"The Highly Original Country of the Yanquis" : Dramatic Irony and Double-Voicing as Cultural Critique in Maria Cristina Mena's Fiction

Abstract

As part of ongoing process of recovery work in early Chicana/o literature, fiction of Maria Cristina Mena, one of first Mexican American writers to publish in United States, recently has started to receive long overdue critical attention. (1) Mena's stories, published between 1913 and 1931 in American, Century, Cosmopolitan, and Household magazines, may be seen as part of local color tradition that depicts for a white American readership scenes of life in Mexico before and during Mexican Revolution. Three of her stories, Gold Vanity Set (1913), Education of Popo (1914), and Marriage by Miracle (1916), also portray cultural influences from United States in early twentieth century through presence of Anglo-American visitors to Mexico. However, these stories rely on dramatic irony to suggest that values such characters represent, particularly attitudes and behavior of modern young American women and idealization of Anglo-Saxon beauty, are not worthy of respect they receive in Mexico. Rather, through carefully controlled tone of Mena's narrators, these manners and ideals are presented as questionable forms of cultural colonialism from United States. Furthermore, Mena weaves into her narration stereotypical notions about Mexicans that are undercut by this dramatic irony, exposing inadequacies of such views. These three stories, therefore, may be seen as examples of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of double-voicing. Discussing discourse in comic novel in The Dialogic Imagination, Bakhtin asserts that author may involve broader social voices in his or her own commentary: The relationship of author to a language conceived as view...is always found in a state of movement and oscillation. ... [The author exaggerates, now strongly, now weakly, one or another aspect of common language, sometimes abruptly exposing its inadequacy to its object and sometimes, on contrary, becoming one with it, maintaining an almost imperceptible distance, sometimes even directly forcing it to reverberate with his own truth, which occurs when author completely merges his own voice with view. (302) An author may incorporate a stylization of certain languages, such as official or ceremonial languages, with result that the of another is introduced into author's discourse (the story) in concealed form, that is, without any of formal markers usually accompanying such speech (303), such as quotation marks. The author, thereby, interacts in a dialogic manner with reported speech, often in order to unmask its limitations. Mena performs such a resistant function in these three stories, for though her narrators invoke stereotypes about Mexicans, texts themselves problematize such generalizations, often even reversing expectations set up by such views. Other tales by Mena also turn a critical eye upon values within Mexican society at turn of century, such as its class hierarchy and subjugation of women. (2) However, Gold Vanity Set, Education of Popo, and Marriage by Miracle, which were published in mainstream American periodicals, clearly criticize dominant social values of United States in early twentieth century. Categorized in their time as charming portraits of Mexican life for largely white, middle-class audiences, Mena's works now can be seen as complex, parodic commentaries about Anglo-American life by an author who lived both within and outside it. Mena's own experiences of cultural plurality may have inspired her preoccupation with border-crossing and cultural contact. Born to an affluent family in Mexico City in 1893, she was raised within traditional parameters of Mexican upper class during President Porfirio Diaz's regime, attending an elite convent school and learning foreign languages (Doherty vii). …