Con un pie a cada lado/With a Foot in Each Place: Mestizaje as Transnational Feminisms in Ana Castillo's So Far from God

Con un pie a cada lado/With a Foot in Each Place Mestizaje as Transnational Feminisms in Ana Castillo's So Farjrom God LAURA GILLMAN AND STACEY M. FLOYD-THOMAS Within us and within la cultura chicana, commonly held beliefs ofthe white culture attack commonly held beliefs ofthe Mexican culture, and both attack commonly held beließ ofthe indigenous culture. Subconsciously, we see an attack on ourselves and our beliefs as a threat and we attempt to block with a counterstance. But it is not enoucjh to stand on the opposite riuer bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will haue to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes. —Gloria Anzaldtia, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza In the beginning quote, Chicana writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa gives us a poignant snapshot ofdie dual realities and double consciousness ofChicanas who must claim their identity as one which emerges at the crossroads of at least two geographical locations and cultures, Mexican and American. Rather than being forced into an oppositional mode ofbeing, either American or Mexican, Anzaldúa makes a clarion call for Chicanas to embrace a "mestiza consciousness," one that allows them to embrace the collective cultures ofwhich they are a part.1 As a mode ofanti-sexist and anti-racist consciousness, mestiza consciousness or mestizaje is part ofa larger movement called transnational feminism. Transnational feminism is both a theory and a political orientation of people who form solidarity in order to transcend oppression caused by [Meridians:feminism, race, transnationalism 2001, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 158-75]©2001 by Wesleyan University Press. All rights reserved. 158 forced identities based on the social demarcations ofnations, ethnicities, languages, races, classes, cultures, sexual orientations and gender. Transnational feminisms epitomize what Chela Sandoval terms "an untried revolution" (355). As a set oftheories and methods born to meet the economic, political and ethical crises ofa multicultural, global society of the 21st century, transnational feminisms enact "a geopolitical upheaval" ofthe nation-state and its social imaginarles (355). Towards this end, transnational feminisms represent and seek to create a space where full citizenship can be achieved and self-determination may be realized for women ofcolor. Founded on a "consciousness in opposition ," transnational feminisms name oppressive social hierarchies and produce tactics for social transformation, paving the way for the alignment of a variety of oppositional social movements such as mestizaje. Transnational feminisms thus open up the possibility forwomen ofcolor to be a "country people," ifnot bound by a common geographical site, then by a common location in consciousness, a common psychic and spiritual terrain emerging from similar experiences of colonization (Sandoval 355). It is the purpose ofthis essay to illustrate the inner workings ofmestizaje as transnational feminisms by tracing both its articulation and tactical implementation in the works ofChicana writer Ana Castillo, So Far jrom God and Massacre ofthe Dreamers. We are using the expressions ofmestizaje as seen in So Farjrom God as the terrain and the site for transnational feminisms. More specifically, applying to the novelistic action Sandoval's five modes of resistance to U.S. social hierarchies, which include the assimilationistmode, die revolutionarymode, the supremacist mode, the separatist mode, and die differential mode, we will analyze mestizaje not just as consciousness in opposition but also as a method for self and group empowerment. How can a novel be a site fora political act? It can be onlywhenwe consider that text is never separable from context, nor its discourse from other cultural discourses and practices. As African-American female literary scholars have noted, women ofcolor never are and never have been afforded the luxury ofwriting fiction. This is not to argue the position of some Anglo American critics who acknowledge white women as creative artists but dismiss women ofcolor as merely knowing and being able to write about only their own experiences. Rather, we contend that it is within the literary tradition and canons ofwomen ofcolor thatwe find the culmination ofdieir creative license. Such a tradition is not invested in CON...