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Autres voix, autres témoignages. Les femmes et la conquête de nouveaux territoires

Does History only Belong to you? Revision through Literature

À qui appartient l’Histoire ? évision par la littérature
Maria Camino Bueno Alastuey
p. 195-210

Résumé

L’histoire a été écrite par les classes dominantes, vantant les mérites des colons et les démérites des colonisés. Ces deux points ont contribué à l’effacement des minorités, et plus particulièrement des femmes issues des minorités. Leurs premières apparitions dans les récits littéraires sont dues à des récits de type ethnographique puis à la naissance de mythes les intégrant. Je souhaiterais aborder ces deux éléments dans mon article: par le biais de deux autobiographies rédigées par des chicanas lors de la conquête du sud-ouest des États-Unis, usant des mots des colons; puis par l’approche des écrits d’une chicana contemporaine qui questionne la narration des événements historiques liés à sa communauté et reprend la figure de La Malinche pour étayer sa démonstration.

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Entrées d’index

Index chronologique :

20th century / XXe siècle
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Texte intégral

  • 1  “Listening to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History”, 433, in Carla Trujillo (ed.), Livin (...)

I do not think that it is a coincidence that in Spanish the word for story and the word for history are the same1.
Yolanda Chávez Levya

  • 2  Phillipa Kafka, (Out)Classed Women: Contemporary Chicana Writers on Inequitable Gendered Power Rel (...)
  • 3  Albert Memmi explains this process: “How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt ca (...)
  • 4  Leal and Barrón call the Mexican-American the “invisible minority” and state that “it is not becau (...)

1The view now has wide acceptance that history has been written by the ruling classes and allowed them to distort the past through a biased recording of events. In this way their control over other groups has been perpetuated and the use of force in achieving their aims has been justified. As Kafka claims, “for as long as history has been recorded […] white men have manipulated their class status and power for their own benefit”2. This manipulation has manifested itself mainly in the portrayal of the “demerits” of the colonized, the “merits” of the colonizer3, and by the consistent disappearance of everything other than white male achievements from the recorded texts, which is perhaps no surprise as the written word has historically been the exclusive realm of a particular class of people: largely white, upper-class, well-educated men (Castillo, 166). Furthermore, history records have been based on patriarchal concepts of importance, according to which historical significance has been masculine by definition, for they have defined significance primarily by power, influence, and visible activity in the world of political and economic affairs4 (Gordon, 75). This has contributed to the “invisibility” and negative stereotyping of ethnic minorities, and especially of their women.

  • 5  Susan Kellog, “Depicting mestizaje: Gendered images of ethnorace”. Journal of Women’s History 12 ( (...)
  • 6  As Kafka points out “In the La Raza movement as well, Chicanas were outclassed, and masculinist di (...)
  • 7  Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Penguin Plume Books. 1994, (...)

2Minorities have denounced this situation, providing accounts which have challenged mainstream discourse based mainly on the achievements and points of view of Anglo-American males. In the case of women from ethnic minorities, their presence has been erased by the dominant group, who focused on matters of state, God and labor5 rather than on what they considered to be the less interesting aspects of life such as family life, sexuality and male-female interactions and by their own ethnic group, which has followed the same rules as far as historical significance is concerned6. To recover their own history, women of ethnic minorities have had to look for other methods of telling their stories. Castillo argues: “As women and as Native people, we must reconstruct our history with what is left unsaid and not with what has been recorded by those who have imposed their authority on us”7.

  • 8  Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: a Critique of Biology and Its Theories of Women. Oxford: Pergamon (...)

3This erasure of minorities and women calls for the use of sources where their voices can be heard and their conditions shown. In fact, Bleier8 considers that the finding of women lost to history, has become the female task. This would also generate a wider unbiased perspective and revise historical sources controlled by the male. In this article, I will examine how three different kinds of feminine texts, biographies, cookery books and novels, are used to expose an altogether different history. They provide portrayals which report, change and challenge white patriarchal mainstream assumptions at two different historical periods.

Biographies versus Novels: Source of Change and Challenge

  • 9  M. Ramos Ramos, “Alternative Sources to Women’s History: Literature”, in Adelaida del Castillo (ed (...)
  • 10  Rosaura Sanchez, “The History of Chicanas: Proposal for a Materialist Perspective”, in Adelaida de (...)
  • 11  C. Ramazanoglu with Janet Holland, Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. London: Sage Publ (...)
  • 12  Genaro Padilla, “Imprisioned Narratives? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women’s Autob (...)

