The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo

Abstract

Now, I-woman am going to blow up Law ... language. (Cixous Laughing Medusa 887) By creating mythos--that is, change way we perceive reality, way we see ourselves, and ways we behave--la mestiza creates consciousness. (Anzaldua Borderlands/La Frontera 80) Ever since initial success of vanguard Chicana writers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Estela Portillo-Trambley, Gina Valdes, Bernice Zamora, Lucha Corpi and Alma Villanueva late 1970s and early 1980s and throughout boom of Chicana literary output from mid 1980s until now, Chicana writers have used written word order to and change, that is, they have been engage writers one way or another.(1) According to Maria Hererra-Sobek, Chicana writers have been making daring inroads into `new frontiers' ... exploring vistas ... and perspectives which reveal new dimensions for both Chicano and mainstream American literatures (10-11). Focusing upon Ana Castillo's novels, The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapogonia, and So Far From God, this essay addresses politics of dislocation and relocation as key aspect of interacting social and cultural practices and ideological that constitute narrative's signifying process. In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldua describes border space as a vague and undetermined place created by emotional residue of an unnatural boundary, space in constant state of transition (3). Those who live Chicano borderlands, this interstitial cross-cultural space, are plagued by psychic ... torn between ways ... product of transfer of cultural and spiritual values of one group to another (78). I want to suggest that Castillo's characters, male and female, are border subjects positioned between cultures and search of an alternative to their lived nepantla state of invisibility and transition.(2) In terms of her female characters, this state is aggravated by what Castillo calls Massacre of Dreamers double sexism, being female and indigenous, that is, by Chicana's identity as man's specularized Other,(3) subject-position conditioned by racism and misogyny. Castillo, I want to demonstrate, uses writing to reveal and change mestiza's imposed subject-position, which, according to JanMohamed, can be defined only in terms of effects of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social manipulation, and ideological domination on cultural formation of minority subjects and discourses (9). In this process her narrative problematizes ethos and worldview of Chicano and Anglo-American cultures through aesthetic creation of mestiza consciousness, repositioning of marginalized subject by means of counterhegemonic discourse that establishes what Goran Therborn has called narrative alterideology (Identity of Power 28): narrative dialectic of difference(4) as socially symbolic act with an ideological utopian function intent on finding imaginary solutions to existing social conflicts. This utopian function--an impulse of liberation and salvation--embraces relation between both individual and collective and life as it is lived and experienced imaginatively. Hence, I want to argue that Ana Castillo's narrative instantiates counterhegemony (culture/ideology) as substance of Chicana/o thinking and is therefore, Frederic Jameson's terms, informed by ... political unconscious ... symbolic meditation on destiny of community (The Political Unconscious 70). It becomes, as it creates, what Bhabha based on Jacques Lacan has termed place of the signifying time-lag of cultural difference (The Location of Culture 237). In The Mixquiahuala Letters Castillo describes Chicana's search for identity borderlands by foregrounding the psychic restlessness which characterizes protagonist's endeavors to deconstruct her imposed identity as man's Other and create an authentic consciousness. …