Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation, and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art

Introduction

1 Q In her six-photo series María’s Great Expedition (1995–1996), the artist Christina Fernandezrecountsthepersonalhistoryof hergreat-grandmotherMaría’smigrations between the United States and Mexico by posing as her great-grandmother. In each of the sepia-toned photos and in the final chromogenic photo, the artist depicts the distant and recurring circumstances of her great-grandmother’s life, centering on gender roles and domestic space. The first photo, “1910, Leaving Morelia, Michoacán, Mexico,” shows Fernandez as María wearing her hair in braids and wrapped in a rebozo, contemplating her departure. The accompanying text explains that after three years in Juárez, Mexico, María left for the United States both pregnant and without her husband, which led to great controversy. The second photo,“1919, Portland, Colorado” (fig.1), depicts Fernandez as María standing in front of a clothesline that holds three shirts, representing her three children and new life in the United States. Fernandez’s dress, the clothes on the clothesline, and other items—including a tin washtub, a wooden and metal “El Rey” washboard, a cardboard box of “Iris All Purpose Laundry Detergent,” two plastic gloves, and a plastic “Iris Bleach” container—are rendered in stark white against the sepia-colored background.With the tin, wood, and cardboard objects alongside the modern plastic gloves and jug, the photo links the past and present. These items of Anglo American and Mexicana domesticity reference the greatgrandmother ’s lived experience as a woman of Mexican descent in the United States; they also depict the role of consumerism in the process of Americanization . The only nonwhite image in the photo is the black fanny pack, which Fernandez holds in front of her body. The fanny pack, an object of the present, suggests a contemporary fast-paced lifestyle, referencing impermanence or the journey of the immigrant who travels “lightly.” Introduction 2 Domestic Negotiations The third photo in the series, “1927, Going Back to Morelia,” features Fernandez as María waiting anxiously beside railroad tracks, sitting atop one large black chest (the historic version of traveling “lightly”), holding sewing needles in her right hand and papers in her left hand, possibly letters from family members or notes that she penned. Wearing late-1920s attire and makeup, and with a coiffed flapper hairstyle of the period, her fashion and dress departs from the Figure 1. Christina Fernandez,“María’s Great Expedition: 1919, Portland, Colorado,” 1995. Gelatin silver print, sepia-tone image, 16 × 12 inches. Permanent Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Courtesy of the artist. Introduction 3 first photo. In the fourth photo,“1930, Transporting Produce, Outskirts of Phoenix , Arizona,” Fernandez as María stands beside crates of produce, signifying the labor she performs as a fruit picker,while the fifth photo,“1945,AlisoVillage,Boyle Heights, California,” shows Fernandez as María standing in front of a clothesline, but this time outside the residence of a family she works for as a maid. She poses confidently in front of the camera and wears a simple maid’s uniform and apron. The final photo, “1950, San Diego,” depicts Fernandez as her great-grandmother standing in front of her stove; she holds a “99-Cent” store circular, signaling the recurring acts of survival in the present. Even as the settings, contexts, fashions, and postures change in each photo, the series consistently shows Fernandez, as María, in domestic and laboring roles (González 1995, 20). Each photo highlights María’s relationships to various spheres: from her defiance of traditional gender roles by leaving her husband while pregnant, to her physical labor in the agricultural fields,to domestic labor in her household and those of others, to the implied “space of her own” in the final photo, which through the “99-Cent” store circular centers the process of making the most “from the least” through the site of domesticity, or what Mesa-Bains terms“rasquache domesticana” (2003).Notably,the act of Fernandez posing as her great-grandmother María in each photo powerfully creates an “overlapping of identification between generations,” with a narrative that links the past with the present (González 1995, 20).Yet as Mario Ontiveros explains, Fernandez “does not collapse the distance between her life and her great-grandmother’s,but instead makes visible the act of tending to one’s history as a process that occurs in the present. It is a process that...