SOURCE: “Queering Chicano/a Narratives: Lesbian as a Healer, Saint and Warrior in Ana Castillo's So Far from God,” in Midwest Modern Language Association, Vol. 30, Nos. 1–2, Spring, 1997, pp. 63–80.

[In the following essay, Morrow examines the character Caridad in So Far from God, and how Caridad's lesbianism is a liberating factor in the male-dominant Mexican culture.]

One of the most conspicuous features of Mexican-American liberatory and feminist discourses is their radicalization of traditional narratives for the purpose of social reform.¹ These discourses were constructed by Chicana/o rights activists in the 1960s and Chicana feminists in the 1970s and 1980s. Both civil rights and feminist discourses contextualized historic Mexican-American models of communal and individual identities in late-twentieth-century terms. Such revisionist pre-Columbian, colonial and post-colonial narratives argued for programs of ethnic and gender empowerment. Much of their appeal to Mexican-American audiences derived from their cultural familiarity. Contemporary ideas were framed in the conventions and icons used by old stories, for example, about Aztlán, the Aztec homeland, and Malinche/Malintzin, the sixteenth-century Aztec noblewoman who is said to have given birth to the first Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Recently, as various discourse communities in the United States are discussing LesBiGay civil rights with increasing seriousness, this strategy of politicizing traditional narratives has been revived in Chicana fiction. Notably, Ana Castillo's 1993 novel So Far from God revises narratives commonly used to socialize Chicanas into traditional gender roles in order to refute a belief widely held among Mexican-Americans that lesbianism constitutes ethnic as well as sexual deviance, that lesbianism is a product and problem of Euro-American social values. Hence, in So Far from God an empowered lesbian subject assumes the roles of healer, virgin-saint, and warrior, the commonplaces for female identity in traditional Mexican and Native American discourses. This represents lesbianism as one of many culturally indigenous identities available to Mexican-American women rather than a betrayal, a “selling out” to the dominant culture.

Historic Mexican-American narratives have been invoked in service of social change since the civil rights movement of the 1960s when traditional stories and symbols were re-read from the perspective of contemporary liberation politics. For instance, during this period, the idea of Aztlán, a Chicano/a homeland, was used to establish a much needed sense of political solidarity among Mexican-Americans. Such solidarity, critical to the success of the civil rights movement, had been impeded by at least two factors. Mexican-Americans are dispersed throughout the United States, complicating attempts to organize a national effort. Moreover, they constitute a population group whose origins and identity lie in a broader experience of cultural diaspora.

In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza Gloria Anzaldúa uses the metaphor of frontier borderlands, the strip of land where Mexico adjoins the United States, to describe this experience. She explains that the Chicano/a diaspora is a consequence of cultural formation that occurs “between the borders” of other ethnic and national populations rather than in a discrete geo-national unit.

Nosotros los [We the] Chicanos straddle the borderlands. … We don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identify with the Mexican cultural values. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie [Sometimes I am neither nothing nor nobody].

(62–63)

The idea of Aztlán, the Aztec homeland featured in pre-Columbian discourses, was revived during the Chicano/a rights movement to remedy the feeling of ethnic “nothingness” experienced by Anzaldza and others. The rhetoric of Aztlan played an important role in establishing a Chicano/a national sensibility and fostered Chicano/as' self-conscious identification of themselves as a ‘people.’ Aztlan supplied Chicano/as a symbolic space in which a communal identity could be forged and answered the need for a sense of unity among Mexican-Americans: “Aztlán simboliza la unión espiritual de los chicanos, algo que se lleva en el corazón, no importa dónde se viva o se encuentre [Aztlán symbolizes the spiritual union of the Chicanos, something that lifted up the heart, no matter where they lived or were encountered]” (Leal 22–23).

