Journal of American Studies of Turkey
12 (2000) : 39-49
Elizabeth
Jacobs
The Chicano critic Genaro Padilla states
that within the tradition of writing from New Mexico the experiential and
discursive network of the Spanish colonial imaginary continues to effect the
orientation of conceptions of self and home towards time past (Padilla 31-32).
Certainly New Mexico was one of the primary arenas in which the Hispanos first
achieved an authoritative sense of self and home in America. Yet the argument
that texts dating from Spanish colonisation function as ‘genealogically
re-empowering narrative[s]’ is problematic in the light of recent trends within
New Mexico’s literary practice (29). Rather than seeking to recover a
legitimating relation between themselves and a discourse of possession and
domination from the past, it is my contention that contemporary Chicana writing
in fact runs counter to this tradition.
New Mexico first acquired its identity as
the home of Spanish American culture in the sixteenth century. It was then that
imperial Spain conquered and claimed the territory and consolidated its power
through an ideology structured around a rigorous system of racial, cultural and
social classification (Gutiérrez 82). The
diaries, (diarios) narratives, (derroteros) and chronicles (crónicas) dating from this time
substantiate this claim. Pedro de Castañeda's narrative, Relación de la jornada de Cíbola
conpuesta por Pedro de Castañeda de Nájera, (1542) which
details Francisco Vásquez de Coronado's massive exploration of New Mexico,
records the establishment of a Spanish homeland through a discourse that
“others” indigenous people. They are represented in ways that dehumanise and
delegitimize their native social and cultural practices (Herrera-Sobek xxi). The description of the Pueblos given by one
of Coronado's party reveals their disappointment at not finding cities of gold
but Indian houses that are “stone and mud, rudely fashioned”(Hine and Faragher
5). Lacking European material systems of classification moreover there are also
no ‘principal houses by which any superiority over others could be shown’ (6).
This kind of hierarchical categorization is also
reflected in other colonial narratives produced at this time. Gaspar Pérez de
Villagrá's Historia de la Nueva México
(1610) similarly records
the superiority of the conquistadores and their defeat of an alien
“other.” In the final cantos of the epic Villagrá details the conquest of the
Acoma Pueblo situated on a high mesa, in terms that authorize the brutalities:
‘Dime sobervia infame como ygualas. /Si
como Luzbel quiere lebantarse, /Y el govierno de todo atribuirse.’ “Behold here this untutored
barbarian born of ignoble savages /who like Lucifer Seeks /to reach such
heights of power ” (Lamadrid 165). Villagrá's
representation of the Indians as demonised “other” hints at the later
consolidation of Spanish imperialism, which occurred through the Franciscan
missionaries and their efforts to convert the region to the Catholic faith
(Hine and Faragher 34). Furthermore at that time and contrary to Spanish
custom, the Pueblos also endorsed a matriarchy “with women exercising complete
control over their households, sexuality and choice of partner” (34). This was
similarly incompatible with the ideology of Spanish Catholicism and the
patriarchal family and over the course of time its dogma conversely affected
the indigenous celebration of the mother's lineage and women's power within the
home.
These kinds of colonial relationships were not
restricted to Spanish colonisation alone of course but are also reflected in
other colonial encounters that occurred at this time. The French incursions
into Canada during the sixteenth century were marked by a similar treatment of
native peoples, and many communities and settlements either disappeared or were
radically altered by European settlement and Catholic conversion (Hine and
Faragher 43-44). By the eighteenth century the territory that comprised New
France in fact was comparable with was that of New Spain (48). In their
northern colonies the English also carried out similar policies for claiming
land with brutal precision and tragic consequences for the native inhabitants.
Indeed it is fair to say, as Hine and Faragher argue, “the colonial period of
North American history was marked by a series of bloody wars involving French,
Spanish and English colonists, punctuated by periods of armed and uneasy peace”
(80).
Yet Padilla argues that “the intra cultural collective memory” from this time continues to persist in exerting a formative role on contemporary Chicano literary expressions (31). As he goes on to state, its “experiential and discursive network”:
branches and imbricates, sustains itself but
also exhausts certain practices at one historical juncture only to recover some
approximate practice at other junctures, crosscuts, jumps between genres, or
borrows forms and filters historically dissonant articulation through them,
disappears, and then arches from one necessary discursive moment to another
(31).
