Chicana Literature Research Articles

Towards a Latina feminism of the Americas: Repression and resistance in Chicana and Mexicana literature

Towards a Latina feminism of the Americas: Repression and resistance in Chicana and Mexicana literature

Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature Yolanda Padilla Keywords Yolanda Padilla, Anna Marie Sandoval, Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature, Feminism, Latin America, chicano, chicana, Latina/Latino Studies, Mexicana Literature, Chicana Literature Sandoval, Anna Marie. Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature. Austin: U of Texas P, 2008. xvi + 129 pp. Anna Marie Sandoval’s Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas appears at a timely moment in Chicana/o and Latina/o studies. To an important extent, these [End Page 289] fields of inquiry have led the current hemispheric/transnational turn that is gaining prominence in American studies. Sandoval contributes to such transnational work through a feminist analysis of Chicana and Mexicana literature, one that highlights the similarities in the discursive strategies and political commitments of each in an effort to “braid Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities” (the subtitle of her first chapter). Few scholars have studied these literatures together, and, to my knowledge, none have devoted an entire book to such a project. There are at least two suggestive antecedents for Sandoval’s work. Debra A. Castillo’s Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) includes chapters on the Chicana writers Helena María Viramontes and Denise Chávez alongside those on Latin Americans such as Luisa Valenzuela and Rosario Castellanos. Castillo does not explicitly make the case for why she includes Chicanas in her study of Latin American women’s writings, but her readings suggest an affinity in these writers’ narrative strategies (such as the use of silence in the work of Viramontes), strategies that foreground issues of gender in their engagements with cultural and political contexts in a Latin America broadly conceived to include Latinas in the United States. In light of her resistance to developing an “overarching theory” to discuss Latin American literary feminisms (1), her decision not to provide a critical framework that accounts for the inclusion of Chicanas was probably a conscious one. Yet even when they deal with similar cultural coordinates, Chicana and Latin American women’s writings are shaped by and respond to very different contexts. Castillo’s readings and juxtapositions are generative while dispensing with an explicit unifying framework, but the inclusion of a rigorous rationale would be necessary in a monograph devoted to transnational analysis such as Sandoval’s. Like Talking Back, Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) does not take as its central focus a transnational study of Chicana and Latin American women’s writings; it attends much more to the links between U.S. Third World and Chicana feminisms. She ends, however, by suggesting confluences between the genre of testimonio and its enabling of the “previously unheard-of self-representation by subaltern women” and similar kinds of narrative expression employed by Chicana border feminists (161). Asserting a connection between Chicana literature and a significant strain of Latin American women’s expressive culture, Saldívar-Hull argues that these women “articulate a feminist consciousness that cannot be separated from its connection to race and class” (164). As a result, gender politics become inseparable from geopolitics. I start with a brief discussion of these two works in order to convey a sense of what has been done on this kind of critical project and to suggest something of what remains to be done. Given that Sandoval’s central focus in Toward a Latina [End Page 290] Feminism of the Americas is precisely the joint study of Mexicana and Chicana writers, it is much more incumbent on her than on Castillo or Saldívar-Hull to provide a rigorous rationale, whether on historical, cultural, political, or aesthetic grounds. To this end, Sandoval identifies and examines a number of common cultural and thematic touchstones, including redefinitions of family, the influence of the Catholic Church, and, most importantly, the writers’ “re-visionings of traditional cultural symbols” such as La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Malinche (9). Along with the “reshaping of cultural symbols...

Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art (review)

