reflections at the end of the day

Ahh what a long way we've come from the tedious pink book, which actually turned out to be the least tedious because it provoked the most heated debate. The best aspect of this class was that the books had so much to offer discussion-wise, from the deeper-than-a-parlor-drama Who Would Have Thought It, to the enraptured prose of Marti, to the fragmented and pretzel-like y no se lo trago la tierra, to the visceral, multi-layered and gutsy Cisneros, and the poignant, nuanced tales of Alvarez and Rodriguez. The class had some interesting thoughts to offer on these books, and it was good that we were able to air our thoughts on complex and sometimes sensitive subjects - including immigrant experiences, thoughts on gender relations and sexuality, and personal relations to and interpretations of the texts.

The majority of these books I probably would've never read, having heard of none of the authors before except for Marti, but I'm glad I have. The books definitely fleshed out for me what it is to be Chicano, as well as gave me insight into the lives of Latin American immigrants, whether privileged ones that hop back and forth between countries like Alvarez's characters or those who have been exiled and engage with their home country only through memory like Rodriquez's characters. Many of the same themes have emerged in these texts, like the importance of language and voice to the self, the importance of carving out a space that belongs to one's self or one's people, the fragmentation of identity as a person attempts to assimilate two cultures into one self.

It's interesting that such a diverse group of writers (in terms of time period, social class, place of origin and gender) were all drawn towards the same themes, I suppose that's how eternal and pervasive they are. Quite different from our complaints about the character Yolanda, perhaps self-reflexive to a fault, whose experience of dislocation is dramatically expressed as a "violation" that lies "at the center of my art", Rodriguez talked of her experience of physical and emotional dislocation as almost commonplace. With this in mind, Latin American literature "north of the Rio Grande" is relevant far beyond its own demographic, but for the majority of the world's population that immigrates, bifurcates, speaks in two tongues, crosses borders, falls in love with the "other," seeks a better life elsewhere, raises children far from home, doesn't know where "home" is.

La Avenida Burrard

For some reason and a body to remember with doesn't draw me in or provoke me as much as the novels by Cisneros and Alvarez. I can't quite pin-point why. However, the novel does bring up some interesting questions pertaining to nationality and national identity, the choices people make when choosing where to put their roots down, dislocation and generation gaps. Like Cisneros, who often let the reader "overhear" conversations between characters on the phone or read texts written by the characters like the little notes of prayer, Rodriguez shows communication between mother and daughter in a one-sided phone conversation and through letters. This seems to emphasize the distance between the characters because their communication is not a single body composed of two voices, but two voices in isolation, separated by a gap that is at the same time technological, geographical and emotional.

Rodriguez's stories don't come off as fragmented as those by Cisneros, but they are still quite varied in tone and content. Some present the current lives of the characters (ex. "black hole"), others relate isolated memories of nostalgic or traumatic episodes (ex. "adios piazzolla" "i sing, therefore i am") and still others tell stories that reveal the Canada or Chile experienced by the characters (ex. "saudades"). The violence of "i sing, therefore i am" was unexpected and brutal, but it reminds you why this immigration, this fork in people's lives, this book took place, due to the Pinochet dictatorship and the horror it caused for countless individuals and families. Though these people try to overcome the past so that it does not poison and cripple their current lives, it never fades completely, for as the title suggests it is not only the mind that remembers but the body.

The place imagery in the book is especially vivid for me because I've been to many of the Chilean locations as well as the Vancouver ones. I enjoyed the dream scene where "Stanley Park would show up by the ocean in Vina del Mar, or the Alameda would replace Burrard Street in downtown Vancouver." I liked how this fusion of places reminds us how the city is experienced so differently by its inhabitants, especially by immigrants, they imbue it with new meanings and make associations that others would never think of. It was interesting to hear Canada described from an immigrant's perspective, from a person that imagines Canada as a Switzerland that doesn't quite make the final cut in National Geographic, from a person who describes one of Canada's greatest shames, the residential schools and their legacy, with the sad and resigned observation that terrible treatment of Indigenous peoples is common across the Americas.

Incidentally, I just thought of another fact that, whether by chance or design, draws the course material together. Both the first and the last books we read in this course are written by women with a Spanish mother tongue who explicitly expressed their fears about writing in English - if it would be possible, legitimate, and well received. Maria Ruiz de Burton was worried that her English text would be picked apart for faults if readers knew that English was not her mother tongue and Carmen Rodriguez had to be encouraged by fellow writers to write in English, although she does not give her reasons. Despite these barriers, both felt the need to communicate with an English-speaking audience. I guess that relates to overarching questions in this course which could be who is Latino literature in the US/Canada written for, why is it written, who are considered legitimate authors and what does their language choices have to do with this?