Furthermore, attempts to locate Aztlán in a specific geography, most often identified as the territory Mexico ceded to the United States in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, supported claims of Chicano/a socio-economic entitlement. For example, the “Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” the Chicano/a rights manifesto drafted in 1969, figured twentieth-century Mexican-Americans as the political, spiritual, and material heirs of the Aztecs. This authorized the manifesto's argument that Mexican-American farm workers were entitled to a greater share of the economic benefits from the lands they farmed, the same lands that had been taken from their indigenous ancestors by the governments of Mexico and the United States.

While this rhetoric of Aztlán and other rhetorics of empowerment described and denounced Mexican-Americans' experience of disenfranchisement in the United States, they also perpetuated traditional, misogynous attitudes toward women, as Alma García recounts in “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970–1980.” Such attitudes are epitomized in the traditional biography of La Malinche or Malintzin, perhaps the most popular Mexican and Mexican-American narrative of ethnic origin. According to this traditional version of her life's story, Malinche/Malintzin, an Aztec noblewoman, was responsible for Western Europeans' subordination of the indigenous peoples of Mexico. Malinche/Malintzin was the slave and mistress of the Spanish conqueror, Hernán Cortés. The children she bore him were “mixed-blood,” the first mestizas and mestizos—Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Hence, Malinche is blamed for giving birth to a “bastard” or hybrid “race,” Octavio Paz tells us in The Labyrinth of Solitude. Paz represents Malinche acquiescing to sexual violation, a representation that suggests Malinche was a whore who betrayed her children to the conqueror even as she conceived them. Explaining how chingada [the female who is fucked] became a synonym for Malinche/Malintzin, Paz reveals how her story circulates in the Mexican and, we can infer, the Mexican-American social imagination: “The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated, deceived. … In effect, every woman—even when she gives herself willingly—is torn open by the man, is the Chingada …” (80).

Chicana feminists began to reread and rewrite such narratives when it became clear that “traditional gender roles … limited [Chicanas'] participation and acceptance within the Chicano movement” and that gender equity was not included in the civil rights agenda (García 221). As disenfranchised by a patriarchal cultural ethic as by the dominant Euro-American ideology, Chicanas constructed “alternate mythical and even historical accounts of women” (Ordóñez 19). For example, Norma Alarcón, in “Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” imputed pejorative representations of Malinche/Malinztin to male authorship: “The male myth of Malintzin is made to seem betrayal first of all in her very sexuality, which makes it nearly impossible at any given moment to go beyond the vagina as the supreme site of evil …” (183). Other feminist accounts, such as those by Juana Armanda Alegría in Psicologma de las mexicanas and Marta Cotera in Diosa y Hembra, provided new perspectives on Malinche/Malintzin by reconsidering her relationship with Cortés (Cotera 30–35; Alegría 65–79). Emphasizing that she was sold into the service of Western Europeans by her own family, they showed that she was betrayed rather than a betrayer. These feminist revisions contended that Malinche/Malintzin, fluent in Spanish as well as several dialects, was Cortés's advisor and translator. They depicted her as intelligent and authoritative rather than colluding in her own sexual violation or implicated in the subjugation of her descendants. Her role in the Spanish conquest, explained Cordelia Candelaria, was a model for Chicanas resisting traditional gender roles: “La Malinche embodies those personal characteristics—such as intelligence, initiative, adaptability, and leadership—which are most often associated with Mexican-American women unfettered by traditional restraints against public achievement” (qtd. in Fox 22). For three decades such revisionist narratives both reshaped and embodied the “personal and collective identity” of Mexican-American women (Ordóñez 19). They participated in revising traditional models of identity, offered women alternative subjective formulae, and involved writers and readers in radical acts of subject constitution whose scope was both individual and communal.

One of the reasons both these revisionist rhetorics—feminist and Chicano/a rights—appealed to Mexican-American audiences is that the programs they advanced were phrased in traditional, culturally familiar narratives. The trope of Aztlán as an idyllic homeland stolen from the heirs of the Aztecs supported the political mobilization of Mexican-Americans. Narratives recasting La Malinche as a model of leadership and resistance rather than submission and sexual surrender argued the cultural appropriateness of feminism. This strategy, slightly modified, is repeated in Ana Castillo's So Far from God in order to refute a belief widely held among Mexican-Americans that lesbianism constitutes ethnic deviance, that lesbianism is a troubling manifestation of Euro-American socio-sexual mores.

