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CHAPTER 4 Ana Castillo’s and Sheila Ortiz Taylor’s Bent Chicana Textualities Chicana Mainstreams and Tributaries U.S.-dwelling Chicana authors have come into their belle lettres own. Since the 1980s, names like Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Denise Chávez, Sandra Cisneros, Lucha Corpi, Pat Mora, Cecile Pineda, Mary Helen Ponce, and Helena María Viramontes, to mention a few, have become regular sights at mainstream bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble across the country . This is not a result of some deus ex machina intervention. Increased visibility is the result of much thumping on the doors of corporate book editors and mainstream agents by Chicana, Nuyorican, Cuban, and Dominican women writers for decades prior to their renaissance in the mid- to late 1980s. It is the result of massive civil rights struggles that eventually led to the increased numbers of Chicanas and Latinas entering universities; it is the result of years of our predecessors struggling to pave a way for us to acquire the skills for better-paying jobs (academic or otherwise) than those available to our forefathers and foremothers. It is the result of eventual growth of an ethnicidenti fied middle-class in the 1980s, hungry for stories other than those of the Brett Easton Ellis or Donna Tart variety. It is the result of a wave of newly minted Chicano/a and Latino/a PhDs who entered the academy to reshape the humanities and university curricula, setting ablaze what has become known as the late-1980s “culture wars.” It is the result of those creative writers working within the academy—Norma Cantú, Cherríe Moraga, Pat Mora, Lucha Corpi, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Gloria Anzaldúa, for example— who forced open doors for Other voices to enter into a literary scene dominated by Euro-Anglo authors. Although initiated in 1981 with the publication of This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Moraga and Anzaldúa, not until the late 1980s and early 1990s would a Xicana feminist theory take hold within the academy, and outside 04-T3393 6/22/05 1:56 PM Page 89 (albeit to a lesser degree).1 This new wave of Chicana critics sought to identify a Chicana borderland aesthetic that expressed, as Carmen CálizMontoro states, “a battleground of identities” and “a crossfire between camps” (14). With the dust settled, a crystallizing Xicana feminism identified the border as the site to critique the triple oppression of Chicanas (race, gender, and sexual orientation) and also as a space for intervention, resistance, and affirmation. Gloria Anzaldúa’s 1987 publication of Borderlands/La Frontera— a hybrid mix of poetry, prose, and metaphysical inquiry—best represents this move away from fixed notions of Chicano/a identity and experience. While Borderlands/ La Frontera experimented with genre, it was not to be confused with a contemporary, Anglo-identified postmodernist disaffection. For Anzaldúa, playing with language and form aimed to unfix heterosexist and racist texts. Just as Anzaldúa celebrated a queer/straight Chicano/a subjectivity , so too did other Chicana feminists, among them Norma Alarcón, Mary Pat Brady, Deena González, Angie Chabrám, Cordelia Candelaria, Teresa McKenna, Cherríe Moraga, Emma Pérez, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Martha and Rosaura Sánchez, Chela Sandoval, Carla Trujillo, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and María Herrera-Sobek. They have expanded the traditionally male-dominated Chicano literary canon to include straight and queer Chicanas. For example, Norma Alarcón theorizes the mestiza subject ’s “provisional identities” as a form of intervention into “dominant Chicano and U.S. Anglo-European discourses of power” (135). And others like Sonia Saldívar-Hull formulate a “New Mestiza consciousness” (172) to articulate a “feminism on the border” that makes visible the sexism, homophobia, and economic exploitation within and outside Chicano communities (34). Certainly, the 1980s proved a hugely transformative moment in Chicana authorship. Much of this change can be attributed to socioeconomic shifts within ethnic groups in the United States and the hard-won struggles of the Chicano/a intelligentsia and artist communities. However, much was also about dollar profits. Mainstream publishing conglomerates are not interested in the social well-being of the people nor in academic protest—unless there are dollars to be made. As Rosaura Sánchez points out, “Interest in this literature had undoubtedly been fueled by the vogue of multiculturalism and the growing market for ethnic and women’s literature both in the academy and more generally...

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