The Devolution of the Garcia Girls

I enjoyed the fact that this book was written in reverse chronological order and I’ve been wondering how exactly that alters our impressions of its events and characters. One aspect is that the first half of the book is caught up with the adult lives of the sisters, so those of their parents become overshadowed and minimized, which can lead the reader to misinterpret their characters. When the girls are adults, Papi seems like a rather depressed and difficult old man who makes great demands on everyone and emotionally distant when Yolanda is hospitalized, and when they are teenagers he is a social hazard (with his embarrassing accent and out-of-place Island-style clothing) and a tyrant (with his ripping up of Yolanda’s masterpiece). However, when they are children you see how these behaviors emerged; Papi grew up in a culture where men were taught to guard their emotions, he was hunted by the secret police in a country where any type of dissension was a death wish, and he worked hard and sacrificed his dignity so that his family could have a good life. The same goes for Mami who is just a fussy old woman who persistently mangles English expressions in the first half of the book, then her personal desires, quirky personality, and inventiveness are revealed in the second part of the book, and finally we see her as a young mother who must bravely be interrogated by secret police for her husband and pack up her life and four daughters in a single night to go to a new country. It’s interesting to see these characters get fleshed out just as the four women revert back to children.

The other aspect of the reverse chronological order is that we see the characters of the four women unravel in complexity, and we can analyze their influences, experiences and traumas with the benefit of knowing the final outcome. It’s interesting to read about these kids’ experiences when at the back of your mind you know that she turned out to be a psychologist, or she was hospitalized with a mental breakdown, or she was the one who had a stable marriage. Many of the chapters are written in first person, as if they were the autobiography of one of the girls. The final chapter is written by Yolanda and she is definitely aware of how her childhood experiences shaped her adult life. For many pages we read about the unfortunate kitten-in-drum incident, then on the final two pages she presses the fast forward button and sums up the next twenty years and psychoanalyzes the source of her artistic angst. I guess the main benefit of the book moving chronologically backwards is that it jolts the reader out of the complacency with which we follow normally unfolding stories, which makes us very conscious of time itself and how our current and past selves are linked together through continuing emotions, memories of significant events, impressions, recurrent nightmares, etc.

Yo/Yoyo/Joe/Cuquita/Yosita/Jolinda/Yolanda

I enjoyed reading the first part of Garcia Girls. Maybe I wasn't as captivated as with Cisneros' stories, which were more forceful and had a more varied narrative style, but Alvarez has a lot to offer. It's so easy to read these stories, with their endearing characters and familiar situations that happened to you or someone you know, but you are always aware of their backdrop commentary on immigration, ethnic and class relations, and gender inequality. I like how Alvarez transports the reader to a variety of settings, from a guava grove in the Dominican Republic, to maternity and psychiatric hospitals, to 1960s-era college dorms. The characters are varied; at first they seem like stereotypes (the revered Latino family patriarch and the irresistible college bad boy for example) but they are actually nuanced with internal contradictions which round out their personalities (the father wants his girls to fit into American society by attending the right schools and speaking without an accent but he won't permit that they act like Americans, the boy that is intelligent and sensitive enough to write love sonnets for class but can't understand why his virgin girlfriend doesn't want to get screwed, laid or fucked.)

The most interesting characters I find are the two we know least and most about. The character of the mother intrigued me, and in some ways reminded me of Mrs. Norval. Despite the fact that these women invest the most work into their families, the father steals the limelight in the form of everyone bending over backwards to please Papi or praising Mr. Norval for being a beloved and kind-hearted father when he essentially left everyone to fend for themselves. Although the Garcia girls' mother is not as greedy or duplicitous as Mrs. Norval, both mother their many daughters with a great sense of order and discipline, and their personal desires are deeply hidden from their families. For much of the first part of the book we don't even know "Mami's" name, much less about who she is or why she acts as she does, though this reveals itself sometimes in roundabout ways.

The second interesting character, and the one we know most about, is Yolanda. She lives her whole life negotiating between life as it was taught to her and life as she experiences it, between the Latino culture she was raised with, Catholic and Spanish-speaking, and the American culture she interacts with at school and in personal relationships. "The Rudy Elmenhurst Story" is interesting because it is apparent that Yolanda must work to interpret her surroundings, not only as a sexually inexperienced young woman but one in a foreign culture. She is also the character where the theme of language is most important, from her nervously babbling in English before the Domincan field workers, to taking refuge in Spanish with her American boyfriend John, to actually getting psychosomatic rashes when certain words are mentioned. As I listed in the title of this post, Yolanda goes by, sometimes against her will, a variety of names. Out of all of these, her real and full name is almost sacred to her, it is an expression of what she perceives to be her real self instead of the other names which refer to compromised versions of this real self, or perhaps roles she is forced to take on.

