Troubling Nationhood in U.S. Latina Literature

Maya Socolovsky

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813569895
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book examines the ways in which recent U.S. Latina literature challenges popular definitions of nationhood and national identity. It explores a group of feminist texts that are representative of the U.S. Latina literary boom of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, when an emerging group of writers gained prominence in mainstream and academic circles. Through close readings of select contemporary Mexican American, Puerto Rican, and Cuban American works, Maya Socolovsky argues that these narratives are “remapping” the United States so that it is fully integrated within a larger, hemispheric Americas.Looking at such concerns as nation, place, trauma, and storytelling, writers Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Esmeralda Santiago, Ana Castillo, Himilce Novas, and Judith Ortiz Cofer challenge popular views of Latino cultural “unbelonging” and make strong cases for the legitimate presence of Latinas/os within the United States. In this way, they also counter much of today’s anti-immigration rhetoric. Imagining the U.S. as part of a broader "Americas, " these writings trouble imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders and a long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders have come to shape and determine the dominant culture's writing and the defining of all Latinos as "other" to the nation.

1 / Spaces of the Southwest: Dis-ease, Disease, and Healing in Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel

One of the most striking aspects of Denise Chávez’s short-story collection The Last of the Menu Girls and novel Face of an Angel is the figuration of New Mexico’s southwestern terrain as a space of dislocation, unease, and dis-ease. Given the long history of Mexicans (and Mexican Americans) in the Southwest, one would perhaps expect a narrative of rootedness and belonging rather than displacement. Instead, Chávez’s stories depict the geographical, political, and cultural space of the region as a complex environment that has both suppressed and maintained its ancestral legacies and histories, and whose characters, I claim, consequently experience symptoms of disease that can only be healed through the imaginary blurring and conjoining of Mexico and the United States’ nation-spaces.

In presenting a troubled and troubling southwestern cultural and physical landscape, Chávez is indirectly responding to one of popular culture’s most powerful and dominant narratives about Mexican Americans in the Southwest: their presence here (whether legal or not) is greatly influenced by the presence of undocumented migrants who cross the border and enter the United States at various places along the nation’s borderland region. As I discussed in the introduction, many critics point out that while undocumented Mexicans are often potentially subject to racial profiling that renders them foreign to the cultural and national identity of the United States, the United States’ racialized notions of citizenship also informally govern all those who appear potentially illegal, so that Mexican Americans who are U.S. citizens or legally resident in the United States can also experience some of the stigma attributed to illegal immigrants.¹ Thus Mexican American national identity, even in the Southwest, is particularly marked by a sense of “unbelonging,” an unbelonging that is understood as cultural and physical presence in place. Some critics argue that U.S. Mexican citizens have long been represented as the quintessential illegal aliens, and that Mexican “illegitimacy” in the United States can be understood as a form of spatialized displacement based on the group’s early racialization as nonwhite, secondary, and “alien.”² Furthermore, the public’s identification of “illegal aliens” with persons of Mexican ancestry is so strong that at times many Mexican Americans and other Latino/a citizens, through sheer cultural practice and presence, are presumed to be undermining the United States’ national character.³ This alienation of Mexicans (and often of all Latin Americans) is also strongly dependent on particular narratives of Latin America that separate it, in historical, cultural, and political terms, from the United States.⁴

Without question, manifest destiny—the United States’ dominant theme of racial superiority justifying territorial expansion in the nineteenth century—played a crucial role in the nation’s construction of territorial and geographic identity, with particular consequences for the Southwest. Even as early as 1846, the conflict between Mexico and the United States, which began as a dispute over the western boundary of Texas (recently annexed by the United States), signaled the United States’ interest in acquiring land as property from its Southern Hemisphere neighbors. And, of course, the watershed 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American War, definitively ceded the northern Mexican borderlands (from Texas to California and Oregon) to the United States and resulted in Mexico losing 40 percent of its territory. As Marshall Eakin notes, “Incorporation into the United States and its legal system would have devastating consequences for ‘Hispanics’ (Californios, Tejanos) and indigenous peoples in what would become the U.S. Southwest.”⁵ In fact, some descendents of the Spanish-speaking population of the region see the subsequent “occupation” of these lands as a form of colonialism. Clearly, literature coming out of the southwestern borderlands has long reflected the concerns, tensions, and history of this particularly blended cultural, political, and geographic space; many border critics have noted that literature written from, about, and/or within the U.S.-Mexico border region is subject to the influences of that region. Rosemary A. King, for example, argues that because it is the site where the national territories of the United States and Mexico abut, “The border ‘orders’ the geography of this region,” influencing the ways that “writers construct narrative space” and “the ways their characters negotiate those spaces, whether landscape, domestic sphere, national territory, public school, or utopia.”⁶

