Lives beyond Borders

US Immigrant Women's Life Writing, Nationality, and Social Justice

Ina C. Seethaler

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438486215
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Women Authors
• Index: Literature

A cross-cultural, comparative study of contemporary life writing by women who migrated to the United States from Mexico, Ghana, South Korea, and Iran, Lives beyond Borders broadens and deepens critical work on immigrant life writing. Ina C. Seethaler investigates how these autobiographical texts—through genre mixing, motifs of doubling, and other techniques—challenge stereotypes, social hierarchies, and the supposed fixity of identity and lend literary support to grassroots social justice efforts. Seethaler's approach to literary analysis is both interdisciplinary and accessible. While Lives beyond Borders draws on feminist theory, critical race theory, and disability and migration studies, it also uses stories to engage and interest readers in issues related to migration and social change. In so doing, the book reevaluates the purpose, form, and audience of immigrant life writing.

1

A GENRE FOR JUSTICE

LIFE WRITING AND UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION

Life writing is intrinsically connected with issues of nationality and gender and offers unique opportunities to challenge these very same, supposedly rigid concepts. It is, thus, perhaps not surprising that autobiography is one of the most important forms in Latinx literature as it “challeng[es] the sociocultural framework” of idealized versions of Americanness (Torres-Saillant 65). In this chapter, I interrogate what meaning memoir carries for undocumented female immigrants from Mexico through an analysis of Rosalina Rosay’s Journey of Hope (2007).1 In the context of Mexican American/immigrant life writing specifically, it is essential to “examine the various ways in which autobiographical expression emerged from social rupture and was formed within a matrix of dislocation, fear, and uncertainty that shaped contradictory but exigent responses” (Padilla 10). The examinations leading to such statements about the origin and nature of Latinx life writing have historically been based on the texts of second generation Chicanos/as and, to a large extent, male writers, which makes Rosay’s memoir a fruitful case study.

I analyze Rosay’s text as an example of a mixing of life-writing genres that opens up new venues for immigrant women to voice how the intersections of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and economic status affect their experiences with oppression and mark migration processes. Ultimately, I read Journey of Hope as a trickster text operating within the generic frameworks of testimonio and métis. With the term “trickster text,” I refer to the book’s ability to pose as a narrative hailing the United States, while, at the same time, it subtly pursues a very political, radical agenda to effect political and social change. Evaluating Rosay’s memoir critically in such a way can contribute to our understanding of what memoir represents for undocumented migrants and provide important commentary that informs our readings of texts by immigrant women.

Journey of Hope tells the story of Rosay’s poor upbringing in a village in 1960s Mexico and of her migration to and education in the United States.2 Rosay is acutely aware that being confined to the domestic realm limits women’s lives. She understands that, as Gloria Anzaldúa elaborates forcefully in her ground-breaking work Borderlands/La Frontera, “culture (read males) professes to protect women. Actually it keeps women in rigidly defined roles” (39), and she uses her life as an example to encourage women like herself to venture outside the realm of domesticity, which falsely carries the attribute of being the only safe space for women. Sexism and extreme economic need intersect and necessitate Rosay’s migration as a young girl when her father, who moved to the United States to avoid political turmoil in his home village, refuses to send remittances back to his family. Rosay’s mother, who has endured domestic violence for many years, decides not to accept this male dominance passively and instead migrates to the United States to confront her husband: “Ma realizes it will be hopeless to stay in the Pueblo. Pa will not be sending us money and there are no jobs any of us can get” (75). In order to secure survival for herself and her children, Rosay’s mother uproots herself to follow her husband. While for the young women in Rosay’s family moving constitutes an exciting prospect, it signifies an immense burden for Rosay’s mother, who has never lived outside her village and does not speak or understand English: “Ma, who is in her early fifties, finds the crossing very difficult. The group has to run over rocky hills at night for many hours” (76). The plan is for Rosay’s mother to take enough of her husband’s money and make some money of her own to return to the pueblo within a few months. But without the necessary (language) skills, it is impossible for Rosay’s mother to procure the needed funds, so Rosay herself joins the rest of her family in the United States.