Similar
ideas of cultural origins and collective memory also lent a sense of pride and
legitimacy to Chicano Movement writings, activism and issues of identity during
the 1960s. It was during el movimiento
that Reies López Tijerina founded and directed New Mexico's Alianza de los Pueblos Libres “The
Alliance of Free City States” and the Alianza
Federal de Mercedes, later renamed La
Confederación de Pueblos Libres, in
order to re-instate land grants and property entitlements dating from the
colonial authority of the Spanish crown. Tracing a direct lineage back to these
times, many New Mexican residents legitimated their claims to land through
their Spanish forbears. According to tradition certain “ancestral holdings” had
originally been awarded to communities or to single people so that “a man had
his private home and a narrow rectangular plot which usually gave him access to
river water” (Chávez 138).
Calling for a stricter adherence to the civil and property rights promised by
the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) Tijerina aimed to continue these
traditions.
Despite basing his claims on the failure of the
Treaty to recognise these rights of land ownership,
Tijerina’s seven-year crusade to reclaim Hispanic land ultimately proved
unfeasible and problematic. In literary terms the positing of a master
narrative derived from the colonial model also poses difficulties. In
reconnecting to the texts of Castañeda and Villagrá, Padilla's argument
implicitly constructs “home” as an imperialising and blatantly masculine
enterprise. It is my contention that recent Chicana narrative problematises
this assertion and, as I go on to show, instead forms a politics of relocation
that presents a shift in relation to the colonial project.
By the late seventeenth century a series of
reconquests had re-established colonial control in New Spain's northern
frontier (Gonzales 38). Indian communities had settlements in the areas between
the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean but Spanish settlers took possession
of these lands in grants made by the Spanish crown according to a perceived
divine right. This established the area as the northern frontier of New Spain
and then of Mexico after its war of independence in 1810, although it would not
be until 1821 that Mexico finally gained independence from Spanish authority. The
complex series of revolts, rebellions and racial clashes which followed
culminated in the U.S.-Mexican war of 1848 when New Mexico along with other
formally northern Mexican territories were ceded to the United States. A number
of Chicano critics allude to the Mexican American war as being instrumental in
the break with colonial literary models and the subsequent formation of an
independent Mexican American sensibility in Chicana/o literature (Padilla My
History 14). Padilla himself acknowledges that a Mexican American literary
formation begins with “the American
violence that ripped the Mexican map in Tejas in 1836 ... and then
completely blanched the geography of northern Mexico in 1846-1848” (14). Yet
despite this radical break with the imperial precursor, he continues to trace a
substantial presence derived from the colonial model into twentieth century New
Mexican literary discourse. The main thrust of his argument engages with the
well-documented contention that when faced with a threat to their social
standing and sense of self the Hispanos of New Mexico repeatedly return to
their oldest identity as Spaniards or Spanish Americans as symbolic acts of
resistance (Gutiérrez 90).
Certainly compared to other states such as Texas
and California, New Mexico had experienced a much longer period as part of New
Spain. From colonisation and the founding of Sante Fe in 1610 to New Mexican
statehood in 1912 comprises some three hundred and twenty years. The relatively
brief period when New Mexico was part of the Mexican nation, after independence
from Spain in 1821 to conquest by the United States in 1846 was only
twenty-five years. The logical outcome of these longer periods of time spent
under Spanish rule encouraged Hispanicisation
and the rejection of miscegenate identities. At the time of independence from
Spain in 1821, the population of New Mexico was approximately half mestizo yet most denied their Indio heritage and considered themselves
to be Hispano or Spanish American.
This impulse was reinforced throughout the nineteenth century when “the ethnic
confrontations created by the Texas Revolution, the US- Mexican war, the Gold
Rush and large scale immigration’ meant that the Hispanos of New Mexico began
to emphasise their Hispanicity in an attempt to thwart anti-Mexican sentiment
as well as Anglo assimilation” (Gutiérrez
97).
In literary terms, the accelerating shifts from
Hispano to Anglo control throughout the twentieth century meant that a
retrogressive but resistant discursive formation became particularly dominant,
and many of the narratives of nuevomexicana/os
continued to foreground the Spanish colonial past as a vital element in their
construction of self and home. Thematically Cleofas Jaramillo's retrospective
text Romance of a Little Village Girl
(1955) begins this way:
Intrepid
Cortez (1520), Coronado (1540) and Oñate
(1598) and brave Vargas (1692) ...
they brought with them colonists and missionary priests. Toiling and suffering
under untold hardships, they penetrated through mountain passes, across vast
prairies, conquering savage Indian tribes and establishing settlements in the
wilderness ... [they] ... helped carry the faith and culture of old Spain into
these remote worlds (Jaramillo 2).