How, then, are Chávez’s New Mexican narratives a part of this border writing, and how do they counter and write back to the assumptions of unbelonging perpetuated by popular discourse? In one respect it is not immediately obvious that she is particularly engaging with popular discourse’s obsessive attention to either illegal immigration or the cultural “otherness” of Mexicans: the New Mexican towns depicted in the stories are insular, their stories narrated predominantly by Mexican Americans, and there is little mention of either undocumented workers or any hostile Anglo presence.⁷ Because her writing is not polemical, it appears to act rather than react, create rather than “talk back.” Of course, this very rootedness and centering of Mexican American voices is part of what legitimates their presence in the United States. But, more important, the long presence, insularity, and rootedness in the region experienced by Chávez’s characters are also strongly marked by personal and political experiences of dislocation that, I would argue, are effects of the continual narratives of unbelonging that delegitimate Mexican presence in the United States. Clearly, when Chávez’s narratives engage with the region’s geographical terrain and physical land, they attempt to reterritorialize it and lay claim to the nation in terms of its physical space. But when the texts describe her characters’ experiences of sickness, abuse, and trauma, when they recount familial and generational histories of violence, recall suppressed memories, engage in discussions of race, or depict cultural practices (particular cuisines and/or languages) that are specific to Mexican American identity, they are also troubling imperialist notions of nationhood, in which political borders and the United States’ long history of intervention and colonization beyond those borders have come to shape the way Mexicans are defined as other to the nation.

The narratives demonstrate Mexican cultural and physical belonging specifically by reimagining the United States as part of a collective of Mexico, forcing a rethinking of the place of the United States as an intersection of physical land and cultural practices/experiences.⁸ In other words, when, in Chávez’s narratives, the geography and cultural presence of Mexico become part of the geocultural landscape of the United States, a transnational identity emerges that delegitimates the nation’s practice of identifying who belongs and who is foreign. Thus the cultural assertion of Mexican American voices and memories in the stories and the novel dismantle the political border, trouble national identity, and assert belonging. Ultimately, then, Mexican American geography in the southwestern United States creates a collective national history that legitimates Mexican and Mexican American presence and belonging in New Mexico.

As narratives, The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel lend themselves particularly well to a geopolitical hermeneutics not only because of the way they feature geographical terrain but also because of Chávez’s own personal connection to the desert landscape of southern New Mexico.⁹ In interviews she reiterates her strong connection to the land, saying that she writes in order to memorialize Mexican American cultural presence and identity in this space. She says that from the moment of her birth in Las Cruces, “in a time of extreme heat, in August,” she has “carried that heat with me, wherever I have lived. A sensitivity to heat, a release in rain, these are my earliest memories.” She continues, “the sky is a part of my interior/exterior world. . . . The change of seasons, so subtle in the south, has occasioned many an observation from me, and has found its expression in my writing.”¹⁰ The world within and the world without are so closely interrelated for Chávez that they blend, and narrative production offers a transposition of that blended world from the self’s place on the land, to the written page. She has commented that “I feel as if I am New Mexico,” that “I am a combined world of heat and dust and little rain,” and that she loves to write “about the people of this world, the compadres and comadres I have grown up with, the maids I have loved, who’ve taken care of me, taught me the language of love, the handymen who left their indelible mark of kindness in my heart.”¹¹

Although Chávez’s interviews and poetry explicitly describe desert landscapes, the cultural and physical topography of her fictional prose is largely unexplored. As I discuss below, while The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel have received some critical attention, with particular emphasis on her narrative strategy (stories within stories), the empowerment of Chicana identity, and the valorization of women’s labor and service, the ways in which the texts negotiate geographic and cultural space in order to legitimate Mexican American belonging and presence in the nation have not been explored.¹² In this chapter I consider what kind of geopolitical identity Chávez’s southwestern texts establish, arguing that her particular metaphor for this colonized space—that of disease and sickness—challenges the nation-state’s fixation on the region’s political border, and consequently troubles its demarcation of Mexicans as foreigners. Situating not just the land and the border as diseased sites but also the characters as sick, Chávez critiques the United States’ amnesia regarding its historical topographical incursions southward, and imagines the possibility of healing through a revisioning of the nation’s space. The narratives in fact rethink the very binary of healing versus sickness, presenting sickness as both a real condition for the characters and a metaphor for the way illegal and legal Mexican bodies are perceived to be a sign of ill health for, and alienation from, the nation. “Healing” therefore means integrating those bodies into the mainstream—reterritorializing the land—by recognizing how healthy bodies are regularly differentiated from sick ones in order to maintain and identify the normative space of the United States. My reading of Chávez’s work thus recognizes how the nation’s mainstream rhetoricizes Mexican presence as sick and damaging to the physical and cultural health of the nation, and interprets Chávez as troubling this rhetoric.

