La Llorona Research Articles

The Politics of Taking: La Llorona in the Cultural Mainstream

The Politics of Taking: La Llorona in the Cultural Mainstream

There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture; Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art

There Was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture; Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art

There was a woman: La Llorona from folklore to popular culture and Day of the dead in the USA: The migration and transformation of a cultural phenomenon

There was a woman: La Llorona from folklore to popular culture and Day of the dead in the USA: The migration and transformation of a cultural phenomenon

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...

Una cubana in the Borderlands: Teresa Dovalpage's La hija de la Llorona

In La hija de La Llorona , Teresa Dovalpage ushers in the latest development in Cuban theater written in the US. Lacking in the nostalgia and politics characteristic of exile theater, Dovalpage represents an emerging transnational identity through her protagonist Caridad that more accurately mirrors the relationship of recent Cuban émigrés to their homeland and adopted country. To this end, the Llorona folktale is re-envisioned and the Southwestern US becomes a contact zone where a Cuban balsera , her traditional Mexican-American mother-in-law and a liberal Puerto Rican friend bond in their shared experiences as women and mothers despite their divergent cultures and histories.

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

Buscando para nuestra latinidad: Utilizing La Llorona for Cultural Critique

This essay analyzes the contemporary constructions of Latina/o identity, Latina/o gender and Latina/o nationality as evidenced in the self-proclaimed “first major studio comedy to reflect the Hispanic cultural experience in America,” Chasing Papi. The contradictions between the film's progressive mission and the film's representations are teased out by a cross-reading of the film's usage of the popular Chicana/o mythic figure, La Llorona. Invoking La Lorona as muse and means, we find that the Latin Lover stereotype succeeds in its anti-assimilationist task while concurrently furthering confusion on who and what is a U.S. Latina/o. However, the authors also demonstrate how cultural cross-readings can provide hope out of delimiting discursive constructions.

Multilingual Aesthetics and the Limits of Chicano/a Identity in Margarita Cota-Cardenas' Puppet

In Margarita Cota-Cardenas' Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985), the protagonist Petra Leyva is relentlessly plagued by what she perceives to be her inability to embody an authentic Chicana self. Pat's desire for authenticity belies her role as a single mother of two girls who holds down two jobs as an instructor of Chicano/a literature and Spanish at a community college and a part-time secretary at a construction company, for the Chicano/a identities that she embraces are extremely reductive. These identities depend upon a romanticized notion of marginalized communities, revolving around conceptions of the working-class laborer, feminist political activist, and selfless wife and mother at the core of a nuclear family. Moreover, Pat associates her feelings of betrayal of her community with some of the most iconic symbols of Chicano/a and Mexican culture, like Cesar Chavez, La Llorona, and La Malinche (also known as Marina or Malintzin). Pat's identification with La Malinche (93), the indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes, who is legendarily known as both the mother of the Mexican nation and as its quintessential betrayer, is particularly fraught; this identification leads her to assume the dichotomous role of female creator and destroyer as she struggles to find her place in her community of friends and family. As a result, Chicano/a identities are impossible to fulfill in the novel, and ultimately reinforce the production of impervious myths and icons of Mexican and Chicano/a identity. Despite Pat's desire for an authentic and immutable Chicano identity, her anxiety also reveals resistance to such strict conceptions of identity. Perhaps the clearest example of the resistance and tension evident in Puppet is the way that the novel appears to promote fixed Chicano/a identities, yet bursts with multilingual tricks and slips that challenge the limits of identity at every turn. The novel deviates from the now dominant mode of hybrid identities and liminal, transnational spaces within much Latino/a and Chicano/a cultural production, evident in well-known texts such as Gloria Anzaldua's influential Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) or Guillermo Gomez-Pena's The New Worm Border (1996). Instead, through a radical interrogation of language and translation, Puppet provides a critical perspective on the ongoing struggle between fluid and essentialist Chicano/a identities. Throughout much of the novel, Pat persists in her desire for a fixed and authentic Chicano/a identity; yet Puppet constantly challenges the institutionalization of identity through this interrogation of language. Cota-Cardenas' novel both rejects the institutionalization of rigid Chicano/a identities and demonstrates a desperate nostalgia for authenticity, fixedness, and monolingualism. While contradictory subjectivities and in-between spaces are explicitly rejected by most of the characters in the novel--especially by Pat herself--the language, form, and style of the novel explode strict boundaries at every turn, symbolically reflecting the transnational condition of Chicano/as in the United States. Instead of perceiving the contradictory representation of identity in Puppet as a marker of stagnation or hopelessness, we should interpret it as a matter of simultaneity and possibility, in which Chicano/as inhabit multiple languages and national identities even as they may occasionally be excluded by them. The secret is to interpret exclusion not as abjection, but as another element of the transformative potential of contradictory Chicano/a identities. Likewise, by emphasizing apparent flaws such as repetition, mispronunciation, misunderstanding, colloquialism, and language mixing, the linguistic games in Puppet privilege flexible identities by revealing each person's capacity to shift between the poles of inclusion and exclusion. This language play also rearticulates myths and icons frequently associated with Chicano/a identity. …

