[In the following essay, Bower explores Teresa's relationship with herself, Alicia, and the other characters in The Mixquiahuala Letters.]

Epistolary novels place primacy on the acts of writing and reading. I have contended that as they write to others of various events, feelings, and thoughts and as they read others' responses to their letters, characters in these novels rewrite or redefine themselves. In addition, they offer to themselves and others the possibilities of rereadings. That is, the epistolary heroine may use the letter as a place to solve mysteries, undo misconceptions, and perceive patterns previously hidden from her view, discovering new interpretations of past happenings that she can present to herself and others. We might call this use of the epistolary response site remapping, for it takes ground that has been gone over and changes the way characters and readers see it. This term seems apropos for The Mixquiahuala Letters because its letters recount adventures and trips in many locations. The term remapping also appeals to me because it responds to the historic link between conquest of land and conquest of the female body that has characterized patriarchal societies.

Ana Castillo's epistolary novel¹ features only one letter writer: the poet, Teresa. Undated letters address her close friend, Alicia, but we know nothing of that artist friend's reading and little of her writing, for Teresa seldom refers to communication from her. Teresa's letters, as succinctly explained by one reviewer, “reflect on [the two women's] experiences in order to confront the ghosts that often haunt women” (Lawhn 1392). Those ghosts, however, are as much internalized attitudes and approaches as external elements of the patriarchal society in which Teresa dwells, as Castillo's epigraph hints: “I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern.” This epigraph, a quote from Anaïs Nin (Under a Glass Bell), who was famous for her ground-breaking personal diaries, forecasts that Castillo's novel will also use a personal writing style to explore troubled relationships with male figures and that it will investigate conformity and nonconformity and the concept of pattern—in art and consciousness itself. The poet/writer heroine and her sketching/painting correspondent must use their arts, both public and private, to repattern or remap the land of former assumptions. Letters function well in such a revisionary effort, but clearly Castillo sees them as but one method.

The responses documented in this particular epistolary novel then are not redefinitions or restorations or regenerations of the protagonist's self. Rather, at the level of story, the letters encompass a search for new ways Teresa and Alicia can perceive, understand, and live with their continuing, conflicted, and known selves. In addition, as Teresa explains to Alicia, this personal effort may serve others: it may become “pertinent, not just to benefit our lives, but womanhood” (47). For this study of pattern, Castillo chooses a highly patterned form—the letter novel—and enacts her call for change by playing with that form.

Castillo reinforces the importance of pattern with introductory material that provides three tables of contents for reading the novel's letters, telling us to decide which plan to follow. Labeled “For the Conformist,” “For the Cynic,” and “For the Quixotic,” these lists leave out certain letters, rearrange their sequence, or both. Of course they also ask that the external reader label herself, thus setting up the expectation that part of Castillo's project is to question the reader's role. What label applies to the reader who, because of the cover-to-cover reading habit, reads letters one through forty in that order, a pattern Castillo does not recommend? Is such a reader to see herself as the ultimate conformist or, in this particular case, relative to the author's instructions, a nonconformist? After providing the three labeled reading strategies, the author also advises us that each letter is a short story in and of itself, and she opens the door to our own participation by wishing us well no matter what pattern of reading we select: “Good luck whichever journey you choose!” Regardless of which path one follows, an initial letter focuses on journeying. In letter 1, Teresa plots the complications of a trip the two women hope to take to Mixquiahuala, Mexico; in letter 2, she refers to a trip to Mexico ten years earlier; in letter 3, she details the two women's first meeting during a summer culture and language course in Mexico City. Thus the notion of pattern becomes intertwined with trips south of the border.

This is very much a quest novel, subsequent letters leading us on various journeys and visits to Mexico, New York, California, and Chicago, but with form and explanation taking us into the women's emotional and artistic searches. The quest here is not for a grail of selfhood, but for a way to live out that selfhood. Eliana Ortega and Nancy Saporta Sternbach assert that Latina writers, when depicting a “search,” usually do so in terms of “a search for the expression or articulation of that identity, but not for … identity itself” (3). Indeed, Castillo's heroine never expresses doubts about her sexuality, desires, pleasures, her mestizo background, or her career choice. Her letters demonstrate, however, that she does struggle with discovering the writing self's best modes of expression, questing for more suitable patterns (in writing and living) than the ones the past has cut.