This geopolitical reading of The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel interprets the cultural markers of the texts as signatures of the physical geography of the land, which displace normative understandings of the nation’s political borders, a displacement that heals the dis-ease experienced by the characters. In other words, in her fiction, Chávez’s natural desert landscape roots Chicana narrative voices into a space of the Southwest that is part of both Mexico and the United States, privileging the region’s borderland identity over the United States’ separation of political nations. Tey Diana Rebolledo notes that this cultural-physical signature is typical of Hispanic and Chicana women’s writing of the region, a writing that frequently describes the enduring cultural historic stamp on the landscape that has been apparent in the region for generations. She writes, “The signatures of their landscapes, both interior and exterior, are a monument to their survival, sense of self, and identity. They use the power of their perceptions of the landscape to transmit this sense of identity: one that is female, Chicana, and deeply connected to land, myth, and self.”¹³ Any reference to the natural regional landscape is thus a politically important gesture of empowerment: a monument memorializing a long and difficult history of estrangement and home on this particular land.

Specifically, this signature represents a literary “talking back” to and taking back of the land from the Anglo writers, travelers, and inhabitants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who saw the land as virgin territory without traditions or roots. While for them the land represented a kind of primal freedom, an empty space to be created by their own hands, early Hispanic women’s writing countered this imaginary with cultural descriptions. For those writers, the land meant a long tradition of families tied to the land that were, more crucially, “nourished by it.”¹⁴ Similarly, historical referents for Hispanic writers came not from the large cities in the American East, with their concepts of progress based on materialism, but from the land south of the border, and a past in which the American Southwest belonged to Mexico. The land, and the Hispanic literature produced on it, exemplified a heritage and tradition in conflict with dominant Anglo values.¹⁵ As a consequence of these Anglo incursions, the land has suffered and continues to suffer a profound sense of dis-ease, while its inhabitants experience displacement that can only be healed through acts of reterritorialization such as Chávez’s.

In this respect Chávez continues the tradition of previous Mexican American women writers: speaking of the land as hers, while at the same time recognizing and respecting the limitations of the territory and the inherent otherness of its topography. She says, “I have always felt the burningly beautiful intensity of my dry, impenetrable land.”¹⁶ Her repeated statements in interviews about the connections between her inner and outer landscape—“My exterior landscape is who I am inside,” “I wanted to connect with the exterior landscape,” “My internal landscape is the desert”—can themselves be read as reconquests of a terrain that has long disenfranchised Chicanos.¹⁷ Of course, the notion that landscapes have cultural and personal meanings, and that they express our identities, talk to us, and influence our behavior, is not new.¹⁸ Chicana writers, however, have a particular interest in configuring their works with images and themes of place, creating, as Cordelia Chávez Candelaria notes in relation to The Last of the Menu Girls, “thematic zones” that may center on “the geography of birthplace and homeland,” or “the home and personal surroundings.” Ultimately, “these external spaces also serve to inscribe aspects of the interior dimensions and private spaces of Chicana experience.”¹⁹ For Chávez’s characters, these zones of place are classic borderland terrains, layered with multiple interconnected voices that combine interior (often feminized) spaces with exterior, traditionally masculinized ones.

In this way Chávez’s narratives legitimate the legacy and presence of Mexican Americans in the Southwest, a region that, from an Anglo point of view, has consisted only of empty desert. Building on these ideas, I argue that the most salient implication of her borderlands writing lies in the way that the rhetoric of domesticity and regional geography comes to redefine national and political identities beyond the immediate region. Ultimately, the unease and dis-ease felt by Rocío (Menu) and Soveida (Face) is healed through the blurring and conjoining of Mexico and the United States’ physical terrain, and through the cultural assertion of Mexican American voices and memories of that land, both of which dismantle the political border and trouble a broader national identity. From a politics of geographical displacement, then, there emerges the possibility of Mexican American geography within the United States’ natural landscape: a location from which to articulate a plural subjectivity, produce a communal narrative, and speak of a collective, rather than individual, national history.