La Llorona's Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, by Luis D. Leon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 331 pp.; $24.94 USD (paper), $55.00 USD (cloth)

La Llorona's Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands, by Luis D. Leon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 331 pp.; $24.94 USD (paper), $55.00 USD (cloth)

Bilingual education & bilingualism

07–469Dicker Hostos, Susan J. (City U New York, USA), Dominican Americans in Washington Heights, New York: Language and culture in a transnational community. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.6 (2006), 713–727.07–470Fitts, Shanan (California State U, USA), Reconstructing the status quo: Linguistic interaction in a dual-language school. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.2 (2006), 337–365.07–471Hall, Anne-Marie (U Arizona, USA), Keeping La Llorona alive in the shadow of Cortés: What an examination of literacy in two Mexican schools can teach. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.2 (2006), 385–406.07–472Han Chung, Haesook (Defense Language Institute, USA), Code switching as a communicative strategy: A case study of Korean–English bilinguals. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.2 (2006), 293–307.07–473Hilmarsson-Dunn, A. M. (U Southampton, UK; amhd@soton.ac.uk), Protectionist language policies in the face of the forces of English: The case of Iceland. Language Policy (Springer) 5.3 (2006), 295–314.07–474Hogan-Brun, Gabrielle (U Bristol, UK; g.hogan-brun@bristol.ac.uk), At the interface of language ideology and practice: The public discourse surrounding the 2004 education reform in Latvia. Language Policy (Springer) 5.3 (2006), 315–335.07–475Jiménez, Terese C. (Loyola Marymount U, USA), , Alexis L. Filippini & Michael M. Gerber, Shared reading within Latino families: An analysis of reading interactions and language use. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.2 (2006), 431–452.07–476King, Kendall & Lyn Fogle (Georgetown U, USA), Bilingual parenting as good parenting: Parents' perspectives on family language policy for additive bilingualism. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.6 (2006), 695–712.07–477Lee, Borim (Wonkwang U, Korea; brlee@wonkwang.ac.kr), Susan G. Guion & Tetsuo Harada, Acoustic analysis of the production of unstressed English vowels by early and late Korean and Japanese bilinguals. Studies in Second Language Acquisition (Cambridge University Press) 28.3 (2006), 487–513.07–478Mar-Molinero, Clare & Patrick Stevenson (Centre for Transnational Studies, U Southampton, UK; cmm@soton.ac.uk), Breaching the peace: Struggles around multilingualism in Switzerland. Language Policy (Springer) 5.3 (2006), 239–245.07–479Mills, Kathy A. (Christian Heritage College, Australia), ‘Mr travelling-at-will Ted Doyle': Discourses in a multiliteracies classroom. Australian Journal of Language and Literacy (Australian Literacy Educators' Association) 29.2 (2006), 132–149.07–480Pagett, Linda (U Plymouth, UK; l.pagett@plymouth.ac.uk), Mum and Dad prefer me to speak Bengali at home: Code switching and parallel speech in a primary school setting. Literacy (Blackwell) 40.3 (2006), 137–14507–481Ransdell, Sarah (Nova Southeastern U, Ft Lauderdale, FL, USA), Marie-Laure Barbier & Toomas Niit, Metacognitions about language skill and working memory among monolingual and bilingual college students: When does multilingualism matter?International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (Multilingual Matters) 9.6 (2006), 728–741.07–482Souto-Manning, Mariana (U Georgia, USA), A critical look at bilingualism discourse in public schools: Autoethnographic reflections of a vulnerable observer. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.2 (2006), 559–577.07–483Worthy, Jo & Alejandra Rodríguez-Galindo (U Texas, USA), ‘Mi hija vale dos personas': Latino immigrant parents’ perspectives about their children's bilingualism. Bilingual Research Journal (National Association for Bilingual Education) 30.2 (2006), 579–601.

