Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity

Pilar Melero

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137502957
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études relatives au genre

Mexican figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, la Llorona, and la Chingada reflect different myths of motherhood in Mexican culture. For the first time, Melero examines these instances of portrayed motherhood as a discursive space in the political, cultural, and literary context of early twentieth century Mexico.

1

Desde las faldas de la madre/From Underneath Mother’s Skirt: Nellie Campobello (Re)Claims (Single) Motherhood and Mothers as Historians

Abstract: Motherhood has been a revered space for women for centuries. It has also been a prison, a place that keeps women in the home, tied to children and—if it is to be considered proper—to a husband. Children must be born to a mother and a father, inside the institution of marriage, to be labeled “legitimate” and to be given the privileges that come with a proper birth. Motherhood can be a privileged (if limited) domestic site or a source of scorn if it happens off the marriage bed. In Las manos de mamá (Mother’s Hands, 1937) Nellie Campobello revises the myths surrounding motherhood—the Virgin, la Malinche and la Llorona—to reclaim out-of-wedlock mothering as proper, and to construct the mother as a historian.

Melero, Pilar. Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004.

Cuando en el Norte una muchacha tiene la desgracia (a veces suele ser fortuna) de dar a luz sin haberse casado, su conducta no es atribuible a maldad sino a bondad, a sencillez, a entereza. Allí a una muchacha mala nadie la engaña; a las buenas, sí. Por eso, y a diferencia de lo que sucede en el Centro del país, a éstas las protege su familia.¹

Nellie Campobello addresses single motherhood in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo (379)

Motherhood and mothering are at the heart of the definition of femininity in Mexico. Mythology of Mexican femininity centers on the figure of the mother: the good mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe and the terrible mothers, la Malinche and la Llorona. However, as central as motherhood is to Mexican culture, good mothering does not always mean good parenting—at least, not officially. Good, fit mothering has been traditionally linked to marriage, so much so, that single mothers have been typically considered unfit to mother, especially by la ciudad letrada dating back to colonial times. We have the precedent of Martín Cortés, the illegitimate son of la Malinche and Hernán Cortés, being sent to Spain to get an education away from the mother. The same can be said of Garcilaso de la Vega and other criollos born to indigenous (non-married) women in colonial times. Though nowhere is it written that the sons were taken from their single mothers because these women were considered unfit to mother them, it is clear in the myths of la Malinche and la Llorona, as well as in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, that “good” mothering means mothering that occurs within institutionalized parenting. Both la Malinche and la Llorona are demonized in Mexican culture, while the Virgin, blessed by the Church, is lauded as the good mother. In this chapter, I examine how Nellie Campobello questions long-held cultural belief systems on single motherhood. In the first part of this chapter, I center my analysis in Las manos de mamá (My Mother’s Hands, 1937) to propose that Nellie Campobello (re)claims single motherhood as valuable parenting, and, with it, recasts the Malinche and Llorona myths that portray single mothers as terrible mothers. I begin with a general introduction to why women mother; I examine mothering in Mexico and the myths of the Virgin of Guadalupe, la Malinche and la Llorona; and follow with an analysis of Campobello’s questioning of single motherhood as unfit parenting. The second part focuses on Cartucho. Relatos de la historia de la lucha en el norte de México (Cartucho. Stories about the History of the Struggle in Northern México, 1931). I examine how Campobello (re)constitutes motherhood to encompass historical subjectivity, relegating los letrados to the role of myth makers.

Motherhood reclaimed: why women mother

As we saw in the preceding chapter, mothering presents a culturally appropriate space for women subjects who are attempting to assert their subjectivity. Motherhood is a deeply rooted “feminine” cultural site that women are likely to reproduce, consciously and/or unconsciously, and that society is bound to accept as proper for women, especially in the early twentieth century in Mexico. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Nancy Chodorow proposes mothering as a central and constituting element in the social organization and production of gender.² She argues that “mothering occurs through social structurally induced psychological processes” and that it is neither a product of biology nor of intentional training. Rather, she states that women’s mothering reproduces itself cyclically and that “women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother” (7). More importantly, she argues that these capacities and needs are built into and grow out of the mother-daughter relationship itself and that:

[W]omen as mothers (and men as non-mothers) produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed. This prepares men for their less affective later family role, and for primary participation in the impersonal extrafamiliar world of work and public life. (7)

Chodorow also argues that the same systematic socialization of gender roles predisposes women for the interpersonal, affective relationships that may produce in daughters and sons a division of psychological capacities, which leads to the sexual and familial division of labor (7).

Chodorow’s arguments need to be reconsidered, as more women have abandoned the home and may no longer be the primary caretakers of the child.³ However, her thoughts are still helpful in our understanding of gender roles and how our becoming women or men and our acceptance of those roles may depend more on the way we are socially (if unconsciously) constructed, than on our own individual choice to abide by gender-specific roles. We may want to keep Chodorow’s comments in mind as we analyze what it means for Campobello to reject traditional models of motherhood, while embracing and even honoring motherhood itself as a worthy role for women.

