Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers, and: Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (review)

The ongoing call, especially on the part of women of color, for feminist work which intertwines the personal with the political (and hence with the intellectual) has resulted in the recent publication of several inter-view and "testimony" collections. Such collections usually come with titles variously referring to "interviews," "conversations," "tales," and "tellings," as well as, in the case of the Latina Feminist Group, "testimonios." Although titles are often reshaped by editors long before the book goes to print, it seems to me that the differences in choice of terminology--"conversations" as opposed to "testimonios"--is a starting place to discuss the distinctions, contributions, and limitations of the two books under review.

Karin Rosa Ikas's Chicana Ways: Conversations with Ten Chicana Writers is a series of interviews conducted between 1996 and 1997 while she was in the United States on a research trip funded by the German Academic Exchange Service. Conversations implies an exchange, a text which is not quite as overtly directed, and this softening of the ethno-graphic connotations of the field interview goes along with Ikas's framing of the collection. In her "Preface," Ikas frames her work by reformulating the "American Dream," noting that though Chicanas/os have been denied the dream, they too struggle "to overcome the tensions between a faulty present and a deeply ingrained faith in a better tomorrow" (xiii). Ikas has shaped her questions, and to some extent the outlines of the interviews, along the lines of a faith in what she calls "a humanistic world" which is, as she quotes from a recent "Statement on Artistic Freedom" by Chicano playwright Luis Valdéz, not just black and white but a "multitude of colors" (xv). More importantly, hers is an intellectual space where the trope of border crossing forms a touchpoint to which she returns in inter-view after interview. This reiterates the strong trend in 1980 and 1990 Chicana/o criticism toward the notion of a presumably hybrid, cultural identity--simultaneously transcultural and bicultural--which somehow manages to cross physical, metaphorical, and social borders at will.

The framework of the interviews shows this critical trend and the interviewees' responses to it. Ikas tends to ask questions that follow some of the major themes in Chicana writing and criticism over the last 30 years. For example, she asks some authors about their responses to Malinche, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and La Llorona, three symbolic Mexican figures whom Chicanas, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, worked to recuperate from their place in patriarchal thought. Again, Ikas asks her interviewees what their literary influences were; this important issue elicited some interesting answers, as did her question about these writers' relationships to white and African American feminism. This last question indeed made it clear that several writers looked to white feminism for some foundational feminist principles, but had to turn to African American feminism (especially in the 1970s) to help them conceptualize their own experiences as feminists of color. However, as Cherríe Moraga notes in her interview, such a move has never been reciprocal: there is very little evidence that black women thinkers have availed or even informed themselves of Chicana thought.

Ikas's thinking about Chicana lives is solidly framed by her desire to stimulate further interest in these writers, not at all a bad goal. But this desire is prompted by a liberal sense which implicitly assumes that race and gender struggles will be ameliorated--even won--through education about and (mostly academic) exposure to the Other. A piece of this assumption is her restating that to be Chicana is to be a border crosser. As might be expected, some writers--especially...