Revised Memories and Colliding Identities: Absence and Presence in Morrison's "Recitatif" and Viramontes's "Tears on My Pillow"

Recently several literary critics have argued that ethnic literatures are comparable in their complex rhetorical remembering of ancestral, linguistic, and gendered realities to negotiate contemporary political, social, and spiritual issues. (1) A close comparative examination of African American and Chicana women's fiction demonstrates that many authors in these fields create literatures that contain similar struggles for personal and collective power. Both include non-traditional spiritual and ancestral connections, and both engender metaphors that recognize the hybridity of ethnic American experience. More specifically, Toni Morrison and Helena Maria Viramontes's stories show that mothers inform the connection to memory and the understanding of present realities; the relationships between the female protagonists and their mothers directly correlates to the relationship between the protagonists and their and ethnic identities. Morrison and Viramontes use archetypal symbols that expose both the absence and presence of mothering in the texts and establish the deeply embedded intersections of identity and mythology. In Toni Morrison's Recitatif (1991) and Helena Maria Viramontes's Tears on My Pillow (1994), the protagonists participate in traumatic mothering situations that reveal an absence/presence paradigm. Characters heal from trauma only when they interrogate and confront the meaning of archetypal figures from their memories. In Tears on My Pillow the main character, Ofelia, struggles to revise the legend of La Llorona, the archetypal wailing woman of Latina/Latino legend who drowned her own children; through this revision she hopes to understand the disappearances and reappearances of mothers in her own life. In Morrison's Recitatif, the archetypal mother figure is embodied through a domestic servant named Maggie; the female protagonists' continually revised memories of an incident in which Maggie is attacked attempt to negotiate a traumatic mothering situation that is both absent and present. Although these two texts are different in many ways, Morrison's and Viramontes's uses of memory point to what these stories--and many African American and Chicana works--actually share: stories are told to revise memory and as a way to cope with an absence/presence mothering paradigm. Analyzing the absent/present paradigm shows how mothers' identities actually collide and intersect with archetypal identities, and how women use culture and memory to cope with trauma. Karla Holloway uses the concept of absence/presence as part of an Afrocentric interpretive model that acknowledges both a spiritual and a physical mother at its center (22). This peculiar paradigm of fracture requires participation in what Holloway refers to as a cleansing of psychic despair or healing (Holloway 4, 59). I use Holloway's paradigm as a comparative strategy because, as she argues, it denotes both a metaphorical and metaphysical presence alongside literal presence and absence to gather together figures of language, myth, and literary in cultural and gendered intimacy (22). Holloway describes ancestral women who are mythologized and become communal and culturally determined archetypes (86). In Recitatif, language, myth, and imagery are united in the archetypal figures of Maggie, a servant at the girl's home where the two protagonists (Twyla and Roberta) meet. In Tears on My Pillow, La Llorona haunts Ofelia's nights while the transgressive presence of her classmate Veronica haunts her during the day. In Morrison's text, Twyla and Roberta revise their memories of Maggie in order to transfer their anxieties and anger toward their mothers onto her. For Ofelia, in Viramontes's text, the absence/presence of females--including her mother, Arlene; her grandmother, Mama Maria; her classmate, Veronica; and Veronica's mother, Lil Mary G.--is mediated by the frightening story of La Llorona. …

