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

Critical works on La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Malinche—the triad of Mexican womanhood—are abundant in Chicana literary studies, but none have included the actual voices of Chicanas and U.S. Mexicanas alongside the writings of Chicana feminist academics in the reworkings of these cultural icons. In her study, Blake compares the oral histories of nine working-class and semiprofessional U.S. Mexican women to the works of, what she terms, Chicana "professional intellectuals," a classification Blake explains more effectively conveys the academics' social class. Blake's purpose is to capture the "diverse representational strategies" of academic and nonacademic Chicanas and to assert how these strategies should not be conceptualized as ideologically oppositional, but as "existing along a continuum of Chicana feminist thinking" (6).

Blake utilizes the term "historias" to signify the three narrative dimensions—histories, stories, and testimonios—that "emerge as counterdiscourses articulating moments of resistance and refiguring" (189). Blake's study can be situated along the trajectory of recent Chicana scholarship on the politics of "telling." Like the authors in the Latina Feminist Group's collection, Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Durham, Duke University Press, 2001), the women in the study reveal that theory cannot always capture the complexity of "a" gendered or racial experience; thus, the project of recognition and cultural refiguring of race, gender, and sexual identity demands that women's lived experiences serve as the basis of theory (re)production. Blake's study, however, complicates readings of women's lives by situating the women's oral narratives within dynamic political and literary contexts. Her analysis resists essentialist usages of methodology and instead draws from a mestizaje—a mixture—of ethnographic, literary, feminist, materialist, and historical theories and methodologies to more fully capture the complexities of mestiza identity.

Blake begins her study by tracing the visual, literary, and discursive cultural representations of La Llorona, La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and Mexica earth goddesses, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This historical, cultural, and material mapping and tracing of Mexican female identity is critical for historicizing the evolution of these cultural legends as well as for understanding their new power and meaning in Chicana feminist academic revisionist writings. Furthermore, this process of historicizing enables the researcher and reader to gauge, through the interviews, the extent to which U.S. Mexicanas today both appropriate and recodify cultural symbols as they shape their identities. Mary Ozuna, one of Blake's subjects, exemplifies this "complex refiguring process" in her account of her ambivalence toward her birth name, "Mary Magdalena" (141). The collision of Ozuna's desire to be a mother outside of marriage with her own mother's reverence of La Virgen de Guadalupe demanded that she construct her identity in a way that did not reject her association with the Virgin Mary, but that reimagined La Virgen as a figure of sexualized motherhood. As Blake's analysis reveals, Ozuna not only navigated the "collision and collusion" of conflicting ideologies but she also constructed an empowered identity among those tensions (140).

Like the women in her study who struggle to negotiate the power dynamics as they cross multiple physical and psychological borders in their daily lives, Blake contends with similar border crossings as a white, middle-class, educated female researcher who speaks Spanish and was raised Catholic, as well as an oral historian who was formally trained in literary studies. As she illustrates, Blake crosses borders by building bridges; for example, to gain the trust of the women, she revealed that she was a survivor of domestic abuse. Through her own feminist practice of life storytelling, Blake sought to engage the women in a practice of telling stories that placed them at the center of their own narratives. Blake's self-reflexivity in her final chapter not only brings to surface the problems she encountered as a graduate...