Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature

Chapter 3: From La Malinche to Coatlicue: Chicana Indigenist Feminism and Mythic Native Women

ChAPter 3 From La Malinche to Coatlicue: Chicana Indigenist Feminism and Mythic Native Women C hicana feminists have used the motifs of indigenist nationalism to advance some of the earliest critiques of relations of power within the movement, eroding the cultural authority of patriarchy to sustain Chicano revolutionary thought. In her groundbreaking essay on Chicana feminism, Norma Alarcón writes that “the reappropriation of ‘the’ native woman on Chicana feminist terms marked one of the first assaults on male-centered nationalism on the one hand and patriarchal political economy on the other” (“Chicana Feminism” 251). In linking feminism and indigenism, Alarcón’s text confirms the degree to which feminist analysis has been propelled by the symbols of nationalist indigenism, symbols that had to be recaptured from the discourses of masculinism and misogyny and reformulated to provide points of identification and sources of empowerment for Chicanas. Women have at times written from within nationalist spaces, voicing internal challenges that also glorify an indigenous ancestral past. And even when women write from outside a nationalist framework, their projects of indigenism resonate with earlier attempts to assert indigeneity and revitalize communities bound by shared cultural and racial characteristics. Feminist indigenism follows two dominant paths in its relation to myth. Some mythmaking enterprises claim their beginnings in specific historical events while another mode invokes mythic figures who did not exist historically. The reclamation of La Malinche, the Nahua advisor and translator to Hernán Cortés, occurred during a formative stage of Chicana indigenist feminism and elevated a gendered racial subject, the Indigenous woman. In recovering some facts about her life, Chicana feminist writing also established a mythical matriarchal origin for mestizaje . Certain meditations on the Virgin of Guadalupe—written and visual 106 Blood Lines emphases on her indigenous features and similarities to Mesoamerican goddesses—also fall within this feminist indigenist tradition of challenging patriarchy.1 Chicana feminists use these Mesoamerican goddesses to symbolize both the limitations and potentials of Chicana material existence . Gloria Anzaldúa’s work on the serpent goddess Coatlicue, around which she builds a complex indigenist schematic, is the best-known illustration . More recently, Cherríe Moraga has made another ancient Mesoamerican goddess, Coyolxauhqui, a central icon of her own cultural criticism . Thus, we can see that indigenist feminism, and its reliance on the languages of myth, continues to hold a vital position within Chicana/o critical discourse.2 This chapter outlines two critiques of nationalism mobilized through the languages of indigenism and primitivism. Adelaida del Castillo’s early recuperation of La Malinche in “Malintzin Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective” recovers a Native ancestor and, in this sense, is indigenist. Del Castillo’s motivation, however, is to reclaim La Malinche as a Christian who opposed a tyrannical and murderous Aztec priesthood. In the depiction of this priesthood and the emphasis on the Quetzalcoatl and Huizilopochtli narrative, del Castillo’s text aligns with dominant representations of the Conquest that emphasize precisely this “barbarity.” The second text I address, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, like del Castillo’s work, draws from and reproduces certain conventions. Yet, Anzaldúa calls our attention to Quetzalcoatl and Huizilopochtli in a dramatic retrieval and revision of the Aztec pantheon. Her text mobilizes indigeneity by valorizing vilified Aztec symbols and practices, such as the “monstrous” snake goddess Coatlicue, the obsidian mirror, and ritual sacrifice, while del Castillo recovers the Indian mother by rejecting the Aztec pantheon claimed by Chicano nationalists and later feminists, like Anzaldúa. Both La Malinche and Coatlicue, however, are examples of “‘the’ native woman” that Alarcón identifies with challenges to Chicano nationalism, and each motivates an indigenist feminism that finds its ground through the processes of mythmaking.3 La Malinche, Indian Mother of Mestizas/os “‘The’ native woman,” as Alarcón says, “has many names” (“Chicana Feminism” 251). “La Malinche” was perhaps one of the first names bestowed by Chicana feminists; others would follow, for example, Coatlicue , Coyolxauhqui, Tonantzin. In some forms of Chicana indigenism, the from La Malinche to Coatlicue 107 icons of pre-Columbian myth are central, whereas the case of La Malinche derives from a process of mythmaking begun after, rather than before, the Conquest. An actual historical figure, Malinche, the Nahua woman who translated for and advised Hernán Cortés, was made into myth over five centuries of accounts of her life, which came to...