Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Borderlands

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 1, 2000 Roberta Fernández’s Intaglio: Border Crossings and Mestiza Feminism in the Borderlands John Sumanth Muthyala A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of tension. —Gloria Anzaldúa The Border is the site of translation —David E. Johnson With the signing of the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo in 1848, the US annexed large sections of northern Mexico that included California, New Mexico, Arizona, and parts of Colorado, Nevada, and Utah.1 But even as the inhabitants of these newly acquired territories of the US found themselves “without land, without a country, and without a voice” (Saldívar 12) and had to sever all ties with Mexico, they were not completely assimilated into mainstream American culture. Soon, a distinct culture began to emerge in this region, in the interstices of Anglo-American and Mexican traditions, a culture that was neither fully Mexican nor completely American. It was the culture of the borderlands. In Intaglio: A Novel in Six Stories Roberta Fernández presents six tales of border crossing, relocation and exile as she charts the travails of a Texas border family struggling to create a sense of home and belonging in the borderlands. These six stories stress the enduring presence and influence of Amerindian and Mexican thought patterns and cultural forms in the “domestic spaces” sanctioned and occupied by border women and the manner in which they often contest and realign these spaces to register discontent and opposition. Named after the women that Nenita, the narrator, describes, these short narratives foreground border women in a variety of roles—as dancers, seamstresses, tarot-card readers, storytellers , historians, and healers—reworking several folk tales, signs, and symbols Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30 (2000) 93 such as the curandera, the bruja, and la llorona, among others. As they cross traditionally sanctioned roles and boundaries designed to place them under systems of hegemony, these women insert themselves into the public sphere of work and refashion their social and gendered roles and identities . It is a reworking that engenders a feminist consciousness, or, as Sonia Saldívar-Hull would have it, a “bridge feminism” that seeks to make connections across the divides of race, culture, language, ethnicity, and nation (209). This feminism does not succumb to the seductive appeal of binary configurations, pure epistemologies, and stable ontologies. Instead, engendered as it is in the “coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference,” this feminism speaks in a tongue that is forked even as it mongrelizes its cultural affiliations while embracing moments and processes of ambiguity and contradiction (Anzaldúa 78). In short, it is a mestiza feminism of the borderlands.2 Rather than dealing with each story separately, in this essay I focus on some pertinent issues that the stories attempt to address, namely, the effects of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) on the US Southwest; the gradual but inevitable process of Americanization in border families; the attempt by borderlanders to cling to native cultural practices; the continuing yet paradoxical significance of curanderismo and archetypal figures like la llorona in shaping the world views of borderlanders who grow up torn between conflicting traditions and cultures; and finally, the affirmation of la conciencia de la mestiza that “keeps breaking the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (80), as Anzaldúa so aptly puts it. During the Revolution, unable to adjust to the constant political tension and turmoil in Mexico, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans either left their families behind, hoping to come back and take them to the US, or tried to migrate to the Southwest with their entire families. Once inside the US, their impulse was not so much to assimilate into mainstream culture and society and become American citizens as it was to maintain a lifestyle comparatively better than the one they had led in Mexico. Moreover , after 1848, the Southwest was inexorably drawn into the burgeoning industrial and urban economy of northern and Midwestern United States, with the result that, by 1912, the border regions had developed...