Lesbianism almost unanimously is designated a category of ethnic and class alterity by an otherwise ideologically diverse Mexican-American population. Colloquially labeled a “white” or “Anglo thing” by Mexican-Americans whose political and religious beliefs range from traditional to radical, lesbianism is excluded from culturally appropriate identities. As Carla Trujillo explains in her insightful essay, “Chicana Lesbians: Fear and Loathing in the Chicano Community,” a woman cannot be both lesbian and Mexican-American unless she is a vendida—a sellout or ethnic traitor. This belief was well summarized by a young woman attending the 1993 conference of the National Association of Chicano Studies (NACS) in San Diego. During a session on the future of lesbian and gay studies in NACS, she said:

I'm a heterosexual and I'm really surprised actually to be here in a place where there's 50 to 60 Chicanos and Chicanas and they say this is an issue in our community. … I'm really surprised because to me this is an Anglo thing and I'm not trying to be racist or anything.

Asked “what's an Anglo thing?” by another audience member, she continued: “I mean to be homosexual. … To me it's just so different because I never thought it was in our community. … It's something from another race, another culture. I'm really surprised.” Such a response to lesbianism, argues Trujillo, originates in a sexist as well as homophobic/heterosexist ethic: “Chicana lesbians are perceived as a greater threat to the Chicano community because their existence disrupts the established order of male dominance, and raises the consciousness of many Chicanas regarding their own independence and control” (255).

This ethic, writes Cherríe Moraga in a series of essays in The Last Generation, caused lesbians and gays to be excluded from psychological and spiritual citizenship in the Chicano/a nation/union conceived during the civil rights movement: “When ‘El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán’ was conceived a generation ago, lesbians and gay men were not envisioned as members of the ‘house’; we were not … counted as members of the ‘bronze continent’” (159). Lesbians and gays subsequently were left out of the Chicano/a rights movement because it was organized on the model of the traditional Chicano family:

The preservation of the Chicano familia became the Movimiento's mandate and within this constricted “familia” structure, Chicano politicos ensured that the patriarchal father figure remained in charge both in their private and political lives. … In the name of this “culturally correct” familia, certain topics were censored both in cultural and political spheres as not “socially relevant” to Chicano and not typically sanctioned in the Mexican household. These issues included female sexuality generally and male homosexuality and lesbianism specifically. … In the process, the Chicano Movement forfeited the participation and vision of some very significant female and gay leaders and never achieved the kind of harmonious Chicano “familia” they ostensibly sought.

(Moraga 158)

So Far from God attempts to redress such exclusion of lesbians and gays by countering charges that “lesbian” is an ethnically alien model of identity for Mexican-American women and by attacking patriarchal cultural institutions that perpetuate those charges. Set in the Sangre de Cristo [Blood of Christ] Mountains of New Mexico, where historically sheepherding was the primary economic enterprise, So Far from God chronicles two decades in the lives of Sofi and her four daughters, Fe [Faith], Esperanza [Hope], Caridad [Charity], and la Loca [the Crazy One]. Their stories are told in Castillo's trademark style, a conspicuously ironic form of magical realism that in this book facilitates a lesbianization of Mexican, Mexican Catholic and Native American discourses.

This lesbianization of traditional discourses is brought about through the figure of Caridad who, unexpectedly falling in love with a woman, eventually occupies each of the principal models of female identity offered by these discourses. Caridad first experiences lesbian desire when she undertakes a Lenten Week pilgrimage to el Santuario de Chimayo [the Chimayo shrine] as part of her training in curanderismo, the arts of spiritual, psychological and physical healing that originated in pre-Columbian Latin America. At the shrine, a chapel built on lands sacred to Native Americans where a statue of Christ had been found in the nineteenth century, Caridad becomes infatuated at her first sight of another pilgrim, a woman.