Mothering in Mexico: the good mother/ terrible mother archetypes

Aside from being an heiress to Western culture, Campobello also inhabits (and is inhabited by) a culture with roots in Spain and Latin America in general and in Mexico in particular. As we saw in the Introduction to this book, femininity in Mexican culture is rooted in the cult to the mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin has been a national symbol of motherhood since colonial times, not only in Mexico City, where she is said to have appeared in 1531, but also in most of the country, as stated in the book Nacionalidad mexicana y la Virgen by Bernardo Bergoend:

[T]he national devotion to the guadalupana [the Virgin of Guadalupe] . . . was not limited to the capital of New Spain . . . There is no hyperbole in stating that all of its soil provided the same assurance, since in about a century, more or less, after [the Virgin appeared], the sacred monuments that told of the nationalism of this devotion were not few, and came from all directions. (101–102)⁴

The Virgin was the unifying national symbol in the Mexican War of Independence, as Miguel Hidalgo’s call to arms came wrapped in her image, turned into a flag, and in her name. He roused the masses to the cry of “Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe y muera el mal gobierno” (“Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe. Death to bad government!”) (Bergoend, 155). It is not surprising, then, that when the Mexican nation attempted to reformulate its identity, during and immediately after the Mexican Revolution, as Rivas Mercado noted in the 1920s, the model to emulate for women was that of the Virgin (324). Jean Franco explains that from the beginning of the Revolution, the need to recodify the position of women in society was recognized, and that this recodification had in its core the image of the Virgin Mother. She writes: “Women were especially crucial to the imagined community as mothers of the new men and as guardians of private life, which from Independence onward was increasingly seen as a shelter from political turmoil” (81).

Albeit traditionally negative, there are two other cardinal models of motherhood in Mexican culture: la Malinche and la Llorona. La Malinche is seen as the symbolic mother of Mexicans because of her role as the lover of Hernán Cortés and the mother of Martín Cortés. Martín Cortés is symbolically the first mestizo.⁵ La Malinche, thus, is cast as a cultural traitor, a terrible mother. She is “perhaps the most famous mythic figure associated with betrayal and treachery” (Herrera-Sobek, Chicano Border Culture and Folklore, 131). Although Octavio Paz has been credited with mythologizing her, la Malinche appears as a treacherous mother already in what is considered one of the first, if not the first, historic Mexican novels: Xiconténcatl, published in 1826 (Messinger-Cypess, 43). This fact is worth noting because it is in the 1820s, when Mexico gains its independence from Spain, that the country first becomes preoccupied with forging its own identity as a nation.

The other mother, la Llorona, mostly transmitted through oral tradition, is a popular character in northern Mexico where Campobello grew up. She is also a variation of the terrible mother archetype. Upset at the betrayal of her lover, she drowns her children and is condemned to eternal wandering and wailing. Accounts of her malignancy were told in books written in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.⁶ The fact that the legend of la Llorona appears in written form already in the early 1900s is significant because it suggests that the story formed part of the imaginary of the young nation already at that point.

With such powerful mother figures dominating national discourse on femininity in Mexico, and with the model of the Virgin Mary served up by Christianity, it makes sense that women like Campobello center their writing on motherhood, even if and when contesting the very parameters of its fundamental cultural construction. Furthermore, as noted in the Introduction, motherhood is a role feminists embrace in Latin America and Spain in the early twentieth century. We may recall Gabriela Mistral’s “La madre. Obra maestra,” “a pure miracle” (“milagro puro”) where she notes that motherhood is worth even more than the work done to arrive at traditionally valued cultural masterpieces, such as the writing of the Illiad or the carving of the head of Jupiter (269). Mistral glorifies motherhood in its traditional form, even as she advocates for women’s rights such as access to education. Like her, Victoria Ocampo advocates on behalf of women arguing that “[i]t is [the] maternal feeling toward future women that ought to sustain us [women as we fight for the rights of women]” (25).⁷

Embracing motherhood while advocating for women’s rights, as Ocampo, Mistral, Rivas Mercado, and, of course, Campobello do, constitutes what has been called feminism of difference or feminism with roots in Spain and Latin America. Unlike feminism with Anglo-American roots, which supported gender equality under the notion that men and women were equal and, therefore, should have equal rights, feminism with roots in Spain and Latin America sought equal rights for men and women, but embracing the idea of innate sexual difference. Alda Blanco explains that “[h]ighly disseminated by feminists at the beginning of the twentieth century, this theory articulated ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as natural categories determined by the biological sex of each human being” (26).⁸ This theorization of sexual difference accepted and even embraced traditional constructs of femininity such as motherhood. At the same time, “it subverted the traditional paradigm by inverting the values assigned to the sexes” (26).⁹

Blanco’s explanation of the theorization of difference that subverts tra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Motherhood as a Feminist Discursive Space
• 1  Desde las faldas de la madre/From Underneath Mothers Skirt: Nellie Campobello (Re)Claims (Single) Motherhood and Mothers as Historians
• 2  Juana Beln Gutirrez de Mendoza: Writing from the Margins of Word, Class, and Gender
• 3  (Re)Thinking Woman(hood): Sara Estela Ramrez, Activity, and Being
• 4  Andrea Villarreal Gonzlez: Forming Rebels/Rebel Forming
• Conclusion: Being Woman (Within) Patriarchy
• Bibliography
• Index