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ENGENDERING RE/SOLUTIONS: THE (FEMINIST) LEGACY OF ESTELA PORTILLO TRAMBLEY 10 Cordelia Candelaria WHEN SHE died in 1998, Estela Portillo Trambley, a native of El Paso, Texas, left a public legacy of writing, storytelling, and several decades of teaching in®uence that I admire greatly and ¤nd solid as cuentos and important as cultural artifacts. At the same time I ¤nd her literary legacy ideologically complicated and complicating, as important legacies often are.1 It is this tension between respect for Trambley’s obra and my struggle with some of the thematics and signi¤cation of some of her representations that in part ¤rst drew me to this collection’s theme of “millennial anxieties” for, after nearly three decades of working to promote appreciation for raza letters, I ¤nd that the notional possibilities associated with “The Millennium” as an idea offer a timely opening for the kind of reconsiderations and appraisals that are associated with the genre of homages , which is one aim of this essay. Intrinsic to the idea of The Millennium and, especially, to writing about that idea is retrospective re®ection as a strategy for prospective thinking. In other words, the millennial idea is a trope that demands a backward glance in order to see forward. Ultimately , The Millennium simultaneously symbolizes the end of an era and the beginning of another, even as it is but a continuation. In the Bergsonian sense of the “real time” of memory and experience2 The Millennium is, of course, a manufactured marker of duration just like the Chinese , Jewish, and Mayan calendars, to name three which do not mark the end of the second millennium as in the Western Gregorian tradition. Accordingly, my essay converges with this anthology’s timely interrogation of Chicana/o cultural studies within the cusp “between” centuries through its examination of the work of a woman who personi¤ed the lived experience of border crossing as an originary, original, and originating personal and material practice. In this I think she is a genuine cultural foremother. This collection’s concern with millennial issues of transition parallels my concern with situating and, more precisely, with appreciating (i.e., both valuing and understanding) the body of her work in the broader ¤eld of U.S. Latina/o and feminist thought, particularly since Trambley died in the postererías del siglo XXI.3 Further, my title’s opening phrase, “engendering re/solutions,” also addresses the idea that Trambley’s writing emerged out of the temporal and spatial precipice of the Chicano Movement—what Velez Ibanez calls “The Great Chicano Cultural Convulsive Transition Movement” (128–136)—with its attendant anxi195 eties concerning material and cultural pasts. The ideological preoccupation with political dogma, identity formation, and their effective expression underlie Trambley’s drama and ¤ction. In this essay I propose that Trambley’s work, like the movement itself, exhibited a concomitant utopian interest with engendering solutions to problems of political exclusion, socioeconomic abjection, and canonical erasure. My title pushes the pun of “engender” to denote the process of conceiving, birthing, and creating and also to connote the semiotics of gender in®ection. The title similarly exploits the pun embedded in “re/ solution” as referring at the same time to something resolved and resolute and also to something that needs to be re-solved or re-addressed. Importantly , depending on context and usage, the noun “resolution” can signify a formal, public declaration (e.g., the resolutions averred in the Declaration of Independence) and a private promise (e.g., a self-improvement program like a New Year’s resolution), as well as a collective commitment to heal the wounds of discord (e.g., many NACCS [National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies] resolutions). This essay examines the nature, and problematic, of Trambley’s “feminist legacy,” particularly in terms of her pioneering presence as a woman of the Chicano Renaissance. In my view, Trambley’s combined work comprises a signi¤cant number of enduring short stories (including the celebrated tale of feminist coming of age, “Paris Gown” [1973]); several fulllength dramas that have seen stage production in the United States and abroad (including the controversial, lesbian-themed The Day of the Swallows [1971] and Sor Juana [1983]); the novel Trini (1986), and other writings . As the ¤rst female recipient of the Premio Quinto Sol awarded by the germinally in®uential El Grito and (to my knowledge) as the ¤rst Chicana to dramatize lesbianism for the stage, her intellectual impact was at least in part strongly sociological...

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