflection “of
the oppressed.” and vows “NO MAS! / WE ARE THE REVOLUTION! ” This
is a call to revolution for women who hold within themselves archcons whose
reflection or representations have been rewritten, or revisualized. When the
persona asks the mirror, mirror on the wall, she hears and sees:
I have come to FREE my people.
I AM MALINCHE
I have come to LIBERATE my people;
the oppressed.
Yo soy
SOR JUANA INES DE LA CRUZ
I have come to be part of the INSURRECTION of my people,
the oppressed.
I AM FRIDA KAHLO
I have come with Malinche, Sor Juana, and Frida.
I have come to guide them to the EMANICIPATION
of mis HIJOS.
Yo soy TONANTZIN,
la Virgen Morena
I AM LA VIRGEN DE GUADALUPE.
Si somos espejos de Cada una,
Soy Malinche,
Soy La Virgen de Guadalupe,
Soy Sor Juana Ines de La Cruz
Soy Frida Kahlo,
Soy Mujer.
WE ARE THE REVOLUTION!
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This Chicana persona takes the form of Corky Gonzalez’ chant and produces
from it a positive message for women. The power of language, creativity,
wisdom, and spiritual truth produce a transformative performance which can
provide the agency to revolutionize women’s secular, sexual, and spiritual
positions in their cultural universe. By revisioning the archcons, the poet
embodies them and empowers them to create a revised discourse about
women. Such discourse then acts as a fetish to enable sexual subjectivity. No
longer disabled within the dichotomy of asexual virgin or sexual slut,
Chicanas can now be sexual challengers.
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CHAPTER FIVE: OWNING THE DILDO, OWNING A DISCOURSE OF
POWER
The truth of the matter is that you know
nothing about me or of me.
i like the samba...but much more
like to dance it with that woman from
brazil.
Carmen Abrego
tu sabes.
you know the feel of a woman
lost en su boca
amordazada
it has always been like this.
Cherrie Moraga
Two lesbians in a graduate Gender Studies seminar brought in dildos
and harnesses as the “show and tell” segment of their presentation. What
stands out was not their confessed discomfort with bringing part of their
sexual practice into the classroom, but the reluctance with which the others in
the seminar coped with these pieces of plastic and rubber (admittedly the
battery operated lady that danced in their hands was a trouble maker). The
dildos went around the room like the children’s game of “hot potato.” Before
we knew it, they were back in the owner’s hands again. Few questions, little
comment, “let’s move on.”
Looking back at this experience, a number of questions arise, none of
which lend themselves to simple answers. First, is there something
frightening about seeing and holding a sex toy of any kind? Is this a
reflection of our original Calvinist/ Puritan repressive characters? Are we so
culturally polarized by heterosexual notions of proper sexual behavior that
we are disturbed by the idea of women using a penis shaped object to satisfy
their sexual needs? Would passing around condoms in this situation elicit a
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similar response? Were culturally understood gender rules being broken this
classroom? These rhetorical questions obviously suggest their own answers
and underline culturally (mis)understood notions about the dildo.
The Phallus on Parade: An Early Performance
The dildo is a sex toy, not a replacement for or copy of a penis. Using
sex and toys in the same sentence suggest that sex is play and fun, a notion
not part of traditional European/Western expectations about women and sex.
There exists no blessing for women that says, “go in peace and have fun with
your body.” Women who own the dildo, literally or metaphorically, are
acting on a blessing never given, a discourse not represented or written in
modem historical times.4 9 Having agency over your own sexual life requires
having power or control over what happens to your body. This was Alma
Villanueva’s central concern in “Mother, May I?”. In the end, her story is
about women and their bodies; they are “the thread o f [this] story”
(Villanueva 122), the bloody thread. A different, but related thread is central
to an old story that at first seems to be about men, but is really about women.
Jean-Joseph Gouxin retells the story in his essay, “The Phallus: Masculine
Identity and the ‘Exchange of Women.’” It is about a penis, a replica, and a
parade. In the myth o f Isis and Osiris, as retold by Plutarch, Typhon kills
Osiris and his body is cut into fourteen pieces. Isis gathers up all the pieces
49Uncovering matriarchies, goddess rituals, and developing academic analysis around female writers and archetypes has
been an important part o f the feminist movement. The list of titles would fill a chapbook but among them would be
Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics o f Radical Feminism, the collection o f essays titled The Feminist
Companion to Mythology edited by Carolyne Larrington, Annis Pratt’s Dancing with Goddesses, and the more recent
When the Women Were Drummers by Layne Redmond (obviously research stimulated by her work as a percussionist
and as a leader o f women’s drumming groups around the country).
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but one. She cannot find the penis. Isis makes another penis, what Gouxin
calls a simulacrum, which she orders honored. Over time this likeness o f the
penis becomes the centerpiece of a cult. For the great festival of Dionysius
(the Greek version of Osiris), women carried in parade male images with
penises attached. According to Herodotus, as they marched down the street,
they pulled a string on their images causing the penises to nod. This was the
only part o f the image that moved. The women followed a flute player in a
parade of nodding penises (Gouxin 41-42). In Gouxin’s account, a woman
constructs the phallus and women animate and parade it. The question
Gouxin essentially raises is: Who is in charge here? Who owns these
animated phalli? Without Isis’s sculpting services, Osiris would be short a
member. In addition, without women to pull the string, those members
would just hang there. In the ancient world, to be in charge of the phallus is
to be in charge of the male principle, “the logos: rational power, or
intelligible reason” (49). The female principle is matter. The women
waving their dildos in the parade appear to have both.
The rubber woman dildo that doesn’t wave but does the hula when you
press a button, or the sleek black cylinder that snaps into a harness, aren’t
phalli in the same sense as the replicas used in the Dionysius festival or even
in the postmodern Lacanian sense o f signifier. However, they do operate as a
signifier/sexual simulator in the lesbian economy in which they provide
jouissance in a materialist and a metaphorical/semiotic sense. As an
instrument of jouissance 5 0 for orgasm or simply pleasure, the dildo gives
women, particularly lesbians who enjoy penetration as part of sexual
50 In a footnote to The Imaginary Signifier, Christian Metz provides a definition with an important caveat “The French
term [jouissance] means both ‘orgasm’ and simple ‘enjoyment’ or ‘pleasure.’ It has been translated as seems best from
the context but the ambiguity should always be borne in mind” (Metz 82).
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pleasure, control of their sexual desire. Taking on the dildo and the power
that it suggests is a way for women to not only become agents of their own
sexuality, but also of their own spirituality, their lives, their bodies, their
production (physical and artistic/textual)5 1 and their pleasure.
