International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies

This World is My Place

Catherine Leen, Niamh Thornton, Catherine Leen, Niamh Thornton

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138097841
• eBook ISBN: 9781135053338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume examines how the field of Chicana/o studies has developed to become an area of interest to scholars far beyond the United States and Spain. For this reason, the volume includes contributions by a range of international scholars and takes the concept of place as a unifying paradigm. As a way of overcoming borders that are both physical and metaphorical, it seeks to reflect the diversity and range of current scholarship in Chicana/o studies while simultaneously highlighting the diverse and constantly evolving nature of Chicana/o identities and cultures.

Various critical and theoretical approaches are evident, from eco-criticism and autoethnography in the first section, to the role of fiction and visual art in exposing injustice in section two, to the discussion of transnational and transcultural exchange with reference to issues as diverse as the teaching of Chicana/o studies in Russia and the relevance of Anzaldúa's writings to post 9/11 U.S. society.

Part I
Critical Paradigms

Continuities and Transitions

Critical paradigms are a good beginning. They allow the reader an opening into Chicana/o Studies and its theoretical frameworks. In this section, cultural production is taken as the key to understanding how Chicana/o identity is played out, explored, defended, and projected for an implied Chicana/o and non-Chicana/o audience. For Gloria Anzaldúa: “Culture forms our beliefs. We perceive the version of reality that it communicates. Dominant paradigms, predefined concepts that exist as unquestionable, unchallengeable, are transmitted to us through the culture” (1999, 38). Culture, then, is how we understand who we are. Anzaldúa continues in her book to challenge how women have been: “subservient to males” (1999, 39), and complicit in transmitting the rules of these more powerful men (1999, 38). That is, they carry the burden of responsibility for upholding cultural values while simultaneously finding ways of resisting those who oppress them.

The authors in this section explore how women navigate these apparently contradictory positions, as well as providing insights into significant trends and patterns in Chicana literature. Notably, all three examine the work of women writers, which itself suggests a dramatic shift from the male-dominated world of the early Chicano Movement and a sea change from the lack of attention to Chicana writing noted by Ellen McCracken in her chapter. Another significant development since the 1960s has been the publication of groundbreaking critical and theoretical works on Chicana/o Studies, such as Cherríe Moraga’s A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings, 2000–2010 (2011) and Arturo Aldama and Naomi Quiñonez’s Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century (2002), by international publishers, yet Anzaldúa’s writing continues to inform the work on critical theory by scholars represented in the field. The variety of literature examined in this section and the identification of genres as diverse as chapbooks, Chica Lit, ethnographic autobiography, and the ecofeminist novel are also richly suggestive of the continuing evolution of Chicana literature and the continual reinvention of its central themes and modes of expression.

Ellen McCracken takes a look at publishing and its evolution from chapbooks, a pamphlet-style publication of small print runs, to Chica Lit, a category that is determined with high-volume sales of works generally issued by a big publishing house. Chapbooks exist on a small scale and vary in quality. Some were accompanied by detailed illustrations, whilst others were a collection of photocopied pages. With the arrival of e-books, they have taken on a different quality as unique, bespoke texts that become covetable objects (Carter 2011, n.p.). For some, the chapbook was an end in itself, while for others it was an alternative means of circulating their writing (often poetry). In McCracken’s chapter, it is clear that many Chicana writers issued their work in this format for specific reasons. They lacked access to alternative means of publication, because of the inherently conservative nature of much book publishing and the consequent marginalization of Chicanas in publishing up to recent times.

If chapbooks can be construed as ephemera that were distributed informally or by small publishing houses, the recent phenomenon of Chica Lit is also seen as ephemera, but in the different sense of being lightweight, easy reading, centered on romance with a largely female readership. McCracken tackles the questions of gender in relation to authorship and readership in tandem with the thorny issue of who is writing and for whom. She traces the trajectory of the move from chapbook to the Chica Lit phenomenon, taking in other significant developments on the way, as a means of approaching Chicana/o cultural and social change through publishing.

Gender is also at the forefront in the other chapters in this section as Chicanas experience double marginalisation, due to their sex and culture. Imelda Martín-Junquera and Mario García consider texts that position the author clearly within the narrative, albeit in distinct ways. Martín-Junquera examines Chicana literature from an ecofeminist perspective with a particular focus on Pat Mora’s House of Houses (1997), a memoir which voices her family’s experiences in the first person. Set against the backdrop of significant historical events, such as the Mexican Revolution, and reflecting on the protagonists’ subsequent move north of the border, it uses the house and garden as evocative tools to convey the family’s stories.

Ecofeminism is a powerful means of approaching this text because of the narrative connections between people and the garden made by Mora, but also because it lends itself to an exploration of how to link this space with the female characters. As Martín-Junquera observes, ecofeminism is not a critical tool that has yet gained much currency in Chicana/o Studies despite much growth in this approach in other fields. She explores the resonance of this space and provides a model for future studies of this kind.