Musical Ritual in Mexico City: From the Aztec to NAFTA

This comparative study combines historical and ethnographic evidence to describe the uses of music and the shifting meanings of musical traditions across almost seven centuries of Mexican history (especially in Mexico City). Despite this colossal scope, Pedelty does not attempt to write a comprehensive history of Mexico through musical practices; in fact, his study is even more ambitious. Rather than providing a plain historical narrative, Pedelty seeks to explain the role of musical rituals as performances that emerge from specific historical, cultural, and political circumstances but are also agents of social change, cultural identification, and political resistance. His comparative approach emphasizes the contemporary coexistence of many of these musical traditions and the ways in which Mexicans have resignifed them according to their current political and social circumstances.Pedelty divides Mexican history into six large periods: the Aztec Empire, New Spain, the nineteenth century, the 1910 revolution, the modern period (1921 – 68), and the contemporary period (1968 – 2002). The book’s structure, alternating chapters of history and comparative ethnography, is conducive to Pedelty’s interdisciplinary goals. His intent is to first describe a particular music tradition historically and then explore its contemporary resonances ethnographically. He explains his theoretical apparatus in a separate appendix, allowing him to maintain a clear and concise prose throughout the main body of his text and scrupulously avoid jargon.Pedelty presents his argument most effectively in the sections devoted to the Aztec period and modern Mexico. The first interprets contemporary Conchero and Mexica dancers as metaphors of indigenous people’s needs to produce a sense of inclusion or autonomy, respectively, in a racially discriminatory society. The section on modern Mexico focuses on the urban success of bolero and danzón and their role in “gaining cultural citizenship in modernizing Mexico” (p. 149). His interesting discussion of bolero is momentarily disturbed by the sloppy selection of some of his musical examples (Agustín Lara’s “Noche de ronda” and “Farolito” are not boleros but stylized triple-meter waltzes and therefore articulate a different history than boleros). But Pedelty’s argument about cabaretera movies in relation to bolero, gender construction, and legendary feminine icons in Mexican popular culture (Coyolxauhqui, La Malinche, La Vírgen de Guadalupe, La Llorona, and La Adelita) is particularly appealing and informative.Most problematic is Pedelty’s treatment of colonial musical practices, nineteenth-century musics, and twentieth-century art music. Although he constructs a complex mosaic of colonial Mexican music by addressing a large variety of secondary sources, he fails to acknowledge some of the most attractive current work on the relationship between contemporary Mexican folk music and European baroque musical practices. His reliance on classic music scholarship to the expense of more recent work prevents him from articulating some of the scholarly discussions that might have better supported his goals. If he had engaged this scholarship (Antonio Corona, Eloy Cruz), he might have been able to illustrate the current life of colonial secular music in the instrumental and vocal techniques of the huapango or son jarocho traditions instead of relying on a single government-supported concert by the Hinojosa-Villey Duo. The survey of nineteenth-century Mexican music in part 3 lacks substance and is marred by a few factual errors. Antonio Gomezanda was not “a precursor of 20th-century nationalist composers” (p. 105), as Pedelty argues, but rather a nationalist composer (only a conservative, less modernistic one) active during the first part of the twentieth century. Nor was Cenobio Paniagua’s Catalina de Guisa (1859) the first Mexican opera (p. 105): Manuel Covarrubias composed Reinaldo y Elina o La sacerdotisa peruana more than ten years earlier, and Manuel de Sumaya’s La Parténope premiered in 1711, more than two centuries before Paniagua’s first opera. The discussion of Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas in chapter 12 is also problematic, as it reproduces a series of myths (Chávez as a nationalist/indigenista composer or the dichotomy of “sophisticated urban Chávez” versus “straightforward rural Revueltas”) that have been challenged by recent scholarship (Eduardo Contreras Soto, Alejandro L. Madrid, and Leonora Saavedra). Some of these weaknesses might be attributed to the lack of engagement with more up-to-date scholarship, but others are clearly the result of a careless reading of sources.Regardless of its shortcomings, Pedelty’s interdisciplinary effort should be noted. It would be interesting to read more texts combining ethnography and history as part of larger interpretative projects. This out-of-the-ordinary contribution to the study of musical cultures in Mexico would make an interesting reading for those concerned with Mexican music, culture, and history.