Owning the dildo implies owning a discourse about women that speaks
to the positive nature of choice, ownership, and power. In contrast, the
traditional cultural discourses that have operated through the juridical
discourses of la Virgen, la Malinche, and la Llorona do not “speak” to a
positive character or sexuality for Chicanas specifically and women in
general. For the lesbian the situation is worse. Moraga says that in the
Mexican-American community, “by stepping outside the confines of the
institution o f heterosexuality, [the woman] is choosing sex freely” and she
then becomes an “institutionalized outcast” (Moraga 125). Doing so is a
double minus--minus because she is a woman and minus because she is a
lesbian. However, in algebra, two negatives make a positive and many
Chicana lesbian artists might see it just that way. While the Chicana lesbian
obviously does experience cultural and family disruption when coming out as
lesbian, there is also the challenge of what Carla Trujillo calls
[a] reclamation of what we’re told is bad, wrong, or taboo,
namely, our own sexuality. Add to this the sexuality of other
women, our lovers, and we become participants in a series of
actions which are not only considered taboo but, by these very
acts, give validation to the sexuality of another woman as well.
(Trujillo x)
^Lesbians having “turkey baster” babies has become as “common as com” (Moraga). Actually, as Karla Jay reminds
readers in Dyke Life, the “nearly mythical days of the turkey basters are over” (158). Today, lesbians, like their
“straight” sisters, are using professionals for artificial insemination.
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While Trujillo’s analysis of the actions of lesbians as validating other
women’s sexuality is an important component in the process, a more critical
outside component is the recasting of female cultural archcons so that a
woman and her sexuality, heterosexual or lesbian, is culturally validated in a
positive way. The Chicana Cultural Revolution that has produced the exciting
and provocative work that rewrites those archcons, empowers other artists to
internalize those liberated, empowered archconic discourses about Chicana
women. Their work reflects such liberated discourse. Art responding to these
recastings of archconic juridical discourse about women is not about
assimilation, or tearing down Mexican-American culture. In fact, such work
usually embraces Mexican-American culture, but insists on that culture
embracing women as well as men. And, importantly, it acknowledges or
reflects what Anzaluda calls the “new mestizas” that live in a border culture
existing in Spanish, Mexican, Tex-Mex, Calo, Chicano Spanish, and English.
Some of the most provocative poetry, art, and performance have come
from these border Chicanas, particularly Chicana lesbians. This may be the
positive side of existing as “institutional outcasts,” where the creative and
political energies are less bound by cultural strictures. This chapter explores
the discourses that result when Chicanas strap on the dildo. It starts with
Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, whose writings provide a theoretical
frame that structures discussion o f Chicana work. The chapter will then
consider particular works that seem to demonstrate a new discourse for
Chicanas sustained by an undeniable sense of self and sexual agency.
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Chicana Lesbian Revolution: The Banner of a New Guadalupe
Lydia Camarillo’s Mi Reflejo operates within and as part of
contemporary Chicana poetics, particularly Chicana lesbian poetic
performances and performance art, that demonstrate Chicanas “are the
revolution.” In this discourse system, “me companero” is not the other half of
the struggle, but the same. For contemporary artists the recasting of la
Virgen de Guadalupe provides a discourse about women that speaks of a
powerful multicultural spiritual world as well as a physical and sexual life.
The “new” la Malinche offers a discourse about women who are smart and
full of language and interpretive possibilities including that of sexual,
spiritual, mothers. Las Lloronas in Chicana performances are powerful in
their abilities as brujas and understand their role in changing the patriarchal
nature of the Chicana/o family. These rearticulated cultural female archcons
do not always find a comfortable place in Chicana/o homes where traditional
machismo and patriarchy are “played out,” if not truly acted out. Many
families reflect Moraga’s observation that
As an obedient sister/daughter/lover, she is the committed
heterosexual, the socially acceptable Chicana. Even if she is
politically radical, sex remains the bottom line on which she
proves her commitment to her race. {Loving 105)
However, Chicana lesbians (closeted and out) may already feel themselves
culturally marginalized. Therefore incorporating these recast discourses into
their own identity may seem not only less difficult, but imperative. For many
“out” Chicana lesbians, being lesbian appears to free them from the mire of
cultural heterosexual subject/object polarities and cultural expectations, and
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at the same time make them cultural outsiders.5 2 Moraga comments on her
own experience saying:
My lesbianism is the avenue through which I have learned the
most about silence and oppression, and it continues to be the
most tactile reminder to me that we are not free human beings.
{Loving 52)
For Moraga, “...heterosexism--The Chicana’s sexual commitment to the
Chicano male— is proof of her fidelity [or infidelity] to her people” (105).
The fidelity is to race, family, and the Roman Catholic Church. Being
a lesbian is to be a traitor, a sellout to the white race. “Resisting sex roles,”
says Moraga, “was far easier in an Anglo context than in a Chicano one”
(99). However “to be a woman fully necessitated my claiming the race of my
mother.” She cannot “turn away from la Madre” (94), the archcon that is also
la Virgen, la Malinche, and la Llorona. The love of Mexican women brings
her back to the place of the outsider:
Women agitate my consciousness. What I am willing to work
out on paper/in life has always been prompted by women; la
mujer en mi alma, mis suehos--dark, Latina, lover, mother.
Tengo Miedo. (141)
52 In both Chicana Poetry and Chicano Literature courses I’ve taught at Loyola Marymount University and California
State University at Long Beach, students were anxious to talk about the sexual issues raised in some of the reading.
Several young women stated this classroom was one o f the few places where they felt they could address these issues.
Heterosexual women were particularly eager (after they were sure this was a “safe place”) to talk about sexuality and
women’s roles and place in the home. I’ve never had an “out” Chicana lesbian in these classes, but, in the Lesbian
Studies classes I’ve taught, Chicana women were also eager to share their cultural experience. Most students said sex
was not a topic to be discussed at home. Moraga quotes Martha Quintanales who says that “There is virtually no
dialogue on the subject [of sexuality] anywhere and I, like other Latinas and Third World women, especially Lesbians,
am quite in the dark about what we’re up against besides negative feminist sexual politics” (Loving 125). When other
students made light of Moraga’s story about serving her brother’s friend’s lemonade (91), several female students said,
“Oh yes, I serve my father and brother their dinner before I e a t” It was normal.
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"The Object Speaks:" Moraga and Anzaldua as Theorists
As woman, third world woman, lesbian, and feminist, the Chicana is
perceived as object in the subject/ object conditions found in heterosexuality,
colonization, and capitalism. She illustrates the point made by Luce Irigaray
in Speculum o f the Other Woman where she asks and answers the provocative
question “what if the object started to speak?” (Irigaray 81). When
objectified, marginalized people are of necessity forced to speak. For
example, in her Chicana lesbian feminist position as a “radical woman of
color, Moraga found herself in an untilled cultural milpa (field). It is there
that Moraga cultivated her politics and her writing, writing that, along with
that of Gloria Anzaldua, has been heavily used as the theoretical base for
much of Chicana and lesbian studies. Loving in the War Years, and
Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera, are books that “see.” For each woman,
the body is a critical conduit to that seeing or understanding and ultimately to
their writing. Writing is a “blood” activity that connects Moraga to herself,
her mother, and her grandmother. It links the past and the future. Writing is
also directly connected to her body in her position as lesbian outsider and to
lesbian desire. In the introduction to Loving in the War Years, Moraga
addresses this intimate relationship between writing and sexuality:
It is difficult for me to separate in my mind whether it is my
writing or my lesbianism, which has made me an outsider to my
family. The obvious answer is both. For my lesbianism first
brought me into writing. My first poems were love poems.