The setting and circumstances of this moment clearly foreground it in multiple spiritual and religious traditions. As an apprentice curandera, a practitioner of curanderismo, Caridad embodies a pre-Columbian model of female identity while participating in a Mexican Catholic ritual at a site considered holy by Mexican and Roman Catholics and Native Americans. Caridad's response to her desire for a woman and, in turn, the community's response to Caridad lends a lesbian inflection to these traditions and their discourses.

Caridad is so affected by the woman, literally and metaphorically idolizing her, that she disappears from her community and for a year lives in a mountain cave. When discovered, Caridad resists returning to society, is beatified in local legend, and becomes a media icon venerated as the “handmaiden of Christ” (87). Consecrated by popular acclaim, Caridad comes to embody a feminist version of a second model of female identity—saint—that was introduced to Latin America by Spanish colonizers. When Caridad's story circulates further, among Native American Yaquis, she embodies yet a third identity, for she is said to be the ghost of Lozen, a legendary female Apache warrior. This convergence of three subjective forms in the figure of Caridad, brought about through the agency of lesbian desire, demonstrates that lesbianismo [Chicana lesbianism] is culturally authentic and profoundly transformational. Moreover, lesbian desire is portrayed as a force empowering Chicanas to resist sexist/heterosexist forms of control.

In her role as curandera, Caridad receives, preserves, and exercises a form of knowledge, curanderismo, that emerged from the synthesis of fifteenth-century Spanish and Latin American medical practices. Fifteenth-century Spanish medical theories, combining the ideas of Galen, Aristotle and Hippocrates, were brought to Latin America by Spanish friars. These theories were especially compatible with the beliefs of indigenous populations, as Ari Kiev explains in Curanderismo: Mexican-American Folk Psychiatry. In Mexico, the two knowledge paradigms intermixed, fused by curandero/as into an integrated set of medical practices which have remained intact through the twentieth century (Kiev 22–30).

Both traditionally and in contemporary practice, the curandera mediates multiple domains—spiritual, temporal and cultural—for the community because she is understood as simultaneously occupying the borders of the natural and supernatural. This unique position endows the power of spiritual, psychological and physical healing on the curandera, whose cures typically reflect the belief that health is a composite of all three categories.

In addition to fulfilling her role as healer, the curandera often negotiates large-scale social changes for the community. Trained in an ancient form of knowledge but practicing in present day United States, the Mexican-American curandera mediates two historical times and three cultures—Mexican, Mexican-American, and Euro-American. As Kiev explains, she “represents a link with Mexican traditions and can interpret contemporary problems and conflicts with a time-tested … ideology” that continues to hold meaning for the community (38). Therefore, in the figure of the curandera, unlike the lesbian, alterity betokens authority, and the curandera's position at the borders of her community is cause for centrality within it. Curanderas are greatly revered, and in Latin America some achieve considerable fame as healers and mystics. For instance, “La Madre María,” a curandera who practiced in Buenos Aires, is remembered as a saint because her cures were effected through her great faith, Raul Ortelli tells us in Brujos y curanderas, describing widespread popular devotion to Madre Maria which continued years after her death.²

In So Far from God, however, Caridad initially is better known for her frequent and energetic sexual encounters with men than for her healing powers. These encounters began when she discovered that her husband, Memo, had impregnated another woman. The community interpreted Caridad's sexual energy as promiscuity. Therefore, when she is viciously raped and mutilated by the malogra, the evil wool spirit of local legend, it is widely understood as the natural consequence of promiscuity, an interpretation that embroiled her father in numerous fights: “Domingo had heard many insulting stories about his daughter and had defended her honor more than once in Valencia County bars when it was suggested that she had for all intents and purposes ‘asked for it’ when she was attacked” (83).