Keeping La Llorona Alive in the Shadow of Cortés: What an Examination of Literacy in Two Mexican Schools Can Teach U.S. Educators

This article, a 5-month ethnographic research in Oaxaca, Mexico, examines various aspects of the literacy curriculum in 2 Mexican primary schools. The author observed and interviewed 35 students in 6th grade and 7 teachers in 2 schools, as well as examined student writing and teaching materials. The research suggests that though the Secretaria de Educación Pública (Secretary of Public Education, SEP) of Mexico mandates progressive educational theories, in practice, the national curriculum reinforces the Spanish colonialist views of indigenous languages and beliefs. In addition, there is a powerful intimate culture of children and families who interact with this curriculum. This study looks at what happens when the ideas and practices of the SEP collide with indigenous traditions, and what U.S. educators can learn from this.

Prietita y el Otro Lado: Gloria Anzaldúa's Literature for Children

Gloria Anzaldúa is known as a poet, a postcolonial theoretician, the author of Borderlands / la Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), and the editor or coeditor of important anthologies. She also wrote two books for children, Friends from the Other Side / Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman / Prietita y la Llorona (1995). Here Anzaldúa honed her sense of “conocimientos,” other ways of knowing. She imprinted her heroine, Prietita, as a “bridge”—a way of transforming the world. For Anzaldúa, writing books for children was an important step of activism because children would effect necessary cultural and social transformations.

La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. By Luis D. León. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 320. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $55.00 cloth; $21.95 paper.

La Llorona’s Children: Religion, Life, and Death in the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. By Luis D. León. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 320. Illustrations. Notes. Index. 21.95 paper. - Volume 62 Issue 3

La Llorona's children: religion, life, and death in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands

Preface Introduction: In Search of La Llorona's Children 1. The Terror of Postcolonial History: Eternal Returns in the Borderlands 2. Virtual Virgin Nation: Mexico City as Sacred Center of Memory 3. Religious Transnationalism: A Mexican Virgin in L.A. 4. El Don: The Gift of Healing, from Mesoamerica to the Borderlands 5. Diaspora Spirits: From the Virgin City to the City of Angels 6. Born Again in East L.A., and Beyond Conclusion: Fin de Siglo in the Borderlands Notes Index

The Boy and the Rose

“The Boy and the Rose” is a case study of a gifted/talented student and his parents. The names of the family, as well as other people in the study, have been changed to protect their privacy. The facts in the study were gleaned as a result of perusing public and private records and the conducting of personal interviews by the author. In some instances, supposition and divination are used to fill in the gaps in the narrative. “The Boy and the Rose” has drawn upon the tradition and conventions of Southwestern folk tales such as “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”) to shape its structure; with their themes of misplaced affection, unrequited love, and their resultant consequences, they echo this study.