Castillo's prefatory ploy emphasizes the difference between story and novel because, as Barbara Dale May explains, each approach yields “a very different resolution and interpretation of each life” (314). Castillo's strategy also calls into question the whole notion of letters' verisimilitude and forces the external reader to question his or her own reasons for and ways of reading the novel. Reading as quest (and for what?), reading as linear journey (and to where?) enter the situation, and again Castillo comments on reading processes through introductory material, for her book is dedicated “In memory of the master of the game, Julio Cortázar.” If reading and, by implication, writing are games, then they amuse, they have rules, but they also can leave behind losers and winners. For these games, the winning strategies, I believe Cortázar and Castillo would agree, are those that open up self-awareness and choice.²

In this highly self-reflexive novel, strangely enough, the relationship between experience and language goes largely unquestioned. The narrative's Chicana protagonist seems to accept experience as the precursor to language and language as an adequate transmitter of that experience. Castillo however, undercuts this conviction somewhat through the work's epistolary form and through her postmodern tactic of alternative orderings for the letters. No matter what a letter novel is about ostensibly, its letter quality makes it about giving and withholding information, about language's ability to transmit thoughts and feelings or to mask them, and about how we construct or misconstruct meaning from language and how we are constructed or misconstructed by language. In the conventional epistolary novel, pen-wielders write “to the moment,” providing their addressees with incomplete, new, fragmentary sections of experience. In this novel however, Alicia knows most of what Teresa writes. The communication focuses not on passing information but on reworking that information, making new sense out of it. Also, if one does not perceive that Teresa seeks new responses to old patterns—that this goal is at the heart of The Mixquiahuala Letters—then its epistolary format will seem very strange. One puzzled anonymous reviewer wrote: “What is not clear is why anyone would write such elaborate letters simply to retell, without analysis, what the recipient already knows” (Rocky Mountain Review 128). Analysis does exist, however. The reviewer neglects the highly reflective quality of the content, along with the possibility that writing here functions to reexamine the experiences, cultural norms, and selves with which the two women have lived. Castillo's heroine participates in the integrative process Ortega and Sternbach claim for Latina writers, in their particular bicultural situation: “She [the Latina writer] accomplishes this integrity by the act of writing itself. This process constitutes an affirmation, and then definition, of that inter-cultural self and serves as her way of returning to the community those stories they have collectively and historically shared with her, recreating them now into new imaginary worlds” (17). In a way, Teresa writes for a small community—that of herself and her best friend—but she also blazes a trial for others.³

The affirmative work of The Mixquiahuala Letters documents the woman writer's ability to overcome patriarchally imposed conformity and quiescence of women, particularly minority women. Writing itself becomes a way to reach understanding of both the near past, involving unresolved jealousies and needs these two women experienced during their twenties, and the farther past, involving their separate youths and family backgrounds. Letter writing also affirms a bond between these two women in a society where, typically, women's friendship is seen as a pallid substitute for marriage or heterosexual relationship. Teresa writes that society decrees a woman should be satisfied by male sustenance: “Her needs had to be sustained by him. If not, she was to keep her emptiness to herself” (29). Nevertheless, for the two women in this novel, unsatisfied by their relationships with men (yet very much involved in heterosexual pursuits), writing can fill some of the emptiness. Teresa creates letters and poems; Alicia prefers visual arts. Words and artwork alike trace new patterns, new understandings, and new supportive lifelines between them.

The self-reflexivity typical of all letter novels is especially strong in The Mixquiahuala Letters. Because, as James Watson reminds us, a letter is always about writing as much as anything else (8), and because Teresa herself is also a professional writer, her letters not only interrogate the stories of her own and her confidante's pasts but also question the telling of those stories. The letter form's particular claim to authenticity—as a document of the writer's heart, as fiction that is nonfiction, as private confession—all of this is questioned in the complex of recollections, imaginings, stories, poems, and diatribe produced by Teresa. For some letter-writing characters, writing is a way to uncover or reveal the truth about an idea or event; for others it is a way to imagine it. As Barbara Hardy observes in her study of narration, any kind of narrative can be compounded of “lies, truths, boasts, gossips, confessions, confidences, secrets, jokes” (7). Castillo and her heroine run the gamut.

In The Mixquiahuala Letters, Teresa goes over experience (her own, her friend's, their shared times) to try to discover what did happen. The character occasionally questions the probability that this process will yield truth. For example, recounting a time when she rescued Alicia from aggressive males, assuming that her friend would be grateful, Teresa admits that her perception of Alicia's reaction may have been off the mark. Perhaps Alicia did not really want to be rescued: “perhaps, you hated me too” (79). However, such expression of doubt is rare in the protagonist. It is primarily Castillo who questions the difficulty of ascertaining the truth, signaling her doubts through the novel's game plan. Norma Alarcón finds that “Castillo mocks [Teresa] … by framing her with the ‘reading charts’ offered to the reader” (100).

Although Castillo's format takes potshots at the notion of some knowable, fixable truth, this author is clearly dedicated to the idea that writing clears paths to experiences otherwise unavailable, for her protagonist can write herself into new understandings and into others' experiences.⁴ For instance, letter 4 recounts for Alicia material about Teresa's relationship to the Catholic Church, giving the addressee a specific event to experience as her own; letter 5 recounts Alicia's background, clearly unnecessary information for Alicia but presumably an exercise in which the writer is wondering whether her comprehension of her friend's past is accurate. Letter 33 includes a poem Teresa writes from the point of view of an old lover, Alexis, expressing his reactions to seeing Teresa after five years, and in letter 40 Teresa imagines what Alicia must have seen and felt at her lover's suicide. In this exploratory, imaginative use of writing, the character and her author seem fully agreed, confident that the writing act is a powerful transformative enactment of desire and subjectivity, a way to create and maintain human bonds.