Arguably
what is most surprising in this passage is the open admiration shown for the
colonizer at the expense of and in relation to the colonised. The Spanish
civilisers are clearly defined against Indian savages and are associated with
religion, faith and culture, while the Indians are all classed as savage, godless
and unsocialised. The passage thus has points of contact with earlier colonial
narrative in that it reinforces the conquest hierarchy of the coloniser as
superior and the colonised as inferior. Its military aspect further
consolidates this rhetoric. According to Jaramillo’s account the conquistadores “penetrated through
mountain passes, across vast prairies, conquering savage Indian tribes”
(Jaramillo 2). Much of the association between the male conquistadores
and feminised land then is sexualised and misogynistic, suggesting a violent
relationship predicated on unequal power relations. In claiming a genealogy
dating back to this time, Jaramillo constructs a version of home that
replicates this tendency, and the colonial tradition of being pro-European and
anti-Indian remains deeply ingrained.
This particular discursive formation can also be
traced in the work of Cleofas Jaramillo’s contemporary Fabiola Cabeza de Baca.
The detailed mapping of the “staked plains” of north-eastern New Mexico, the Llano Estacado, which begins de Baca's novel We Fed Them Cactus,
(1954) has a clear resonance with that of earlier colonial narrative:
The llano is a
great plateau. Its sixty thousand square miles tip almost imperceptibly from
fifty-five hundred feet above sea level in Northwest New Mexico, to two
thousand feet in Northwest Texas ... As one descends Cañon del Agua Hill from Las Vegas, a great stretch of country
greets the sight... the Montoso
wooded land ... Conchas Mesa, Corazón
and Cuervo peaks, the Variadero Tableland, travelling on
... one reaches Cabra Spring,
after passing Cabra Spring one
comes in view of the Luciano and
Palomas mesas, Cuervo Hill and
in the distance Pintada Mesa (de Baca 1-3).
Clearly, as in Jaramillo's account, on the one hand
the descriptions and naming of the Spanish language geography do implicitly
disclose the sense of disempowerment in which the twentieth century Hispanos
found themselves (Padilla 29). Yet on the other hand the llano is a space over which Cabeza de Baca has a particular kind of
panoptic vision and in this sense the descriptions also clearly resonate with a
nostalgic tone for a colonising culture. Renato Rosaldo famously discusses this
tendency and argues that people often “mourn the passing of what they
themselves have transformed”(Rosaldo 71), and to a certain extent Cabeza de
Baca creates a similarly nostalgic version of events.
The narrative of We
Fed Them Cactus recalls the arrival
of Hispanic pioneers to the Llano
Estacado in the 1830s and their gradual establishment of ranches and
communities. It then goes on to outline the ways in which this society was
undermined first of all by the Mexican American war, then by the arrival of the
railroads, Anglo settlers and homesteaders in the 1880s. Finally it records the
complete loss of Hispano land to Anglo America by the 1940s. The series of
events that bring about this situation are presented in ways that critique the
dissolution of Hispanicity by Anglo forces. Yet Cabeza de Baca responds to this
by emphasising the Spanish and de-emphasising the Mexican and mestizo heritage. The ethnic and
inter-ethnic relations reconstructed in the text reflect this perspective. For
instance it is obvious from Cabeza de Baca's account that the Hispanos of New
Mexico did not live in isolation. At that time as Gonzales argues, there were
complex economic, cultural and racial relationships between Native Americans
and Anglo Americans, both of which in turn exerted a considerable influence on
their Hispanic neighbours (99). Gonzales goes on to point out that surrounding
the Hispanic settlements in New Mexico were numerous Indian pueblos and tribes,
including ‘Utes and Navajo to the northwest, the Jicarilla Apache to the north,
the Comanche to the east, the Mescalero Apache to the south, and the Chiricahua
and Western Apache to the southwest’ (100). Yet their presence is only ever
mentioned by de Baca obliquely and then only in terms of the unequal
relationships between the Indians and the rancho
elite.