4Biographies have already been accepted as valid accounts in social sciences and in feminist studies because they provide knowledge that otherwise would not exist. Novels, particularly those written by minority women, may also offer new perspectives. Ramos9 argues that through its portrayal of cultural conditions, traditions, customs, traits and effects on individuals, the Chicano novel has become another source of information and insight about historical events and into “the lived experience of women”10. In fact, novels have given an insight into the social conditions and problems faced by women which would otherwise remain absent from the records. Furthermore, literary works are valuable in recreating specific social situations and events as they provide the “background” which is often missing from the documents, thus enabling the researcher to uncover, for example, the conflicts and struggles which may lie behind apparent consensus (Scott, 12). However, we have to consider contributions as products of their times as “all experiences have social and cultural contexts”11 which, in many ways, predetermine the type of work and possibilities women in general, and even more so minority women, may have of inclusion and distribution into mainstream circles. This largely explains why the first accounts by Chicanas were cookery books restricted to a female public and autobiographies conforming to the “overwhelming non native discursive world”12 in the early part of the 20th century. Novels only became the main genre after 1980.

  • 13  Raymund A. Paredes, “The Evolution of Chicano Literature”, in H.A. Baker Jr. (ed.), Three American (...)
  • 14  Jack D. Forbes, Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán, Greenwich, Co: Fawcett Publications, 19 (...)

5Chicanos are descendants of the Indians who were conquered by the Spaniards in Mexico. A lot of them, of Indian origin and mixed-blood, moved northwards and occupied the northern part of Mexico which was sold to the Anglo-Americans in 1848. The inhabitants of those parts had “the choice of migrating southward across the new boundary or accepting American citizenship […] eighty thousand remained”13. Although they were supposed to have equality with the Anglos, their rights were constantly violated and occupation of their lands through murder and questionable legal means was common. Their conditions worsened in the 1890s when the Anglo majority drafted a new constitution which “delegalized Spanish; Anglos took over the economics and politics of Southern California; and the schools were transformed into replicas of the New England school houses”14. After World War II, the Chicanos made an effort to integrate into American society and in many cases this meant negating their roots and making a conscious effort not to transmit their culture and language to their children in order to pursue the American dream of wealth and improvement through hard work. However, in the 1960s, Mexican-Americans decided to start fighting against a system, which oppressed and disadvantaged them due to racism. They adopted the new term “Chicano” to symbolize their new attitude of resistance and pride in their Indian and Spanish heritage.

  • 15  From 1985 to 1992 Chicana writers published 34 novels in which “the central question [was] to rela (...)

6There are three types of literary works which show the change in conditions after 1960. In autobiographies and cookery books written before, Chicana writers try to resist the disappearance of their culture, history and traditions inside the “assimilationist” and dominant romantic Anglo discourse. On the other hand, the novel, especially after the 1980s15, allowed writers to challenge the prevailing images of Chicana myths and question the exclusion and erasure of some accounts and characters from the historical records, as well as the appropriation and invention of certain events and traditions by the Anglo-Americans.

Autobiographies and Cookery Books

  • 16  Padilla, op.cit., 44.
  • 17  Paredes, op.cit., 56.

7Although the Anglos dominated all the political and social life in the south-west of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, there were members of the local high classes who shared that power. As Padilla explains, “bringing the pre-colonial élites into closer proximity with its structures of power” is a necessary process to control lower classes and to create an official cultural discourse which, in the case of the south-west, was to paint an illusory and idyllic past, “through which the subjected group ma[de] sufferable its subordination”16. Some women from this elite wrote autobiographies, which have been criticized for perpetuating the status quo and racial prejudice “reminiscent of the conquistadors themselves”17. Two writers of this period are Cabeza de Baca, who published The Good Life (1950)—a cookery book—and We Fed Them Cactus (1954), and Cleofas Jaramillo, the author of The Genuine New Mexico Tasty Recipes (1939) and Romance of a Little Village Girl (1955). Although critics rightly observe that both We Fed Them Cactus and Romance of a Little Village Girl offer a romantic and distorted image of the past and are thus folklorist ethnographic records, a different reading may be possible showing the importance of these apparently conformist autobiographies as historical and sociological sources. It is plausible to believe that they copied the style of the Anglos in a concentrated effort to reappropriate their own history and culture while exposing the truth, even if only through one-line comments or ambiguous phrases unnoticeable to the ruling colonizers.