Cisneros, Style

In my last post I mentioned how I was able to read Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories quickly, which is thanks to Cisneros' unencumbered style and accessible language, the shortness of the stories and their ability to convey powerful emotions and vivid images succinctly, at least for the most part. But you can’t confuse a quick read with a simple read, because the more you examine this collection of stories, the more their sub-surface messages and clever narrative techniques emerge. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories is like a stylistic laboratory – it has a little bit of everything mixed into one powerful concoction. There are stories written in first and third person, stream-of-consciousness, little vignettes that capture a slice of someone’s life, and stories with a cast of characters and a plot with action. Some passages describe tender and beautiful scenes in poetic language and others are brutal or crass and use street language. But what makes this book great is not just the complex and varied style but the fact that there is always an underlying message – sometimes the message is clear and other times it’s obscured and you have to dig to get at it – you have to question each element in the passage and why it was written that way. It surprised me how much we were able to get out of our analysis of “The Marlboro Man” – how deceptively simple the passage was initially in comparison to what it had to offer. I would like to revisit other stories in more detail – even though I read them once I have the feeling that half of them is still lying under the surface.

Telenovela meets La Malinche

Today I sat down with Woman Hollering Creek and I didn’t get up until I was halfway through, and even then I was reluctant to stop reading. Cisneros has such a powerful and fluid writing style that I quickly read through these stories while being completely engrossed in each of them. The first section, which is composed of girlhood vignettes, made me smile because the language is so evocative that it called up many of my own memories. Cisneros doesn’t neglect any of the senses, from the larger-than-life colours and objects seen from the eyes of a child, to the smell of Lucy and theatre popcorn, to the awful itch of the red sweater and being physically overtaken by emotion about an inconsequential and irrational thing. There were certain experiences and emotions I could relate to in the adolescent and adult sections of the book, but more commonly I felt dismay and frustration to be experiencing second-hand these terrible realities that are thankfully not my own, but are to many Chicanas.

Living in a deeply misogynist society is one of these realities. Not only do we read about the spousal abuse suffered by Cleofilas, but in both “My Tocaya” and “Woman Hollering Creek” the female characters mention how the newspapers are filled with accounts of women beaten and killed by their husbands, lovers, and male family members. When this happens it is not a surprise, but with a sickening resignation it is accepted as business as usual. Another reality that Chicanas must deal with is how their femininity and sexuality is constructed by the cheesy romanticism of telenovelas and ballads on the one hand and the Mexican and Southwestern myths of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Llorona, and la Chingada on the other. The ways, often profoundly damaging ones, that these manifest themselves in women’s lives can be seen multiple times in the first half of the book, most painfully when a Chicana actually jokingly reenacts the Malinche/Cortez relationship with a white man she’s having an affair with.

The last reality that I’ll mention is that of being caught between two countries, not really being from one or the other, and feeling like you’re failing in both. There are strange and sad moments of dissonance when, for example, a bumbling tourist takes a picture of “authentic” Mexican children only to find out that they’re actually “Mericans,” and how the family in “One Holy Night” sends its female members back and forth between Mexico and the U.S. when they accidentally get pregnant, a migration forced by family honor in which the women have no say.

Overview

This has been an interesting class for me so far, having never read Chicano literature. Progressing through the texts we have come across similar themes, but what is most interesting is how the representation of each theme contributes to the greater message about Chicano identity in each text. For example, we talked last class about the differences between …y no se lo tragó la tierra and The Salt of the Earth, and how the former found the root of Chicano exploitation in racism and the latter found it in class. Who Would Have Thought It?, …y no se lo tragó la tierra, and the pieces by Jose Marti posed questions without solutions: is the true home of mixed-raced people in Mexico or the U.S., how can the incessant toiling of campesinos be ended, or can Latin Americans be content in the “soulless” culture of the U.S.? The film, on the other hand, established that while racial tensions exist, class is at the root of exploitation, and that liberation lies in unionization. In the second half of the course we can be sure that different questions about Chicano history/identity/destiny will surface. I am particularly looking forward to the subject of Chicana subjectivity that will come out in Woman Hollering Creek.