Building From the Embers: A Mexicana-Chicana Memoir

The last five years have witnessed an emergence of several publications of Chicana memoirs in the form narratives and essays, one of the most recent ones being Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us (2013). Writing memoir is not new to Chicana and Mexican-American women’s literature as argued by scholars like María Herrera-Sobek and Clara Lomas, with precursors to twentieth and twenty first century Chicana autobiography with nineteenth-century writers like Adelina Otero-Warren, Cleofas M. Jaramillo and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca. Yet, to have women writers who came-of-writing-age during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s provides a distinctive frame of reference from which to analyze these recent publications. From Cherrie Moraga’s A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness: Writings 2000-2010 (2011), to Sandra Cisneros’ much anticipated memoir A House of My Own: Stories From My Life (2015) and Ana Castillo who, as the keynote speaker at the 2015 Society for the Study of American Women Writers biennial conference, announced her upcoming memoir in 2016 Black Dove: Essays on Mamá, Mi’jo and Me. Among these Chicana writers we also find Lucha Corpi’s recent publication Confessions of a Book Burner, a diverse collection of stories and photographs that travel to and from the colonial Mexican town of San Luis Potosí to the intense and transformative cities of San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, California.

Corpi, a Mexicana-Chicana writer born in Jaltípan, Veracruz, raised in San Luis Potosí, migrated and matured as a writer in Berkeley. She is a well-known poet, Bay Area educator and has provided the literary world with two of the first contemporary Chicana feminist detectives with her characters, Gloria Damasco and Dora Saldaña. In her essay “La página roja” (The red page), drawing its title from the crime section in Mexican newspapers, Corpi connects her fascination with mystery, crime and murder to her childhood interactions with her family. Narrating how her father would poorly hide la página roja from his children, attempting to protect them from the world’s vices, only to have the school age Corpi readily find the copy and hungrily study it. To hearing how the her family matriarchs: grandmother, aunts, cousins and mother give each other advice on how to get rid of an abusive husband without raising suspicion or punishment; the influence of these memories lies in Corpi’s groundbreaking work as the first Chicana feminist mystery writer. Confessions of a Book Burner touches upon a diverse range of experiences from an essay that contributes to the emerging fields of Animal Studies and Environmental Humanities to the lack of accuracy and certainty that memory and remembering holds. Her essays do not necessarily follow a chronological order, they rather are intertwined with her childhood memories, serving as reflection pieces that help uncover the woman she has become and who she understands herself to be today.

If you have ever seen Corpi publically perform, you will also hear her melodic timbre in her writing, giving the essay collection a full-bodied voice. She takes pauses on landmark moments, especially focusing on her activism as an educator and artist during the Chicano Movement in the San Francisco Bay Area; to what does it mean to embody and live up to her artful name “Lucha Corpi.” When I first mentioned Corpi and her work to a professor from Mexico City, her first question was “Is that a pen name?” When I told her it was a combination of a nickname and her family name, she immediately responded with “Qué curioso ¿no? El nombre de la escritora Chicana también significa el cuerpo en combate.” / “How interesting, no? The name of the Chicana writer also means the body in conflict.” While this conversation occurred years before Corpi’s memoir was published, the writer’s awareness of the uniqueness of her name does not elude her. The essay “Also Known As: A Woman’s...