  • 18  Padilla, op.cit., 44.
  • 19  Padilla affirms that Jaramillo “authors her own cultural preservation activities, in English, for (...)

8It must be borne in mind that, as Padilla explains, “[e]very subject, or prisoner, wishes to be free [and] we must search for those moments where dissent discloses itself even in the most acquiescent discourse. We must look therefore for momentary struggles […] whispers of resistance […] those gaps in the narrative where the native cultural ‘I’ voices itself against the imperial ‘Other’”18. I believe these writers chose the moments and the subjects they wanted to expose very carefully and then introduced them into the narrative in apparently harmless, feminine works, taking advantage of their awareness of their oppressors’ mindset. It is typical that the members of an ethnic or racial minority, deprived of material goods and sophisticated technology, should rely on their wits to survive in an oppressive society. The writers’ key advantage over their adversaries was greater understanding (Paredes, 37). They realized that their only possibility of transmitting the real experience, culture and images of themselves was through the kind of accounts Anglos were writing, but with subtle variations19.

  • 20  A. Kaminsky, “Gender, Race, Raza”. Feminist Studies 20(1), 1994, 24.
  • 21  Cleofas Jaramillo, Romance of a Little Village Girl. San Antonio: Naylor. 1955, 174.

9The first step in the fight against the Anglo version of the south-west was to appropriate the language of the colonizers. It was the ability to speak, think and work within the English language, and to do it well, which finally provided a ticket into mainstream discourse (González, 59).Once they controlled the “foreign” language, they could write in that language so that the perspective of the original inhabitants of those lands was recorded and could be heard. They wanted to stress that they had not been removed from their land, but that its identity had been changed via appropriation by another power, “turning them, its previous inhabitants and their descendants, into strangers in what was once their home”20. Both Jaramillo and Cabeza de Baca thus stressed that they were the original inhabitants of those lands fighting against the transformation practices Anglo artists were creating in the name of “preservation”. When talking about the annual Santa Fe fiesta in her autobiography, Jaramillo states: “So far we have seen mostly what Americans have arranged”21, revealing the fact that although the Fiesta was called Spanish and was recorded as being a true cultural manifestation, it had been created and organized mostly by Anglos.

  • 22  Paredes, op.cit., 52.
  • 23  Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, We Fed Them Cactus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1954, 73, (...)

10Nevertheless, in their romantic and static accounts of life in New Mexico, there are not many instances in which resistance is clear, leading Paredesto claim, “there is something profoundly disturbing about this body of work. It seems a literature created out of fear and intimidation, a defensive response to racial prejudice […] and ethnocentrism”22. However, it is probable that the muttered thoughts and inappropriate commentaries within such texts would not have been published within and for an Anglo audience if the rest of the narrative had not been so innocent and feminine. Moreover, Cabeza de Baca refers four times to land fraud23, a topic which never appeared in Anglo accounts, and Jaramillo mocks on several occasions the efforts of Anglos to transform or reinvent Spanish history or celebrations in order to make them “more Spanish”. Padilla claims that Jaramillo in the process of being appropriated, actually appropriates, the discourse of the Other.

  • 24 “The women in this isolated area had to be resourceful in every way […] a great debt is owned to th (...)

11These autobiographies also challenged the erasure of women from records. On the one hand, they were literate, brave women with very “resourceful”24 characters, not weak and submissive as they appear in history. On the other hand, they or their characters do not fit into any of the four dramatic paradigms women seem condemned to: “Virgin, martyr, witch, whore” (González, 58). They are themselves the embodiment of resistance to patriarchal discourses of erasure and false images of Chicana women. They also recorded and transmitted the oral tradition in their cookery books where recipes mingle with traditional stories and are the natural preservers of culture and tradition. They provide, in the bits and snippets of stories, jokes and legends told around coffee cups and kitchen tables, the material of an unauthorized, often unrecognized, but nonetheless very real history (Pérez-Torres, 541). Thereby the writers resisted the assimilation and appropriation current not loudly and boldly, but nevertheless subtly and effectively.

