Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script by Cristina Herrera (review)

In the field of mothering and motherhood studies, there is a lack of literature which specifically focuses on the mother-daughter relationship in Chicana Studies. Cristina Herrera’s Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script fills this void in literary scholarship by examining a diverse array of Chicana writers that push the boundaries of maternal relationships. The text is a welcome addition to the canon, especially since it goes beyond the limited interpretations of Chicana mother-daughter relationships, motherhood, and mothering and recognizes the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, socioeconomics, and religion in shaping the relationship between Chicana mothers and daughters. With its widely interdisciplinary literary, cultural, religious, and historical sources, Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re) Writing the Maternal Script gives readers some much-needed critical perspectives and Herrera should be commended for her notable effort.

Contemporary Chicana Literature: (Re)Writing the Maternal Script focuses on the analysis of certain literary works about the Chicana mother-daughter relationships which experience empowerment, conflict, and/or identity differences. While such factors are not unique to Chicanas nor provide a universal discourse about Chicana motherhood, Herrera’s complex analysis of the protagonists in novels by Denise Chávez, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Carla Trujillo, and Melinda Palacio reconstructs the Chicana mother-daughter relationship and situates them in a newly written framework. This includes, as Herrera attests, the “insistence on defining motherhood and daughterhood on their own terms, rather than as culturally ascribed” (30) and the emergence beyond the static binaries appropriated by the three Chicana archetypal figures, Malinches, Lloronas, and Guadalupanas, that define women and mothers as either “good” or “bad.”

As a part of redefining Chicana motherhood and daughterhood, Herrera explores a daughter’s burgeoning sense of agency in Palacio’s novel Octotillo Dreams. In this text, the protagonist Isola channels her mother’s community activist spirit to help documented and undocumented Mexicans in Arizona. However, Isola only discovers her empowerment after her mother’s death. Likewise, the protagonist Regina feels self-empowerment after her mother’s death in Castillo’s novel The Guardians. She renegotiates her mother’s oppressive influence upon her life when her mother dies and dismantles the binary of virgin/mother by embracing both roles when she adopts a child and maintains her virginity into middle-age. Herrera also extends this complex model of motherhood to Chávez’s Face of an Angel. In this novel, the protagonist Soveida chooses to become a single mother and reject the legacy of motherhood as associated with maternal sacrifice, emotional suffering, and physical pain.

Another significant theme of the literary Chicana maternal relationship that Herrera addresses is the rejected mother and daughter. Cisneros’s novel Caramelo describes the contentious relationship between a daughter and mother when the daughter rejects her mother as she tries to create her own identity. This tension between mothers and daughters is also prominent in Trujillo’s edited anthology on Chicana lesbian relationships, The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About. Instead of focusing on the entire complication, Herrera explores Cherrie Moraga’s essay, “A Long Line of Vendidas” and Trujillo’s novel What Night Brings. Both texts demonstrate how the mother’s rejection of her daughter is caused by the daughter’s lesbianism. Yet, in Moraga’s text, the daughter essentially comes to love her mother because she loves Chicana women. On the other hand, the daughter in Trujillo’s text is never able to have a positive relationship with her mother and must seek an alternative maternal figure in her grandmother. By challenging the limited models of Chicana mother-daughter relationships that frequently dictate the analysis of Chicana literature, Herrera presents a fresh paradigm to the ensuing discussion of Chicana literary scholarship. She recognizes that Chicana mothering, like society, is changing and that it is time the academy understands this broad scope. In doing so, she succeeds in rewriting Chicana mother-daughter relationships and forming a new space of reexamining representations of Chicana mothers and daughters.