Chicano Vibrations: Notions of Vital Materiality in Lucha Corpi’s Black Widow’s Wardrobe

At First Glance . . .

The cover of lucha corpi’s novel Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999) features a woman’s illuminated torso (Fig. 1). Her face, from her mouth upward, is in shadows, as are her arms. Her hands emerge from the darkness and are represented in the act of pulling apart her robe to reveal her bare chest. There we see not her breasts but the outline of a house on fire, its flames reaching up to the woman’s collarbones. However, what at first looks like a house also looks like a spider, with the house’s central cupola standing in for the spider’s head and the far-reaching flames extended like spider legs. Then again, the incandescent image bears the same outline as La Iglesia de la Conchita, the sixteenth-century church in Coyoacán, a neighborhood in Mexico City, at which La Malinche, Hernán Cortés’s indigenous mistress, reportedly worshipped (Fig. 2).

Each of these images—house, church, spider—correlate with the novel’s plot, which features a protagonist, Licia Lecuona, also known as the Black Widow, who kills her husband. Licia believes herself to be the late twentieth-century reincarnation of La Malinche, and her final act in the novel is to set fire to her own house in Oakland, California. The enigmatic cover image, however, suggests philosophical themes beyond this plot. It recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertions in Nature that the “nature in us must have some relation to the nature outside of us” (206). The cover image presents a figure both in and of its world—not

Fig 1.

Cover Image of Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999). This cover photo is reprinted with permission from the publisher of “Black Widow’s Wardrobe” by Lucha Corpi (©1999 Arte Público Press—University of Houston).

Fig 2.

La Iglesia de la Conchita, Coyoacán, Mexico. Copyright Philipp Müller; photo reprinted by permission.

a subject separated from its surroundings but a being materially imbricated in her built environment, much like a spider who inhabits a structure crafted from her own bodily secretions. In the cover image, the spider-house-church is superimposed on the woman’s torso, and yet it glows as if from within. The cover image thus suggests that the nature outside the woman bears some relation to what is inside her, being one and the same.

Merleau-Ponty was moving toward articulating a deep physical connection between the human and nonhuman in the lectures collected in Nature, delivered near the end of his life. Nature has received considerable attention from scholars engaged in the turn toward a new materialism, scholars such as the political philosopher William Connolly, who uses the later Merleau-Ponty as a staging ground for what Connolly calls a “philosophy of immanence” or “becoming” (178).¹ For Connolly, Merleau-Ponty’s depiction of humans as not just connected to their physical environment but as forming integral parts of it grounds a specific idea of the universe as being sustained by “uncertain exchanges between stabilized formations and mobile forces”; that is, by the motion and interaction of matter, out of which new matter and new forces emerge (179). Connolly’s “immanent materialism” is foundational to his theory of progressive political change, and the catalytic interactions central to his and Merleau-Ponty’s work ripple throughout Black Widow’s Wardrobe.

The cover image offers an initial illustration of the connections the novel draws across time and space. I highlight and expand on those connections by using Black Widow’s Wardrobe as a case study for how new materialist philosophies can help articulate a new mode of chicanidad, one that accounts for questions of identity, political engagement, and cultural production. In the novel, connections are metaphysical, such as Lecuona’s belief that she is the reincarnation of La Malinche, but they are also empirical, as evidenced in the very concrete story of pre-Columbian artifacts that structures the...