That’s the source--^/ amor, el deseo— ihaX brought me into
politics, (iv)
To the extent that lesbianism brought her into politics through her writing, we
might say that Moraga picks up the metaphorical dildo, using this “power” to
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cruise her reader, creating a text that proves “it desires” (Barthes 6) you, the
reader. As we have also seen the Chicana always writes on la frontera, or on
what Barthes calls the seam, where “neither culture nor its destruction is
erotic; it is the seam between them...which becomes so”(7). It is here on the
edge where one can almost feel “the language lined with flesh, a text where
we can hear the grain of the throat, the articulation of the body, of the
tongue.” The transformational moment for the reader/spectator is the moment
in which that voice “...comes: that is bliss” (67)—the bliss of lesbian desire
realized.
For Anzaldua the sexual body, the writing, the race, the heritage, and
spirituality work together. She reaches back to her Aztec past for the blood
sacrifices that metaphorically constitute her writing practice. Her computer,
mi Amiguita, serves as an altar that includes a Virgen de
Coatlalopeuh candle and the burning of copal incense: My
companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers is to my right
while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the
spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it
is my obsession ...This is the sacrifice that the act of creation
requires, a blood sacrifice. (Anzaldua 75)
If the act of sacrifice has the transformational power, the lesbian is the one
who makes the “choice to be queer (for some it is genetically inherent)”
(19), who brings the knowledge and the understanding. Moraga stresses that
this choice is the way to the writing and the uncovering of multiple cultural
oppressions which ultimately leads to the political. Choosing to be queer,
says Anzaldua is an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out of
the white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instincts.
In and out of my head. It makes for loquerla, the crazies. It is
a path o f knowledge-one o f knowing (and of learning) the
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history of oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of
mitigating duality. (19)
The path is about living and “seeing” on the seam. In both cases, the
writing moves through the body of the lesbian and can be culturally
transformational in the political, sexual, and/or spiritual sense when the text
creates that erotic, orgasmic, or blissful experience. For Chicanas, la
frontera can be that seam in the ways that it can represent the complexity of
dualities o f language, race, gender, and/or ethnicity. For Chicana lesbian
artists, sexual preference appears to make Barthes’ seam even hotter— a place
where you can be burned, have your imagination or intellect catch on fire, or
find an erotic flame.
M others and Mixed Messages
The mothers as figured in the Chicana revolution are neither passive,
traitors, murderers, cryers, or brujas. Mothers written about in work by poets
such as Cathy Arellano and Juanita Sanchez become metaphors for spiritual
and cultural power. This is in stark contrast to traditional roles in which
Anzaldua says men are the ones who have “written” culture while mothers
have sent mixed messages:
No voy a dejar que ningun pelado desgraciado maltrate a mis
hijos. And in the next breath it would say, La mujer tiene que
hacer lo que le diga el hombre. Which was it to be— strong, or
submissive, rebellious or conforming? (Anzaldua 18)
Arellano answers Anzaldua’s question in her poem, “I believe en la mujer”
(Trujillo 14). In the beginning she speaks of la luna and how it sucks or pulls
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her blood out, but that “ [she] bleed [s] a pleasurable pain.” In the last six
lines, she makes a turn:
I do not doubt
that Christ died on the cross
with nails in palm
and if it were for
my sins to come,
I thank her. ( Trujillo 14)
This persona exists in a bi-spiritual world and in a web of relationships. The
“father/son” primacy of European Catholicism and modem Mexican and
Mexican-American culture is not part of this poetic mise en scene. The poem
emerges in the light of la luna, a Mexican and European aspect of la Virgen,
but particularly an aspect of La Virgen de Guadalupe, who in turn is related
to the Great Mother Coatlicue through Tonantzin. The moon that supports
her feet is said to be the daughter of Coatlicue, Coyolxauhqui, whose
decapitation and dismemberment by Huitzilopochtli, is part of the larger
Aztec rebirth myth (Markman 188). From European myths comes the notion
that the moon signifies virginity, and from the Bible the representation o f the
virgin or Woman of the Apocalypse supported by or standing on the moon:
And there appeared a great wonder in heaven, a woman clothed
with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a
crown of twelve stars. (Revelation 12:1)
As the moon pulls or sucks out her blood each month, the persona in
Arellano’s poem is not afraid. To bleed for this aspect of la Virgen is “a
pleasurable pain”(14). This is a spiritual mother— a deity that she knows and
believes would die for her sins. Without a moment’s hesitation, no break in
the line, no new stanza, the Christ becomes “her.” For the persona, la
Virgen’ s ascension to the spiritual throne, the cross of redemption is made
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automatically. The recast discourse of la Virgen makes this particular casting
both possible and probable for Chicana lesbians seeking spiritual lives not
controlled by patriarchy in materialist or spiritualist forms.5 3
Sanchez’s poem, “Paso a Paso,” works like an allegory with everyone
in his or her metaphoric places except the mothers, who make a striking
cultural turn. The father, maker o f cultural law, wants the persona “to go to
work.” The grandmother, holder of the culture’s past, “wanted me / to speak
more Spanish.” The mother, mouthpiece of the culture, says nothing until the
second she violates cultural expectations. The persona remembers that
nothing turned out like
they wanted but
my mother did say,
“if you want to be with a woman,
que le hace, as long as you’re happy.”
(Trujillo 15)
Sanchez’s mother rewrites cultural understandings with the kind of love that
Moraga experienced as a child when her mother returns after a long illness
and she remembers “the smell of a woman who is life and home to me at
once. The woman in whose arms I am uplifted, sustained” (Moraga 94).
Sanchez’ persona is sustained and, indeed, “nothing tum[s] out like / they
53Trying to find a spiritual life within organized religions is a difficult task for gays and lesbians o f all colors. This
seems especially true for those raised and schooled in orthodox, Roman Catholic, and evangelical systems. Gay and
Lesbian groups have been established within many churches, among them are Dignity in the Catholic Church and
Integrity in the Episcopal Church. Many join the gay fundamentalist Metropolitan Community Church. But, as
historian Lillian Faderman points out, “Iesbian-feminists felt that no matter what reforms were attempted in traditional
organized religions, the churches and synagogues still perpetrated patriarchy” (228). Some lesbians have joined wiccas
to connect with women- oriented values and other powers. Others look to the past for Goddess driven religions such as
that presented by Riane Eisler lin The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. Churches such as the Unitarian
Universalists encourage women to explore other spiritual avenues and, in fact, have developed a curriculum for
workshops on The Goddess.
For most Chicanas, however, to lose their ties to the Catholic Church is to turn their backs on a central part o f their
culture. The solution for many artists is to hold and reshape the best and abandon the rest. In a short essay titled, “The
Conference for Catholic Lesbians,” Karen Doherty addresses the problem: “The reason I continue to identify myself as
Catholic is something of a mystery to me. ...I suspect the answer is quite simple: if I were to renounce it all I would
have to renounce my memories as well, but because they are so integral to my life, it would be impossible to let them
go.”
