Indigenous Feminist Narratives

I/We: Wo(men) of an(Other) Way

I. DUlfano, Kenneth A. Loparo, Isabel Dulfano

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137531308
• eBook ISBN: 9781137531315
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyzes the literary representation of Indigenous women in Latin American letters from colonization to the twentieth century, arguing that contemporary theorization of Indigenous feminism deconstructs denigratory imagery and offers a (re)signification, (re)semantization and reinvigoration of what it means to be an Indigenous woman.

1

Canonical Representations of Indigenous Women in Latin American Literature

Abstract: Chapter 1 traces the Latin American canonical depiction of Indigenous women in fiction and non-fiction. By interrogating the characterization and representation of Indigenous females from the colonial period forward in literary works, we are able to flesh out the paradigms of oppression and colonization with which they dialogue, or are in contention. Setting the stage for how Indigenous woman has been portrayed in the collective imaginary through hegemonic works provides the point of departure for understanding the construction of a gendered self-affirming and self-determined identity in contemporary writing.

Dulfano, Isabel. Indigenous Feminist Narratives I/We: Wo(men) of an(Other) Way. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137531315.0004.

You don’t walk through life everyday feeling invisible, because the only images the public sees of you are fictionalized stereotypes that don’t represent who you are at all ...

Adrienne K., Native American blogger

Our sense of identity with regard to our place in the socioeconomic and political/cultural landscape is shaped in part by literature. The canon and other media sources inculcate societal norms and propitiate images of who we are or how others conceive us, as Adrienne K states above. When we speak of the sign “Indigenous woman” in Latin America, her cultural representation, the scope of action she is permitted, and the expression of her personal sense of selfhood, we note a metamorphosis over time in literary letters, yet certain stigma associated with who she is. The predominant portraits painted in words about what it meant to be a female “Indian” or “Native,” her class and tribal affiliations, attitudes toward sexuality, her values and norms, her physical attributes and psychological demeanor have varied widely. She fluctuates between angelic to devilish, coastal to inland denizen, princess to slave. Nonetheless, she is a referent whose content and form were determined, as Cornejo Polar (1980) says, by Europe in the literary canon. Our cultural imaginary has been cast from the symbolic and literal treatment that this signifier elicited over time in canonical written form. From literature through a cultural pedagogy, we have constituted the core of Indigenous woman from the lens of the wielders of power. This chapter looks at direct characterizations of the discourse and actions of Indigenous woman in the literary canon to uncover the provenance and evolution of this problematized figure.

Several literary types have had a bearing on our reception of the referent Indigenous female. The central role played by Indian slave La Malinche as interpreter for Spaniard Hernán Cortés inscribed one of the first archetypes of her on the Mexican national psyche as “Mexican Eve, tainted sex who is selfish and rejecting” (Cypess 1991, 6) and a manipulating traitor. Her name came to signify prostitute and apostate. This iconic woman has prompted debate, reinvention, deconstruction, appropriation, and rejection since her initial appearance in the early sixteenth century. Perhaps the most notorious and only Indigenous female to share the limelight with men in narrative, La Malinche provides one important figurative and historical portrait of Indigenous female that continues to be relevant today.

However, more common is the customary portrayal equating Indigenous woman to muted, one-dimensional exotic noble savage, sexualized seductress, wild Amazonian warrior, or the ubiquitous submissive slave/fieldworker, mother of bastard mestizo offspring. In this chapter, I will trace the emergence of the representations from the Renaissance New World era of conquest to Baroque figuration of royal Indian princesses, through neoclassical and romantic idealizations of the virtuous ravishing savage, and realist depictions of abject sexually abused peasant. Finally, we consider the late-twentieth-century testimonial renditions as revolutionary “guerrilla” vanguard. This is not an exhaustive study of the topic, nor does it try to capture every representation available. Rather it serves as an introduction to the key archetypes relevant to the Indigenous women writers highlighted in the second section of this book. In their voyage of self-interrogation, contemporary voices react to, analyze, and dialogue with these predecessors. The corpus of literary criticism that analyzes individual Indigenous female characters is sparse, and fewer studies undertake a comparative longitudinal approach in order to trace the evolution of the imagery of Indigenous woman over time in Latin American letters.

Overwhelmingly, Indigenous male and female characters were passive agents either conscripted to folkloric adornment as romanticized, uncivilized inhabitants of alluring undiscovered natural scenery, or they filled subservient roles with limited character development. Often silent, reaping nominal literary worth, and bearing no consequence on the plot, the Indigenous woman is used, exploited, overlooked, or discarded depending on the literary movement, even more so than men.