  • 25  “Las autobiografías de mujeres […] han sido criticadas a menudo por centrarse en el mundo de la fa (...)

12Henríquez notes that “women’s autobiographies […] have often been criticized because of their focus on family, telling in many cases the stories of some of its members, revealing what worries them from a personal and domestic point of view”25, but, in this case, they are also a successful means of contributing to the positive re-evaluation of customs and culture, and to the replacement of the negative image of Chicanos with positive and real images. These ethnographic records provide inestimable information about the protagonists of history through social relations because:

  • 26  Kaplan, Caren, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects”, in S (...)

Personal histories that link individuals with communities are “cultural autobiographies” that go beyond the limits of the individualism of Western autobiographies. In these “revisiting autobiographies” there is a need to name and remember the people who have given the writing subject inspiration to speak about a gendered and cultural community26.

  • 27  Jaramillo, op.cit., vii.
  • 28  Padilla, op.cit., 47.
  • 29  “Nosotros nos reconocemos como “nosotros” porque somos diferentes de “ellos”, si no hubiera ningún (...)

They are the only authentic source, and very valuable due to the fact that, by choosing to be conscious transmitters of literary expressions, they have allowed for the recovery of their common culture, legends, folklore and myths in their own metaphors (Castillo, 166), as well as being essential preservers of cultural practices. Furthermore, when outside authors rewrite their testimonies, they probably miss the essential parts, “the current invisible to the stranger and understood only by its inhabitants”27 and report them while “mystifying and mythifying their cultural practices, reducing their social history, [and] ignoring their individuality”28. Authentic accounts, on the other hand, offer the insiders’ point of view, contrasting “us” with “them”, and challenge the pretendedly objective anglicized account of life in New Mexico. As Hobsbawn claims, “we recognize ourselves as ‘us’ because we are different from ‘them’, if there weren’t any ‘them’ who we are different from, we would not have to ask ourselves who are ‘we’”29.

  • 30  “To raise troubling antecedent texts to inclusion within the Chicano literary tradition requires m (...)

13Alarcón (372) regrets that much of that early work by Chicanas often goes unrecognised, which she sees as indicative of the process of erasure and exclusion of ethnic women within a patriarchal, cultural and political economy, but also of the rejection and lack of analysis of these works by Chicano critics who have not recognized their value30. They should be reevaluated and rescued for history for two main reasons: firstly, because they transmitted and reported the most important aspects of Chicano culture and identity, and secondly, because they managed to get into mainstream circles, which was quite an accomplishment as Padilla explains:  

  • 31 Ibid, 54.

 [The authors] knew they were lying to themselves, and they certainly knew they were engaged in a battle in which lies were crucial to survival. In intercultural discourse between a dominant and subject group, survival is predicated upon strategically voicing one’s presence. Often, simply being able to open one’s mouth signals a moment of affirmation31.

14Their purpose in writing autobiographies and cookery books was to recover a discourse, a culture and a world which had been taken from them in the only way they thought it was not going to get lost: in English and for an Anglo audience. Furthermore, they also offer a female account of a New Mexico world, which apparently was totally controlled by men and male language. In the middle of that patriarchal discourse we find these narratives in which all the aspects and many of the main themes such as language, the soil, domestic life, etc. are feminine, revealing the point of view which had been dismissed or eliminated everywhere else. If the history of women is to be written, biographies and cookery books may be essential to see reality through female eyes and not through the “dominant” or “reporter” view. As Castillo explains, an alternative history and social record is not so easily written:

  • 32  Castillo, op.cit., 215-216.

Historians have the most unfortunate task of either examining our past using sources that obviously either omit or distort us and employing white male methodology, not writing about us at all, or of still using Western arguments and language to try to make a revisionist case with what they do find32.

15In this essential work, all feminine texts should be considered and revised to make a proper and adequate selection because when we work with literary, testimonial and pertinent ethnographic material to enable Chicanas to grasp their “I”, we must select from the range of cultural productions those materials that actually enable the emergence of ”I/We” subjectivities (Alarcón, 378-379).