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wanted.” The mother/cultural spokesperson has gone against the grain of
family, church, and race 5 4 by giving her daughter permission to turn away
from heterosexuality. These Chicanas can’t be what Moraga calls the
“‘fucked one[s],” or las Vendida[s], sellouts to the white race, because they
now represent a recast Malinche archcon, in which they accept that power is
inherent in being a linguist, a translator, bilingual and a mother. This mother
is not a traitor but rather an allegorical figure created through a poetics whose
metaphors reflect a conceptual experience of “mother” that rewrites cultural
iconography. The child will not turn out the way “they wanted,” but is, the
poem implies, moving, paso a paso, step by step, into a different cultural
reality, one that is willing to include her experience as a part of its cultural
representations. Each of these poems is charged by the erotics of lesbian
desire and supported by a metaphoric context that reflects the recasting of
female archcons. They also demonstrate what Anzaldua calls the new mestiza
consciousness whose
Energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps
breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm .... The
work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-
object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh
and through the images in her work how duality is transcended.
(Anzaldua 80)
^4Moraga says that “lesbianism can be construed by the race then as the Chicana being used by the white man, even if
the man never lays a hand on her. The choice is never seen as her own. Homosexuality is his disease with which he
sinisterly infects Third World people, men and women alike” (Moraga 114).
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The Conundrum of Subject/Object Polarity
If it is true that subject/object polarity rather than duality confines the
mestiza in culturally accepted roles. Contemporary Chicana poetics reveals
that acting on lesbian desire and sexuality can disrupt that polarity. For
example, butch/femme lesbian roles encourage some reversal of culturally
specific gender behaviors without requiring a renewed schematic for
feminine representations.
In, “Dark Morning Husband,” (Alba 21) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, she
writes out of one of these impulses while working inside the form of another.
The narrative is right off the heterosexual barroom floor, here cast as a
butch/femme barroom floor, with the butch lesbian desiring the femme
through much o f the same discourse and body language found in the “hetero-
bar-room.” Listen to the familiar description o f the women’s meeting:
You meet a woman on the street
Outside a gay bar. Blonde hair,
Open red shirt, nipples
Like tiny fists.
She looks you over down
The loose curve of shoulders
Arms and hips. Your massive thighs
Twitch in the dark. (21)
While writing in what surely can be described as tough, macho discourse,
Alba is empowered to write out of her body, her desire, using a discourse that
enacts a desire that is not part of traditional cultural understanding for
women. The result is a “grain of voice” (Barthes, Music 181) that “rubs” not
the wrong way, but both ways, where the “grain is the body in the voice as it
sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs-the whole erotic part of
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185
the body” (Barthes 188). The seam, or “most erotic portion of the body,”
according to Barthes, “is where the garment gapes” (Barthes Pleasure 9). The
figurative “gap” or space that this poem exploits is the “lesbian bar” whose
terms reflect the butch/femme role playing analysis by Sue-Ellen Case in her
well-known essay (Case 64). Using Joan Riviere’s early thoughts about
masquerade (published in Riviere’s article “Womanliness as a Masquerade”
in 1929) Case considers the way that masquerades of butch and femme
“become ironized and “camped up,” (64) giving the lesbian
at least two options for gender identification and, with the aid
of camp, an irony that allows her perception to be constructed
from outside ideology, with a gender role that make her appear
as if she is inside it. (65)
This irony creates a gap between what Case calls the “penis-related
posturing” of the butch and the excess of cultural femininity in the femme.
Here, at the seam between these two camped up postures, is the erotic charge.
A similar “charge” sparks across la frontera, the seam or bar between two
countries and two cultures, a gap that is always being negotiated by the
Chicana. For lesbian Chicanas the cultural emphasis on gender roles by its
own excess can cause an opening in the garment of gender particularly
because of the “ macho ” subtext that often runs beneath the butch/femme
lesbian drama. Alba’s poetic narrative is in the voice of a Chicana, whose
“brown” hand writes her own desire and dresses her persona in a role not
only as subject, and subject of her own desire, but in a role that infiltrates a
subject position not culturally open to her. The persona, cast as a traditional
Malinche, cannot fill this role because she has constructed herself as a butch.
A biological woman, she is determined culturally as “fucked over,” but her
“perception [is] constructed outside ideology, with a gender role that makes
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186
her appear as if she is inside of it [the gender role]” (65). The impulse to
write this desire is driven by a recast Malinche whose control of the text is
driven by the erotic nature of the dance between performance and spectator.
De Alba uses the discourse of la Malinche both ways to “cruise her reader.”
Using the second person singular, “you,” Gaspar de Alba moves the
reader from the meeting to the denouement. Like any tasty male “fish”
story, the persona meets a blond and the first thing she notices are the breasts,
those “nipples like tiny fists” (3-4) causing her “massive thighs [to] / twitch
in the dark” (7-8). They have the obligatory dance “inside the red / glare of
the dance floor,” (9-10) and “she jams bone and muscle / against [her] flesh”
(10-12). The next stop is the blonde’s motel, where, finally, “Her odor clings
to your finger / tips. You cannot lie” (20-21). To complete the macho
narrative,
you smash your hands
into the wall, bare your teeth.
When you leave you kick
the door. Somewhere,
a dark morning husband
waits for you to get home. (22-28)
The physicality of the “butch” and the way in which macho stereotypes play
out in the metaphors of hitting walls and kicking doors read as spousal abuse,
but not by the usual perpetrator. Finally, it is not the “little woman” and
children who wait for the father to fall in the front door and throw what’s left
of his paycheck into the hall, but rather the husband who waits for the “little
butch.” The Chicana poet empowered by a re-characterized Malinche
discourse writes lesbian desire in a figure of “not Malinche. ” The desire and
the text it writes come together at a material, a linguistic, and representational
seam in the last half of the second and first half of the third stanza:
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187
how luscious
it would be to munch on your tangy prose and
brace for a surge of ganas de hacer cosas contigo.
As you linger on my tongue the thoughts teasing my slit
como salsita de chile en mi lengua. (6-10)
This is metaphorically (and also physically, if read aloud), what Barthes calls
the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat,
the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal
stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue,... it granulates, it
crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss (Pleasure 67).
The Grain of the Voice: Moraga's Querida Companera
The previous quotation comes from Barthes’ discussion of what he
calls “writing aloud,” the “geno-text” that is carried by “the grain of the
voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language” (66). Poetry,
surely, and performance art, without doubt, depend on “writing aloud” in
order for the body of the text to be “heard” and felt as performance. Anzaldua
describes texts as “aris [ing] from the human body--flesh and bone”
(Anzaldua 75). Such texts carry the “grain of voice” and in turn create an
aural mise en scene. They contain the possibility for the spectator to “Hear in
their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of
the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle... (Barthes Pleasure 67).5 5
^ As a poet, I always hear what I write. At some point I determine how the writing sits on the page. It has always been
my belief that the way a poem presents itself on paper is like a musical score guiding the silent reader as well as the
performer. In my experience, it is in the performance that Chicana poetry really takes on the body, the sweat, the anger,
and the “grain o f the throat” Readings by poets such as Gloria Anzaldua, Teresa Mendoza, Pat Moor, and Michele
Serros take the listener viscerally into the poetic action.