This phenomenon is exemplified for instance by the paradoxical twentieth-century revival and eschewal of a nongendered “cosmic race of Latin America.” Taken up as oppositional signifier to occidental materialism, imperialism, and patriarchy by nonnative writers like Vasconcelos, the Indigenous were viewed as primitive, ingenuous, and uncontaminated symbols of spiritual integrity. On the one hand, 1930s realism disseminates compelling reenactments of the violent exploitation of submissive, bestial Indian peasants (Huasipungo) on the lowest rung of the social order. On the other, they are placed on a pedestal as bearers of the essential component in a universal redemptive culture. Summarized, Ocasio outlines two major trends in the positive characterizations of the Indigenous, from the vanguard experimental surrealist techniques and the indigenista realist fiction (2004, 69). Thus, the dichotomy perpetuated in literature “tended to overestheticize its referent” or “endeavors to analyze that referent in social and economic terms” (Ward 2012, 401), which in the case of Indigenous woman is further complicated in her primarily domestic roles and triple marginalization.

As previously mentioned, the first and most interrogated female character in the constellation of Indigenous women is La Malinche, translator/interpreter for the Spaniards during the invasion of the Tenochtitlan Aztec capital in 1521. Unlike others, she is not silent or invisible. She most definitely has been enshrouded in controversy and paradox, pitted in opposition to her native people, yet depicted in codices as an axial, prominently positioned figure, more central than even Cortés at times (Herrera-Sobek 2005, 117; Godayol 2012, 64). Her name, Malinche-Tenepal, derives from the Nahuatl meaning of “loquacious woman who speaks with ease in a spirited fashion” (Godayol, 65), an attribute donned by contemporary feminist writers.

This uncharacteristic and delusive autonomy throws off balance our conventional idea of woman during the period of conquest, where the male-subject acts upon, rapes, subjugates, and mutes the female-object. Breaking that mold, this contradictory “factual, fabled and apocryphal” woman has been studied by myriad groups beginning with the chroniclers of the conquest (Cortés, Bernal Díaz), who “mythologized” her as legendary interpreter (Alarcón 1989, 64). Transformed over centuries from historical to literary/semiotic sign, her next iteration appears during Mexican national independence, where she became scapegoat, demystified as self-serving traitor to the Mexican people. Continuing in that vein, Octavio Paz, in the 1950 Labyrinth of Solitude, consecrated her place as Mother of the Chingados (fucked Mexican bastard sons of the conquest). However, her final vindication by several contemporary feminist writers commences as they rewrite the myth and exonerate and rehabilitate her image as an assertive, knowledgeable, and spiritual Indigenous foremother. Some are successful, especially among Chicana writers, whereas others, like Esquivel, are problematic in their desire to recreate and psychologically comprehend the driving force of her indomitable spirit (Dulfano 2010, 95).

La Malinche has been exhaustively analyzed from the perspective of the literary, linguistic, historical, anthropological, and sociological disciplines as well as in the fields of gender and ethnic studies. Her mythical image is ambiguous and paradoxical: empowered unlike other females, yet marginalized and vilified all the same by patriarchy. The Malinche we are familiar with was originally embellished and drafted in the writings of the chroniclers of the New World conquest, serving these historians’ or conquerors’ agendas. As Godayol states, “Alternating praise and calumny, the patriarchal system of the last five centuries has not ignored her” (2012, 62).

In fact they have shaped our reception of this controversial figure, setting the stage for malinchismo, the repudiation of anything Indigenous, be it blood, lineage, physical attributes, cultural artifacts, or languages, in favor of the “foreign” for hundreds of years (Cypess 1991, 35). Some have upheld her sexual qualities as principal, whereas others stress her linguistic gifts as her distinguishing characteristic (Godayol 67). However, in the efforts of contemporary Chicana writers to resuscitate this controversial cultural mother, they reclaim “La Malinche’s gifts as a linguist and mediator; others uphold her philanthropic, sexual, maternal, religious, political or ideological facets” (Godayol 70). Thus, she is appreciated for her polyhedral, multidimensional persona.