Continuing this exploration of the particularities of women’s experiences growing up in this interstitial space, García closely examines Mary Helen Ponce’s Hoyt Street—An Autobiography (1993). He provides a brief historical overview of Chicana/o history to contextualize his account. Then, drawing on theories of transculturation as articulated by the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, he explores how Ponce’s autoethnographic approach attempts to understand her own childhood and coming of age. In a country like the United States, where to belong is to acculturate and assimilate, Mexicans have been seen to be resistant and eager to keep outside of mainstream culture. García uses Ponce’s text as a way of exploring the multiple strategies employed by each new generation to figure their way into and through the various ways of being Chicana/o, Mexican, and North American. This study is tinged with gendered expectations that make women responsible for upholding traditions and cultural practices and transmitting these onward to the next generation.

García explores the very real discrimination that Ponce experienced on growing up and reflects upon how she negotiated these struggles as a child. In addition, he highlights the emotional anguish that these struggles inflicted upon a generation told that their Mexicanness was a failing and who had to find ways of maintaining a sense of self despite this negative message. This generation is the one that formed the Chicano Movement, and Ponce’s text provides García with an invaluable means of exploring who they are and the historical, social, and cultural conditions that impelled them to challenge the negative stereotypes of their culture and peoples imposed upon them from outside.

McCracken, Martín-Junquera, and García’s chapters variously explore publishing, terroir, and growing up, and provide useful critical paradigms for the future study of other texts and contexts. For all three authors, culture and its expressions are not fixed but a series of ongoing and ever-changing adaptations, reconfigurations, and negotiations. Foregrounding the experiences of women, on whom much responsibility has been placed to maintain rigid traditions irrespective of their validity and relevance, allows for an expanded exploration of what culture means and takes into account alternative perspectives and voices.

Works Cited

Aldama, A., and Quiñonez, N., eds. Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Anzaldúa, G. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1999.

Carter, H. “Chapbooks: Ancient Form of Publishing Enjoying Renaissance 500 Years On,” The Northerner Blog in The Guardian Online, March 4, 2011. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2011/mar/04/chapbooks-publishing. Accessed February 20, 2013.

Moraga, C. A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000–2010. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

1
From Chapbooks to Chica Lit

U.S. Latina Writers and the New Literary Identity

Ellen McCracken

In the beginning, the venues for U.S. Latina writers were chapbooks and occasional publications in the journals or newspapers of the Chicano Movement. The Chicano journal El Grito dedicated only one special issue to women’s writing in 1973. A few small presses raised funds to publish small collections of the new women poets. In striking contrast, in June 2002, after a bidding war among five mainstream publishers, 32-year-old Alisa Valdes-Rodríguez received a $500,000 advance from St. Martin’s Press for The Dirty Girls’ Social Club, a novel she wrote in six days. This chapter will consider how the early publications of Latinas in journals and chapbooks have evolved into the half-million-dollar advance.

At the height of the Chicano Movement in the early 1970s, a handful of Chicana poets were beginning to make their mark. Anna Nieto Gómez called for “humanity and freedom between men and women” as the prerequisite for “la revolución verdadera” [the real revolution] in her poem which appeared along with Leticia Hernández’s “Mujer” [“Woman”] in the April-May 1971 issue of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc [Daughters of Cuauhtémoc] published at California State University, Long Beach. In her September 1971 “La Nueva Chicana” [“The New Chicana”] published in El Camino [The Way], Ana Montes invokes the no longer silent Chicana who has “cast off the shawl of the past to show her face: and spreads the word “VIVA LA RAZA.” Leticia Hernández’s 1971 poem “Hijas de Cuauhtémoc,” connects contemporary Chicanas to their pre-Columbian mothers and the Adelitas of the Mexican Revolution (see García 1997, 19, 73, 109, and 141). Nineteen-year-old Lorna Dee Cervantes traveled to Mexico City with her Chicano theatre group for the Quinto Festival de los Teatros Chicanos [Fifth Festival of Chicano Theatre] in 1974, where she gave her first poetry reading and had the first publication of her poem “Refugee Ship” in a major Mexico City newspaper that year. She taught herself printing and published the literary magazine and press Mango from 1976 to 1982, releasing Sandra Cisneros’ chapbook Bad Boys in 1980 (see Ikas 2002, 27–28).¹ Other major Chicana poets such as Lucha Corpi, Alma Villanueva, Bernice Zamora, and Ana Castillo began to publish in the mid-1970s.