In its detailed depiction of women’s reasons for migrating, Journey of Hope presents its audience with a unique opportunity to hear stories of undocumented migration and the topography of displacement from a woman’s perspective.3 Rosay challenges dominant understandings within the American population about so-called “illegal” immigrants. Sonia Saldívar-Hull writes: “We have to look in nontraditional places for our theories: in the prefaces to anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies … in the essays published in marginalized journals not widely distributed by the dominant institutions” (46). Rosay works as an accountant in Los Angeles and is not an established author. Her text, published by a very small press, offers such a chance for theorizing.4 It exhibits the kind of insights to which highly praised and well-discussed authors like U.S.-born Anzaldúa have second-hand access.

Although life-writing studies and Chicano/a studies are booming sectors of literary criticism, U.S. Latinas still have comparatively few opportunities to read texts that speak to their own experiences. This is even more so the case for undocumented immigrants to the United States who are usually relegated, at times for protection of their identity, to a life of silence. With her memoir, Rosay writes against this trend, depicting undocumented migrants’ everyday lives and their humanity. Place is a driving force in her narrative as she describes the artificiality of borders for families and makes clear how essential mobility and the freedom to choose a place of residence are for securing survival and personal independence.

While some critics tend to see the U.S.-Mexico border from a purely theoretical point, Rosay clarifies in her writing that it is impossible for (undocumented) immigrants to see the border merely as a metaphor. Borders silence; they arbitrarily separate communities and exacerbate movement politically, culturally, and linguistically. Undocumented writers share with the rest of the Latinx community the “experience of diasporic uprooting and the sense of living outside the dominant realm of the receiving society” (Torres-Saillant 63). But for Rosay more is at stake; publicly naming her experiences constitutes an empowering and subversive act for her as she overcomes systematic misogyny and xenophobia to promote social transformation.

Writing against undocumented immigrants’ oppression and silencing, Rosay uses the oppressor’s language and images to gain access to her desired audience and to influence their opinions on immigration. Through her technique, Rosay “mimes the subjectivity of universal man,” a location, as Smith elaborates in Subjectivity, Identity, and the Body (1993), which “proffers authority, legitimacy, … readability … [and] membership in the community of the fully human” (155). As being considered human affects a community’s survival, Rosay’s changes to the autobiographical “I” and the purpose of the genre take on an urgent character. In reviving the testimonio with new intent for immigrant writers, Rosay’s work shows how migration patterns are gendered and underscores immigrant women’s fight for agency.5 Life writing—unmarked by a stable, identifiable, preferably U.S., nationality—turns from a genre strictly recounting an individual’s experience into a catalyst for social change.

UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION AND GENDER

Journey of Hope demonstrates undocumented migration’s intersectional character as it is not only racialized and shaped by class status but also fundamentally linked to gender. Rosay witnesses physical and emotional violence especially due to the misogyny of her patriarchal home culture. From the very beginning, when Rosay introduces the reader to her years as a little girl in a poor Mexican village during the late 1960s, she exhibits an astounding gender consciousness. She questions early on that her brothers do not have to do any house chores: “Pa said house chores were only for women” (Rosay 77). Realizations such as this one about the division of labor lead her to an analysis of women’s status in Mexico at the time of her childhood. Rosay questions women’s roles in their families and culture and demands an equal voice. She explains that her mother had ten children, not including the ones who died: “Most women my mother’s age had eight, nine, ten kids, often giving birth to babies around the same time as did their oldest daughters” (Rosay 11). Her explanations speak to the lack of opportunities for women and their entrapment in family life, child-rearing, and domesticity and show that the gender oppression in her family is systematic.

These sexist limitations directly affect Rosay, as “by the time [she] was about six or seven years old [she] already knew that [she] faced a lifetime of poverty and deprivation. … [Her] father felt that girls did not have to be educated, since all they were going to do with their lives was to get married and have babies” (13). Gender bias manifests itself in a part of her life that is extremely important to Rosay: her education. Her enthusiasm regarding school makes her realize there can be more to womanhood than marriage. Yet, pushing her father for the right to a more extensive education is not a viable option because “you are a traitor to your race if you do not put the man first” (Moraga 95). As an education can constitute a way out of poverty and gender oppression, Rosay lives the reality that classism and sexism intersect. Because of this momentum, she does not prioritize gender over class or ethnicity. It is always clear that all three forces influence her life simultaneously.