Novels

16In the second half of the 20th century, Chicana writers of novels were very active. They voiced all their main problems, exposing a history of oppression, racism and erasure. However, one author stood out in her attempt to question the way history had been written and the need to record events, as well as in her original revision of long-standing Chicano myths, Lucha Corpi. She has written four novels: Delia’s Song, Eulogy for a Brown Angel, Cactus Blood and Black Widow’s Wardrobe. Some aspects of these works illustrate appropriately how novels can provide an alternative historical and social account and how feminine reality can be used to question established perspectives.

17In all her novels she has selected a significant Chicano event which forms an important part of the plot, but she has reinterpreted its significance. Delia’s Song starts at Berkeley University in 1968 when students supporting the Grape Boycott were forcibly removed by the National Guard which entered a University for the first time. She describes the events that took place and emphasizes the need to record them so that they are not forgotten or distorted by historians, even if their protagonists disappear. As Samuel, one of the characters, remarks: “One day someone will come looking for all the information. Historians, maybe a writer. But who would look for us Ant […] Vermin […] Invisible […] Remember” (28).

18This quotation stresses the importance of writers who have, together with historians and researchers, the power to make events visible and important. Ramazanoglu emphasizes the same argument:

  • 33  Ramazanoglu, op.cit., 113.

All social researchers […] can exercise power by turning people’s lives into authoritative texts: by hearing some things and ignoring or excluding others33.

For this to be possible, sources are needed which also record the presence of minorities and especially women so that they can be given a presence and a voice which they have long been denied. As Behar puts it:

Where are the women among those gigantic looming shadows of the male liberators, tyrants, generals, colonels and revolutionaries? […] The history textbooks tell the story of Spanish America’s bloody national struggles for independence, decolonisation and freedom as if women were never there, as if women had no place in the nation and in history (Behar, 6).

  • 34  Lucha Corpi, Delia’s Song. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1988, 24.

19Corpi therefore criticizes the role women have been given because apparently, in these important historical events, “they follow orders”34 and are subordinate to men. Delia’s Song can be considered a sociological text as it exposes two very important realities: first, the lack of records where there is feminine presence and where the protagonists inform of what is happening, and, secondly, the subordination of minority women in political movements and, therefore, their erasure as subordinates to the male power structure which records the events.

20Her next two novels also start with a historically significant event. Eulogy for a Brown Angel begins with the Chicano Moratorium, a massive demonstration by Chicanos/as in the city of Los Angeles in 1970 to protest against the war in Vietnam. Three Chicanos died due to the police overreaction and use of force. Cactus Blood opens with the 1973 United Farm Workers strike and grape boycott in the San Joaquin Valley to protest against the working conditions of Chicanos and the toxic effects on people of the pesticides used in growing the grapes. In both novels, there is another parallel event: in the first one, the murder of a child and, in the second, the suicide of an artist. These, together with other minor events, generally outlining women’s oppression, the lack of resources and education, make up the bulk of the portrayal. When considering the effect of such disadvantages on people, the novels question the accuracy of traditional and patriarchal recorded history which only refers to events and not to their consequential impact on people’s lives. Ramos explains the point of view as follows:

Standard history textbooks make the following assumptions: a) historical development is equated with political events; b) politics is the affairs of men; c) the public domain is the only legitimate arena for political activity, decision making, important business and the real world; d) only those events taking place in the public domain are worthy of historical chronicle (Ramos, 203).

On the other hand, the events which really influence people’s lives are normally inner, family or minor occurrences from the point of view of history. These, as Corpi’s novels illustrate, are largely ignored.

  • 35  ”Malinche is hardly mentioned in history books”, Lucha Corpi, Black Widow’s Wardrobe. Houston: Art (...)

21In Black Widow’s Wardrobe, Corpi questions the way history has been reported through the portrayal and recovery of one of the most important Chicana myths, La Malinche. She revises her real history contrasting it with the image that has been portrayed and passed from generation to generation, pointing out that there are almost no accounts of Malinche’s existence in history books35. This emphasizes the way women have been erased from history but recreated as images, myths and stereotypes to be used to control and blame the rest of women, “brainwashing Chicanas into believing that treachery flowed into their veins at birth from their maternal line only, from their female Indian foremother” (Kafka, xvi).

  • 36  Mary Louise Pratt, “’Yo soy la Malinche’: chicana writers and the poetics of ethnonationalism”. Ca (...)
  • 37  “Chicana scholars and writers aimed at creating a more positive image of her”, Lucha Corpi, Black (...)

