Radical Chicana Poetics by Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez (review)

Ricardo F. Vivancos Pérez poses a seminal question in his text, Radical Chicana Poetics (2013), and implicitly challenges his readers to find the answer: Can (or should) a non-Chicano man really author a book that (re)presents the Chicana feminist voice? By the end of his “Disclaimer,” the reader can confidently respond with a resounding “¡Si se puede!” In a witty play with words, Vivancos Pérez inverts an expected formula and tactic of religious women writers, captatio benevolentiae, and draws the reader’s attention to the “Malevolentiae” that persists in academic discourse about valid authorial subject positions. Fueled by his own subject position and his outside-insider tension, Vivancos Pérez writes a text that maps what he terms “dangerous beast poetics.” He explains this term as the poetics developed and wielded by the in-process Chicana writing subjects whose “complex approach to commonality” (106) is “not only about creativity and raising consciousness, but also about appreciating the pedagogical responsibilities involved in creating a poetics, as well as the role of the reader-viewer” (85).

Exploring the works of influential feminist Chicana writers, Vivancos Pérez contextualizes their writings and connects their roles within their literatures diachronically: Chicana writing in the 80’s and 90’s is directly informed by the Chican@ movement of the 1960s. Radical Chicana Poetics is broken up into three parts, each part made up of two chapters and two junctures, which serve as connective tissue that he deems “peripheral,” but importantly suture together the body of work of dangerous beast poetics.

In part one, he analyzes the writings of Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, specifically, their appeal to the mythopoetic and mythohistorical figurations of embodiment and dismemberment. In part two, he comparatively analyzes the textual productions of Ana Castillo, Emma Pérez, Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Sandra Cisneros, whose texts, according to Vivancos Pérez, expand dangerous beast poetics, encompassing Latin American literary tradition, historicism and feminist psychoanalysis. His structure succeeds in recreating the trope of Coyolxauhqui as a dismembered figure.

Chapter one engages Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) with the aim of plotting the author’s non-linear developmental and reflective writing process as it relates to Chicana identity formation. Significantly, Vivancos Pérez writes, in detail, about Anzaldúa personal notes written in the margins of her original, rough drafts. This seems to betray Anzaldúa’s voice rather than reveal it and perhaps raises an ethical concern.

In chapter two, the author’s focus shifts to the analysis of Cherrie Moraga’s body of work. In contrast to Anzaldua’s paths to amassing Chicana bodies of knowledge, Vivancos Pérez contends that Moraga’s concern is specifically with the lesbian bodily experience. That is, for Moraga, the embodiment of memory becomes the point of enunciation and the impetus for social action and reform. Vivancos Pérez profiles Moraga’s writings, painting her as a straightforward intellectual who redefined Teatro Campesino about what it means to be a Chican@ with a border experience. Alternately, the third chapter focuses on redefining Chica@ poetry within feminist ideology using Castillo’s and Pérez’s works to engage Berdotti’s nomadic subject. This chapter reiterates the imperative to read for the polycentricity of the writing subject through the analyses of her narrative figurations.

Chapter four traverses Gaspar de Alba’s Sor Juana’s Second Dream (1999) and becomes the ground for Vivancos Pérez’s quest to chart dangerous beast poetics. Gaspar de Alba’s reinvention of Sor Juana validates the body/text metaphor implicit in these poetics while simultaneously exploring the Chicana poet as a nomadic and desiring subject through her focus on language and sexuality (115). In chapter five, the author examines Cisneros’s Caramelo arguing her female narrating “I”, or the Chicana/girl protagonist, represents the dangerous beast, contentious subject-in-process, and controlling agent of the narrative (148). Vivancos Pérez analyzes the importance and the role of the rebozo (shawl...