Epistolary characters will transmit the belief either that writing is a direct way to express emotion or that it is a way to master emotion. In discussing Jane Austen's novel-in-letters, Lady Susan, Patricia Meyer Spacks sorts out the two ways epistolary characters write emotion. The traditional emotive and sentimental character, whose emotions are represented as overwhelming, supposedly transfers emotional content directly to the letter's recipient. The nontraditional, aggressive character, whose emotions are elements to be mastered or disguised, uses writing as an artifice by which to manipulate the recipient (64–67). In Castillo's novel, the protagonist, although never manipulative of her addressee, takes both the traditional and nontraditional roles in relationship to the letters' emotionalism.

One way Teresa exorcises remembered events and their pain is by writing. She can explain and reflect on Alicia's and her own conflicts over a particular man or over their ways of dealing with strangers. Expression of feelings is sometimes unbearable, however; exploring a shared experience in Yucatan, Teresa explains to Alicia that “to be rid of it, i must create distance” (64). Recounting events is a way to control the emotions that would otherwise overwhelm her. Yet, at times she reaches an impasse and has to admit loss of control: “i don't want to go on with this story. You know the rest” (68). Sometimes story, in the classic sense of beginning, middle, and end, is more than Teresa can, or perhaps wants to, impose on experience and emotion.⁵ In such instances Castillo allows her poet-protagonist to shift (within the letters) into other forms: dreams, poems, third-person fiction, and reporting of uninterrupted dialogue. Here we find Castillo extending the epistolary format, crossing genres to repattern the discourse form itself and the content it represents. She exploits the form's power to communicate emotion, modifying the protagonist's letter content and writing style, so that either can communicate changing motives, states of mind, and so on. As has been noted in earlier chapters, the formal aspects of writing can represent complex emotional relationships even when the relationships themselves are not the precise content of the letters: “to write a letter is to map one's coordinates—temporal, spatial, emotional, intellectual—in order to tell someone else where one is located at a particular time and how far one has traveled since the last writing” (Altman Epistolarity 119).

Emotional conflicts can also be implied in terms of the materials and circumstances of writing itself. This inscription has a long history. In Clarissa, for instance, Lovelace's ability to control the heroine's access to pen and paper, his easy interception and reading of her correspondence to others, and his forging of letters all represent his control of her body and his power to control the relationship (Castle 22–23). Teresa's dedication to the writing act and the lack of letters from her addressee imply a conflict over much of how the two women understand the past, a conflict Teresa wants to resolve because she continually asks Alicia to “recall” and “remember” the past. These letters form a bond, one Teresa insists she can create in spite of the men who come and go in both their lives, in spite of the miles between them.

Teresa's letters to Alicia, undated, but covering we are told at least a ten-year period, clearly demonstrate the writer's desire to affirm and continue a relationship. A variety of closings indicate a wide range of feelings. “Amen” closes a letter that recounts a night in a haunted house during which Teresa's background of mixed Catholic and folk faiths assisted the two women (84). A letter that delves into the difficult topic of how women attract men and confesses her own docility before men is signed with an unassuming “T” (113), whereas a letter hopeful about the future of both women inscribes futurity with “Always, / Tere” (119).

The letters' salutations similarly encode a variety of emotional ties, moving within three letters, for example, from nothing at all to “Querida Alicia” to “A—” (104–11). Not only is the emotional tone of the letters subject to fluctuation; presumably silences or nonverbal responses (such as the drawings or small gifts Alicia reportedly sends) are tenable parts of the relationship as well. Although the emotional content of Teresa's letters may vary, their steadfast commitment to retelling the past and clarifying it for both women is indicated by the fact that none of the letters is a note: each entails a substantial allocation of space and time. Teresa's persistent effort to rewrite the past for herself and for Alicia could be termed, to borrow a phrase from Nancy K. Miller, an effort to “unwrite the text which keeps her prisoner” (The Heroine's Text 95). Miller finds that the early “feminocentric novel in letters … is the locus of an exchange of desires unauthorized by the fathers” (150). Certainly this generalization about earlier texts applies to Castillo's novel, for it is the world of their fathers which both characters struggle against and which Teresa attempts to rewrite.

Of Teresa's biological father we hear nothing, other than that he was “a migrant worker or a laborer in the North” (21)—her uncertainty is a comment in and of itself. Another father, the priest to whom she confesses, interrogates her, probing suggestively, and providing no guidance or comfort (24). Alicia's father plays no part in the story. The art instructor under whom Teresa and Alicia study in Mexico City is “an adequate instructor, could be charming,” but teaches them little and flirts with the blonde students (20). Rather than actual fathers or father figures, what Castillo's heroine rails against are authoritarian, male-dominated social systems that constantly threaten women's autonomy and freedom. Thus she writes that in Mexico “society has knit its pattern so tight that a confrontation with it is inevitable” (59), and the confrontations there with men young and old, college educated or street smart, seldom yield anything but pain. America is no better: a place where women's lives and hopes are constantly at risk. Husbands and lovers are ineffective at best, brutish or self-destructive at worst. Thus, although both women crave “a family, to share life with a steady man, children to sit around the table together, hold fast to each other during winters, and to go out to play in better days, always as one unit” (106), each must find another life pattern, one that does not revolve around male figures, to satisfy their needs for community and communion.

