Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo

Bernadine Hernández, Karen Roybal, Bernadine Hernández, Karen Roybal

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780822988120
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

For more than forty years, Chicana author Ana Castillo has produced novels, poems, and critical essays that forge connections between generations; challenge borders around race, gender, and sexuality; and critically engage transnational issues of space, identity, and belonging. Her contributions to Latinx cultural production and to Chicana feminist thought have transcended and contributed to feminist praxis, ethnic literature, and border studies throughout the Americas. Transnational Chicanx Perspectives on Ana Castillo is the first edited collection that focuses on Castillo's oeuvre, which directly confronts what happens in response to cultural displacement, mixing, and border crossing. Divided into five sections, this collection thinks about Castillo's poetics, language, and form, as well as thematic issues such as borders, immigration, gender, sexuality, and transnational feminism. From her first political poetry, Otro Canto, published in 1977, to her mainstream novels such as The Mixquiahuala Letters, So Far From God, and The Guardians, this collection aims to unravel how Castillo's writing impacts people of color around the globe and works in solidarity with other third world feminisms.

PART I

THE CHICANX LETTERS

Transnational Poetics, Language, and Form

CHAPTER 1

LETTERED ENCOUNTERS

Ana Castillo’s Poetics of Spilling in The Mixquiahuala Letters

XIMENA KEOGH SERRANO

Where, I wonder . . . is the shadow of the presence from which the text has fled?

—Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken”

In Ana Castillo’s 1986 epistolary novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, the letter-page emerges as a space for self-weaving. It is a space of movement, and drifting habitations. In its capacity to mediate between space and time, self and other, absence and presence, the letter becomes a site of theoretical inquiry for the Chicana writer, who tactfully adopts the fictional realm of the epistle to engage with questions of boundaries and border formations.

The Mixquiahuala Letters presents a compendium of letters written from Chicana poet Teresa, to her friend Alicia, who is a New York visual artist of Spanish Gypsy roots. In her unidirectional address to Alicia, Teresa draws upon their shared experience while traveling across the United States, Mexico, and briefly through Puerto Rico in their twenties. The letters relate the formation of these two young women who are bound by friendship, cultural hybridity, and emergent desires for embodied freedom and the pursuit of the arts. Through shifting methodologies of expression, Teresa’s letters interrogate the violence emitted by patriarchal codes and gendered conditionings. They express the ambiguities that emerge from cultural expectations set on women, and the psychic effects of defying expected models of behavior.

This chapter explores Teresa’s modes of critical reflection and dialogic exchange over the page. In examining Teresa’s narrative style of self-weaving, I argue that her traversed epistolary cartography negotiates and resists structured boundaries in cultural identity, womanhood, national belonging, and kinship. In this way, Castillo’s use of the epistolary form creates a strategic space through which to question border formations vis-à-vis what I call a “poetics of spilling.” I utilize the metaphor of “spilling” as a way through which to understand the epistle’s rich and symbolic acts of articulation. A poetics of spilling points to what emerges outside of the confines of recorded speech. Emotion, resonance, and silence are but a few of the ungraspable elements that emerge in acts of “spilling.” Here, “spilling” points to that which cannot be contained. It registers the quality of both fluidity and mess, as it evidences a form of excess. It also defies structures of legibility by its mode of revealing that which has come undone. In this way, Castillo’s epistolary framing enacts a theoretical praxis wherein the epistolary form becomes the mode of embodying, shaping, and creating a record of transnational feminism, informed by her transcultural, fronteriza state of being.

As Teresa recounts her and Alicia’s real and symbolic border crossings, she makes apparent and archives their modes of subjected fragmentation. Thus, in the process of narration, Teresa becomes both witness and cocreator of emerging scenes of the past. Meanwhile, the page also retains the affective residues that seep out of Teresa’s recorded return. In this sense, that which “comes to light,” as the etymological root emergere denotes, is a blistered understanding of the past, one that reveals itself also to be incomplete, another fragment. Through the act of crossing, however, we come to see a poetics that embraces the porous conditions of skin, space, place, and time.

READING PATHS

Set across and between the United States, Puerto Rico, and Mexico, Teresa’s thirty-eight letters arrive to the reader undated. The letters are numbered, and the opening pages offer the book-holder possible reading trajectories—be it Conformist, Cynical, or Quixotic. Following Julio Cortázar’s 1966 novel Hopscotch,¹ the reader enters the bounded cartography to thereon choose her path.

The divergent reading possibilities Castillo proposes in the novel’s opening pages succinctly speak to the desire for unbounded readings. They problematize the lines of authority, cutting any possibility of wholeness to the narrative. Instead, this call onto the reader performs the idea of a self, being, and culture (always) in the making. Nevertheless, narrative coherence is still made possible through the letters, even through different sites of entry.²

In choosing to break with a single narrative path, Castillo also gestures toward the ways in which all readings are subject to continual interpretation, following a particular lens of engagement with the world. I bring attention to this dissolution of unitary path as a mode through which to engage with transnational belongings. That is, in offering up the text as an entity “in formation,” Castillo plays with the notion of fixed territories and the arbitrary drawing of lines and limits. Here, the author’s suggestively framed reading routes—Conformist, Cynical, or Quixotic—become loaded signifiers. Although the reader is not obligated to follow any of these organized paths, any engagement with the book-form will lead to incomplete and irresolute encounters with chrononormative time-mapping. With this, Castillo demonstrates a desire to question accustomed practices of entry. In this case, it is a matter of reimagining points of entry into the text and pursuing a nonlinear navigation through its pages. The book operates as an inviting territory, one wherein the reader does not have to participate in acts of expected behavior in order to access the story. Thus, the linear model of reading from one page to the next becomes denaturalized here. This is crucial to point out given the narrative conventions enacted by novels and the ways in which they call for the reader to perform a whole system of acts as they engage with the storyline.