Kate Horsley’s New Mexico Trilogy: Masks of Ambivalence in the Southwest

Roxanne Swentzell. SOMEONE TO TALK TO. 2001. Clay. 10"w x 15"d x 18"h. Courtesy of the artist. W o r k s R e v i e w e d Kate Horsley. Crazy Woman. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: La Alameda Press, 1992. 239 pages, $14.00. --------. A Killing in New Town. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: La Alameda Press, 1996. 271 pages, $14.00. --------. Careless Love: Or the Land of Promise. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. 249 pages, $23.95. Ka t e Ho r s le y ’s New Mexico T rilogy: Ma s k s o f A m b iv a l e n c e in t h e S o u t h w e s t D o n n R a w l i n g s Despite all precautions, fiction continues to shape our understanding. Rudimentary stories insistently repeat themselves in our lives. But we may be compelled to turn toward all those muttering, chaotic voices that push against the familiar shape of the tale. Official stories redundantly colonize our experience, as it were, but sooner or later the buried life talks back—and writes back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, passim).* Kate Horsley has a good ear for the voices that talk back. She has produced in the last decade or so three novels that make up a coherent trilogy all set in New Mexico: Crazy Woman, A Killing in New Town, and Careless Love: Or the Land of Promise, and the publication of Careless Love provides an opportunity to examine how the trilogy functions as a whole and where these characters have been. These novels are crowded with voices that talk back against the official colonizing stories of a westering empire. Revisionist fiction about the West has become its own tradition by now with some of its own strident patterns. But Horsley’s fictive world is filled with such rich and questioning humanity, such resonant pain and unpredictable delight, that it does not settle into a mannered revisionism. Novels that come alive hurt, according to D. H. Lawrence, because they work against the “real voluptuousness [that] lies in re-acting old relationships, and at the best, getting an alcoholic sort of pleasure out of it, slightly depraving” (530). They hurt because they tear away the comforts of denial. Horsley’s novels imagine the unrecorded lives that would flesh out the historical record she has so closely studied. The official stories are re-enacted in a critical, subversive, often comic or grotesque context that opens us to much that we need (but do not always want) to know. Her fiction con­ tributes to an unauthorized, illicit, irreducible history, the history of what Lawrence called the uniquely “living moment” (527). Although each novel has its own cast of characters, Horsley’s tril­ ogy works as a whole, a reading of each novel informing our under­ standing of the others. They present a clear historical progression, showing the increasing impact of the Anglo incursion in New Mexico, from shortly before the Civil War to the late 1880s. Horsley traces the entangled implications for the development of the West of sex and gen­ 1 0 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 4 der, ethnicity, religion, economics, and loss of roots in place—with the railroad playing a powerful symbolic role in illuminating how diverse motives and fears mesh in an aggressive capitalist empire. She makes subtle use of the captivity narrative, the La Llorona folktale, and the metaphor of the theater to explore the boundaries of self and culture. Most significantly, her protagonists, in their efforts to create themselves anew in their westward migration, encounter in the landscapes and peoples of the West a range of intractable potencies and uncanny pos­ sibilities that force them back upon themselves, with a seditious refusal of closure and yet with genuine revelation. It’s an outcome that leads to tentative but lifelike compromises. As Edwina says near the end of Careless Love, “We don’t like liars, but we...

Helena María Viramontes: social and political perspectives of a Chicana writer

Helena MarÃ-a Viramontes: social and political perspectives of a Chicana writer Helena MarÃ-a Viramontes is one of the most socially and politically conscious writers of today and these concerns permeate her work. Viramontes is also clearly a feminist writer, joining ranks with other Third World women writers. She recognizes the common ground of the colonized experience of many Third World countries as well as those marginalized groups in the United States and the often silenced struggles of many women against the dominating patriarchy. In this manner, we can see some of Viramontes' stories, such as "The Moths" or "Growing," revolving around young girls reaching womanhood and discovering the paternal restrictions imposed upon them due to their sex. Other women are forced to resist the demands or violence placed on them by their husbands such as in "The Broken Web," "Birthday " or "The Long Reconciliation." Her women, both young and old, are characters who rebel, but are fraught with contradictory blends of weaknesses and strengths, fighting against their unfulfilled potential, their selfless lives of giving to others, tensions in the domestic sphere and performing apparently small, but heroic acts of resistance. Viramontes often chooses the myth of La Llorona as a link to a web of the international community of women who frequently can do no more than wail, cry for those children they have lost to wars, whether abroad or in the barrios , to immigration and deportation, to drugs, to abortion , to discrimination and humiliation. In stories such as "Snapshots" or "The Jumping Bean" she often contrasts the ideals of the middle-class woman with the impossibilArizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 5, 2001 224 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies ity of the working class woman, who only asks for day to day survival, and maybe, a "toilet" of her own. But at the same time, many of her stories center on women fighting and resisting against other social injustices such as issues of immigration, racism, undocumented workers , class distinctions, and ecological concerns. The struggle of these women is not only their own, but that of their class or community. In her first novel Under the Feet of Jesus, adolescent Estrella wakes to the issues of pesticides and their effects on the downtrodden migrant workers. "The Cariboo Café" centers on displaced persons, a blurring of national and geographical borders leaving only the marginalized people who suffer the police antiimmigrant racism. Helena Maria Viramontes continues in her recent work with similar issues. In her second novel, currently being reviewed for publication, Their Dogs Came With Them, the Chicano Movement and social injustices remain a prime concern. She is also working on a collection of short stories, Paris Rats in East L.A., based on the life of Modesta Avila, a California woman who fought to defend her property rights against railroad encroachment in the 1890s. Viramontes, personally and through her characters, identifies with all the downtrodden people of the world, in particular with women and has committed her energies to endowing them with a voice so they will be heard. Helena Maria Viramontes is currently an Associate Professor in the Creative Writing program of the English Department of Cornell University. She has previously taught at Antioch College and California State and participated in numerous writing programs and workshops, among them the Sundance Institute under the direction of Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the Breadloaf Conference and many Latino workshops. She obtained her M.EA. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine and was awarded the John Dos Passos Literary Award in 1996. She devotes much of her time to community projects, scholarly work, having co-edited a number of books, acting as literary editor for several journals and projects and lecturing and reading from her work all over the United States and Europe. Many of her stories and essays on writing have been reprinted repeatedly in diverse anthologies, among which are several from distinguished publishing houses such as Norton, Longman, St. Martin's, Oxford, Gale, Simon & Shuster, Harper Collins, Harcourt Brace and Houghton Mifflin. Her creative books are The Moths and Other Stories (1985, 1995) and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) other than the two...

