Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural Refiguring in Literature, Oral History, and Art (review)

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 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.