22Reconstructing Malinche’s life accurately was a difficult, if not impossible task. All the available information on her, complimentary or not, had been provided by men, which effectively kept women subjugated as events were explained by the divinity of masculine opinion presented as objective reality36. Lucha Corpi lends her voice to Malinche, by creating a character who believes she is her reincarnation, and can therefore talk and explain her acts and attitudes in the narrative. Thus, a more positive perspective is offered. According to Corpi, other Chicana writers and scholars37 are also using this myth to rewrite their cultural history and to escape from the historical founding moment of the construction of mestiza(o) subjectivity which entails the rejection and denial of the dark Indian Mother as Indian (Alarcón, 377), or even as traitor. Malinche specifically questions the concept of traitor:

  • 38  Corpi. op.cit., 121.

I have been called a traitor to my people […]. But who were my people? My poor mother who gave me to the slave traders because as a woman she could retain her power only through their male child? The slave traders for whom I was just a commodity? My Mayan and Tabascoan masters? The Mexicans who subjugated everyone and went to war for the sole purpose of getting human hearts to appease their god’s wrath? To whom did I owe loyalty? No. I belonged to no one38.

23It is clear that, through Black Widow’s Wardrobe,Lucha Corpi criticizes the fact that history only offers one version of events: “I suppose we believe what historians tell us […]. We would get a rounder view only if all sides were presented but that’s rarely the case” (120). Malinche was the victim both of white males who have offered distorted historical documentation disseminated to the general populace by the power system that has traditionally governed the country (Castillo, 22), and of males from minority groups who excluded Malinche from the record when she was no longer of any use to Cortés.

24It can be concluded that Lucha Corpi, in all her novels, offers a very useful alternative perspective which opens up new points of view as regards history. She reports and questions three basic concepts. Firstly, she emphasizes the need for protagonists to record events so that the documents will be found in the future and, therefore, all the points of view will be shown. Secondly, she challenges the belief that only history and politics affect people’s lives. Thirdly, she contests the erasure or distortion of women in historical accounts because they only appear in relation to men and from the point of view of men.

25For a very long time, women have had problems challenging patriarchal accounts and discourse because the legitimacy to define their own identities is appropriated through the ideology of objectivity (Córdova, 22) and patriarchal mainstream discourse has made an extra effort to silence them:

These “new” women-subjects find themselves bombarded and subjected to multiple cross-cultural and contradictory ideologies—a maze of discourses through which the “I” as a racial and gendered self is hard put to emerge and runs the risk of being thought of as “irrational” or “deluded” in her attempt to articulate her oppression and exploitation (Alarcón, 378).

26This has led to the need for women to use other types of accounts to rewrite experience in an attempt to express themselves within an alien masculine world of constraining patriarchal institutions whose discourse does not allow for their existence (Kafka, 53). In this context, literary works have been essential in the exploration of racial history and of what women-of-color scholars now identify as an important ingredient in identity studies, the significance of racial memory (González, 58). In fact, as Pérez-Torres argues:

  • 39  Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Ethnicity, ethics and latino aesthetic”. American Literary History 12(3), 20 (...)

The means by which Chicano—and to a greater extent Latino—identity has been given a cultural voice for a broad audience has been via the novel and short story39.

I believe that, in all other disciplines, literary works, as cultural and historical expression, should be reevaluated and the border between personal stories and history examined in a call to take seriously our historias, by turning to the storytellers in our community in order to understand the past (Chávez, 433). In the context of Chicana literature, it may be useful to consider that in Spanish there is only one word for both concepts and some authors and myself argue that such stories constitute very valid accounts of social and historical conditions.

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Bibliographie

Works cited

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Kellog, Susan, “Depicting mestizaje: Gendered images of ethnorace”, Journal of Women’s History 12 (3) (2000): 69–92.

Leal, Luis and Pepe Barrón, “Chicano Literature: An Overview”, in Houston A. Baker Jr. ed., Three American Literatures: Essays on Chicano, Native American and Asian-American Literature. New York: Modern Language Association. 1982, 9-32.

Lomelí, Francisco, “Contemporary Chicano Literature, 1959–1990: From Oblition to Affirmation, to the Forefront”, in Francisco Lomelí ed., Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Art and Literature. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1993, 86–108.