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That “muzzle” and the double entendre suggested in Barthes’
translation becomes transparent in the poem, “Querida Companera"{Loving
149) by Moraga. Language and desire are “ profundo y sencillo” and the
tongue is necessary for both:
Tu sabes.
you know the feel of woman
lost en su boca
amordazada
it has always been like this,
profundo y sencillo
lo que nunca
paso
por sus labios
but was
utterly
utterly
heard. (9-21)
The language, the desire, even if it does not pass through her lips,
cannot be silent. This iconic discourse has a presence that speaks. This does
not characterize the demure, eyes downcast, virginal love of a traditional
Guadalupe, but the love of a woman with a body, a Guadalupe whose
sexuality has been revealed under the spiritual robes of Immaculate
Conception. Contemporary Chicana poetics have yanked the covers. What
has been revealed is not a sexless body with alabaster legs and a “V” where
“it” is supposed to be, but rather solid, strong brown legs and a thick bush of
dark pubic hair, muy rica. What has been uncovered is a “ Lupe ” whose
discourse is of “church and cunt” (Moraga 90). Moraga expands that
comparison in the epilogue of Loving in the War Years, titled “La Mujer
Saliendo de la Boca.” Speaking of her sincere desire to re-leam Spanish, to
be “the same and a different woman in Spanish” (142), maybe even to “fuck”
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in Spanish, she concludes, “The mouth is like a cunt” (142). Now the
archconic discourse has una boca. It has taken up with the Malinche, whose
^boca... spreads its legs open to talk...” (142). The talk is impassioned and
erotic, but it is connected to church or spirituality as well as the cunt and,
finally, to the heart. Moraga’s boca cannot be controlled by church, state,
culture or society. She says,
It will flap in the wind like legs in sex, not driven by the mind.
It’s as if la boca were centered on el central del corazon not in
the head at all. The same place where the cunt beats. (142)
Performing the Layered Erotic: Ester Hernandez’ Serigraphs
The archconic recasting of discourse for Chicana lesbians allows a
representation that reflects a flesh and blood reality; the archcons become
metaphoric entities that arise out of a conceptual understanding of the
Chicana cultural body in the world. Such discourse moves Chicana poetics
into a realm of performance that seeks a lover, a listener/spectator whose own
conceptual understanding of the world works to generate the erotic electricity
between performer and audience and texts that make such transformational
experiences possible. It is an erotic that does not exist on a single plane,
ideologically or materially. Rather, it manifests itself through shared and/or
previously unspoken understandings of the spiritual (Catholic and
indigenous), the cultural (gender roles and expectations), and the
physical/sexual— la boca, el corazon y la panocha— as those are expressed in
combinations of word, line, paint, lithography, collage, drawing, sculpture,
music, song, dance, and drama.
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The highly stylized Chicana dyke in Ester Hernandez’ untitled
serigraph represents such a performance (see Figure 15). The hard, stylized
lines of the woman’s short, black almost pachuca-styled hair stand out
against broad areas of monochrome color (the colors change in some
printings and a texturizing line is often added). The head is a profile, turned
to the side on a body that presents itself from the back. There is no
contouring or perspective. The firm, almost mechanical line of the head,
becomes slightly softer as it outlines a small, fine-featured face, a mouth with
lip color, and a single dangling crystal earring. The flat profile presentation of
the head and body is reminiscent of postures found in Aztec codices. Like
most pachucas, this dyke has gotten a “tat.” This one writes a representation
of la Virgen across her back, into her flesh and blood. Reaching into the
piece from bottom left is another hand (it appears feminine) offering la
Virgen's signature, the rose. The body of the woman is clearly contoured
and stylized, in contrast to the Guadalupe tattoo which is fussy and detailed,
complete with all the archcon’s iconography— angels, crown, aura, quarter
moon, starry cape, and figured dress. The work has appeared in several
shows, but probably has been most widely seen as the front cover o f the book
Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. This serigraph
performs its message through a series of contradictions and affirmations that
exist at the very edge of the cultural stage. The echoes of a cultural past join
a street savvy present, not filled with boys, but with girls. The church and
family sanctions against homosexuality are challenged— no, set aside, as this
lesbian “writes” the symbol of church, family, and race onto a body that no
longer reflects that cultural understanding of woman’s body. This is a blood
relationship; the ink has become a part of the skin. The offering then is both
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191
Figure 15. La Ofrenda, a serigraph by Ester Hernandez is on the front cover
of the 1991 edition of Chicana Lesbians: The Girls our Mothers Warned us
A bout (Third Woman Press, 1991).
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192
to the woman and to her most intimate companion, la Virgen . In this
representation they are joined under the skin and so both are characterized as
lesbians.
Hernandez’ pastel drawing of the Chicana in sunglasses which appears
on the back cover of Sexuality ofLatinas (see Figure 16) is also an
internalized archcon—la Malinche (as the sexual woman). But this time
without the sign of avendida or chingada in sight. This Chicana, while
obviously sexual, does not carry the additional la Malinche baggage of slut or
traitor. Indeed this representation is neither “fucked” nor a sellout. Well-
protected and hidden behind oversize sunglasses, this Chicana does not
reveal her identity but her representation lets the viewer know what she is
about. The softness of pastel crayon works here to create a persona, full, firm
and confident in her own desire. The knowing smile as her tongue caresses
her finger is sexually suggestive. It is bold and says, “Yes, I want you,” or
“Yes, I’ve had you.”
The work connects la boca to la lengua, to desire. The gesture is
lesbian and heterosexual. It could also be described in Anzaldua's words as
the marriage of “the masculine force and the feminine force” {Frontiers). In
the Frontiers interview Anzaldua claims that “we’re socialized into having
male energy and female energy,” but as if to disavow it, she goes on to talk
about lesbians saying,
In the valley ...called mita y mita... half the month we’re a man
and have a penis , and half a month we're women and have
periods. That’s what a lesbian is, that’s what a dyke is. But
instead of being split like that I think of it as something that’s
integral. (126)
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193
Figure 16. This pastel drawing by Ester Henandez appears on the back cover
of the 1993 edition of The Sexuality ofLatinas ( Third Woman Press, 1993).
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194
Because of the way the finger and mouth are represented in the
Hernandez drawing, this persona’s sexual preference could be read anywhere
along the “continuum.”5 6 What is quite clear is the freedom and joy with
which the gesture is made. The drawing appears to be a guilt-free
sexual/“textual” representation. This bold Chicana seems to “act out”
Moraga's assertion that since “the spirit and sex have been linked in our
oppression then they must also be linked in the strategy toward our
liberation” (Moraga 132). Is she looking at me? At you? Who knows what’s
going on behind those sunglasses. But, there is no mystery about what is
going on con la boca. She is tasting someone.
