Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative by Theresa Delgadillo (review)

Gloria Anzaldúa's borderland theory and philosophy have inspired the production of Chicana feminist critical practice in the humanities, social sciences, and interdisciplinary fields of study. Even though the core of Anzaldúa's philosophical project centered on her elaboration of spirituality, there are few critical literary studies that have taken to heart this important aspect of her work. Theresa Delgadillo in Spiritual Mestizaje: Religion, Gender, Race, and Nation in Contemporary Chicana Narrative brilliantly takes on this theoretical task by offering a critical examination of how spiritual mestizaje is depicted and enacted in Chicana feminist symbolic production including narratives and visual representations.¹

Delgadillo superbly expounds and engages Anzaldúa's conceptualization of spiritual mestizaje, and in doing so, produces an elegant and intellectually rigorous text that contributes to a complex understanding of the relationship between spirituality, decolonial practices, nation, gender, and sexuality. Delgadillo argues that at the center of Anzaldúa's writing—autobiographical, historical, theoretical, and poetic—is a process of transformation and renewal. Spiritual mestizaje is at the heart of renovations of the self and community as it relates to "one's relationship to the sacred through a radical and sustained multimodal and self-reflexive critique of oppression in all its manifestations and a creative and engaged participation in shaping life that honors the sacred" (p. 1). Spirituality, then, refers to non-Western and non-institutional relations to the sacred and to an understanding of the interrelationship among the material and non-visible worlds and among all living beings. Delgadillo proposes that spiritual mestizaje requires a shift from individual to collective perspectives, highlighting principled commitments to social justice. Spiritual mestizaje is grounded in history and involves the multiple spheres of intellect, rationality, psyche, spirit, the body, and material realities.

In her study Delgadillo develops a theory and methodology that is nurtured by memory, where the link between mind, body, and spirit and between the material and symbolic worlds is enacted. For her analysis, Delgadillo deploys Anzaldúa's conceptualization of autohisteoría, a term for narrative that shares much with Latin American testimonio but makes its theorizing and critique clear in its efforts to advance new paradigms—new ways of thinking and being in the world, including cross-cultural understanding and praxis.

Eight texts selected for analysis include Denise Chávez's Face of an Angel (1994); Demetria Martínez's Mother Tongue (1994); Norma Cantú's Canícula (1995); Kathleen Alcala's trilogy Spirits of the Ordinary (1998), The Flower in the Skull (1999), and Treasures in Heaven (2000); and the documentaries Flowers for Guadalupe (1995) by Judith Gleason and the Feminist Collective of Xalapa, and Lourdes Portillo's Señorita Extraviada (2001). These texts represent an eclectic body of work that engages and represents spiritual mestizaje and borderland sensitivities. In their unique ways, these texts engage in a critical examination of patriarchy, nationalism, colonialism, and class exploitation that honors the formation of alternative female subjectivities that reclaim women's bodies and sexuality. The three analytical chapters examine how Chicana narratives address different aspects of spiritual mestizaje allowing for a complex understanding of the relationship between spirituality, decolonization, and multiple forms of oppression.

In the chapter "Bodies of Knowledge," Delgadillo turns her attention to the formation of sexual agency in the female characters of Chávez's Face of an Angel and Martínez's Mother Tongue with a larger quest for a spirituality that leads to critical insights and commitment to social justice. Both texts provide a critical discourse on the patriarchal family, working class sensibilities, and gender norms. While these are not new themes for Chicana feminist writing, what is new is how these are connected with spirituality. That is, the development of feminist subjects is produced through the interrelationship between material realities, power, gender, sexuality, and spirituality. The narratives represent transformative processes that allow the characters to create a feminist spiritual praxis...