Rebozos de Palabras: An Helena María Viramontes Critical Reader ed. by Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs (review)

In the last decade in particular, Latina writers and Latina writing have been topics of interest for critics and scholars alike. Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs critical reader, Rebozos de Palabras: An Helena María Viramontes Critical Reader, joins in the conversation with one of the many important and needed collections of essays on Latina writers. In the foreword, Sonia Saldívar-Hull states that Viramontes makes her readers “look at the lives of the subaltern who are murdered daily, figuratively and literally, by the conditions of containment” (X). Much like Viramontes, Gutiérrez y Muhs forces us to acknowledge and see the need for a critical reader that studies Chicanas’ works and their relationship to other American writers.

The reader is divided into four parts, including a section with two interviews with Viramontes. Part one explores the author’s distinctive narrative style and thematic elements, pairing up writers such as John Steinbeck and his novel, The Grapes of Wrath, with Susana Sánchez Bravo and her novel, Espacios Condenados. What these essays show is a strong connection between religious imagery and the close relationship of religion and social justice explored in the novels. While Steinbeck shares similar thematic elements with Viramontes, in Under The Feet of Jesus, Viramontes uses a strong female protagonist to protect and demand equal treatment for farm workers. Barbara Brinson Curiel finds that, “Estrella encompasses references not only to feminine divinity but also to the masculine divinity of Jesus” (38). Curiel explores these two works to show that both authors, although from very different backgrounds and several decades apart, share an interest in “the representation of agricultural workers and to a critical engagement with Judeo-Christian traditions and beliefs” (44), but it is clear that Viramontes uses a strong feminist perspective of the Chicano/a movement to celebrate a young woman’s consciousness development that goes beyond the traditional growing-up story. Raelene Wyse studies Espacios Condenados and Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them, as they both rely on the act on remembering and memory to ensure survival. Both novels also explore the impact of the city on their characters and the possibility for community. Wyse finds that both novels suggest that, “external and internalized oppression wreak havoc on individuals and communities” (55) particularly when suspicion and fear threaten the possibility for strong supportive relationships.

Part two focuses on Viramontes’s representation of the female body, and how people come together in struggles drawn by fear, labor, violence, and love. The authors in this section explore both of Viramontes’s previously mentioned novels, but also her short story collection The Moths and Other Stories. The studies on the gendered body in the articles of this section show how characters are connected to the earth, institutions and the city, but also how their bodies are often subject to violence as a means to “control both gender and race at the expense of mutilating an individual’s freedom” (110), as Juanita Heredia notes in her study on the women in east Los Angeles in this section.

Gutiérrez y Muhs’ uses the term ‘Maztlán’ to describe “the Chicana mythic homeland that unites us to womanhood” (12), this is particularly evident in part three titled, “Ethics and Asthetics,” which explores the way Viramontes uses love and ethics not only to construct knowledge, but also as a liberating force that makes it possible for her characters to love, know, and live on their own terms. Mary Pat Brady, among many other important points, finds that Viramontes suggests that the city or urban spaces, despite the forces that criminalize its inhabitants and condemn their houses, wants us to see “East LA not as ‘blighted,’ but as home to brave and determined people caring for others” (181). In the same manner, Viramontes makes the reader realize the way that people who work the land are part of it. Joyce Garay here...