Speaking From the Body: Latinas on Health and Culture (review)

Speaking from the Body is an edited collection of 12 illness narratives, written by group of highly successful Latina women who tell their life stories in the context of wrestling a range of medical and chronic health issues: cancer, dementia, chronic pain, obesity, hypertension, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic lupus, and high-risk pregnancy. The contributors are all Latinas, all either academics or professionals (ranging from physicians and a clinical psychologist, to professors of anthropology, romance languages, women’s studies, and Latin American studies). The purpose of such a collection, the editors write, is to call attention to the way that cultural narratives can be an important opening for accessing critical information about constructions of illness and the network of social relationships that formulate the health status and worldview of Latina women. The editors use the term Latina to emphasize the panethnic solidarity of diverse persons of Hispanic origin in the United States.

The editors’ purpose is gracefully achieved. Beautifully written and painstakingly referenced, these stories provide a dynamism and fluidity to understanding Latina culture in a comprehensive, yet not overly simple way. The medical and chronic health issues described in this book are not exclusive to Latina women; indeed they are all too common among all U.S. women. The particular ways that the contributors confront these health issues, however, reflect the traditions, history, and personal and spiritual connections specifically associated with Latina culture. The link between mother and daughter, for example, is poignantly illustrated in Enriqueta Valdez-Curiel’s story as a daughter whose mother struggles with the constant pain of osteoarthritis, yet suffers from the “pain of a soul outraged and trampled by the man she loved, the most, my father.” Her mother’s physical decline, in parallel with her mental degradation from overt emotional abuse by the author’s father, highlights the persistence of inequity in gender relations, historically constituted from Pan American systems of patriarchy. Clara Lomas’ essay, “Letters to Ceci,” explores the experience of thyroid disease through the medium of personal connection by letters; the interconnection of body and spirit is delicately explicated in AnaLouise Keating’s documented conversations of poet and writer Gloria Anzaldua’s struggle with the bodily manifestations of diabetes before her death.

Although these are stories of suffering, personal agency is brimming throughout these narratives. Despite the adversity of the relentless deterioration of Parkinson’s disease, for example, Adaljiza Sosa-Riddell’s narrative is a poetic triumph of the capacity for spiritual liberation despite physical decline. “I know that a part of me will never resign itself to my limitations . . .” Sosa-Riddell writes, imploring others, “to make the world a better place for Chicanas/os and thus a better place for everyone.” In fact, most of the narratives reflect the great sacrifices that Latinas (usually the authors’ mothers), made to make the world a better place for their children, the fruits of which are borne in the successful careers and, for many, the socio-economic mobility of their daughters, although at enormous cost.

The likely readers for this collection are Latinas in all walks of life as well as academic professionals and students in the humanities, area studies, medical anthropology, and the liberal arts. For these students, the collection brings the together the social context and metaphorical meanings assigned to illness in an appropriately literary, yet accessible way. This book is a significant new contribution, however, for students in health professions training, as a text in cultural competence training.

The book’s final chapter presents the aggregate socio-economic, demographic, and medical profile of Latina health. This might have more usefully been woven into the introduction to the book, where it would ease readers more accustomed to scientific writing into the literary nature of the narratives. The editors’ crucial penultimate chapter, which summarizes the significance of illness metaphors, social context, extended family, therapeutic listening, and communal identity formation for Latina women’s...