Reviewed by: Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art Nadia Avendaño Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art. Duke University Press, 2008. By Debra J. Blake. What do La Malinche, La Llorona, and la Virgen de Guadalupe and Mexica goddesses all have in common? They are all cultural symbols that have exerted a profound impact on the way women of Mexican descent have understood their sexuality and have imagined their roles within society and the family. This study, a welcome volume addition to the critical series Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations, examines the way different groups of Chicana and U.S. Mexicana women have made use of these cultural symbols to negotiate, contest, and transform the forces that have restricted or oppressed them. Since the 1980's Chicana writers and artists have refigured these iconic figures and assigned them new meanings. Debra J. Blake compares these refigurings by professional intellectual Chicanas with that of working-class and semiprofessional women's oral narratives. The book examines how representations of the four Mexican female cultural figures have been used by dominant forces from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century to oppress women, and how Chicana writers have been influenced by their "transformative foremother," La Malinche. In contrast to patriarchal representations, Blake analyzes how Chicana artists have [End Page 224] refashioned the four figures in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first centuries. Blake then examines the significance of indigenous Mexican mother earth goddesses used in fictional and autobiographical writings by Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Alma Luz Villanueva, Ana Castillo, and Sandra Cisneros and compares them with several interrelated feminist discourses including anthropology, spirituality, and radical/cultural feminist debates about sexuality, women's culture, and universalized gender oppression. The book subsequently discusses the importance of La Virgen de Guadalupe in the lives of the working-class and semi-professional women from a semiotic perspective and shows how their refigurings of women's roles and sexuality are based in practical or action-oriented strategies. It also analyzes both groups' shared experiences with the legend of La Llorona, and its continuing relevance in Chicana cultural thought, for example, the legend's disciplinary function for children and its regulatory message regarding female sexuality. Blake analyzes fictional writings by Chicanas that refigure the misogynist view of La Llorona. Finally, the author considers the historical reception of written and oral narratives from a literary studies perspective and suggests that oral histories be "read" as literary representations and incorporated into the "canon." Blake concludes that regardless of Chicanas' and U.S. Mexicanas' social and economic locations, the female symbol they affiliate with, or how they identify, their narratives indicate that they are engaged in claiming and redefining power for themselves and others. Finally, this study shows that Chicana feminist writings continue to address significant concerns affecting real women's lives, including those of working-class and semiprofessional women, and to redefine what it means to be a Chicana or U.S. Mexicana into the twenty-first century. Chicana Sexuality and Gender is the first full-length study of Chicana literature to analyze oral histories as narrative representations along with fictional writings and visual artists' representations. This study offers one of the most thorough discussions of the archetypes of La Malinche, La Llorona, and La Virgen de Guadalupe as well as the lesser known Mexica goddesses. Though Blake provides an in-depth analysis of the experiences of Chicanas and U.S. Mexicanas, she recognizes that further studies of the experiences and ideas of middle-class, professional Mexican American women would contribute an even more complex picture regarding identity politics, Mexican female cultural symbols, gender roles and sexualities. Despite this omission, Debra J. Blake makes a great contribution to Chicano/a studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and literary studies. Nadia Avendaño College of Charleston Copyright © 2009 The Board of Regents of the University of Arizona

River Reflections: A Collection of River Writings ed. by Verne Huser

W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 7 Like much Chicana literature, this memoir deals with identity crises and the blurring of a variety of borders. Gloria Anzaldua defines the multiply interpolated identity of Mexican Americans in Borderlands/LaFrontera (1987): “Having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision” (100). These cultural colli­ sions, for Guilbault, involve the national border between the United States and Mexico, linguistic borders, class borders, racial borders, gendered borders, and the generational border between the girl and her parents. The story ends with the last summer that Guilbault spent sorting tomatoes on a conveyor belt. She had just finished junior college and was leaving for the university. Her coworkers, the “conveyor belt ladies,” as she called them, were migrant workers, mostly Mexican, most recently from Texas. At the end of her last day on the line, the conveyor belt ladies shook her hand, “and gave [her] a blessing or a big hug. ‘Don’t come back. Make us proud, hija’” (155). As they banished her from the community, they also wished a better life for her and for their own children— a life beyond borders. River Reflections: A Collection of River Writings. Edited by Verne Huser. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. 273 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Katherine Fischer Clarke College, Dubuque, Iowa Voyageurs, fur trappers, explorers, and pioneers paddle through the pages of River Reflections: A Collection ofRiver Writings alongside modern naturalists, families, fishers, famous entertainers, and thrillseekers. Forty essays, journal entries, and stories offer energetic insights into economic, environmental, emotional, and political forces that affect American rivers as diverse as the Mississippi, Brazos, Snake, Salmon, Missouri, Tuolumne, Yukon, St. Croix, and Peace. These are not the tales of those who study rivers from a safe distance in academic offices or from high atop bluffs rendering quantitative analyses and pretty pictures. At its heart, this collection celebrates rivers from the rough and tumble perspectives of those who travel them in kayaks, steamboats, canoes, sportyaks, squirt-boats, rafts, and, the greatest of all river crafts, the human body. Divided into two sections— “The Classics” and “Modem Times”— the first part of the book delivers the history of discovery by those who accompanied John Wesley Powell, John Jacob Astor, and Lewis and Clark. These tales of adventure and exploration are joined in the second half by contemporary stories of shooting rapids, exploring the past through names etched on canyon walls, and running rivers. Throughout both parts, editor Verne Huser precedes selections with his own commentary that places the works within the field of riverine literature. BO O K REVIEW S Benchmark river writers such as A. B. Guthrie, Mark Twain, Ann Zwinger, Norman Maclean, and William Faulkner are featured in this volume. Included, too, are the writings of well-known conservationists Michael Frome, Joel Vance, Tim Palmer, and Edward Abbey. Dayton Duncan tells of following the Lewis and Clark trail. Lyrical selections by Wendell Barry and Patricia McCairen take readers deep into the heart of what it means to know a river. Less standard in river literature, but nonetheless stunning, are accounts by Amelia Stewart Knight who chronicles river crossings on the wagon journey from Iowa to Oregon, culminating in the birth of her eighth child, and broadcaster Tom Brokaw’spoetically grim account of running the Salmon River only to lose one of their party at Webber Falls. Here there are other hard stories of loss such as the depredation of rivers, canyons, and species due to human greed and stupidity. But here, too, are hopeful tales of dams being removed and of watersheds and habitats being restored and protected. In the wilderness of untamed places, these writers— and those who travel with them— find their souls in something as simple as paddling a river or in watching a heron take wing. Although river folks will feel immediately at home with this collection, those unacquainted with...

