Chicana/Latina Women Poets

Abstract

Focusing on twentieth-century Chicana/Latina poets and poetics, this essay examines their compound marginalization within a literary tradition that relegated women to a separate space required by orthodox social practices. Whether designated “sentimental writers,” “scribbling women,” or “women's verse,” the result segregated women's work in gender-defined terms denoting substandard quality. Chicana/Latina literature rejects both the notion of a separate “women's verse” and hyphenated identities for women of color that further distance them from valorized literary achievement. Exposing and resisting this compound hyphenation explains some of the compelling power of Chicana/Latina poetry for over a century. As vital participants in the project of recuperating their inheritance from the oversimplification of a single “English-only melting pot” American identity, these poets reject the erasure of the multicultural, transnational dimensions from America's literary record. Embodying the transborder realities and creativity of the hemisphere's marginalized peoples, Chicana/Latina writers like Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda, Rosario Castellanos, Lourdes Casals, Dolores Prida, Evangelina Vigil, Angela de Hoyos, Cherrie Moraga, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Carmen Tafolla, and others demonstrate American literature's multiplicity despite its erasure from traditional canons. Mexican writer Claire Joysmith describes this as “a hymn to a rich oral and poetic tradition” with “mirrors … where the past … profiles the present” in her volume of Chicana poetry, Cantar de espejos: Poesia testimonial chicana de mujeres (2014). This description also applies to poets of Puerto Rican, Nuyorican, Cuban American, and other Latinas who share histories of conquest, colonialism, cultural mestizaje , and multilingual traditions. “ Mestizaje is Spanish for racial mixture … specifically to the hybrid mix of Native American, Spanish, and African heritage” dating to the colonial period. The heritage of conquest, mestizaje , and multilinguality explains why twentieth-century Chicana/Latina poetry often inhabits a shelf separate from canonized U.S. American authors with solely English colonial roots like the “Mayflower Compact” (1620), Anne Bradstreet's The Tenth Muse (1650), and Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom (1662), among others. To accurately reflect the hybrid reality of multiple colonial and classical traditions throughout the Americas, Chicana/Latina writers carved an alternative space challenging the distortion and/or erasure of their respective mestiza/o experiences and transnational legacies. This plural heritage comprises Native American tribal sources admixed with European, Greco-Roman, Judaic, Anglo-American, and African influences.