From Llorona to Gritona: Coatlicue in Feminist Tales by Viramontes and Cisneros

In Borderlands/La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua discusses the significance of the pre-conquest fertility goddess, Coatlicue, to contemporary Chicana feminist struggles. According to Anzaldua, states which disrupt the smooth flow (complacency) of life are exactly what propel the soul to do its work: make soul, increase consciousness of itself (46). A psychic and emotional foregrounding conflict and struggle instead of easy resolutions and compliance to social oppression, the Coatlicue state encourages Anzaldua to delve into the depths of her consciousness and acknowledge the negative forces affecting her life, among them racism, homophobia, poverty, and misogyny. Coatlicue brings suffering to the forefront of consciousness, providing clearer vision as to whom or what to confront. She prompts Anzaldua to assert herself fully in the face of external psychic, physical or emotional violence so she will emerge completa or whole: instead of victimhood, Coatlicue encourages resistance against external forces that diminish sense of self. In pitting creative resistance against destructive energy, this ancient goddess, representing a cosmic process rather than fixed entity, embodies the act of struggle inherent within the principle of contradiction--the dynamic tension between conflicting forces, such as creation and destruction, lightness and darkness, masculinity and femininity.(2) Many goddesses have descended from Coatlicue, among them Cihuacoatl, the patron of midwives who, like her precursor, embodies holistic figure that embraces both death and creation. In turn, Anzaldua and many folklorists have drawn the connection between Cihuacoatl and the legendary Mexican and Chicano figure of La Llorona (the weeping or wailing woman).(3) Recurring themes in the maternal legend of La Llorona include: her white dress; her wandering at night wailing at the loss of her children whom she has often killed herself; and her association with water--she either roams by bodies of water or drowns her victims. Similarly, Cihuacoatl covers herself in chalk, dresses in white, and wanders the streets at night weeping and wailing, foreboding war (Barakat 290). Within folkloric literature on the La Llorona legend, La Llorona emerges as both figure of maternal betrayal and maternal resistance. While she is most often imagined as destructive figure, contemporary Chicana writers Helena Maria Viramontes and Sandra Cisneros, by constructing defiant Llorona heroines in their respective short stories, Cariboo Cafe and Woman Hollering Creek, have propagated and vitalized the set of tales about maternal resistance. Their contemporary Llorona tales give voice to the violated Latina mother who, in Cariboo Cafe fights against poverty, military dictatorship and the U.S. immigration service (INS) and, in Woman Hollering Creek, struggles against wife battery and economic and emotional dependency on men. Viramontes and Cisneros do not explicitly invoke La Llorona's pre-conquest antecedents in their writings, yet they make implicit references to pre-conquest figures, and their Llorona heroines undergo transformative that strikingly resembles the described by Anzaldua in her State. In putting these writers in dialogue with ethnographic literature on La Llorona and with contemporary Chicana feminist work, such as Anzaldua's, genealogy of La Llorona as both an ethnographic and literary figure emerges that foregrounds her as resistant, culturally specific maternal figure. In examining ethnographic accounts dating back to the colonial period, La Llorona and her antecedent, Cihuacoatl, repeatedly emerge as dangerous and destructive figures. These tales of maternal betrayal describe La Llorona as treacherous, selfish woman who murders her own children, usually through drowning. The motivations provided include: insanity, parental neglect or abuse, and/or revenge for being abandoned by lover. …