Telling Border Life Stories: Four Mexican American Women Writers

Introduction

Introduction Contemporary MexicanAmerican autobiography began to be recognized as a“distinct genre”with the publication in 1988 of a special issue of the Americas Review.1 This publication focused on“U.S. Hispanic Autobiography ,” and the works of writers such as Oscar Zeta Acosta (The Brown Buffalo), Ernesto Galarza (Barrio Boy), Richard Rodríguez (Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez), Gary Soto (Living Up the Street) and Anthony Quinn (The Original Sin) were deemed as important contributors to the development of the genre. Of particular interest in this collection of essays is Genaro Padilla’s study entitled“‘Yo sola aprendí’: Contra-Patriarchal Containment in Women’s NineteenthCentury California Personal Narratives,” which includes references to nineteenth-century women such as Apolinaria Lorenzana, María de las Angustias de la Guerra,Eulalia Pérez,María Inocente Pico deAvila,Rosalía Vallejo de Leese whose autobiographical utterances involve self-identification and “gender related issues” that deal with the woman’s realm of experience.2 The narratives provided by these women form part of the Bancroft Collection of the University of California.3 In a more recent discussion of contemporary trends in the development of Mexican American autobiography, Charles Tatum has presented a list of twenty-six works that he says have contributed to Chicana/o canon building. In his lecture “Voces únicas: Trends in Contemporary Chicana/o Autobiography,”delivered in 2006 at the International Conference on Chicano Literature, he mentions the works of Acosta, Galarza, Rodríguez,and Soto.Of this list of works,which is not an exhaustive one, Tatum points to autobiographies written by the following women:Gloria Anzaldúa,Norma Cantú,Gloria López-Stafford,Pat Mora,Cherríe Moraga, Sheila Ortiz Taylor, Sandra Ortiz Taylor, and Mary Helen Ponce. In addition to this list he also includes This Bridge Called My Back:Writings by Radical Women of Color, an anthology that includes life writing by women of color. It is important to note that a number of scholars have undertaken the study of autobiographies, work that entails the life narrations and writing of MexicanAmericans who express their experiences during the 2 inTrodUCTion Transition period (1848–1910), the Interaction period (1910–42), and the Chicano period (1943–present).4 As I have mentioned,Padilla’s archival work in the Bancroft Library of the University of California Berkeley has resulted in the uncovering and analysis of narratives concerned with early Mexican American life experiences. His 1993 text, My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography, involves a close look at the works of Mariano G.Vallejo’s “Recuerdos históricos y personales tocante a la alta California,” Juan Seguín’s Personal Memoirs, and Rafael Chacón’s “Memorias.” These narratives provide documentation of the Mexican “discursive response to American conquest” prior to and after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.5 Padilla’s text includes a detailed discussion of the women whose testimonials were recorded by the Bancroft field team, and he also presents analysis regarding the importance of Romance of a LittleVillage Girl by New Mexican author Cleofas Jaramillo. Here he emphasizes Jaramillo’s “desire to inscribe her own experience”(197) through her life story.It is through the “discursive response” evident in these narratives, then, that alternative histories become evident;thus MexicanAmerican autobiography can be seen as situated“outside the formal boundaries scholars have traditionally reserved for autobiography as a singularly self-disclosing text”(29). Besides these early California memoirs, those autobiographies involving the lives of women prior to the Chicano movement are of special importance.The autobiography of Olga BeatriceTorres,Memorias de mi viaje, written in 1913, presents an account of the author’s family members as they flee the Mexican Revolution and later settle in El Paso,Texas. Another recovered autobiography, The Rebel,6 written in the 1920s, is a narrative written by LeonorVillegas de Magnón,who was originally from Mexico but then became a border activist in the area of Laredo,Texas.In her text the author narrates her support of the Mexican Revolution as a member of the Junta Revolucionaria and as founder of the Cruz Blanca, which offered care to the revolutionary forces in Mexico and the United States.Jovita González is considered one of the“escritoras méxico-americanas pioneras en la producción literaria generada en el sur deTexas.”7 In addition to portions of her writing that were published in Folklore Publications , she also coauthored Caballero: A Historical Novel...