Castillo's novel gives us a body of letters addressed to one individual, in a pattern typical of much epistolary fiction. By frequently positioning personal correspondence within a broader social context this novel also accepts epistolary tradition. The social (and political, economic, and historic) commentary in letter novels, as Spacks and others have pointed out, can subvert given social norms or contribute to their inculcation, or it can critique some aspects of society while accepting others.⁶ It can also explore an individual's ideas and feelings about social freedoms.

For the protagonist of Castillo's novel, social and personal freedoms must be wrested from the patriarchal power system, a system she evidently presumes will endure. Teresa is a young Chicana who has experienced the so-called liberation of the sixties and seventies and yet not found herself freed of psychological or social burdens, and because her sole correspondent is another woman of similar experience (though of Spanish, not Mexican, descent), this novel's letters are very much a critique of the patriarchy. Repeated incidents detail the psychological and physical freedoms men take with women, liberties patterned into both the American and the Mexican social systems. Yet the letters always return to the personal, focusing on the protagonist's relationship to her correspondent Alicia, who can be seen as both an alter ego and an Other with whom the writer experiences conflict.

Depending on how one reads this novel, the letters resolve the writer's relationship to herself and to her friend in different ways. If one ends with letter 1 (the “quixotic” route) one sees the letters as working toward a new resolve and maturity, but facing an unknown outcome. The two women seem to be planning a new trip to Mexico, a place of past adventures. However, Teresa seems to accept her own situation: “At thirty, i feel like i'm beginning a new phase in life: adulthood” (15). At the same time, she wonders if the reason that the women seem not to have reached their idealistic goals is that they “were not furious enough” (16).

If one ends with letter 34 (the path recommended for “the conformist”) one is left with the picture of both women entering new phases of their lives with determination and assurance. Alicia has just had her first one-woman art show, a show Teresa praises for the works' power to perform “the exorcism of the artist's rite” (118). The artist-friend has survived the past and become capable of expressing her anger at and rejection of the existing social power structure. Teresa, meanwhile, has chosen a different path. She announces to her friend that she is “going home” to Mexico, where she and her son will be enveloped in the love and acceptance of the boy's grandparents and where Teresa's husband (from whom she has had long separations) will play a vaguely benevolent nonthreatening role (119). Teresa will teach, but mentions nothing about her poetry. This version of the story is for the conformist because it plots a divided womanhood: either one is the artist or one is the domestic, as so often in the past. The alter ego splits off. Alicia goes to Europe, to art; Teresa turns to motherhood, teaching. This is the plot that women have known for years.

If one follows the “cynic” track of this novel, then letter 8 closes the story. In this angry letter Teresa asks Alicia, “How long did you think i would tolerate your growing pains?” (125). Teresa is jealous of Alicia's flirtation with Vicente, once her own companion. Here is another trapping plot: the one that says a man will always come between women.

In letter 40, placed at the end of the physical novel, Teresa recounts the christening of her son and Alicia's participation in that ritual. This letter, written after the suicide of Alicia's lover, includes a second narrative of participation, for in it Teresa creates an account of the events surrounding the suicide, events she, Teresa, never witnessed. In this writing, Teresa makes herself into Alicia and demonstrates to Alicia her empathic understanding of the friend's terrifying experience. The telling of the story is the making or proving of the relationship. Writing becomes a way the correspondent creates herself and her friend and their importance to each other.

The internal reader in The Mixquiahuala Letters is the nonwriting painter friend Alicia. Yet one realizes that the other internal reader of Teresa's letters is Teresa herself. These recountings of the past are as much self-directed as other-directed. For this protagonist (as for many other epistolary protagonists), writing a letter is an opportunity to read herself, an “interpretive rereading” (Irigaray 75). Thus both of the posited readers in this text assume that reading a text can change the way one sees the events reported in that text and, consequently, can change one's beliefs or actions. Castillo, in spite of her metafictional and postmodern stance, seems to have considerable faith that language can reconstruct reality.

