With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

CHAPTER 1. Chicana Lesbian Fictions

CHAPTER 1 Chicana Lesbian Fictions Publishing The issue of visibility of Chicana (and in many of the cases below, Latina) lesbians is full of ambiguity. Lesbian writers have not always chosen to differentiate themselves from their heterosexual colleagues, either in their writings or in their public statements about their identities . Anthologies of Chicana writing of the past twenty-five years can be evaluated as falling into three categories: “nonlesbian,” “lesbianfriendly ,” and “lesbian.” “Nonlesbian” refers to those collections in which the authors and the tone are predominantly heterosexual. While lesbian authors may appear, their work is unmarked as lesbian, compartmentalized , or tokenized. Examples are Woman of Her Word (1983, 1987), edited by Evangelina Vigil; Las mujeres hablan (1988), edited by Tey Diana Rebolledo, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry, and Teresa Márquez; and Infinite Divisions (1993), edited by Rebolledo and Eliana Rivero. Woman of Her Word was originally published as a special double issue of Revista Chicano-Riqueña1 devoted to the writings of Latinas. It contains fifty-four pieces, mainly poetry, by twenty-four authors, and eleven works by visual artists. Neither the poetry nor the prose includes lesbian themes or content, and none of the authors or artists identifies herself as a lesbian. Yet the contributors include several authors who are now “out lesbians,” among them the Cubana Achy Obejas and the Puertorriqueña Luz María Umpierre, or others such as Ana Castillo, who consistently deals with homoerotic desire in her writings. This lesbian absence is unmarked, as is the essential, structured heterosexual 10 With Her Machete in Her Hand theme of the anthology. Woman of Her Word was a groundbreaking collection , a serious recognition by a major Chicano/Latino journal that women’s writing is significant. And yet not only was lesbian writing not represented, its absence was not even remarked.2 Unfortunately, even later anthologies continue this trend. Las mujeres hablan: An Anthology of Nuevo Mexicana Writers (1988) was in part a feminist response to the 1987 publication of Voces: An Anthology of Nuevo Mexicano Writers, edited by Rudolfo Anaya, in which Chicana writers were perceived to have been underrepresented.3 Las mujeres hablan features forty-four authors and artists, including Gina Montoya and Juanita M. Sánchez, both of whom later contributed to the Chicana Lesbians (1991) anthology. This anthology, striving for a broad cross section of nuevomejicana writers, provided an expanded model of women ’s literature, including recipes, artwork, and dichos, as well as poetry and prose. Emphasizing traditions and oral forms passed down from mother to daughter, Las mujeres hablan also included many writers from the same families. Unlike Woman of Her Word, which was organized by genre, Las mujeres hablan is divided thematically into sections, including “La Niñez Rescatada,” “Nuestras Familias,” “Nuestros Vecinos,” and “Nuestros Paisajes,”4 which are presented as traditional ways of dividing up women’s worlds and women’s lives. Like Woman of Her Word, there are no explicitly lesbian writings in the collection,5 nor do any of the lesbian authors identify themselves as such.6 The title phrase, “Las mujeres hablan,” was consciously chosen by the editors as a refusal of the dicho “La mujer que sabe latín no tendrá ni marido ni buen fin”: the woman who knows Latin—the educated woman—will not find a husband and will come to a bad end. The dicho, of course, equates spinsterhood with a bad end. Implicit in this collection of works is the notion that women can speak without fearing either of these eventualities . However, the implied undesirability of “spinsterhood” and thus the implications of compulsory heterosexuality are not addressed, either by the editors or the writings. Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature7 is a large, broadbased , and historical survey of Chicana writing, no doubt intended as a textbook for literature courses. It features 175 works by forty-eight authors and spans the period from 1877 to 1993. In their thirty-page introduction to the volume, Rebolledo and Rivero discuss three major trends in current Chicana writing: the personal essay, “the redemption of the male relationship in the lives of Chicanas” (1993, 27), and Chicana Lesbian Fictions 11 “dealing more openly with sexuality,” which covers menstrual imagery, heterosexuality, lesbian identity, and domestic and childhood sexual abuse. With respect to sexuality, they acknowledge the significance of the publication of the first anthology on Chicana and Latina sexuality, The Sexuality of...