Toward a Latina Feminism of the Americas: Repression and Resistance in Chicana and Mexicana Literature

Chapter 2. CROSSING BORDERS AND BLURRING BOUNDARIES: SANDRA CISNEROS RE-VISIONS THE WAILING WOMAN

crossing borders and blurring boundaries: sandra cisneros re-visions the wailing woman Chapter 2 Chapter 1 discusses the early work of Chicana feminist critics as well as more recent significant scholarship by Chicana critics. When analyzing these critics’ work as a whole, the following political/theoretical projects may be seen: (1) a redefinition and transformation of family institutions;1 (2) a critique of the patriarchy in the dominant culture and in Chicanas’ own communities; (3) a collectivization of certain relevant cultural symbols; (4) an interrogation of harmful dualisms; and (5) an examination of issues of identity (especially sexual identity) and subjectivity.2 The fiction I invoke in this analysis is in dialogue with this project. One of the first published collective articulations by women of color in the United States to question the systems that have subordinated women is This Bridge Called My Back.3 Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga stress that theory for women of color is articulated through their particular ethnic and cultural experience; furthermore, the authors see writing as a “tool for self-preservation and revolution” (xiii). In Bridge, many contributors stress that theory needs to be viewed as personal as well as political. Through their political writing, these authors talk back to the patriarchal systems and the elitism of the academy . Not surprisingly, they challenge the feminist movement to look at its classism and racism. The authors’ feminist political theory derives from their lived experience, and a new brand of feminism has evolved: feminism on the border, or bridge feminism.4 In Making Face, Making Soul, Gloria Anzaldúa offers her own definition and application of theory: “Thus we need teor ías that will enable us to interpret what happens in the world, 20 toward a latina feminism of the americas that will explain how and why we relate to certain people in specific ways, that will reflect what goes on between inner, outer and peripheral ‘I’s within a person and between the personal ‘I’s and collective ‘we’ of our ethnic communities” (xxv). The blurring of boundaries between theory and lived experience is of primary importance in the theoretical model that Anzaldúa proposes; she insists that theorists and theory be responsive and responsible to the community. The root of theory, “theor,” is defined as “one who travels in order to see things, also an envoy, ambassador.”5 Anzaldúa, then, does not stray from the original meaning of theory, but, rather, embraces it within her own critique and encourages her audience to do the same. Furthermore, she racializes its meaning to make it meaningful to the women-of-color politics she is promoting. She reminds us that we need to look at personal experiences in order to articulate them with new theoretical models and to bring them into the larger community, not only into the academy. These models provide a more organic means of interpreting individual experience. In Anzaldúa’s adapted definition, then, theory by women of color would be found in unconventional places, since hegemonic culture often considers the work of women of color illegitimate. As Sonia Saldívar-Hull suggests: “Hegemony has so constructed the idea of method and theory that often we cannot recognize anything that is different from what the dominant discourse constructs. We have to look in nontraditional places for our theories: in the prefaces to anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies, in our cultural artifacts, our cuentos” (“Feminism on the Border,” 206). The political/theoretical agenda for women of color, as Saldívar-Hull suggests, is often embedded in their narrative texts. Certainly, other writers maintain similar agendas; however, because of the subject position of women of color, issues of race and class are often inherent in their literature. Specifically recalling Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, Saldívar-Hull notes: “Feminism on the border exists in a borderland not limited to geographic space, a feminism that resides in a space not acknowledged by hegemonic culture” (“Feminism on the crossing borders and blurring boundaries 21 Border,” 211). Women of color are articulating a literature of resistance. Repeatedly in the work of Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros, we see these border feminism projects being carried out, beginning with her first book of vignettes, published in 1984, and continuing with Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories.6 In 1985, The House on Mango Street was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award. In...