The third letter in the novel states that the two women's earliest letters were “passion bound by uterine comprehension” (18), associating friendship with a maternal bond. Sexuality and physical action are inscribed in the letter too, for Teresa refers to their then correspondence as a way they could know each other and themselves: “We needled, stabbed, manipulated, cut and through it all we loved, driven to see the other improved in her own reflection” (23). Reading is here intimately tied to writing, and both acts are metaphors for physical violence and love. Verbal acts are also related by Teresa to the exchange of other items: jewelry, poems, and sketches (23). The metonymy of the letter as a piece of the self is as strong for the reader/receiver as for the writer/sender. Teresa and Alicia serve various roles for each other: friend, quasi-lover (one might say a sexless lesbianism), colearner, sister, confidante, guide, guardian (in the case of Teresa, who sees herself as rescuer of the more delicate Alicia), rival, alter ego. Castillo here follows a model common to Latina artists. As Ortega and Sternbach explain: “In Latina writing, the entire extended family of women—mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, cousins, godmothers, lovers, neighbors, fortune-tellers, curanderas (healers), midwives, teachers, and friends, especially girlhood friends—makes up a cast of characters” (12). Teresa's mother, other female friends, her grandmother, and Alicia in a multitude of roles fill out that circle of female characters. Latina “writers have often displaced a central patriarchal figure, replacing it with a woman-headed and woman-populated household” (Ortega and Sternbach 12). Yet Castillo is clear on the heterosexuality of the two women, their desires for and interest in men, even as she establishes the two women's distrust of particular men and anger at a male-dominated society.

In spite of her discursive strength, Teresa worries that a woman's words can never make enough difference to another woman. When she frets that her attempts to help Alicia see herself as beautiful have failed because they are not a man's words (45), is she not casting doubts on the whole project of convincing Alicia of anything? Here she questions the power of her woman's voice to use society's language to dismantle that society, a questioning she shares with many feminists. Although Teresa seems content that she can reread the world around her, she fears that Alicia will not be able to do so. These doubts do not deter her, however; she continues to write, “fighting” (127).

It seems logical for Teresa to place her most intimate trust in another woman. Although Alicia may not read Teresa's texts with complete accuracy, and although Alicia is capable of keeping secrets and deceiving her, still this old friend is more likely to understand Teresa's experience (and her own) than any man. Castillo gives her protagonist the implicit belief that, as Judith Fetterley puts it, “Women can read women's texts because they live women's lives; men can not read women's texts because they don't lead women's lives” (“Reading about Reading” 149). Throughout The Mixquiahuala Letters men are depicted as imposing egotistical or sexual needs on women, and they do not perceive the women as separate or distinctive from themselves. Teresa reports a simple instance of this in a scene between herself and her uncle Chino early in the novel: “i said i was going in to get a beer as an excuse to get away. He said, no thanks, he already had one. i said, it wasn't for him, but for me. The look i got could've stopped a charging bull” (13). Chino, like most of the other men both Alicia and Teresa have known, is incapable of perceiving that women have their own needs—their own stories. The men here are like the men in Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers.” As Fetterley explains, “It is not simply that the men can not read the text that is placed before them. Rather, they literally can not recognize it as a text because they can not imagine that women have stories” (“Reading about Reading” 147–48). For Castillo, women have many stories, and, presumably, other women will best understand them.

In The Mixquiahuala Letters both the pleasure of the quest and the pleasure of the text are deliberately frustrated by the author's refusal to create a plot of conquest or a set timeline. In addition, tension arises because of confusion the external reader will probably experience concerning the possibility of a lesbian relationship between the two women. Various letters suggest such a bond, but at one point Teresa pointedly denies it, affirming to Alicia that “you and I had never been lovers” (121). What to conclude? The external reader may discover that he or she becomes complicit with a culture that refuses the possibilities of intimacy or sensuality without genital sexuality.

With its content-level focus on the ways women interpret the actions of men and women, The Mixquiahuala Letters forces reflection on how women readers respond to texts by women versus texts by men (and, consequently, how men respond to male-and female-authored texts). Castillo's novel encourages us to think about whether we read for mastery and knowledge or for intimacy and the sharing of experience. Castillo incorporates her own theory of reading that highlights indeterminacy, multiple interpretations, and the need for re-readings. Then too, as Patrocinio Schweickart explains about feminist reading in general, this text heightens one's awareness of how the woman's text exists in its social context. What Schweickart says of feminist reading is true of this feminist text: it stresses “the difference between men and women, … the way the experience and perspective of women have been systematically and fallaciously assimilated into the generic masculine, and … the need to correct this error” (39).

Nonetheless, although The Mixquiahuala Letters presents a woman-centered reading of society, it does so while also situating that reading within the specifics of place and history. To read this novel is necessarily to delve into how one reads individual women affected by their class, race, ethnicity, education, and roles as artists, teachers, mothers, and so on. Because Teresa's letters are preponderantly retellings of past events and fastidiously rooted in the particulars of places and times, Castillo does not seem to dictate to each reader what she should think about women in general. Rather, she asks each of us to read as we wish. We can take each letter as a short story, follow one of the three patterns the author recommends, or read from cover to cover. The hope of recovering the personal past to repattern the future will still exist. Reading Teresa's letters could encourage one's own act of redefinition, but would ask that we consistently confront stereotypes with particular experiences, just as Teresa does.