Book Review: Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of space

Book Review: Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of space

“The Wall in Our Minds?” Colonization, Integration, and Nostalgia

The Journal of Popular CultureVolume 39, Issue 5 p. 780-795 “The Wall in Our Minds?” Colonization, Integration, and Nostalgia JOSEPH F. JOZWIAK, JOSEPH F. JOZWIAK Texas A&M UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorELISABETH MERMANN, ELISABETH MERMANN Texas A&M UniversitySearch for more papers by this author JOSEPH F. JOZWIAK, JOSEPH F. JOZWIAK Texas A&M UniversitySearch for more papers by this authorELISABETH MERMANN, ELISABETH MERMANN Texas A&M UniversitySearch for more papers by this author First published: 08 September 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.2006.00305.xCitations: 8 Joseph F. Jozwiak is an Associate Professor of political science at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi where he teaches on comparative politics and international relations. He has published articles on European integration and environmental politics. Elisabeth Mermann is a Professor of English at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi, where she teaches contemporary American literature and theory. She is author of Postmodern Vernaculars: Chicana Literature and Postmodern Rhetoric. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume39, Issue5October 2006Pages 780-795 RelatedInformation

Life in Search of Readers: Reading (In) Chicano/A Literature

Since colonial times, Chicano/a literature has varied with the authors' assumptions about the class and gender of their audiences, the linguistic choices available for literary communication, the geographic mobility of writers and readers, and the tastes they may have acquired in Mexico or other countries. In this examination of Chicano/a literature, Manuel M. Martin-Rodriguez analyses the ways it connects with and is shaped by the interaction with its audiences. Motivated by a Tomas Rivera essay from 1971, Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature, Martin-Rodriguez began collecting, researching, and examining Chicano/a literature. He soon determined that a work of literature without a reader has no real existence and, specifically, Chicano/a literature has been defined as much by its readers as by its authors. Martin-Rodriguez begins this writing with an examination of the Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when the creation of Chicano-owned or controlled publishing enterprises made possible a surge of Chicano/a literature at the national level. He then concentrates on Chicana literature and engendering the reader and on linguistic and marketing strategies for a multicultural readership. Finally, Martin-Rodriguez provides a very thorough list of Chicano/a literature which he studied and he recommends for the reader to consider.

Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space

Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space

"A Kind of Queer Balance": Cherrie Moraga's Aztlan

A constant in Chicana author Cherrie Moraga's critical analyses over the past twenty years has been her exploration of the maternal bond, which her first text, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Paso Por Sus Labios (1983), simultaneously constructs as the core of the nuclear family, the larger tie to Chicano community, and the place of origin for Moraga's lesbian sexuality. Following Moraga's lead, critics have primarily focused on the psychosexual connection between Moraga and her as seen in Loving in the War Years, centering much of their analysis on Moraga's revision of Malinche, a pivotal figure in Chicana literature. (1) The mother-daughter relationship in Loving in the War Years presents an origin point, however, rather than an end, for investigations into Moraga's theories of representation. By considering Loving in the War Years in conjunction with Moraga's later two texts The Last Generation (1993) and Waiting in the Wings (1997)--expanded and more complicated readings of Moraga's evolving politics become possible. Since Moraga's texts are all undoubtedly worth further (and fuller) consideration, the lack of critical attention that her later publications have received is somewhat troubling. Such silence says volumes about the expectations cultural critics place on the texts of minority writers. As Gloria Anzaldua comments: Position is point of view. And whatever position we may occupy, we are getting only one point of view: middle-class. Theory serves those that create it. White lesbians and gays are certainly not speaking for me. Inevitably we colored dykes fall into a reactive mode, counter their terms and theories [...]. We focus on the cultural abuse of colored by and thus fall into the trap of the colonized reader and writer forever reacting against the dominant. (To(o) Queer the Writer 252) This trap, which Anzaldua specifically addresses in terms of queer writers of color, is one that critics of all ethnicities often duplicate when analyzing the work of non-white or multiethnic authors. For writers of color, as Anzaldua suggests, the trap may be defined as a recurring reaction against dominant discourses, which, by its very repetition, acts to reinstate the dominant as center. I suggest that white middle-class writers also fetishize this conflict by ignoring the texts in which Moraga moves beyond white/nonwhite binaries of identity formation. Thus, by continually situating critical conversations about Moraga's autobiographical fiction entirely around Loving in the War Years, critics remain in comfortable territory. But Cherrie Moraga's theoretical project is not about comfort. With each new text, Moraga extends her investigations of identity formation, inviting readers to follow suit. Each new book also, however, moves readers progressively away from the comfort zone in which the climax of a multiethnic author's narrative lies in a return to the mother culture. (2) Instead, the body of Moraga's work presents complicated and less tidy narratives in which Moraga examines the multivalent nature of identity. As critics have shown, Loving in the War Years is the mother's story, describing Moraga's trajectory away from and then back to the Chicano community and ending with Moraga's solid identification as a Chicana lesbian. (3) But behind the figure of the in at least two of her texts, Loving in the War Years and The Last Generation, lurks the omnipresent shadow of the father, a figure as yet unexamined in the critical conversation surrounding Moraga's work. In both texts, the father's ghost is a queer presence. Figured as homosexuality, whiteness, and a silencing of history, he is always creating an absence that can be filled only by a woman: a mother's frustrated passions by a daughter's lesbian sexuality, a daughter's guera [fair-skinned] privilege by a mother's Chicana heritage, a father's Anglo past by an aunt's stories. …

Cartographies of Resistance: Poetics and Politics of Space in Chicano/a Writing

This review essay of Mary Pat Brady's Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space, and Monika Kaup's Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative places these recent publications within a context of works that focus on spatial politics in Chicano/a Studies. It pays particular attention to the authors' methodologies.

Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and The Urgency of Space (review)

Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and The Urgency of Space (review)

Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space; Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives

Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space; Gang Nation: Delinquent Citizens in Puerto Rican, Chicano, and Chicana Narratives

Extinct lands, temporal geographies: Chicana literature and the urgency of space

A train station becomes a police station; lands held sacred by Apaches and Mexicanos are turned into commercial and residential zones; freeway construction hollows out a community; a rancho becomes a retirement community—these are the kinds of spatial transformations that concern Mary Pat Brady in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies , a book bringing together Chicana feminism, cultural geography, and literary theory to analyze an unusual mix of Chicana texts through the concept of space. Beginning with nineteenth-century short stories and essays and concluding with contemporary fiction, this book reveals how Chicana literature offers a valuable theoretics of space. The history of the American Southwest in large part entails the transformation of lived, embodied space into zones of police surveillance, warehouse districts, highway interchanges, and shopping malls—a movement that Chicana writers have contested from its inception. Brady examines this long-standing engagement with space, first in the work of early newspaper essayists and fiction writers who opposed Anglo characterizations of Northern Sonora that were highly detrimental to Mexican Americans, and then in the work of authors who explore border crossing. Through the writing of Sandra Cisneros, Cherrie Moraga, Terri de la Pena, Norma Cantu, Monserrat Fontes, Gloria Anzaldua, and others, Brady shows how categories such as race, gender, and sexuality are spatially enacted and created—and made to appear natural and unyielding. In a spatial critique of the war on drugs, she reveals how scale—the process by which space is divided, organized, and categorized—has become a crucial tool in the management and policing of the narcotics economy.