One important way this kind of information
is transmitted is through different narratives that occur throughout de Baca’s
text. During El Cuate’s “the twin's”, recuerdos
or storytelling, he recounts his and other ciboleros
“buffalo hunters” relations with the Comanches. These he states were always
“friendly” and had been so “for more than a century” (de Baca 47). From his
perspective it was the Anglos who the Comanches most resented and not the
Hispanos, mainly because of the movement of Anglo-owned cattle onto Indian
land. According to El Cuate's narrative, “stealing cattle was the means of
revenge which the Indians used against the cattle owners,” the stolen livestock
in turn became the means by which the Comanches traded with the Hispanos and
their comancheros “Indian traders”
(48). Yet these economic relations were not as idyllic as El Cuate's narrative
suggests. Internal divisions developed out of conflicting economic and
political agendas. Gonzales argues that the elite New Mexican patrones looked upon both the comancheros “Indian traders” and the
Comanches as common cattle thieves and relations between them were often
strained and antagonistic (100). Likewise, although American cattle barons
ultimately made most profit out of these systems of exchange, the Hispano population nonetheless benefited and the Indians
did so the least:
The Americanos
around us were the real racketeers in the business. They did the buying from
us, then they would drive the loot to Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, or to
California where they sold it at great profit …The American government kept on
the trail of the Comanches, but often the officers who were sent out to stop
the illicit trade found it profitable to engage in it themselves … the
Comanches were finally rounded up by the military government [and] were put on reservations
(49).
In
these ways the unequal ethnic and class relations of the Spanish hacienda society surface in the text.
Earlier during the Mexican period the growing affluence of the region had
created a significant stratification between those who accumulated wealth and
those that could
not. By the time of American occupation Hispano
society tended to break down into two fairly rigid classes, the ricos “rich” and the pobres “poor” (Gonzales 99). At the top of the social hierarchy
were the ricos, a small number of
families who monopolised the pastoral and mercantile life of the province.
Beneath the elite were the pobres who
were predominantly mestizos, below
them were the genízaros and Pueblos
Indians who had the lowest social status of all. Cabeza de Baca states she was
not of the poor mestizo or genízaro classes, but was part of “the
landed gentry, in whose veins ran the noble blood of ancestors who left ...
Spain, for the New World” (53). Raymund Paredes has analysed this literary
tendency and has accused de Baca and her contemporaries of displaying a
“hacienda mentality” (Rebolledo and Rivero 37). Certainly the spatial
descriptions of de Baca’s rancho home
represent these class and race distinctions and echo on a micro-political level
the mapping of the llano during the opening pages of the text:
We had pine floors
in the front room and dining room. The despensa
occupied the space of 12 hundred square feet. This room served as a storeroom,
summer kitchen and sleeping quarters for stray cowboys. All the rooms were
spacious...we had Papa's big desk in the front room and dozens of chairs with
wide arms. Over the mantel in the dining room hung a large antique mirror
(9-10).
Yet
within some family spaces restructuring also produced different roles for women
and out of these roles new constructions of feminine identity arose. This is
clearly reflected in the text and Cabeza de Baca does actively include women’s
“great part in the history of the land” (59). In this sense as Tey Diana
Rebolledo argues, we should reframe our understanding of the “hacienda
mentality” when considering the works of these writers (209). Not only did they
face strong stereotyping tendencies from the Anglo American community, but were
also constrained by Hispano society and codes of conduct, all of which
militated against women’s independence, educational opportunities and literary
expression (Rebolledo and Rivero 37-38). In this sense it is hardly surprising
that de Baca’s representations of women by and large reproduce traditional stereotypes
and divisions of labour.
This can be clearly seen as much of the text is
spent in detailing the organisation of the rancho
around her father’s role as the patrone
and head of household, supported by his male employees, the mayordomo, the caporales and the countless vaqueros.
This kind of hierarchical authority not only explicitly promotes a sense of
home that is organised along rigidly authoritarian and patriarchal lines, but
its gendered ideology also circumscribes the female subjects of the text. A
clear example of this can be seen in the author’s own role in the hacienda
society. As her mother died when she was young, Cabeza de Baca takes on the
role of patrona, a role that has existed since the first incursions into
New Mexico in the sixteenth century. Yet on closer reading this role also
conforms to recent definitions of women’s ambiguous positioning within colonial
society (Stoler 344). Clearly enjoying the power afforded them through their
social position on the one hand, women such as de Baca were also just as
clearly part of the patriarchal ideology entrenched within hacienda
society. As a consequence women's subordination to paternalistic family
structures are naturalised and accepted in the narrative, often leaving the
unequal relationships between genders unquestioned and intact. At an
ideological level this works to sustain the division of labour reinforcing the
sense of an unproblematic and apparently fixed ideal of women's roles and their
duties within the domestic sphere.