The letters in this novel permit us to see that Teresa can read herself and Alicia in different ways, just as society can interpret either woman's actions in different ways. To see with one's own eyes becomes not only the goal of the artist but also the goal of the socially and personally responsible individual who wants to move past sexism and prejudice of all kinds. Yet, reading this epistolary novel, as Alarcón notes, “brings into question our own reading practices, for the apparently unconventional suggested readings actually lead to resolutions that are more conventional than the handful of letters attributed to Tere” (105). Alarcón believes that each of the suggested reading maps provided by the author actually provides “an ideological nexus … that forces us to reconstruct the meaning of Teresa's letters as always and already leading in that direction,” thus countering the notion of play and choice that her introduction apparently introduced. That is, each of us carries textual reading patterns in our heads that we need to question, just as Teresa carries patterns for “reading” relationships which she very much wishes to question.

The Mixquiahuala Letters uses various techniques to repattern our assumptions about the epistolary novel. The most obvious, certainly, is the “hopscotch” possibility of alternative reading routes. Just as important is Castillo's demonstration that letters need not contain “news.” Kauffman notes that “it may seem quixotic to study ‘epistolarity’ … when letter writing has practically become a lost art, supplanted by telephones, fax machines, computers, camcorders and tape cassettes” Special Delivery xiv).⁷ Yet we see here that the letter form retains specific helpful properties not provided by newer technologies. The writer of a personal letter requires no special equipment or special training. Letters can be adapted to the needs of the individual (formal, informal, including poems, sketches, and so forth); they pass from writer to reader, carrying the touch of one individual to the other, and they can be kept and reread. No other means of communication combines these particular qualities and is so readily available to the poor and rich, the itinerant and the stay-at-home, the radical and the conservative. For Castillo's protagonist what other means would do?

Whether we see Teresa's struggle for a new life pattern as successful or not, we will necessarily focus on the sources of accepted or considered patterns. Alarcón refers to the protagonist being “framed by certain ‘semantic charters,’ using terminology borrowed from Pierre Maranda (100).⁸ Such charters exist within each of us, but, if we follow Castillo, the hope exists that they can be restructured. Through the writing act, which entails also acts or rereading the self, others, and experiences, we may discover new maps of understanding, new patterns of greater freedom. To adapt DuPlessis's well-known book title, we could engage in reading as well as “writing beyond the ending.”

When I began working on Castillo's novel, I wrote to her with various questions, inviting her to respond with a letter that would then form part of this chapter. Among the topics I suggested she might explore were the way that Teresa uses writing to retell her own and her friend's experiences and how the character of Alicia functions—did Castillo see her mostly as Teresa's construction or as her alter ego or as her friend? I also asked what influenced Castillo to choose the epistolary form. The letter I received, echoing The Mixquiahuala Letters' use of narrative as a reflective tool, tells a story of its own.

Yes, dear critic, there really is an Alicia:

The last time I saw her—head bobbing just above the crowd, predictably slender, Alicia was taking brisk New Yorker strides towards me. I was standing katty-corner from Washington Square Park in front of my hotel. We spotted each other and smiled what could be said to have been sad smiled, then we each looked away. She was hardly recognizable, not only to me, she remarked later, but to everyone who knew her. Her hair, which as long as I had known her, she had always kept waist length, was now in a crew-cut.

The color of that hair, which matches her shiney coal black eyes, comes from her father's side, the Andalusian gitana grandmother, the one who retired in a trailer park in Pensacola and who called herself “exotic,” who knew a rosary of men after the brief marriage to Alicia's grandfather in New York, after she disappeared one day, leaving husband, children behind and emerging decades later in that peninsula of exiles, Florida. Eyes and hair and tannable skin, all made my friend the non-fit of her mother's family that came from Eastern European stock. Alicia, the foreign-looking child whose blood must surely be darker. She remembered a family member remarking once, as dark as a monkey's, the relative joked at a family gathering. Alicia's mother did not laugh—her mother and her Czech grandmother who never learned English very well and therefore had not understood the “joke.”

On her own Alicia would never have cut that straight sheet of dark hair, never. That was the Latina side of her, the one tell-tale betrayal to her feminism, keeping her hair so long because men loved it so much. Maybe it was the Eastern European side of her, too, inherited from her mother's mother, the one who hid her flaxen braids under babushkas when she cleaned houses in Queens in the early decades of this century, wrapped tight and covered like Alicia does when she is at the potter's wheel and the way she looked the very first time I saw her in Mexico, studying art in a gringo summer program, nearly two decades ago.

We were having orientation and all the students were sitting outside on metal fold-out chairs beneath the sheathed Mexico City sun. A little restless, maybe bored, for sure already disappointed in the summer program I had worked so hard and traveled so far for and had dreamed of attending for so long, I turned all the way around, to take a glance at my soon-to-be classmates, who had turned out to be mostly all gringas, and my gaze fell on her who later was to become known to me—and to you, as Alicia. Her chiseled cheekbones, the bandanna tied around her slender head, black eyes and lashes, in a Georgia O'Keefe kind of way, she was utterly stunning. That Stieglitzian image has been locked permanently in my memory bank. That is, that young woman who was at that moment a stranger to me had, not the kind of beauty that turns heads on the street, but a photographable remarkableness, chiaroscuro, black and white, hung in galleries later where you might find yourself staring, wondering, what was she like? I asked myself that question that afternoon, twenty years ago. And not long after that, perhaps starting that same afternoon, because of the fusion fomented by an instant friendship, I was no longer wondering. She was funny. She was difficult—an incorrigible Yo-Se-Todo. She was too frugal for my comfort. (She'd rather wait at night for a bus in the pouring rain than spring for a cab for us.) And she was formidably talented. At not quite twenty-one years of age she was—compared to my urban provincialism—well travelled—from art school in Rome to pottery classes on a Navajo reservation. She could find her way around New York like I, a young renegade Mexican-American wife, knew my way around my apartment kitchen in Chicago. She was sharp as a tack. And after that summer, I loved her for years.