Memmi, Albert, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. 1965.

Padilla, Genaro, “Imprisioned Narratives? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women’s Autobiography”, in H. Calderón and J.D. Saldívar eds., Criticism in the Borderlands. Durham: Duke University Press. 1991, 43-60.

Paredes, Raymund A., “The Evolution of Chicano Literature”, in H.A. Baker Jr. ed., Three American Literatures. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 1982, 33-79.

Pérez-Torres, Rafael, “Ethnicity, ethics and latino aesthetic”, American Literary History 12(3) (2000): 534-553.

Pratt, Mary Louise, “’Yo soy la Malinche’: chicana writers and the poetics of ethnonationalism”, Callaloo 16(4) (1993) : 859-873.

Ramazanoglu, C. with Janet Holland, Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. London: Sage Publications. 2002.

Ramos Ramos, M., “Alternative Sources to Women’s History: Literature”, in Adelaida del Castillo ed., Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History. Encino: Floricanto Press. 1990, 201-213.

Sanchez, Rosaura, “The History of Chicanas: Proposal for a Materialist Perspective”, in Adelaida del Catillo ed., Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicano History. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press. 1990, 1-31.

Scott, John, A Matter of Record. Cambridge: Polity Press. 1990.

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Notes

1  “Listening to the Silences in Latina/Chicana Lesbian History”, 433, in Carla Trujillo (ed.), Living Chicana Theory. Berkeley, CAL: Third Woman Press. 1998, 429-434.

2  Phillipa Kafka, (Out)Classed Women: Contemporary Chicana Writers on Inequitable Gendered Power Relations. Westport: Greenwood Press. 2000, xvi, my emphasis.

3  Albert Memmi explains this process: “How can usurpation try to pass for legitimacy? One attempt can be made by demonstrating the usurper´s eminent merits, so eminent that they deserve compensation. Another is to harp on the usurped´s demerits, so deep that they cannot help leading to misfortune. His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time”. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press. 1965, 52-53.

4  Leal and Barrón call the Mexican-American the “invisible minority” and state that “it is not because of their number but because members of the dominant culture chose to ignore them”, “Chicano Literature: An Overview”, in Houston A. Baker (ed.), Three American Literatures: Essays on Chicano, Native American and Asian-American Literature. New York: MLA. 1982, 15.

5  Susan Kellog, “Depicting mestizaje: Gendered images of ethnorace”. Journal of Women’s History 12 (3), 2000, 71.

6  As Kafka points out “In the La Raza movement as well, Chicanas were outclassed, and masculinist discourse and perspective prevailed”, op.cit., 102. González adds “my concern is about the strong linkage between the silencing of women and nationalist Chicano politics”, op.cit., 53.

7  Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma. New York: Penguin Plume Books. 1994, 111.

8  Ruth Bleier, Science and Gender: a Critique of Biology and Its Theories of Women. Oxford: Pergamon. 1984, 199.

9  M. Ramos Ramos, “Alternative Sources to Women’s History: Literature”, in Adelaida del Castillo (ed.), Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History. Encino: Floricanto Press. 1990, 208.

10  Rosaura Sanchez, “The History of Chicanas: Proposal for a Materialist Perspective”, in Adelaida del Catillo (ed.), Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicano History. Encino, CA: Floricanto Press. 1990, 16

11  C. Ramazanoglu with Janet Holland, Feminist Methodology: Challenges and Choices. London: Sage Publications. 2002, 128.

12  Genaro Padilla, “Imprisioned Narratives? Or Lies, Secrets, and Silence in New Mexico Women’s Autobiography”, in H. Calderón and J.D. Saldívar (eds.), Criticism in the Borderlands. Durham: Duke University Press. 1991, 47.

13  Raymund A. Paredes, “The Evolution of Chicano Literature”, in H.A. Baker Jr. (ed.), Three American Literatures. New York: The Modern Language Association of America. 1982, 37.

14  Jack D. Forbes, Aztecas del Norte: The Chicanos of Aztlán, Greenwich, Co: Fawcett Publications, 1973, 116.

15  From 1985 to 1992 Chicana writers published 34 novels in which “the central question [was] to relate experiences from an optic—mainly female—that [had] been ignored, subdued or silent”. Francisco Lomelí (ed.), Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the United States: Art andLiterature. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1993, 89.