The trope of Indigenous woman as translator of, or bridge for her own culture to the European Northern hegemon, is one that will recur in examples from colonial times to the present. Recent feminist Indigenous writers erect bridges between several struggles “having to explain to the black movement the importance of feminist demands and to the feminist movement the relevance of the fight against racism” (Hernández Castillo, Speed, and Stephen 2006, 57). Maureen Shea links engagée testimonial, the genre appropriated by many Indigenous women principally in the 1970s–80s, to a process that “becomes the bridge between the oral history and the act of writing that history, or, as critic Bell Gale Chevigny phrases it, ‘the site of the encounter between writing and history’ (181)” (1993, 141). Recently, Third-World women have often been designated as mediators – “native informants from elsewhere” (John 1996, 23) – forging links between socioeconomic, racial and ethnic divides.

Yet Malinche translates and erects a linguistic bridge to the conquest era, an act of sheer survival, at the behest and under the hand of Cortés. Even her extraordinary linguistic prestidigitation precludes the exertion of any sort of real influence in the betrayal or advancement of the Aztecs. Doing so would have been tantamount to vesting control of her own life story. In 1521, an Indigenous female, lover of Cortés or otherwise, had no agency. The decreed selection of her Spanish husband, mandated by the conqueror to wed the Indigenous slave, is but one example of this impotence. Similarly, the exiguous material contingency available to colonized Indigenous peoples of the times attests to her nominal agency. If and when she spoke to bridge a gap, her words were those of Cortés; her material and social status was dictated literally by the conqueror.

The seventeenth-century Inca Garcilaso de la Vega posits a distinct rendition of Indigenous woman for our consumption. His act of figurative and literal translation of Indigenous culture for the Spanish crown as descendant of royal Inca and Spanish ancestry is nuanced and conditioned by his position in society. The text designated as an exemplum of conquest by Patricia Heid (2002, 94, 96) was intended as a chronicle of heroic civilized protagonists and evangelized Incas, who would purportedly provide exemplary historical profiles of Native culture worthy of comparison with the Spaniards. Liesder Mayea Rodríguez’s excellent analysis of the representation (2010–11), and lack thereof, of the subaltern female in Royal Commentaries (Comentarios reales) (1609) contends it is written using a masculine, Christian lens, and imperial language in order to construct the subaltern subject and, for this analysis, particularly women as motif palatable for European regal ingestion. Even with all the subtlety and Renaissance grandiloquence El Inca wields, doubts arise about the veracity of the concrete social and political circumstances described, much less the position of women, or the likelihood of his revealing the fundamental tenets of the collective consciousness of the Incan society from his vantage point as mestizo soldier addressing the crown.

Much of his transliteration of cultural and linguistic concepts from the Inca empire do not translate to European sensibilities (Zamora 1988, 4), a problem which is further compounded by his reliance on poetic license to conflate and distort Incan roles. Michael Horswell points out the “foundational family, a ‘king’ and a ‘queen,’ ” derive from paradigms of European dynastic monarchies (2005, 27–28), which tends to underscore an unusual semiequality between the opposite sex potentates. Heid notes the emphasis on Incan use of dialogue in the conquest to challenge and subjugate the binary paradigm of gender identities inherent in epic: “Garcilaso’s model of conquest portrayed the constantly evolving dynamic of dialogue between two speaking subjects, in which the boundaries between self and other, male and female, civilized and barbarian were blurred” (2002, 96).

This guide to exemplary conquering puts forth frequent references to the Inca and coya (queen) of equal stature fortifying the image of the two as a unit, a decussate of reality and myth given their birthright as siblings. His mother, Palla or princess, is markedly associated with eloquent speech (platicas) in quotidian conversation at home about lofty topics such as monarchs, nobility, empire in war and peace times, and munificent laws. Equally, she is said to evince pathos and compassion through her watershed of tears about the plight of the Indigenous. This emotional spigot opens in unison with her rational Renaissance logic and rhetoric, creating harmony and balance of intellectual and emotional reserves. With the female Inca taking on qualities beyond the scope of verisimilar norms, Spivak’s contention that the “subaltern consciousness is subject of the cathexis of the elite” becomes manifest (1993). Moreover, the highly mediated presentation of Indigenous royalty, and even of the female, is functionalized to minister to the sociopolitical purposes of the author.