Ronnie, a good friend, having known me for many years said he had observed that I invent myself as I do the characters in my novels, or rather transform my image: stylish vintage in Chicago, fluorescent beachwear in Southern California and yes, Tony Lamas in New Mexico. And once, this same poet friend told a third party when I had taken up residence in San Francisco and having seen me go through these various stylistic reincarnations living in different cities, “Ana is like a chameleon, she blends right into any environment she inhabits.”

But Alicia, to my knowledge, is not a chameleon. You, above all the readers of The Mixquiahuala Letters I think, would agree to that. She was born in New York and has never lived elsewhere. Her life is a constant, the daughter of New York liberals, she was raised a vegetarian, as a child with her mother walked the UFW picket lines, growing up as an only child, studied karate and guitar and for a long time, as a young adult, lived alone. She is the product of an American city that belongs to the world. A Manhattanite through and through, she is anything but American and everything American. She has been an artist her whole life and although she has never been terribly ambitious, over the years she made a name for herself around town—a town where no doubt to make your mark as an artist is nothing to sneeze at. She still loves to dance as she did in dancehalls and nightclubs from Puerto Rico to Puebla, Mexico, merengueing from Santo Domingo to San Francisco, although as she settled into her thirties, she did less and less of it. Her art, the man who stayed who does not dance and is also an artist: her life, mostly a quiet one. For complicated reasons, no children, because of allergies no pets and as a matter of preference perhaps rather than economics, her life became a stable affair, unfettered by the kind of spontaneity that is usually attributed to the artist's nature.

Alicia and I embraced and then walked to find a café open for lunch. She immediately took note of my post-modern sunglasses, asked to take a look at them and said she didn't like them. I inquired about her health. Alicia, as I've already mentioned, has always eaten organic; she has never smoked cigarettes not even tolerated cigarette smoking in her living quarters. She never cared for the taste of alcohol, not even a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve. A glass of sparkling apple cider at the stroke of midnight and then off to bed. She has never been into caffeine, no café au laits, no Cokes, nothing but herbal teas for our Alicia. But she still breathed New York City pollution all her life. And she still drank New York City tap water, at least on occasion, I would guess. In short, she was a product of this neo-civilization of ours and like one out of every four U.S. residents today, she got cancer. The crew-cut was one of the results of recent chemotherapy treatments. “You lose all your hair,” she said to me sardonically, over lunch, “everywhere.”

Four years after the publication of The Mixquiahuala Letters Alicia was fighting cancer, my friend Ronnie—who I met the day after Reagan was first elected—tested HIV positive, and I was grateful to be biting the heels of “almost 40” with both breasts, uterus and ovaries intact, no surgical scars, no “positive results” on any of my annual tests. So far a virtual model of good health. Considering the odds, a miracle in itself.

There are certain almost perfunctory questions I am always asked concerning my first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters. The most common one usually comes from students, those poor innocents whom I always fear will be turned off to my writing altogether because of having to develop a critical eye for interpretation, being prodded to find hidden meaning in the text in order to satisfy academia rather than simply enjoying or not enjoying the stories I enjoyed (as well as in some passages did not enjoy) telling. The most popular question concerning that text has to do with the use of the lower case “i” for the personal pronoun. Although the letters are not dated, one letter does clearly set the time of the novel which is in the mid-seventies. As you may know, the use of the lower case “i” for poets was at that time a trademark of protest poetry. Teresa saw herself as a political activist and hoped to become a poet.

Different languages do not give different names for the same thing, they give different names for very different things. In Teresa's other language, Spanish, the personal pronoun is not capitalized. However the abbreviated formal “you,” Ud., is. You,—Ud.—are important, i—yo—am no one, simply your humble servant—Spanish, baroque and elegant, a tango of reflexive verbs and reversed syntax, perhaps falsely humble but provocative and charming nevertheless, a veritable concert of courtesies. The Spanish yo of the poor, the agricultural pickers and factory workers was a we—at least then, at least in spirit, at least in our stories.

The second most common question refers to the authenticity of the events told in the novel. In other words, is The Mixquiahuala Letters autobiographical? My standard answer is that approximately forty per cent of the novel is based on actual occurrences; however, it is up to the reader to decide for her/himself what in the novel comprises autobiography and what is only and always possibility.