Rosay points to the oppression of women not only in terms of missed opportunities but also in the context of domestic violence: “I was six years old when I saw Father being violent for the first time. … Papa comes in with a rusty old machete threatening to kill [Ma]. Ma calls him a coward. Why don’t you ever do this when my older sons are here” (31). While in this instance Rosay’s mother exerts power in verbally confronting her assailant and Rosay is still convinced that “he would never hurt any of us or our mother” (32), at other times Rosay makes it very clear how far the physical abuse went: “Her [Rosay’s mother’s] face was unrecognizable, black eyes, swollen face, and lips twice the regular size” (33). Based on her analysis of women’s status in the Mexican family, Rosay understands that her mother does not have many options to exit her marriage. She clearly portrays the family as the “cornerstone of male domination” (Garcia-Bahne 44). Through cultural training within the family, devastatingly executed to a large degree also on the part of women, young girls in traditional patriarchal societies are reared and socialized to see themselves as wives and daughters instead of independent human beings.

As sexism is interconnected with other forces of oppression, the gender injustice in Rosay’s family creates forms of violence besides her father’s physical abuse. Rosay painfully describes how her mother “never hugs or kisses [her children] and she is worse to [Rosay] than to [her] brothers, sister, or cousins. [Rosay] know[s her mother] does not beat [her] brothers because boys are more valuable than girls” (22–23). The male-centered society in which she lives affects Rosay physically and psychologically. In essence, Rosay gets punished for not being male. Her comments reflect Anzaldúa’s observations about her own mother, that “her allegiance was and is to her male children, not to the female” (“La Prieta” 201). In her memoir, Loving in the War Years (2000), U.S.-born Cherríe Moraga empathizes with her mother’s oppression due to her class, gender, and ethnicity and analyzes that “through her son [her mother] can get a small taste of male privilege, since without race or class privilege that’s all there is to be had. The daughter can never offer the mother such hope, straddled by the same forces that confine the mother” (94). Because of her low social status, a daughter cannot offer a mother any chance of social mobility, which perpetuates the oppressive cycle.

All three writers mentioned in the paragraph above describe how their mothers become accomplices to their own and their daughters’ oppression, which creates a traumatic experience for Rosay as she struggles between love and hate for the woman who nurtures yet also punishes her for being a girl: “After every beating, I hate Ma and wish that she would die. I hate her for hours even though I sort of know why she is so mean” (23). Even though Rosay does not openly discuss her mother’s situation as “oppression,” she does not blame her mother because she understands her actions in the face of misogyny. Rosay’s comments on how her mother was married very young and “had a baby every other year and nursed it for as long as possible” support my reading (23). She does not portray her mother as a villain but shows how she is a victim of multiple layers of oppression and how her actions are consequences thereof.

Journey of Hope clarifies that it is not only one’s gender and socioeconomic class that decide how one is treated and which opportunities one has in life, but that these identity markers further intersect with colorism (a concept denoting prejudice based on skin tone) and bias against native looks to create unique forces of oppression for Latinx women.6 Studies show that a preference for lighter skin and European facial structures persists among white people and systems of power based in whiteness, such as the legal and educational systems, as well as within communities of color globally due to the lasting effects of slavery and colonialism. For instance, dark-skinned women tend to get longer prison sentences in the United States (Viglione, Hannon, and DeFina), and darker girls are expelled from schools at higher rates than light-skinned girls in the United States (Hannon, DeFina, and Bruch).

Rosay explains how in her culture your skin tone and facial features significantly influence your familial and social status: “ ‘Rosa [sic] is not pretty like her sister Catalina or street smart like her brother Gerardo, but at least she has light skin’ ” (18). Rosay’s mother makes these judgments without trying to hide them from Rosay, an attitude that deeply hurts Rosay and weakens her self-confidence. With regard to concepts of beauty, Rosay’s case is complicated. She has light skin, which pushes her into a higher social rank because lighter skin is associated with European heritage and might allow her to pass as white in U.S. culture. Moraga speaks to a similar influence of her skin color on her identity: “I was ‘la güera’–fair-skinned. Born with the features of my Chicana mother, but the skin of my Anglo father, I had it made” (43; emphasis mine). In the Chicano community, just as in Rosay’s village, looking white correlates with social acceptance and the possibility for economic success. Anzaldúa experienced the opposite: “What I lacked in whiteness, I had in smartness. But it was too bad I was dark like an Indian” (“La Prieta” 198; emphasis in original).

