Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature by Tey Diana Rebolledo

Abstract

406 Western American Literature of an index necessitate hunting for specific items. This compilation is best suited for readers intending to read through it page by page and perhaps tab sections of special interest to themselves. A brief Preface explains that the selected novelists have been chosen because they “came to prominence in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s.” Each listing is preceded by a short, useful account of the author’s literary importance, major points of critical attention, and several plausible topics for further research. Although no bibliography is ever complete, Kich has scoured the territory well for germane writings, including stray items as well as the more important primary and secondary works. Readers of Clark, Davis, Fisher, et al., will find Western American Novelists valu­ able—expensive but informative and clear. Future volumes with additional authors of the period are promised. SANFORD E. MAROVITZ Kent State University Women Singing In The Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. By Tey Diana Rebolledo. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. 250 pages, $35.00/$16.95.) This work is presented as the first book-length analysis of the Chicana literary tradition, and Rebolledo has done an admirable job of covering an immense amount of previously uncharted territory. As she points out in her introduction, “not a single article on Chicana literature by a Chicana critic has been published in . . . PMLA, Critical Inquiry, or other mainstream journals.” Women Singing is not an in-depth, critical examination nor a deeply theoret­ ical work, but it does place Chicana writers and theorists within a living sociohistorical and cultural context. Rebolledo begins with a look at some of the earliest MexicanAmerican women whose stories were collected as oral histories, cuentos, and estorias, linking them to the later, more well-known works of Nina Otrero-Warren, Cleofas Jaramillo, and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, among the first Chicanas to be published in English. Chapters three and four are devoted to detailed examina­ tions of the ways in which Chicanas have claimed and altered liter­ Reviews 407 ary myths and archetypes, from the Aztec goddess Coatlicue to La Llorona and the figure of the curandera/bruja. Rebolledo includes extensive discussion of the work of other Chicana critics like Maria Herrera-Sobek, Alvina Quintana, and Gloria Anzaldua, as well as some examination of male theorists. One of the most interesting ideas Rebolledo tackles is how Chicana literature fits within the postmodern. That many texts pro­ duced by Chicanas contain multiple voices and shifting subjectivi­ ties, she says, implicates them as typically postmodern. However, Rebolledo rejects the idea of “the death or absence of the speaking subject.” Chicana writers are actively and deliberately articulating their identities, they simply do so in a manner unlike that of their white or male counterparts. Her discussion of postmodernity follows closely a fascinating examination of the role of recipes and the claiming of authorial power. From Cleofas Jaramillo’s indignant 1939 response to inaccu­ rate portrayals of New Mexican recipes to Laura Esquivel’s best­ selling Like Water for Chocolate, Rebolledo posits that Chicanas’ critical strategies are often formed around metaphors of cooking, an act which she describes as “cooking the texts” and one which forms a gendered line of authority stretching back to mothers, grandmoth­ ers, and great-grandmothers. SARA L. SPURGEON University of Arizona Dictionary of Native American Literature. Edited by Andrew Wiget. (New York: Garland, 1994. 598 pages, $95.00.) This handsome volume is an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, and general readers of Native American literature. The book consists of a brief introduction and three sections—oral litera­ tures, the historical emergence of American Indian writing, and the Native American Renaissance from 1967 on. The sections begin with critical overviews (by Andrew Wiget, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, and Joseph Bruchac) that help orient readers to the discus­ sions of genres, archetypes, and individual writers that follow. The work of fifty-two scholars in over seventy essays is represented in a ...