This masculine autoethnography, a form taken up by contemporary testimonials, describes a minute cross section of the empire’s female population, encompassing less than “one percent” of the total body count (Mayea Rodríguez 2010–11), to depict the upper echelons while ignoring the indigent mass populace. Among the array of females he describes are the requisite sacred virgins (chapter 11, 2006) living reclusively in a huge sanctuary, where only the coya was privy to visit (chapter 4), elderly priestesses called mamacuna (mother-of-crib) residing with and responsible for didactic training of the royal virgins, abbesses, and other virgins acting as couturieres of the Inca and coya’s accoutrements (chapters 11 and 12). Yet these women are not full-bodied characters or drivers of the historical record in the least, solely adorning and obliging his personal agenda as objects of veneration. I agree with Mayea Rodríguez’s conclusion that although there is a voice given to the subaltern, and not to women, it is partial at best.

According to El Inca’s narrative, female roles were traditional, responsible primarily for the instruction and edification of girls of royal lineage, including maternal teachings on weaving, sewing, and other domestic duties (chapter 4). Some tutored eight-year-old and older novices and virgins in the art of designing and elaboration of the Inca’s ornamental dress and head pieces, as well as the production of specialized items, including clothes, bags for herbs, and other accessories for the Inca leader and his coya (chapters 11 and 12). Thus, their comparison is to ladies-in-waiting; he draws an association with other Western notions of a gentlewoman who is chaste and responsible for organization of the domestic sphere. Rounding out the profile, their ability to “speak their minds, but their thoughts and ideas were shaped by men” (Hull, 1996, 15) further attests to their manipulation by El Inca to incite empathy and identification within his European audience.

Maintaining equanimity between male and female, as much as comparisons of Spanish and Incan hygiene practices, detailed descriptions of hairstyles and hair-dying procedures reinforce the prologue’s parallel of Cuzco being on par with Rome’s stature. References to the coya position her physically next to, and with, the Inca. Mention of statues representing both men and women, as much as the Inca and his principal wife speaking, or how men and women would allow themselves to be buried alive with the king (chapter 16), suggestively deceive the reader into believing egalitarian gender relations existed. In other instances, the coya has designated solo duties she fulfills, such as interceding on behalf of curacas, the Indian chieftains, to allow a royal envoy to collate and read the quipus (chapter 19) or serving as intermediary with the virgin’s sanctuary. Thus, women were inconsequential adornments who bore no real pull on the advancement of the plot or narrative as a whole.

Other sections of El Inca’s tome (2006) could be classified as a general ethnography of Incan culture and sociology, wherein women are incidental with casual allusions to their existence, yet grossly objectified. Chapter 24 provides a long enumeration of typical foods consumed, inclusive of ancillary commentary about women milling flour, though there is no direct reference to their duties in preparation of comestibles. Perhaps the most sundry and curious Chapter 28 describes Indigenous women’s hair, how they wore it, and the effort taken in the name of beautification to wash it in herbs and boiling water. At the end of this longer segment, the Inca compares his empirical knowledge of Peninsular women’s practices equivocating through use of vague, nonspecific language so as not to elevate either culture’s practice as superior. By universalizing vanity as a human trait, he suggests European and Indigenous females are vulnerable to this conceit. Therefore, the Inca seems bent on the presentation of a palatable, hygienic, Indigenous object of female demeanor, yet stripped of dynamism, so as to project the vision of a pure, chaste, cultivated civilization with equivalent customs and sensibilities to those of her European analogue.

In contrast to this sanitized representation of Incan royalty is the depiction of the quintessential Ecuadorian jungle princess, alleged daughter of a reigning chieftain. Cumandá (1879) is illustrative of the romantic tendency of Indianismo. Unlike her predecessors, Cumandá has a voice heard verbatim in dialogues with several characters, though the content of these conversations is contrived and adheres to neoclassical or romantic elocution. This full-fledged character, commandeered as megaphone to privilege the non-Native perspective of power relations and cultural identities, moves the plot forward. As a hybrid facsimile of the nonpareil Indigenous traits superimposed on a white plantation owner’s daughter, captured by Indians and brought up in the wild, Cumandá is the romanticized product of a quasi-biblical case of miscegenation, useful for didactic, theological, political, and social indoctrination. The extensive descriptions and actions imparted to her in the narrative transform the mold of Indigenous woman in the nineteenth century. As a female figure more valiant and independent than her male counterparts in the fictional space, yet cadaverous at the end, she serves, as Doris Sommer says, through her figurative sacr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Canonical Representations of Indigenous Women in Latin American Literature
• 2  Notes on Indigenous Feminism Post-Testimonial
• 3  Memory/Memoir, Challenges, and Anthropology
• 4  What Does It Mean to Be an Indigenous Woman in Contemporary Times?
• Conclusion
• References
• Index