Puppet: a Chicano novella

Originally published in Spanish and now in its first bilingual edition, this is a complex, challenging, and ultimately compelling narrative. It tells the story of Petra (Pat) Leyva and how she comes to terms with the murder of Puppet, a Chicano youth, and the subsequent police cover-up. Already an underground classic, Puppet will appeal to readers interested in the politics of the Chicano movement and in racial and feminist politics in the United States. The bilingual edition will be welcomed by professors who teach American Studies, Chicano Studies, and Chicana literature.

Understanding contemporary Chicana literature

Exploring the work of six notable authors, this text reveals characteristic themes, images and stylistic devices that make contemporary Chicana writing a vibrant and innovative part of a burgeoning Latina creativity.

Scaling the West Differently

# * E s s a y R e v i e w s Carmen Lomas Garza. E L M ILA G R O (T H E M IR A C LE). 1987. Oil on canvas. 36" x 48". Courtesy of the Nicolas and Cristina Hernández Trust Collection, Pasadena, California. 'P® Many of Lomas Garza’s paintings are nostalgic, evoking sweet memories of her Tejano childhood, but others, like El Milagro juxtapose familiar scenes with the ominous and the sensual. In this painting, the neighbors have come to witness and to worship the appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe (in the wood grain of the elevated cistern). The landowners concerned about the danger of rattlesnakes are warning the neighbors to walk carefully through the fields. The conver­ gence of the virgin and the snake combines two ancient female symbols, acknowledging both good and evil. (For more information, see Lucy R. Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, 1990.) S c a l in g t h e W e s t D if f e r e n t l y M a r y P a t B r a d y One day I happened to meet a screenwriter best known for his work on Jean-Claude Van Damme films. He thought of himself as something of an expert in “world literature,” so not surprisingly he asked about my course of study in graduate school. “Chicana literature ,” I replied, but then quickly translated, “Mexican American lit­ erature.” He thought for a minute, looked at me intently, and said, “You mean like Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende?” A few months later in an anonymous MLA hotel room, a mem­ ber of a search committee prefaced a question with the comment, “Chicano studies is too parochial.” We had a bit of an argument, and, not surprisingly, I didn’t get the job. As most scholars of Chicano lit­ erature who have had a recent turn on the job market will tell you, her comment was not an unusual one— nor was it an ignorant one. But rather, it was a comment that emerged from reading influential texts such as Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes and Amy Kaplan and Donald Peases’s anthology Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Like the screenwriter, she wanted to make connections between Latin American studies and American studies, and she longed for a scholar who would, working within the confines of an English department, teach all of the literature of Latin America as well as that by U.S. Latino/as. These conversations might not have been so frustrating if I had understood then that we were not discussing literature or literary studies, or even the canon and canon-making processes, but scale. Embedded in our discussions were assumptions about the scale of lit­ erary and national studies, taken-for-granted ideas about the division of the world and the world’s literatures. While we tend to overlook it, scale is a site over which political and economic struggles are repeatedly waged because it is a primary means by which we measure and categorize. Or as Neil Smith puts it, “Scale demarcates the sites of social contest, the object as well as the resolution of contest” (66). Had I understood that the screenwriter could not imagine a scale as fine as one that distinguished Chicano/a writers not only from other U.S. writers but also from Latin American writers, or that the uni­ versity professor could see only the limits of scale, our conversations might have taken different turns. WAL 3 5 .1 S P R IN G 2 0 0 0 The questions then would not have been why he didn’t know any Chicana writers or why she was not interested in the categorical work of Chicana/o studies, but at what scale literature should be studied and to what ends. By using scale we might have been able to talk about the usage of geographical boundaries to define texts, produce identities, or expand and exclude knowledge. We might then have discussed the relative advantages between scales as different as “Latina,” “Chicano,” or “western.” Or our conversation could...

La Malinche at the Intersection: Race and Gender inDown These Mean Streets

Piri Thomas'sDown These Mean Streets(1967) challenges binary notions of whiteness and blackness by valorizing a third term—mestizaje.And yet the novel enlists dominant views of female gender and sexuality to affirm the protagonist's ethnic male identity. In my Chicana feminist reading of this Puerto Rican text, I import the reinterpreted figure La Malinche and its companion figure La Chingada—prevailing tropes in Chicano and Chicana literature and discourse of the 1960s—to illuminate the complex intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. These intersections are key to social analyses that transcend binary conceptions of race and paradigms of dominant and subaltern.

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

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. …

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

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 ...

Chicano and Chicana Literature, 1992-96: An Annotated Bibliography

Chicano and Chicana Literature, 1992-96: An Annotated Bibliography