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Chapter 4 The Female Subject and Expressions of Life Experiences Social Practice and Imaginary Formations The border autobiographies created by González, Jaramillo, WilburCruce , and Ponce can be understood as a system of texts that interact dynamically. Each of these narratives provides the reader with information regarding a cultural explosion that affected various semiotic spaces. Therefore,each life story includes certain memories about the historical process, especially those events concerned with the changes brought about by this explosion.Ultimately,then,these texts function as a reserve of cultural memory that points to the autobiographer’s attitudes regarding land rights,home,history,and the cultural“other.” Of further relevance is the way in which discursive production and mechanisms of power and ideology are represented in the narratives of the four female writers considered here.As I suggested in chapter 2,each text provides the reader with a narration of the life course of an autobiographical subject.The life story presented in “Early Life and Education” involves the autobiographer’s development first of all in the space of the father’s home,then within the public space of school and the university, and finally in the space dominated by her husband’s endeavors.Similarly, the autobiographical “I” of Romance of a Little Village Girl charts the early phase of her development within the space of her father’s home and boarding school.Jaramillo then points to her transition into married life and the space of her husband’s home, and finally into the symbolic space of widowhood, where she lived first with her daughter and then alone.It is in this final space that the reader contemplates a woman who is capable of managing her“own”life. In A Beautiful, Cruel Country the autobiographical narrator also presents life experiences in terms of her position within her father’s home, The Female subject and expressions of life experiences 137 especially his ranch.As I have explained,those spaces such as“the Cerro” and “the gap” involve the autobiographer’s initiation into the father’s realm. Activities involving a female space are also presented. That is, Wilbur-Cruce recalls her mother’s activities within the home, a place of comfort and nurturing for a young girl. Ponce’s Hoyt Street also emphasizes the development of the autobiographical“I”within the space of her parents’Mexican American home in the barrio.Ponce further focuses on her development at school and ultimately within a private space where she discovers her own sense of sexuality. In this chapter I examine the social world mapped out by each autobiographer and the manner in which she articulates her subjugated position within certain cultural and religious systems.As part of her life story each writer focuses on certain practices within a cultural space. Indeed, as suggested by Edward Said,“Culture is a sort of theater where various political and ideological causes engage one another. . . . Culture can even be a battleground on which causes expose themselves to the light of day.” Said also notes that “stories . . . become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.”1 I would argue,therefore,that because each life story examined here presents the reader with a social world and various types of cultural practice, the autobiographer is clearly exposing “to the light of day” the Mexican American experience within the United States. However, each of these life narratives also presents the story of a female subject who asserts her own sense of identity in a sphere marked by a patriarchal system of authority.Thus,I continue my reading of these four authors by examining the discursive practices evident within their narratives, particularly in terms of the way each text presents a vision of a world that is affected by ideological constructs and struggles that are reflected in the realm of family life where discourse circulates. Here I am interested in how the power structures of religious and cultural institutions and doctrines affect the way the female subject represents herself within the life story.Indeed,as Foucault has argued,“in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organized and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures whose role it is to ward off its powers and dangers.”2 To initiate my discussion,then,I present a brief overview of the prohibitory aspects of discourse and procedures of control that serve as the basis for analyzing those sociocultural aspects that have been chosen...

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