Rewriting the Salacious History of Food: Palacios and Mendoza
Food as a sexual metaphor for the taste of, tasting, or eating the
beloved has a long, salacious literary and cinematic history. A perfect
example from a Latina is the novel and its film version, Like Water for
Chocolate by Mexican writer Laura Esquivel. The entire narrative is driven
by food and includes recipes at the beginning of each chapter. Food in
Esquivel’s fantasy culture not only keeps the body alive, but keeps it sexual.
A serving o f quail, described as “a dish for the gods!,” acts on sister
Gertrudis “as an aphrodisiac.” ( Esquivel 51) She runs naked to join a
Zapatista and the revolution. On the other hand, sister Rosaura has little
interest in food or sex. Food for the gods only causes her to have gas so
56 "Continuum" is used here in spite of being considered politically incorrect in the world o f identity politics to suggest
such a range o f self-identifying possibilities for sexual behavior.
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195
poisonous that her husband will not stay in her bed. In the end it is Chiles in
Walnut Sauce (also known as Chiles Poblanos) that sends the ranch on a
lovemaking bender. This is the food fetish supreme that causes guests to
leave the party “throwing heated looks at each other.” (241) The sexual heat
produced is so strong in Tita and Pedro that their
fiery bodies began to throw off glowing sparks. They set on
fire the bedspread, which ignited the entire ranch. (245)
The Chicana in the Ester Hernandez drawing clearly throws off sexual
sparks, sparks that are ready for just the right “taste” to turn into sexual fire.
Lesbian performance artist and writer Monica Palacios seems to cite or at
least paraphrase the Hernandez drawing when she poses as the subject of
Luiz Sampaio’s photograph, “Food and Fetish Fool” (VIVA centerfold). The
picture first appeared in the Summer 1993 Food and Fetish issue of the VIVA
Arts Journal for Lesbian and Gay Latino Artists( see Figure 17). Here,
instead of strongly suggesting a touch or taste, la lengua is actually touching
something. In the photograph, Palacios’ hands draw a plump bunch of grapes
into the caress of her face where one is kissed gently by her tongue. A
cropped version showing just the mouth and a few grapes is used as the
issue’s cover art. In the full-frame version, Palacios looks out with a gaze that
invites the viewer to join her in the dual meal o f food and sexuality. The
tongue also suggests the cultural connection of sexuality with talk and
translation. Such an image represents the end to, or refusal of, what Moraga
called “the virtual dead silence among Chicanos about lesbianism” (112)5 7 -
^7Both Monica Palacios and playwright Luis Alfaro (founders o f VIVA) have been subjects o f Los Angeles Times
articles and recipients o f major grants. The performances sponsored by VIVA and the journal are about “discovering,
empowering, and promoting Lesbian and Gay Latino artists and art” (VIVA 1).
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Figure 17. Monica Palacios, as centerfold in the Summer 1993 issue of Viva
Arts Quarterly
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In performance, as both a writer and performer, Palacios often assumes an
“inviting” persona, the sexual hostess, complete with a tray of “hot”
metaphors. In the photograph, Palacios invites the reader to make what
could be a culturally illicit discovery.
Her poem/performance script, “Taqueria Tease” was first published in
the same 1993 issue of VIVA. Its point of view occurs within the mise en
scene where the reader/spectator experiences the subject of the persona’s
attentions, and metaphorically, the desire those attentions produce.
Throughout all eight stanzas, three metaphoric constants weave the vision of
this culinary voyeur: food, ethnicity, and sexuality. The title provides the clue
to the overriding metaphor—“Taqueria” says food, Mexican-American food,
and “Tease” signals sex or more specifically, “no sex, just possibilities.” The
bilingual title also foregrounds the poem’s ethnic and border mise-en-scene.
Most of the work’s metaphors are more commonly used to express male
desire, the notion o f men coveting through the conceptual experience of
eating, or even coveting the female, the exotic, the other. Palacios releases
the metaphors from gendered role playing determinations in order to enact a
woman’s conceptual experience of desiring another woman. A closer look,
however, reveals that the metaphors are less about eating, than about the
eater, the physicality of eating, the body that eats. The persona does not make
the typically masculine metaphoric leap that turns the woman into an erotic
meal. The clue is in the first line: “It was turning into a kinky ritual”
(Palacios 1). The “kink” is not in the nature of the erotic behavior. The twist
here is in the direct and stereotypical food/sex metaphor. The desire comes
not from any imagined physical taking or eating of the object, but rather from
viewing the subject; the persona gazing at the woman creates the erotic
charge. The narrator claims in the first verse that:
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What lured me was the way she used her sexy mouth,
and god—
she loved to CHEW!
Yes, I watched her eat came asada tacos from afar. (2-5)
The eroticism of eating is combined with an eroticizing of the cultural and
ethnic. The admired woman is not dipping french fries into catsup or slicing
into Chicken Kiev. The persona wraps her less than Mexican culturally
correct culinary habits, vegetarianism, in a burrito. This is a Chicana fantasy,
a taqueria tease, a woman whose description conjures the vision o f Yolanda
Lopez’ “Portrait of the Artist as La Virgen de Guadalupe: ” She is
...a Chicana—
Brown woman
Dark eyes
Dark thick Mexican girl hair
About 5’2”
Athletic built and she was,
Hungry! (8-14)
This thick physical description o f the woman overwhelms the description of
the food. It is the process of eating and the desire with which the food is
consumed that consumes the voyeur. “She didn't just wolf down her 2 tacos
and Corona with 2 limes (15),” says the persona,
She consumed her meal creatively, slowly, tenderly—
Con pasion.
Ab-so-lute-ly loved when she closed her eyes after every bite.
(16-18).
For the eater then, the metaphors insist that she is not engaged in a rape, but
rather a love affair with her food. She eats her loved one gently, sweetly and
with great tenderness. There is no taking, but rather an enjoying, a passion
that savors. The voyeur notices that she chews “at least 20 times as if she
was becoming one with the came asada. / OOOOMMME!” (19-20). Like a
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woman’s multiple orgasms, her metaphoric lover is masticated within the
understanding of that response to desire and her own where
Peaceful and beautiful she looked as her full Chicana lips
produced
KISSES
as she
Masticated! (21-24)
In the third stanza, the erotic bodies from both inside and outside the
eroticized persona act as fetishes whose discourse eroticizes cultural
memories and understandings. Their discourse clearly comes from a
revisioned Guadalupe who, while “peaceful and beautiful,” is also an
embodied woman; a mythic being whose rewritten archconic discourse sees
women as not only powerful and spiritual, but also powerful and sexual. She
is “hot” in multiple metaphorical senses including her relationship to culture
and family. Palacios calls that relationship an
Added attraction: at every 3rd or 4th bite, she chased it with a
bite
of a
Jalapeno
Ay, pura Mexicana!
And, of course, a few seconds after, she had the sniffles. Her
jalapeno gestures reminded me of my
Parents
Tios
Their comadres
always in need of jalapenos with their food.
Even dessert
It was
Intense! (25-38)
These relationships are intense, passionate. Even going to the “Taqueria La
Cumbre” reminds her of family,
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because the cashier looks like my nina and when she gives me
my change
she always says,
“Thank you, mija." (40-42)
Being at the taqueria is a culturally accepted activity, sanctioned by
family. The “Guadalupe” being worshipped in the person of a Chicana would
be considered by those sanctioners as not just a bit “kinky,” but outrageous
The persona is worshiping this metaphoric Guadalupe the physical, using a
revisioned discourse about women that allows the representation and practice
of desire for Chicanas.
