The Power of Exile

Abstract

The power of exile, both self-imposed and otherwise, with regard to experiences of community is a common thread of three recent works by women: Sanctuaries of the Heart/Santuarios del corazon, a novella by Margarita Cota-Cardenas, Communal Feminisms: Chicanas, Chilenas, and Cultural Exile, a collection of interviews with prominent writer/ activists by Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, and Latina Activists across Borders: Women's Grassroots Organizing Mexico and Texas, an in-depth look at nongovernmen tal organizations (NGOs) by Milagros Pena. Read as a collection, these works demon strate the interconnections of the many facets of Latina women's social and political activism. All of them bring the idea that the personal is political back onto the theo retical agenda, and all of them the feminist lens becomes the obvious rather than the radical choice of approach. Margarita Cota-Cardenas's earlier novella Puppet (Cota-Cardenas, 2000) has been described by Tey Diana Rebolledo (2005: x) as having marked an important stage the development of the Chicano narrative. Her Sanctuaries of the Heart/Santuarios del corazon is a bilingual novella (with the text appearing first English then Spanish) that begins with an account of the main character's experiences as a writer exploring liberation theology and the movement Latin America. This focus quickly slips aside, however, favor of an interweaving of moments the life of Petra Leyva (a character from Puppet) with theorizing on the situation of children of divorce general and the Mexican-American culture particular. As the author puts it, the novel turned out to be not about the movement itself, but about (3). In a complex, emotion-filled text she explores the ways which sanctuary in is similar to exile She suggests that the experience of children of divorce can be thought of as internal exile—a dividing up of one's feelings between those that one inhabits and those that one is exiled from. This self-imposed separation from painful memories is a coping mechanism, but it must be overcome if one is to see one's parents and oneself as individuals and to heal.