The Will to Heal : Psychological Recovery in the Novels of Latina Writers

6: No Way Home: Traumatic Returns in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters

u 149 Chapter Six No Way Home Traumatic Returns in Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters What is the “homeland” of my relatives? What is my relationship to this homeland? What are my cultural roots? In search of a new understanding of the cultural self, in the mid-980s and 990s, Chicana authors began posing these questions in their literature. Mixing autobiography and fiction, they have explored the personal process of leaving the United States to embark on a return journey to Mexico. For some this return journey has marked a retracing of the initial departure and a return to the birthplace. For those born in the United States, the return has been an explorative journey to the land their parents or grandparents left behind but always remembered. In each literary representation of return, the journey presents a highly charged geographical, cultural, and psychological undertaking that raises many questions. How does the traveler encounter her parents’ or grandparents’ homeland? How does this place resonate with past memories and present dreams? What cultural behaviors and social practices seem familiar or foreign? Why do the protagonists of Ana Castillo’s novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, appear in Mexico as “two snags in the social pattern”? Initially, accounts of return represented a break with the Chicano canon. Narratives written in the ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s primarily focused on the experiences of migrants and Chicanos living in the United States, revealing the exclusions and prejudices that these groups encountered as they entered and fought to assert themselves within the Anglo-centered establishment. A return to the homeland proved too difficult; as Norma Klahn has stated, the journey “further problematized an already complicated identity crisis” (“Writing the fahey.indd 149 8/10/07 10:13:50 AM 150 u Chapter Six Border” 38). Within this context, Ana Castillo’s first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters, published in 986, is one of the first Chicana novels to posit a full-fledged return to the cultural homeland; it makes a journey that many were hesitant or unprepared to pursue. In undertaking this journey, Castillo dares to open a dialogue that soon explodes after the 989 publication of Gloria Anzaldúa’s La Frontera/The Borderlands, and which eventually leads to emerging transnational alliances between Chicana and Mexicana authors that are characterized, as Klahn has shown, by a common interest in contesting hegemonic nationalist discourses (“Chicana and Mexicana Feminist Practices” 64).2 Also a work of fictional autobiography, The Mixquiahuala Letters plots the excitement but also the disillusions and difficulties that this initial attempt at dialogue presents. The fictional protagonist of the novel, Teresa, returns to Mexico, her parents’ original home, to escape her oppressive life in the United States and to uncover a freer, more spiritual identity. In Teresa’s mind, her return to Mexico will represent a homecoming, a return to the place where she belongs and an opportunity to recover the true identity she has lost. Before her departure, she refers to Mexico as a cultural paradise from which she, by way of her mother’s experience, was expelled. She chooses to return to Mexico to find deep identification, the origins of her feminine “native spirit” (24). Teresa’s Mexico is idealized, caught in a transhistorical time and in the symbolic ideals of maternal love: “Mexico City, revisited time and again since childhood, over and again as a woman. i sometimes saw the ancient Tenochtitlán, home of my mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmother, as an embracing bosom, to welcome me back and rock my weary body and mind to sleep in its tumultuous, overpopulated , throbbing, ever-pulsating heart” (98). Teresa’s actual return as a young adult reveals a less perfect reality. In Mexico, she confronts the living residues of colonial and imperial orders and on multiple trips there finds herself oppressed by deeply held prejudices, attitudes, and cultural mores. In her travels, Teresa confronts a society that, like the United States, maintains a hierarchy structured by the privileges of male entitlement, wealth, and fahey.indd 150 8/10/07 10:13:51 AM No Way Home u 151 whiteness. This encounter is traumatic for Teresa who desperately seeks relief and repair. In the Mexico she has idealized she is ostracized : Mexicans perceive her in pejorative terms as a gringa (75) or as a pocha (27) and treat her as if she were a prostitute. Rather than find belonging and...