Castillo’s reimagined engagement with the epistolary form thus works to destabilize the reader’s often unquestioned attunement to both the real and symbolic borders that follow suit in all reading encounters. The letters shift across space and time in order to break with the reader’s spatiotemporal compass. The absence of marked chronology, which comes by the refusal to date the letters, suggests that time flows and circulates outside of a teleological bordering of time. Instead, we imagine a coexistence of the past and present, here converging, as though in a perpetual crossing.

The letters redraw the lines of experience, augmenting the texture of the past, through its reformulation in the present. In the act of reading, we come to experience new frequencies of emotion that emerge through the inscription of memory. The partial transcription of letter 2 (below) enacts this relation. Upon immediate view, the reader witnesses a defiance of convention, where the epistle appears textually in the form of a poem. In narrative prose, the text produces a summary of the years Teresa and Alicia shared while traveling in their twenties. In wishing Alicia a happy thirtieth birthday, Teresa writes:

Dear Alicia,

Finally we end the cesspool

twirl of our 20s

that will be remembered always

untainted by today’s designer jeans

camouflaged makeup, sculptured fingernails

pampered feet and glittering teeth. We

shared a jar of Noxema. In the music halls

of a sacrificial temple at the ruins of Monte Albán

you changed your tampon

before the eyes of gods, ghosts, scorpions

while i watched for mortals. [. . .]

[. . .]

Finally men

no longer can

deposit memories of past love affairs

with their dirty underwear in our hampers. Our

art is not a handkerchief to wring out with sobs of

my man done gone and left me over and again

like a warped Billie Holiday record. (Just when

one thinks she can forget, the ass is knocking

on the door again.)³

Moving across the bounds of the present in relation to the past, the line in parenthesis points to that which returns. Like an interruption, the parenthesis seeks to explain that which lies outside of the borders of a sentence. It lies in-between, as a marker of explanation and readdress to the main line of argument. In this case, the assertion of a felt reality becomes undone gesturally through the parenthetical break. It shows how in attempting to determine the present, which happens through the pronouncement of a renewed womanhood in relation to men, a spilling occurs. The acknowledgment of this fact can even appear as Walter Benjamin’s theoretical elaborations on the “angel of history” and the shattering of the past, that cannot but return as debris in the present.⁴ As Benjamin’s theoretical framing on historical materialism establishes, “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was.’ . . . It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.”⁵ The historical materialist thus acknowledges that “moment of danger” and grabs hold of it, making it a scene of knowledge and recognition. In the case of Teresa here, her written line in parenthesis takes note of the past and its ever-shifting dynamic in the present. The preceding reference to a “warped Billie Holiday record” furthermore instantiates a spatiotemporal distortion, wherein the voice of Billie’s Blues echoes over the present retelling.

WRITING THE SELF

Existent scholarship on the epistolary form points to the possibilities of self-formation through letter writing. As Paul J. Eakin asserts, “all letters represent an intent, conscious or not, of constructing the I, even if writing to construct the other.”⁶ Similar attitudes are held in relation to the letter’s ability to preserve the self in history. Following the historical practices that have prevented women from participating in the public production of history and/or its preservation outside of the private home, letters have been seen to be important spaces through which women could relate their experiences in the world.⁷ In addressing the very materiality of the letter, we come to see the way it can be understood as a living document that in some form or another marks a passing. The letter leaves a trace, becomes the symbolic habitus of experience—one that importantly travels, making its way out of the physical body and into an external world. Hence, this too invigorates my argument as it performs a “spillage.”

For Anne Bower, “the epistolary heroine . . . creates a material object—the letter—that not only speaks the self, but metonymically, is the self.”⁸ In this material self-configuration, the letter becomes a drifting body, willing to travel and to be dispersed. In other studies on epistolary writing, the letter has also been seen as opening up a unique space through which to construct what Rebecca Earle nominates “fictions of the self.”⁹ In this sense, the letter permits a refashioning of the self, a making of the self, separated from the exterior forces that often aim at a facile modality of containment. That is, of an other’s gaze—especially when it happens that she is routinely spoken for, by hegemonic powers. A woman’s decision to express the self through the epistolary mode illuminates another theoretical approach to the woman’s intent for the conservation and telling of her own history: “The letter-writing female protagonist uses the pen not only to affirm herself, not only to bridge the gap between self and other, but often to rewrite the self, presenting a personal self-definition that contradicts, supersedes, or supplements the identity others have assumed her to have.”¹⁰

Teresa documents and archives a history yielded on her terms, operating within a logic of transgression and affective corporeality. This method of writing and history-making makes claim to feminist models of knowledge production that aim to locate intersectional struggles, and work to account for embodied subjectivities. Chicana theorists Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa conceptualize these forms of knowledge-making as “theory in the flesh.”¹¹ In writing of the self, expanding upon the ways in which the writer’s body enters into contact with others, and is perceived by others, Anzaldúa and Moraga make visible the gendered, racial, sexed, and cultural politics that structure personal experience.

Through Teresa’s written record, the reader witnesses an intersectional framework of writing, wherein her personal subjectivity permeates the text. She speaks in her own way, one that applies to her multidimensional forms of embodiment. Beyond her corporeal registry, Teresa shifts between the styles of writing poems, offering critical analysis of past events, and serving as documentarian, to design her own mode of being read. It is here where its poetics of spilling comes to be, as a mode of theoretical purpose and feminist positioning. Teresa’s thoughts and remembrances spill across the letter ...