Hungry Women: Borderlands Mythos in Two Stories by Helena Maria Viramontes

Abstract

Hungry Woman In place where spirits live, there was once woman who cried constantly for food. had mouths in her wrists, mouths in her elbows, and mouths in her ankles and knees. She can't eat here, said other spirits. She will have to live somewhere else. up above, there was only empty air, and to right and to left and in front and behind, it was just same. In those days world had not been created. Nevertheless, there was something underneath that seemed to be water. How it had got there nobody knew. If we put her below, they though t, then perhaps she will be able to satisfy her hunger. No sooner had thought occurred than spirits (Quetzalcoatl and Texcatlipoca) seized woman and dragged her down to water. When they saw that she floated, they changed into snakes, stretching over her in form of cross, from right arm to left leg and from left arm to right leg. Catching her hands and feet, they squeezed her from all four directions, pushing so hard that she snapped in half at waist. Now look what we've done, they said, and not knowing what else to do, they carried bottom halfback to spirit place. Look, they cried. What's to be done with this ? What shame, said other spirits. But never mind. We'll use it to make sky. Then, to comfort poor woman, they all flew down and began to make grass and flowers out of her skin. From her hair they made forests, from her eyes, pools and springs, from her shoulders, mountains, and from her nose, valleys. At last she will be satisfied, they thought. just as before, her mouths were everywhere, biting and moaning. And still she hasn't changed. When it rains, she drinks. When flowers shrivel, when trees fall, or when someone dies, she eats. When people are sacrificed or killed in battle, she drinks their blood. Her mouths are always opening and snapping shut, but they are never filled. Sometimes at night, when wind blows, you can hear her crying for food. --Aztec creation myth In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Gloria Anzaldda describes Chicano/a experience as one of ambivalence and unrest, the lifebloods of two worlds merging to form third country--a border (3). Because it sustains gaze that is doubled, ambiguous, neither inside nor outside system, this border culture is often charted as danger zone or denied in melting pot myths of nationalism. Like hungry woman, figure that can be traced from Aztec mythology through Chicana folklore, this third country will not be silenced or contained. Challenging discrete boundaries invoked by American nationalism, borderlands act as site of agency and transformation in Chicana literature. Here, [T]he trope of border culture is not thus simply another expression of postmodern aesthetic indeterminacy, as Juan Flores and George Yudice explain, It corresponds to an ethos under formation; it is practice rather than representation of Latino (60-61). Helena Maria Viramontes employs this practice in two of her short stories from The Moths collection, Broken Web and Cariboo Cafe. In these two stories, narrative design illustrates experience of cultural hybridity as it exposes and critiques structures of domination in Chicano/a border culture. Fragmenting temporality, place, memory and voice, Viramontes's narratives inscribe ways that various oppressions interact in situated contexts. My reading of these two stories examines how figure of hungry woman enacts these configurations of difference, suggesting what Anzaldda terms a borderlands consciousness. I preface my examination of Viramontes's work with an discussion of what I term mythos of hungry woman. As women who will not be satisfied or contained, Chicana mythic figures, la Llorona, la Malinche, and la Virgen de Guadalupe allegorically inform Chicana literature. …