Additionally, historically within Hispano society
women’s place was confined to the home, this was not only required by the
church but was also intended to ensure the purity of Spanish blood. Confronted
by the legacy of such profoundly rigid restrictions on their domestic, economic
and political options, de Baca’s female characters obviously display a specific
set of socially and culturally constructed “feminine” values:
Without the
guidance and comfort of the wives and mothers, life on the llano would have been unbearable ... many of them have gone to
their eternal rest and God must have saved a very special place for them to
recompense them for their contribution to colonisation and religion in an
almost savage country (61).
Here
women's political agency is domesticated through the language of familial
service and subordination and subsequently their identity is figured as
supportive and auxiliary. Yet within the gendered and racialised settlement of
the West, these women also represented and projected the most effective form of
colonialism as the quotation clearly demonstrates. Their daily habits including
household and social etiquette as well as religion can be translated in this
context as the conscious and planned reproduction of fundamental colonial
values (Stoler 344). De Baca makes the point, as the quotation illustrates,
that despite the general absence of priests and churches on the llano,
women helped to sustain religious orthodoxy. Yet in supporting the church and
orthodoxy in these ways, Cabeza de Baca and other women of the hacienda
elite played an active role in colonisation, particularly during social
ruptures that unsettled the community's economic, religious and cultural
context. Given these ideological factors her reinscription of “home” as a
consequence emerges somewhat problematically in a vexed intersection between a
feminine discourse and a powerful set of retrogressive master narratives.
More
recent Chicana writing from New Mexico significantly reworks the patriarchal
imaginary informing Cabeza de Baca's text. A native of Las Cruces, New Mexico,
Denise Chávez has had numerous works published, including the collection of
short stories, The Last of the Menu Girls (1986), and the novels, Face
of an Angel (1994) and Loving Pedro Infante (2001). Some of the
factors that account for the differences between the work of Chávez and her
literary forbears are undeniably the result of narratives being written at
different times by different individuals. The thirty years that separate their
texts production have seen radical changes in global and local economies and
patterns of family cohesion. While many of the daily cultural practices of
language, social customs and communal relations have been retained; at the same
time these massive changes have all had a profound impact upon individual
conceptions of self and home.
In The Last of the Menu Girls
home is not constructed around a gendered hierarchy but is centred on a mother
and her two daughters, who become the resistant and oppositional figures on the
terrain that Chávez describes. The
disrupted patrimonies that the text affects also make the mapping of this
terrain profoundly different from that of earlier New Mexican writers. Whereas
Cabeza de Baca's text gives a sense of the infinite horizons and possession of
the llano, Chávez's narrative is
concerned with smaller spatial units. Rooms, houses, streets and vacant lots
are the dominant spaces in The Last of the Menu Girls. The
narrative is thus much more in keeping with other
contemporary Chicana narrative, in that the primary connotation of home is of
the “private space” in a working class district in the borderlands area of the
state.
The larger location for the novel is a rapidly
expanding town whose specific racial formations and economies, high incidence
of female cancer and outbreaks of encephalitis, all suggest that “home” is no
longer the nostalgic myth which Cabeza de Baca describes. Descriptions of the
town indicate its “borderland” location as a place where national and
international, rural and urban economies coexist in complex and contradictory
ways:
East and west were the boundaries of the
town, the farms of Chile and cotton ... east and west were intimations of space
and proof of relatives who still clung to the land: ... the northern road led to
mountains and snow...to government and politics ... but now commercial
development had forced the unspoken boundaries back (153).
These
diverse familiar locations are all perceived as transitional spaces, the
‘multiple shifting landscapes’ associated with advanced capitalism, which is
particularly acute in certain towns and cities on the United States-Mexico
border. In this sense the area that Chávez describes is not an isolated Mexican
American enclave but displays a connection with rather than an occlusion of
pressing international economic and political issues. As we have seen in the
case of de Baca's work focusing on domestic space often corresponds to a
retraction from current events, Chávez on the other hand highlights how her
characters’ lives intersect with more global affairs. These include references
to nuclear contamination, US military intervention in Vietnam, the struggle for
land rights and the growth of multinational capitalism. Readers are also made
aware of waves of migration and an ‘epidemic’ of Mexican immigrants seeking
economic opportunities by crossing over the border. Descriptions of complex
patterns of settlement within the barrio reflect the subsequent racial
and economic differentiation among the communities living there:
North
and east lay Chiva Town … [which] … consisted of several dirt streets
crisscrossed by countless smaller ones. Within the unregistered boundaries of
this neighbourhood lived a portion of the town’s poorest families. Farther
north and near the city park lay another world, that of the Fullerton’s and the
Brown’s, black families … So, on driving north one passed through parallel but
disunited worlds, worlds surrounded by invisible yet real membranes that pulled
and yielded and fell back once more into themselves ... separate, distinct,
part of the greater whole, yet consciously marked off: Chiva Town and Brown
City (153).