Disparaged by the community, Caridad's sexual energy is transformed into healing power after she miraculously recovers from the malogra attack. Chapter four, “Of the Telling of Our Clairvoyant Caridad Who After Being Afflicted with the Pangs of Love Disappears and Upon Discovery is Henceforth Known as La Armitaña,” relates how Caridad fell in love with a woman. The ironic voice of the narrator explains that in the eyes of doña Felicia, a curandera of many years' experience, Caridad's sexual energy was an abundance of heart that made her ideally suited to study the mystical arts of healing:

It was a funny thing because you might figure that after what happened to her not only with Memo, but especially because of that nightmarish night in Caridad's life, she might have become an embittered woman, who hated men for having served little purpose in her life but to bring her misery and shame. But she didn't. Caridad was incapable of hating anyone or anything, which is why doña Felicia had elected her heiress to her healing legacy. Hating came quite easy in this life of injustices, doña Felicia figured, but having an abundant heart took the kind of resiliency a curandera required.

(77)

Caridad acquires the functions and authority of the curandera when she begins her apprenticeship with doña Felicia. Applying Kiev's description of the curandera's social role to Caridad allows us to see her as a link with tradition, a character who keeps ancient practices and forms of knowledge alive. When she experiences the sexual energy that qualified her to become a curandera as lesbian desire, an oral tradition that curanderas often are lesbians is textualized.³ Such textualization of this oral tradition explicitly represents lesbianism as central to Mexican-American culture because the curandera occupies a central position in it. Lesbianism is portrayed as being within rather than alien to Mexican-American culture. Hence, the figure of Caridad interprets lesbian identity as a culturally indigenous subjective possibility for Mexican-American women just as previous revisions of the male myth of Malintzin provided a cultural context for feminist agendas.

Framing Caridad's initial experience of lesbian desire in Mexican Catholic rituals, iconography and discourses also argues that lesbianism is a culturally appropriate identity. Roman Catholicism was imposed upon the indigenous populations of Latin America in the Spanish Conquest and remains a dominant socio-cultural construct. Historically, its ideologies have organized multiple aspects of Mexican and Mexican-American culture, especially gender relationships. Contextualizing a lesbian love story in the forms and practices of Mexican Catholicism claims a central cultural position for homosexuality.

One such practice exercised by New Mexican Catholics living in the region where the novel is set is a Holy Week procession to el Santuario de Chimayo. Significantly, the history of this chapel is linked intertextually with Native American, Mexican colonial, and New Mexican Catholic religious narratives. Before the arrival of Spanish Catholics in New Mexico, Native Americans attributed healing powers to the land on which the chapel sits. Early in the nineteenth century, an incarnation of Christ known as Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas, el Cristo Negro [Our Lord of Esquipulas, the Black Christ] came to be worshipped by New Mexican Catholics living in the region. Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas, according to Stephen F. Borhegyi in his history of El Santuario de Chimayo, is a statue that was used by sixteenth-century Spaniards to convert the indigenous population of Esquipulas, Guatemala, to Christianity. Carved from a dark wood, this image was more appealing to native Guatemalans than Eurocentric likenesses of Christ. A chapel honoring Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas was built at a site in Esquipulas where, like Chimayo, the soil is thought to have curative properties. Borhegyi speculates that someone transferred worship of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas to New Mexico because of this connection between the otherwise disparate places. Other explanations are articulated in local legend.⁴ The most widely known, cited by Castillo in So Far from God, is that during Holy Week a Penitente brother, a member of a Mexican Catholic fraternity, who was performing penances in the Sangre de Cristo hills saw a light coming out of the ground. Digging, he found a statue of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas near the Santa Cruz river. The statue, identical to the Guatemalan Christ except that it is not black, was installed at the Santuario de Chimayo. This spot continues to play a prominent role in the spiritual practices of regional Mexican and Roman Catholics as well as Christian and non-Christian Native Americans. Annually, thousands of pilgrims honor Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas by journeying to the Santuario which the archbishop of New Mexico, Michael J. Sheehan, S.T.L., J.C.D., recently described as “un centro de fe tricultural [a tri-cultural center of faith].”⁵

During such a pilgrimage to el Santuario Caridad falls in love with a lesbian: “She was dark. Indian or Mexican. Black, black hair. Big sturdy thighs” (79). Caridad first sees the woman on Good Friday when she and doña Felicia reach the Santuario after a three-day journey on foot:

It was then … that she stopped short at the sight of the most beautiful woman she had ever seen sitting on the adobe wall that surrounds the sanctinary. At that moment the woman also turned toward Caridad, but since she was wearing sunglasses, Caridad wasn't sure whether her gaze was being returned. “Come on, come on,” doña Felicia summoned Caridad the way one does with children. Caridad, completely overwhelmed by the sight of the woman, blushed and followed doña Felicia into the church without a word.