As to the ingenuous opinion of one of your colleagues, who wrote in a review that it is “unclear as to why anyone would write such elaborate letters simply to retell, without analysis, what the recipient already knows,” I would have to suggest for that scholar to do as he most surely demands of his students and that is to kindly take the time for a more careful reading of the text.

To my knowledge, Alicia herself has never read The Mixquiahuala Letters. I never asked why or if I did she did not answer. She told me that afternoon over lunch that she kept the copy I sent her in a closet, hidden from view.

After lunch Alicia gave me a small gift of a pair of pastel flowered socks. I picked up the tab. We hugged, arms wound tight around each other, breasts to breasts, and then let go. As we parted in front of the restaurant I remembered to give her saludos from Teresa, who still lives in Chicago. “Oh yeah,” Alicia replied, smiling a bit and seeming suddenly to be caught up in private reflection, “By the way, is she still gaining weight?” she asked.

“Oh no!” I said, as usual a little put off by Alicia's bluntness and this unshakable feeling that she can be, for all her political correctness, catty. “The last time I saw her, Teresa looked fantastic—beautiful, in fact—as always!” I added. Alicia shrugged her shoulders, or maybe it was a reflex, and waved good-bye and turning around, was immediately sucked into the mesh of the Manhattan lunchtime crowd.

Another question I have frequently been asked regarding the book is what I think about what critics think about it. Well, for a long time, I didn't. But increasingly there is a tendency for that entity known as the critic to split and multiply; and with time, appear in all manner of shapes, tones and sizes everywhere I go. There are critics who believe that without them my work has no meaning. I am sure, dear critic, that you are not one of them.

Franz Capra in his book The Tao of Physics, states “… In atomic physics, we can never speak about nature without, at the same time, speaking about ourselves.” Likewise, no matter how sure of himself or herself a critic may feel behind the illusion of an empirical argument, I think the critic cannot speak on a text without revealing him/herself. Susan Sontag, critic and novelist, in her essay, “Against Interpretation,” states that ultimately all thought is interpretation. Therefore, I feel that even my own comments here on my novel several years after its publication are very likely interpretations of others' interpretations of The Mixquiahuala Letters, rather than untainted reflections of my own. I can only add that the writing process was an experience that I would like to remember as being one of unselfconsciousness, having been a self-taught and relatively unknown poet at the time that I completed the second version of the manuscript and with not so much as a presumption about my first novel's potential publication. I close with a simple thanks for your interest in my work.

Te deseo mucha suerte con tu proyecto—Siempre,

Ana Castillo

July 18, 1992 / 'Burque, Nuevo Méjico

y June 6, 1995, Gainesville, Florida

Notes

1. The novel was published in 1986 and won the 1987 American Book Award. Published originally by Bilingual Press, the book is now more widely available in a paperback edition from Doubleday.

2. One of the strongest statements I have ever read about reading strategies comes from Patrocinio P. Schweickart, discussing feminist approaches. “The point is not merely to interpret literature in various ways; the point is to change the world. We cannot afford to ignore the activity of reading, for it is here that literature is realized as praxis. Literature acts on the world by acting on its readers.” Reading and writing are critical aspects of “interpreting the world in order to change it” (39).

3. Although Teresa's primary community for her writing is herself and her best friend, the letters' content mentions other outlets. Because both Teresa and Alicia actively produce art (Teresa teaches and writes, although she does not mention publishing; Alicia meets with success as a visual artist), their artistic products can influence others. Teresa also selfconsciously and humorously notes the possibility of others reading the letters (88).

4. Given Alicia's art, Castillo presumes that nonverbal and verbal processes can yield new insight. Alicia's one-woman exhibit (described by Teresa in letter 34, the final letter for “the conformist” reader, but absent for “the cynic” and “the quixotic”) contains a project titled La casita—mixed media pieces that analyze stereotypes of domestic women (118).

5. Norma Alarcón analyzes the way this distancing is linked to the emotions surrounding “romantic love” that “cannot be spoken of, intimately or directly” (103).

6. Spacks contends that most epistolary novels have “reinforced the status quo by assuming it. Declaring in their reliance on epistolary form their concern only with ‘private’ matters, women novelists apparently accepted the necessity of the system under which they suffered” (75). Janet G. Altman also finds that little epistolary fiction of the past “overtly challenged the privilege accorded to male conqueror figures” (“Graffigny's Epistemology” 173). Like Jane Austen, whose epistolary Lady Susan is a “female character capable of play and mastery through play” (Spacks 75), Castillo invents a heroine who uses word play and verbal mastery to explore a range of public and private issues.

7. Note, however, that fax machines, e-mail, and computers still often use the basic letter form. One difference is the speed of the letter's transmission. Video and audio recording devices certainly depart radically from the letter format, especially the first, which (especially when edited) can become nonlinear and contains different ways of reflecting on or analyzing

8. Maranda proposes that “semantic charters condition our thoughts and emotions. They are culture specific networks that we internalize as we undergo the process of socialization” and “have an inertia and a momentum of their own” (qtd. in Alarcón, 106).