16  Padilla, op.cit., 44.

17  Paredes, op.cit., 56.

18  Padilla, op.cit., 44.

19  Padilla affirms that Jaramillo “authors her own cultural preservation activities, in English, for an Anglo-American readership in order to forestall another Anglos from describing her people’s cultural history”, Ibid, 57.

20  A. Kaminsky, “Gender, Race, Raza”. Feminist Studies 20(1), 1994, 24.

21  Cleofas Jaramillo, Romance of a Little Village Girl. San Antonio: Naylor. 1955, 174.

22  Paredes, op.cit., 52.

23  Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, We Fed Them Cactus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1954, 73, 135, 175 and 178.

24 “The women in this isolated area had to be resourceful in every way […] a great debt is owned to the brave, pioneer women who ventured into the cruel life in the plains”, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, op.cit., 61.

25  “Las autobiografías de mujeres […] han sido criticadas a menudo por centrarse en el mundo de la familia, relatando en muchos casos historias de algunos miembros que la conforman, revelando lo que les preocupa a nivel personal y doméstico”. María Henríquez Betancor. “Canícula: la Construcción de la Biografía Chicana y la Fotografía”, in F. Eguiluz, F. López, A. Ibarrarán and D. Ríos (eds.), Aztlán: Ensayos sobre Literatura Chicana. Vitoria: UPV. 2002. 107.

26  Kaplan, Caren, “Resisting Autobiography: Out-law Genres and Transnational Feminist Subjects”, in S. Smith ed., De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Genre in Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1992, 130-131.

27  Jaramillo, op.cit., vii.

28  Padilla, op.cit., 47.

29  “Nosotros nos reconocemos como “nosotros” porque somos diferentes de “ellos”, si no hubiera ningún “ellos” de los que somos diferentes, no tendríamos que preguntarnos quiénes somos “nosotros””, E. Hobsbawn, “Contra la política de la identidad”, Nexos XIX. 1996, 42.

30  “To raise troubling antecedent texts to inclusion within the Chicano literary tradition requires more than summarily, if not begrudgingly, recognizing their presence […] we must account for the complex textual voicings of socially subordinate writers without losing ourselves to a form of progressive intellectual snobbery that overlooks or ignores those flashes in imprisoned discourse that are a textual signal of embryonic consciousness, whispers of antecedent resistance that have provided us the opening for clearly revisionary and resistive utterance”, Padilla. op.cit., 60.

31 Ibid, 54.

32  Castillo, op.cit., 215-216.

33  Ramazanoglu, op.cit., 113.

34  Lucha Corpi, Delia’s Song. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1988, 24.

35  ”Malinche is hardly mentioned in history books”, Lucha Corpi, Black Widow’s Wardrobe. Houston: Arte Público Press. 1999, 72.

36  Mary Louise Pratt, “’Yo soy la Malinche’: chicana writers and the poetics of ethnonationalism”. Callaloo 16(4), 1993, 866.

37  “Chicana scholars and writers aimed at creating a more positive image of her”, Lucha Corpi, Black Widow’s Wardrobe. op.cit., 97.

38  Corpi. op.cit., 121.

39  Rafael Pérez-Torres, “Ethnicity, ethics and latino aesthetic”. American Literary History 12(3), 2000, 546.

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Maria Camino Bueno Alastuey, « Does History only Belong to you? Revision through Literature »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal, Vol. II - n°4 | 2004, 195-210.

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Maria Camino Bueno Alastuey, « Does History only Belong to you? Revision through Literature »Revue LISA/LISA e-journal [En ligne], Vol. II - n°4 | 2004, mis en ligne le 03 novembre 2009, consulté le 29 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/lisa/2944 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/lisa.2944

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Auteur

Maria Camino Bueno Alastuey

Dr. (University of Navarre, Espagne)
Maria Camino Bueno Alastuey holds a PhD in English Philology from the University of the Basque Country. She has taught English to adults in Masters and vocational training courses at the Technical College of Marketing and Commerce for several years and is currently teaching English for Specific Purposes and the use of literature in the classroom at the Public University of Navarre. Her research centers on minority women’s literature, for which she spent some time doing research at the Universities of Arizona and California, and “English for Specific Purposes”. Her latest publications include two articles in Ibérica and a submission to MELUS.

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