The
references to racial differences illustrate rather than obscure the interethnic
tension and the conflicting loyalties of the community that Chávez describes.
Brown City is home to African American families like the Fullertons and the
Browns, and is differentiated sharply from Chiva Town which is an undeveloped
area lying outside of the city limits and home to the most recently arrived
Mexican immigrants. Racial conflict between these groups is endemic as is that
between whites and ethnics. The racialised discourse of a white woman, her
xenophobia and denial of citizenship rights to others together with the refusal
by the head nurse in the local hospital to bridge racial and cultural
differences, illustrate the internalised racism of the population (Chávez 101).
The nurse complains about the arrival of “the Anglo sons of bitches” and the
“epidemic” of “lousy wetbacks” who cross over from the other side of the border
(31-33). Within the community “they”, the Anglos and the recently arrived
Mexican immigrants, are differentiated from ‘us’ the resident New Mexicans. But
given the proximity of the US-Mexico border racial distinctions are not that clear
cut and consequently a distinct sense of being “in between” often dominates the
narrative. Rather than replicating the territorial possessiveness of Cabeza de
Baca's text, the extended discussions of boundaries, restrictions and space
reflect this “border state”:
I was a child
before there was a South. That was before the magic of the east, the beckoning
north, or the west's betrayal ... For me there was simply up the street ... or
there was down past the marking off tree in the vacant lot that was the shortcut
between worlds (41).
Chávez’s
complex sets of maps are unlike those of earlier New Mexican writers. The
topographical categories here centre on liminal spaces, margins, and thresholds
and “in between” spaces rather than the listing of semantic configurations of
space. Whereas the earlier mappings recorded conquests and claims to space
through a panoramic gaze, those of Chávez emphasise the mediate nature of home
and its multiple and shifting meaning. The Last of
the Menu Girls as such rather than reoccupying what Padilla considers “the
colonial narrative habitus”, in fact disrupts and distorts its master
narrative in multiple ways (Padilla 31).
This can be clearly seen in the descriptions of the
character’s homes. Unlike the class distinctions of her literary forbears rancho,
the house of the protagonist’s uncle, Regino Suárez, is described as “rasquache”; its haphazard construction repudiates
the growing “whiteness” and commodification of the neighbourhood as it “stood
out in its unconcern for the flat, vast-creeping tide of dried materialistic
life...”(154). In comparison, the houses of Anglo families are implicitly
racialised and are referred to as “mansions” (42) or “white temple[s]”(60). On
the whole these houses are only ever observed from the outside and form a
contrast with the depictions of the material interiority of compadre Suárez’s home. For compadre Suárez constructing home is controlled by labour and economic factors;
building materials are found, and in contrast to white middle class consumer
capitalism, emphasis is placed on mending, refixing and reusing. This means
that in the Suárez household things are not thrown away but are saved and
recycled, like “a tiled table, redesigned from a former cable spool” (153),
“the grey foam coach given to comadre Braulia by Toña Canales’ sister-in-law,
la Minnie” (159), “everything in the house was used, old, second-hand, mended,
fixed up, someone else's”(160). Situated on the margins of Chiva Town its
location indicates its difference and segregation from the other sectors of the
society in which Suárez lives:
Regino’s house faced out to Algodones
Street, that farther south led into that part of town called Little Oklahoma by
certain vociferous residents who deemed the viaduct area little more than a
strip of run-down, second-hand stores, flea markets and small motels of dubious
reputation (151).
The
mapping of this “new tarnished south” emphasises the socio-political realities
of Mexican American working class life. As such it provides a counter discourse
that is clearly outside of the master narratives that dominated earlier New
Mexican writing. In this sense Chávez's text marks a compromised return to a
sustaining tradition as the more complicated modes of home making and
identification hint at a politicisation that undermines the ideologies running
throughout Cabeza de Baca's text. In the latter, “home” is derived from an
unbroken line back to a colonising and patriarchal past. In contrast Chávez has
developed an alternative space within which the spatial distances and the
environments women map affect a politics of relocation that is framed in
resistance to the colonialist project. In The Last
of the Menu Girls, it is not so
much the conscious and territorial projection of the past, so much as a “border
state” that signifies and has become home.
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