The Last of the Menu Girls

Chávez’s interconnected collection of stories The Last of the Menu Girls recounts in chronological order the childhood and adolescent experiences of Rocío Esquibel, a young Mexican American girl growing up in a southern New Mexico town with her mother and sister.²⁰ Over the course of the stories, Rocío moves from a domestic to a geopolitical understanding of place, allowing her to ultimately contextualize her personal sense of dislocation within the broader, national setting of the Southwest borderlands. In some respects my reading of the role of disease in these stories adds to the work of both Douglas Anderson and Elizabeth Wright. Anderson reads the “sick body” in the stories as abject, arguing that this abjection allows Rocío to differentiate herself from the sick bodies around her and to psychologically distance herself from what she now regards as the “other.” Wright, looking at the title story and “Space Is Solid,” extends Anderson’s argument, using theories of disability to discuss the cultural construction and meanings of the stories’ bodies and to show how disability is a culturally loaded term that the characters negotiate.²¹ Interestingly, both Anderson and Wright conclude that Rocío herself initially distances herself from the abject (or disabled) bodies, but ends up identifying more with abjection (or is herself read as disabled). In my analysis of the title story, “The Last of the Menu Girls,” and the collection’s final story, “Compadre,” I build on their readings by interpreting this notion of sick or diseased bodies more broadly and metaphorically as markers of Mexican American cultural and social unbelonging from the nation-state. Thus I understand Rocío’s (Chávez’s) emergence as a writer at the end of the collection as an empowering experience not because she herself becomes othered or abjected but because her narrative production can trouble the nation’s writing of Mexican Americans as alien residents, and potentially legitimate Mexican American cultural and political presence in the Southwest.

I read the stories’ rhetoric of displacement as expressions of the Southwest’s colonized cultural and political geography, whereby domestic and personal spaces become connected to national ones.²² The title story, “The Last of the Menu Girls,” where the intersection of geography and politics remains implicit, and where the borderland and its inhabitants are described as diseased, offers some creative possibility for healing, as sick bodies become integrated into the same space as healthy ones. The last story of the collection, “Compadre,” heals by reterritorializing the land, discrediting the national U.S.-Mexican border, and figuring storytelling itself as the most effective way to reassert Mexican American belonging in New Mexico. Here, geography—physical terrain, regional and national spaces and places—connects explicitly to the characters’ political consciousness and identity formation, and the United States’ new transnational identity reimagines the entire collection’s borderlands by topographically joining the United States and Mexico, privileging the region’s ancestral legacy and heritage, and legitimating the creative authorial voice that comes out of the borderlands.

“The Last of the Menu Girls”: Dis-ease and Dislocation

Out of the entire collection, the title story is most explicit about using physical illness as a metaphor for the political and sociocultural ills of the borderlands.²³ Specifically, Rocío’s psychological dislocation occurs through her encounters with those who are sick, and her translation of their disease into her own dis-ease emphasizes the entire collection’s rhetoric of displacement as an expression of the Southwest’s colonized cultural and political geography. The story takes place in two separate locations simultaneously: one, in the hospital where Rocío, just out of high school, has taken a summer job as a menu girl, distributing daily menus to patients; and two, in her house, where she is haunted by her great-aunt Eutilia who died five years earlier in one of the rooms, but still appears present and continually dying to Rocío. The only direct mention of the U.S.-Mexico geographical border in this story occurs in a brief conversational exchange in the hospital, when a migrant worker, Juan Maria, is brought in for surgery after getting into a fight. One nurse describes him as “an illegal alien,” and another talks disparagingly about “people sneaking across the border” as part of “an epidemic.”²⁴ Here, the language of disease and infection is used to describe illegal Mexicans in the state, so that for this story in particular, and for the collection as a whole, the rhetoric of personal sickne...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Troubling America(s)
• 1. Spaces of the Southwest: Dis-ease, Disease, and Healing in Denise Chávez’s The Last of the Menu Girls and Face of an Angel
• 2. Mestizaje in the Midwest: Remapping National Identity in the American Heartland in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia and Sandra Cisneros’s Caramelo
• 3. Colonization and Transgression in Puerto Rican Spaces: Judith Ortiz Cofer’s The Line of the Sun and The Meaning of Consuelo
• 4. Memoirs of Resistance: Colonialism and Transnationalism in Esmeralda Santiago’s When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover
• 5. Tales of the Unexpected: Cuban American Narratives of Place and Body in Himilce Novas’s Princess Papaya
• Postscript. The Illegal Aliens of American Letters: Troubling the Immigration Debate
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author