Peering “at / Miss Sabrosita,” the persona watches as the “came asada
grease” trickles from her mouth, down her neck, and “Almost down her
cleavage” (46-51). Now the viewer names the viewed— Miss Sabrosita, the
little tasty one or the little racy one. The naming distances her from the
persona and closes the erotic gap between them. In her article “Refiguring
Lesbian Desire,” Elizabeth Grosz proposes what she calls a “positive view”
of desire that seems useful in the discussion of this poem. First, of course,
she challenges Freud’s notion of desire as lack, “inherently masculine,” and
“active.” In this case, she says, “the notion of female desire is
oxymoronic...[and] the idea of feminine desire or even female desire is
contradictory” (Grosz 72-73). Starting with Spinoza and going on to Deleuze
and Guattari and Lyotard, Grosz unravels a reading of “lesbian sexuality and
desire, in terms of bodies, pleasures, surfaces, [and] intensities”(76). In her
model “sexual relationships are contiguous with and part of other
relationships such as those of the writer to pen and papers, [and] the body
builder to weights” (77). Along this surface or site of desire the most intense
places are “always...at a conjunction, [or] interruption...the coming together
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of two surfaces produces a tracing that imbues both of them with eros or
libido” (78). The site or surface for the persona in this poem is eating the
body of the Chicana, but only by remaining a voyeur can she keep the gap,
keep the erotic energy flowing. So she gives the woman a loving nickname,
but nothing that would require really knowing her. The poem also requires
that erotic distance between writer, paper, and pen. That gap or seam
between the poem and Palacios keeps it “hot.” To make that introduction, to
bring the surfaces together
can’t be.
I have to stay in the shadows,
across the room,
behind the salsa. (58-61)
If she does not, there is no poem. “Silence is like starvation,” says
Cherrie Moraga {Loving 52). It is a desire which produces, but as Grosz
makes clear “reproduces nothing. It is the effect rather than any intentions
that occupy our focus, what they make and do rather than what they mean or
represent” (79). For Grosz then, the beautiful Chicana admired “from afar”
is produced out of the erotics of the pen to paper metaphor creating, in turn,
that erotic space between the physical and the spiritual where the woman as
Guadalupe and the Guadalupe as woman are worshipped in the taqueria
instead of the basilica, eating the “wafers” of Chicana culture with passion,
love, satisfaction and peace. La Virgen de Guadalupe delivered by Chicana
artists, writers, and performers like Rachel Salinas and Yolanda Lopez has
provided a new palette of colors and textures to paint the Chicana. The
representations, especially by Chicana lesbians, appear to provide sexual
agency for these women by breaking apart the notion of heterosexual
active/passive dichotomies in favor o f active libidos sliding against each
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202
other, covering each other, but not necessarily being in the
penetrator/penetrated, colonizer/colonized, or devourer /devoured positions.
In the same issue of VIVA as well as in a chapbook titled Life in the
Dyke Lane Teresa Mendoza’s poem, “Chicks and Salsa,” also serves up
sexuality through a cultural food fetish feast that presents itself as hot and
breathless. Using the eating of peppers, one of the stereotypes for Mexican
culture, as the fetish for lesbian sex Mendoza subverts the culture’s
machismo, patriarchal, heterosexual notions with metaphors that have both
women eating and both getting “hot.” For each woman, the pepper fetishes
are “Too hot to put in my mouth / And too hot to resist” ( Mendoza 1-2). This
poet and this persona have realized a discourse about women that is not about
the perfect woman, the slut, or the bad mother. Rather she is sexual and out
there where
One bite
Two bites
It’s not enough
For the two
who are used to
Fire in our throats (17-22)
From three bites
four bites
That are not enough. (26-28)
The tropes Mendoza uses create a layered patina of cultural, food and sexual
signs. Pulled out of their relationships with each other, they create what
linguist George Lakoff calls basic metaphors of experience. Working
together inside the poem, these metaphors form a metalanguage that speaks
to lesbian desire within cultural norms and subverts heterosexual tropic
language by using it to act out that desire. The basic parts of the cultural
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203
understanding include the fact that in the Mexican-American experience
people eat hot peppers, they quench the burning, and they eat more. Eating
hot peppers can also be addicting. Peppers are also usually long and are put
into a space, the mouth. The sexual understandings are equally basic.
Heterosexual behavior is usually about putting a penis into a woman’s
spaces. So the notion o f two women eating/feeding each other Jalapeno
peppers rewrite the image of a man inserting a penis into a woman.. In this
poem, the women disrupt the active/passive dichotomies, while holding onto
the metaphoric cultural and sexual connections. The result is an orgasmic
frenzy
That send our screams
To Jalapeno bursting
Between our lips heaven
And tears streaming
Down flushed faces
As we pant for air
To breath.(40-46).
The personas are in charge of this experience. They can be imagined as
acting within a discourse that says they have a right to act on their sexuality.
This action is not characterized as la Malinche, nor an act o f perdition against
the perfection of Guadalupe. In this scenario the speaker is neither slut nor
perfect, just woman. If Rachel Salinas can take off the sacred garments used
by both the Aztecs and the Spanish Catholics to hide the body, and Alma
Villanueva can internalize that body and give it blood, then Chicana artists,
given those “fantasies,” can imagine and act on their sexual agency.
Mendoza describes a sexual agency as hot and addictive as any other.
For her persona the fires of love can be quenched and rekindled with
“another bite,” but how
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to end this hot
Blistering
Chile Relleno
Jalapeno
Molcahete Salsa
Chile de Arbol Night
Where we knew we had enough
But couldn’t find a way to stop! (50-57)
This is a women’s sexuality, multiple and kept hot by the cultural metaphor
of the chili as dildo and las puras Chicanas.
Women as hot sexual beings get a humorous twist in a lesbian reading
of the la Llorona story. Written and performed by Monica Palacios, it is
usually experienced on stage, but is also reprinted in several anthologies
(Rebolledo and Trujillo). The piece is presented in a contemporary Chicana
lesbian narrative style— hip, trilingual (lesbo/Chicana/English), and irreverent.
The story is called La Llorona Loca: The Other Side. Our heroine? Caliente,
of course. The title is a hint that this version is not the one heard by little
children being tucked into bed. In the Palacios version, la Llorona is called
loca or crazy, not an adjective traditionally attached to her name. But this is
a story, Palacios tells listeners, that she “was never told” (Trujillo 49).
Caliente lives up to her name. She is hot. Every man wants her-every
woman wants to be like her. She walks down the street and men shout out:
“Ay, mamasita!”
Come here, baby."
“Let me touch your chi-chi’ s. (49)
But, as the storyteller reveals, there is something “wrong” with Caliente. She
is beautiful, but has never married, “never seen with a man” and she is thirty!
People begin to talk.
“Lack of male companionship.”