Rosay’s native features lower her status and neutralize the benefits of her light skin tone. Rosay is keenly conscious of how her body shapes her life when she compares her appearance with those of other family members: “Ma had dark skin, but did not have the typical Indian features: small eyes, flat nose, high cheekbones, and full lips. … I was born with light skin, but all of the Indian features” (18). She lists in detail those features of her face that constitute the cause for her being ostracized in her family and community at large. Continuously during her childhood, people confront her with the comment that she combines “all the bad Indian features” (Rosay 71–72). Her body showing the native heritage of the Mexican people turns Rosay into the Other and lays the ground for her exclusion. Though she does not make these connections in the memoir explicitly, I argue that the criticism of her Indian appearance is a comment on her part about the remnants of racist, colonial attitudes, which denounce and attempt to eradicate native culture. The attacks she writes about exhibit the internalization of oppression that her accusers, mostly the women in her family, have undergone. They do not question the importance of Anglo looks, a sign of perpetuated colonial forces.

As she does not receive any consolation from her family, usually the main support system against racism, Rosay turns to religion for understanding and help: “I often wondered if there were any saints that looked like me. I had heard that la Virgen de Guadalupe looked more Indian. But when I saw I [sic] picture of her, I did not think she had small eyes, a chunky nose, and full lips like me” (93). Trying to find her rejected identity reflected in the most important female saint of the Mexican church, she is again disappointed. While Rosay admits that she will miss the church and priests in her village, she “will not miss people thinking that only girls who look somewhat like our virgins are pretty” (94). This comment speaks directly to the sexist collaborations of patriarchal church and society.

Although her name never appears in Rosay’s writing, I read a reference to Malinche into Rosay’s experiences concerning her “undesired” native features. Malinche, the native woman who was sold by her father to the conquistador Hernán Cortés to serve as his guide and translator, functions in traditional, male-dominated Mexican culture as the traitor figure who caused the extinction of her people. In a similar manner, Rosay becomes the ultimate outsider, physically through her appearance and also through the choices she makes in life that contradict her community’s sexist culture. Anytime that Rosay does not fit the prescribed gender roles, does not follow the patriarchal rules, or speaks up for herself, a connection with Malinche can be inferred. As Saldívar-Hull explains, “individuality is devalued and selfishness decried” since “women’s role in the Chicano family is primarily to serve men” (4, 30). When Mexican women like Rosay attempt to improve their lives, for example via education, they are considered narcissistic and are ostracized. The traitor woman trope originated on a national level and forced its way into the family and personal sphere where it functions as a misogynistic social control tool. Yet, its negative implications regarding national identity and gender linger as it perpetually marks Latinas as hypersexual, untrustworthy seductresses in the eyes of many in the United States.

Her desire to be educated exerts such an important influence on Rosay’s identity that it generates perhaps the bravest example of her self-assertion. After her father has returned to Mexico, he demands that Rosay, her mother, and her younger brothers join him. Instead of following her father’s ruling, which is expected of her, Rosay stands up for herself by refusing to leave: “He promises he will pay for me to go to high school in Mexico, but I do not believe him. I get off the phone and tell Ma I am not going back to Mexico even if he comes and drags me by my feet” (143). Contradicting the head of the household in a patriarchal family constitutes an immense act of courage for Rosay, for, if “a woman doesn’t renounce herself in favor of the male, she is selfish” (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 39). Strong and independent, Rosay stands up for what she perceives as her rights and refuses to sacrifice her dreams and education to keep the family together. Rosay talking back to the patriarch recalls Anzaldúa’s memories of challenging sexist indoctrination: “Repele. Hable pa’ ‘tras. Fui muy hocicona. Era indiferente a muchos valores de mi culture. No me dejé de los hombres. No fui buena ni obediente” (37).7 Interestingly, both women reach this goal of stand...