With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

CHAPTER 6. Shameless Histories: Talking Race/Talking Sex

CHAPTER 6 Shameless Histories: Talking Race/Talking Sex How will we choose to describe our past, now, at this moment, as an enunciation in the present? —EMMA PÉREZ, THE DECOLONIAL IMAGINARY Chicana lesbian fictions demonstrate a pressing concern with history.1 Many of the stories I am discussing in this work create historical narratives that situate characters within a long line of women who were proud of their sexuality and their Mexican heritage.2 To understand this literary engagement with queer Chicana history, I have found it extremely valuable to examine the research of Chicana feminist historians. For example, Deena González, in her study of Spanish-Mexican women in Santa Fe, New Mexico, from 1848 to 1898, articulates how feminism informs her work: Widows are frequently described as wives without husbands. I instead view them as unmarried women, women unpartnered with men; and I place them in the context of generally being unmarried, which was a far more important condition in frontier New Mexico than we have been led to believe. Most adult women spent their lives in a state of unmarriedness. . . . If we focus on their relationship primarily to [men] . . . we miss some crucial elements of their existence. Women were indeed bound in marriage. . . . Women also managed to disavow marriages , to obtain annulments, and, in many cases, to outlive husbands and never remarry. (2000, 7) Shameless Histories 129 González argues that the historical means of evaluating women—that is, in relation to men—obscures “crucial elements of their existence,” including their work, their class status, and their relationships to other women. By showing that many women “managed to disavow marriages [,] . . . obtain annulments[, and] . . . outlive husbands,” she seems to be saying that the women themselves refused to be defined solely by their marital status. Like González, the authors of Chicana lesbian fictions create Chicanas of the past who live their lives independent of men. In so doing, they are both claiming and creating a history of Chicana lesbianism. Their work confronts the erasure of Chicanas/os from the history of the American West, of Chicanas from Chicano history, and of Chicana lesbians from gay and lesbian histories. In this chapter I focus on three short stories published during the 1980s: Jo Carrillo’s “María Littlebear” (1982), Gloria Anzaldúa’s “La historia de una marimacho” (1989), and Rocky Gámez’s “A Baby for Adela” (1988). I do not claim that these authors are representative of Chicana lesbians writing in the 1980s—indeed, only Anzaldúa and Gámez identify as lesbians—but argue that the stories reveal a search for and creation of legitimating histories of lesbians in Chicana communities . As the other chapters in this book show, these are not the only stories in which this theme can be found, nor is history the only theme in Chicana lesbian fiction. My goal is to introduce a particular group of texts to demonstrate how they take up and remake history for Chicana lesbians. Their stories, whether passed on, reprinted, or lost in the archives , tell “histories” through short fiction. These three stories employ three different popular forms: Carrillo’s “María Littlebear” creates fiction in the form of an oral history; Anzald úa’s “La historia de una marimacho,” employs the Mexican corrido; and Rocky Gámez’s “A Baby for Adela” plays with pulp fiction. Carrillo’s story tells a first-person narrative as if it were oral history, a form that has emerged as the optimal methodology for documenting the lived history of working-class people. Progressive programs such as women’s studies and Chicano/a studies employ oral history in their pedagogy: undergraduate students become researchers, taking down the histories of parents and grandparents, community elders, migrants and immigrants. In “La historia de una marimacho,” Anzaldúa creates her own version of the corrido—the Mexican border ballad, a narrative produced 130 With Her Machete in Her Hand by the border cultures of South Texas. The corrido has been an oppositional form of history since the eighteenth century. Widely recognized as a forerunner of Chicano/a literature and Chicano/a history, it praised male heroes such as Gregorio Cortez, who stood up against the racial violence of the Texas Rangers. In contrast to these “organic” narrative forms that emerge from the community, engaged by Carrillo and Anzaldúa, Gámez references pulp fiction, mass-produced paperback books of...