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“She wears spurs— on her house slippers.”
“She's always eyeing the senoritas. I bet she's a PE teacher!”
One day while balancing her bankbook, she is spirited away by a beautiful
woman. They ride off into the sunset, or rather towards Tijuana, where they
are "married by a curandera" and settle down in Bakersfield. Eventually la
Stranger says she has to move on. Unfortunately she tells Caliente this down
by the river and Caliente drowns her, crying so much in the process that “she
faint[s] into the river and die[s]” (51). The bodies are found and buried and
from then on a woman dressed in white and wearing clogs is seen
almost every night— searching, crying desperately for La
Stranger. Her crying was so hysterical, everyone began to call
her La Llorona Loca— the crazy crier. (51)
Unlike the traditional la Llorona story, this is not a tale of murder or
sacrifice, it is the story of female desire. Caliente returns as a ghost in clogs,
not to mourn her children, not filled with the guilt of a bad Mother. She is a
lover, mourning her lover. She is a woman whose crying for her desire (for
the lover) is so desperate that “everyone began to call her La Llorona Loca—
the crazy crier”(51). The metalanguage spoken by this recast archcon
contains tropes, or synchronic (metaphoric) and diachronic (metonymy)
associations and combinations that cannot be read by “Everyone,” or the
traditional community. A sign that does not work must be seen as “crazy” or
to move outside of Palacios metaphor, it is a discourse understood only by
those “in the know.” How do we know? On the street the answer is, “by
walking the walk and talking the talk.” Lesbian and gay discourse, African-
American hip hop discourse, psychiatric discourse, and even dog fancy
discourse can become in this way part of the parlance of popular culture
which then often skew the discourse to suit itself. But, the historically,
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politically, and culturally impacted archconic signs being addressed by the
lesbian Chicana artists discussed in this chapter are much more difficult to
assimilate or “change” because, as W.J. T. Mitchell claims
“the semiotic notion of iconicity has greater ambitions than
simply providing images or pictures” (Mitchell 56).
The success of chicana artistic foremothers such as Yolanda Lopez,
Carmen Tafolla, and Alma Villanueva in recasting and transforming the
discourse created by the archcons of la Malinche, la Llorona, and La Virgen
de Guadalupe is realized through the powerful, culturally unacceptable
sexual agency claimed in the work of the Chicana lesbians presented in this
chapter. The embodiment of la Virgen and the revelationof the erotic border
she cruises provide a discursive ground for creating “texts” both written,
performed, and imagistic that address issue of female desire. They are, of
course, culturally subversive. But what makes them resonate for the
audience/spectator, as did the earlier archconic recastings, is a deep footing in
the intensely valued layered and interleaved Mexican-American and Mexican
cultures. It is, after all, her parents, her tios, even her childhood that Palacios
is reminded of as she watches “Miss Sabrosita” masticate “Con pasion.”
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J
Figure 18. Monica Palacios, aka Caliente, aka la Llorona Loca, in a publicity
photo.
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CONCLUSION
Con pasion is the only way to leave a discussion of contemporary
Chicana lesbian art, poetry, and performance. But, it is also the way both
artists and spectators/audiences engage with the corpus of Chicana work. It
is a passion of the heart, erotically and emotionally, and a pasion de dnimo, a
passion of the soul. Such passion is also a dynamic response to the body, the
figure that literally supplies much of the metaphoric structure in Chicana
poetics. That Chicana body internalizes and wraps itself around history,
politics, and spirituality that fill that passionate potion of culture. At the
same time, it is the powerful archcons of that culture that have constructed a
prescriptive juridical discourse for women—one whose laws position women
without agency, forcing them to exist on a polarity o f virgin/slut. The
implications for such cultural understanding has been an understanding for
women that they can never really meet the cultural expectations for women
unless they hie themselves to the convent or the streets. The patent
absurdness of these two positions is that Chicana women often felt (feel) they
were (are) living outside the law and were (are) guilty in some fashion of a
crime or sin against their culture — “condemned if you do, condemned if you
don’t” position.
This study has demonstrated that the recasting of archcons can,
through a performance interaction (performer/writer, reader, or spectator),
transform that discourse and open up a space for female sexual agency. By
breaking the bonds of dualism that hold such polarities as subject/object,
male/female, aggressive/passive, and physical/spiritual intact, Chicana artists
have created those “seams” Roland Barthes suggests are the gaps where
erotic agency is found. This is not to say that such eroticism is imagined as
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209
unmediated sexual behavior, but rather as a space to proclaim and act on
specific desires, or not. In Chapter Five the work of lesbian artists was
analyzed to demonstrate the ways these artists have textually acted on those
desires. The cover art on Sandra Cisneros’ 1987 book of poetry, My Wicked
Wicked Ways, makes a similar statement. Called “La Panchanela con
Acordion, by Terry Ybanez, it shows a woman dressed in nothing but white
high heels and sunglasses, lying on a couch, playing an accordian. It clearly
makes a claim for the desire of the poems found inside. In her 1994
collection, Loose Women, Cisneros writes many poems about her sexual body
and her desire. In “Love Poem for a Non-Believer” the persona misses her
lover and reminds herself of him/her by
(running) my hand
along the flat of my thigh
curve of the hip
mango of the ass Imagine
it your hand across
the thrum of ribs
arpeggio of the breasts
collarbones you adore
The textual/sexual space for her desire is available. In the poem’s last stanza
the moment of most complete intimacy is recalled, not with an aura of sin,
but rather as a religious experience. Looking for words to describe it the
persona concludes
we won’t
Have a word for this except
Perhaps religion.
In “Hesitations,” a poem by Naomi Quinonez, first published by West
End Press in 1985, the ownership of desire and the body come together
between a laugh and a glass of wine. In the fourth stanza the persona claims:
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210
I am my own chastity belt,
And laugh at that thought
Into the dark red wine.
The poetics that recast and reclaim the body are expanded in this study
beyond the strict definition of literary or verbal (written) discourse to also
include as “texts” the wide range of plastic arts and performance art. Its
multivalent character in all these expressive modes constructs a semiotic
system with possibilities for transformation using poetics that remain
consciously engaged with the female body and its real presence in the
physical world. It employs tropes of the body to embody the archcons and
archconic tropes to reveal the archconic within the body. Most importantly,
while spiritual and historical archconic cultural constructions are revised,
cultural essence is never lost. Cultural integrity supports revision. Chicana
poetics never lose respect and love for the Mexican and Mexican-American
culture. Such cultural regard creates a metaphoric context that provides a
safe, congruent, and comprehensible entry into performances whose intent is
often revolutionary. The daughters of this poetical adventure may well have
been afraid, as Yolanda Lopez shared in Chapter Three, of what their mothers
would say about breaking the plate of tradition, only to discover that their
mothers never really liked that particular set of dishes.
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211
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Creator Ladd, Robbin Ann (author)

Core Title Chicana poetics: Performing desire, recasting archetypes

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag OAI-PMH Harvest,sociology, ethnic and racial studies,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor McKenna, Teresa (committee chair), Boone, Joseph A. (committee member), Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-285418

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