As Marta Sánchez (1986) and others have argued, Chicana writers of the early Movement period focused on poetry because of time and money pressures, and the desire to rapidly communicate a message. The early poetry functioned similarly to the corridos of previous decades by recounting information about a figure or event important to the community and immediately disseminating the message. A poem could be quickly written and published in a small journal or newspaper, or publicly declaimed in the Latino tradition of oral recitation. Poetry required less time and resources than novel writing or play production. But poetry could also be marginalized. Carlota Cárdenas de Dwyer’s 1975 anthology Chicano Voices, published by Houghton-Mifflin, had 34 contributions by men and only three by women, and included the work of five men and only two women in the chapter on “La Chicana” (even the imposter Danny Santiago had a story he had published in Redbook included in this anthology).² Building on the early Movement poetry of urgency, Chicanas continued to write and publish verse in subsequent decades. But read by fewer people, poetry does not produce the profits for publishers that fiction does. Despite the important role that poetic discourse played in the early feminist writing of the Movement period, Latinas would make their mark in mainstream publishing circles with the exciting new fiction that blossomed in the post-Movement period.

It is important to note that the so-called Boom of Latina fiction did not suddenly appear from nowhere. Critical redeployments of narrative were central to the Chicano Movement and from the start involved the recuperation of oral traditions, corridos, history, journalism, fiction, narrative poetry, mural art, theater, film, and political narratives such as the utopian recovery of Aztlán. The Chicano Movement initiated a large-scale renarrativization of the master account of U.S. history, this time from the perspective of the repressed subjects of the melting pot. Women published political essays and short stories early in the Movement, and volumes of fiction by Estela Portillo, Berta Ornelas, and Isabella Ríos (Diane López), appeared in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s, an emerging group of new Latina narrativists published their longer works of fiction with small regional presses. These included: Castillo, Cisneros, Denise Chávez, Corpi, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Mary Helen Ponce, Nicholasa Mohr, Rosario Morales, Aurora Levins Morales, Carole Fernández, Carmen de Monteflores, Gina Valdés, Sheila Ortíz-Taylor, Alma Luz Villanueva, Margarita Cota-Cárdenas, Helena María Viramontes, Patricia Preciado Martin, and Beverly Silva. There began to form a community of women writers who are, in Ramón Saldívar’s terms, “counterhegemonic to the second power” because they “critique the critiques of oppression [by men] that fail to take into account the full range of domination” (1990, 173). They contest what Angie Chabram-Dernersesian terms “the preferred male subject” of Chicano and Latino nationalism (1992, 83).

In this post-Movement period, the new cohort of Latina writers benefited from the inroads made by the struggles of the early Movement. Several have commented on the financial aid they received to attend college and the grants they were awarded to pursue writing in the late 1970s and 1980s. Little by little, they began to come together across geographic distances to support and critique one another’s writing. Lorna Dee Cervantes points to her own initial interactions with writers such as Cisneros, Castillo, Viramontes, and Vigil beginning in 1976. These were a new group of Chicana writers who were the first to be educated in the public schools and therefore more liberal than their Catholic-school-educated counterparts (see Ikas 2002, 32–33).³ Small clusters of writers such as these served as the space of fomentation of the new fiction that would appear in the 1980s. Julia Alvarez recounts her frustration at only being able to find male Latino writers in the bookstores when she first began to connect her writing and her ethnicity. Finally, in 1983, the anthology Cuentos: Stories by Latinas opened a space of incipient community for her, and the publication of Cisneros’ House on Mango Street the following year marked the beginning of her connection to writers such as Castillo, Ortiz Cofer, Cervantes, Moraga, Viramontes, and Chávez. Alvarez notes:

Suddenly there was a whole group of us, a tradition forming, a dialogue going on, And why not? If Hemingway and his buddies could have their Paris group, and the Black Mountain poets their school, why couldn’t we Latinos and Latinas have our own made-in-the-U.S.A. boom? … At last I found a comunidad in the word that I had never found in a neighborhood in this country. By writing powerfully about our Latino culture, we are forging a tradition and creating a literature that will widen and enrich the existing canon. So much depends upon our feeling that we have a right and responsibility to do this. (1999: 169–70)

Cisneros similarly recounts the isolation she felt as she struggled to complete The House on Mango Street when she returned to Chicago in 1978, and the strength she experienced when she finally connected to other Latina writers: “She [Cisneros] hasn’t read Virginia Woolf yet. She doesn’t know about Rosario Castellanos or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga are cutting their own paths through the world somewhere, but she doesn’t know about them yet…. She’s making things up as she goes” (2009, xv). Sometimes she invited other writers who shared her sense that art should serve their communities to hold workshops in her apartment and together they published the anthology Emergency Tacos, referring to their predawn visits to the 24-hour taquería after finishing their collaborations. She credits literary critic Norma Alarcón, founder and editor of the journal Third Woman, with showing her examples of writers who served others rather than principally themselves, such as the Mexican writers Elena Poniatowska, Elena Garro, and Rosario Castellanos. She speaks of being unable to trust her own voice, censoring herself, unsure of her own way: “Until you brought us all together as U.S. Latina writers—Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marjorie Agosín, Carla Trujillo, Diana Solís, Sandra María Esteves … until then, Normita, we ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Critical Paradigms: Continuities and Transitions
• Part II From the Regional to the Global
• Part III Visual Culture: Producing Resistance
• Conclusion
• Guide to Further Reading
• Contributors
• Index