Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature (review)

Anna Marie Sandoval’s Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas appears at a timely moment in Chicana/o and Latina/o studies. To an important extent, these fields of inquiry have led the current hemispheric/transnational turn that is gaining prominence in American studies. Sandoval contributes to such transnational work through a feminist analysis of Chicana and Mexicana literature, one that highlights the similarities in the discursive strategies and political commitments of each in an effort to “braid Chicana and Mexicana subjectivities” (the subtitle of her first chapter). Few scholars have studied these literatures together, and, to my knowledge, none have devoted an entire book to such a project.

There are at least two suggestive antecedents for Sandoval’s work. Debra A. Castillo’s Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992) includes chapters on the Chicana writers Helena María Viramontes and Denise Chávez alongside those on Latin Americans such as Luisa Valenzuela and Rosario Castellanos. Castillo does not explicitly make the case for why she includes Chicanas in her study of Latin American women’s writings, but her readings suggest an affinity in these writers’ narrative strategies (such as the use of silence in the work of Viramontes), strategies that foreground issues of gender in their engagements with cultural and political contexts in a Latin America broadly conceived to include Latinas in the United States. In light of her resistance to developing an “overarching theory” to discuss Latin American literary feminisms (1), her decision not to provide a critical framework that accounts for the inclusion of Chicanas was probably a conscious one. Yet even when they deal with similar cultural coordinates, Chicana and Latin American women’s writings are shaped by and respond to very different contexts. Castillo’s readings and juxtapositions are generative while dispensing with an explicit unifying framework, but the inclusion of a rigorous rationale would be necessary in a monograph devoted to transnational analysis such as Sandoval’s.

Like Talking Back, Sonia Saldívar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) does not take as its central focus a transnational study of Chicana and Latin American women’s writings; it attends much more to the links between U.S. Third World and Chicana feminisms. She ends, however, by suggesting confluences between the genre of testimonio and its enabling of the “previously unheard-of self-representation by subaltern women” and similar kinds of narrative expression employed by Chicana border feminists (161). Asserting a connection between Chicana literature and a significant strain of Latin American women’s expressive culture, Saldívar-Hull argues that these women “articulate a feminist consciousness that cannot be separated from its connection to race and class” (164). As a result, gender politics become inseparable from geopolitics.

I start with a brief discussion of these two works in order to convey a sense of what has been done on this kind of critical project and to suggest something of what remains to be done. Given that Sandoval’s central focus in Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas is precisely the joint study of Mexicana and Chicana writers, it is much more incumbent on her than on Castillo or Saldívar-Hull to provide a rigorous rationale, whether on historical, cultural, political, or aesthetic grounds. To this end, Sandoval identifies and examines a number of common cultural and thematic touchstones, including redefinitions of family, the influence of the Catholic Church, and, most importantly, the writers’ “re-visionings of traditional cultural symbols” such as La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Malinche (9). Along with the “reshaping of cultural symbols...