(76)

This and subsequent passages detailing Caridad's feelings for the beautiful Chicana lesbian are framed in the conventions of Roman and Mexican Catholic apparitional narratives relating encounters with a divine or sanctified figure, often the Virgin Mary. Clearly, the tale recounting the discovery of the statue of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas at Chimayo is a variant of such narratives, but the most influential Mexican Catholic apparitional narrative is the archetypal story of Juan Diego's encounter with the Virgen de Guadalupe.⁶ In fact, it provides one of the behavioral models traditionally prescribed Chicanas, the virgin-saint.

Although each apparitional story differs in detail, such accounts share a number of distinctive narrative conventions. Vision recipients are astonished when they first see a divine figure. Sometimes they doubt the vision's authenticity, thinking that it is a hallucination caused by a debilitating physical condition such as illness. The divine figure provides a variety of proofs to reassure them and to persuade others that the vision is authentic. Vision recipients characteristically assume a posture that signifies respect and awe for the divine figure. Frequently, their eyes are averted from the vision because it is too majestic to be seen by mortals. Vision recipients inevitably are transformed by the encounter, a transformation that often is consummated by gazing directly on the divine figure. Usually, a miraculous event or healing marks vision recipients' transformation. Such miracles almost always cause the community to recognize vision recipients' transformation as beatifying. As in the story of Juan Diego's encounter with the Virgen de Guadalupe, vision recipients and the divine figure subsequently become objects of veneration, the divine figure often known by the place where the apparition occurred. The Virgin Mary, for example, is variously identified as Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Knock, etc., because she appeared at these locations.

Such narratives are composed within the patriarchal cultures of Roman and Mexican Catholicism and long have been critiqued by feminists for socializing women into traditional, limiting gender roles. For example, the story of the Virgen de Guadalupe, according to Trujillo's analysis, has been employed to exercise control over Chicanas by mandating motherhood and, further, by teaching that passive suffering renders the experience of motherhood redemptive:

Religion, based on the tradition of patriarchal control and sexual, emotional, and psychological repression, has historically been a dual means of hope for a better afterlife and social control in the present one. Personified by the Virgen de Guadalupe, the concept of motherhood and martyrdom go hand in hand in the Catholic religion.

(258)

The figure of the Virgin Mother, Mary, has been so important in perpetuating this and related beliefs regulating Mexican American women that they are referred to as marianismo by behavioral scientists. Marianismo, according to Rosa Maria Gil and Carmen Inoa Vazquez in The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self-Esteem, masks women's subordination to men as veneration and adoration. In general terms, marianismo inhibits women's self-realization: “The noble sacrifice of self (the ultimate expression of marianismo) is the force which has for generations prevented Hispanic women from even entertaining the notion of personal validation” (7–8). Specifically, female sexuality is the object of marianismo regulation. Olivia Espín writes that women's sexual repression is the consequence of the mother/martyr mandate embodied in the figure of the Virgin Mother.

To shun sexual pleasure and to regard sexual pleasure as an unwelcome obligation toward her husband a necessary evil in order to have children may be seen as a manifestation of virtue. In fact, some women even express pride at their own lack of sexual pleasure or desire.

(qtd. in Castillo, Massacre 125)

Castillo shows, moreover, that the belief that women's sexual pleasure is evil is problematic when internalized by Mexican American women, especially lesbians:

The Mexican Catholic lesbian, rejected by family and ostracized by her immediate community, may find it painful and even impossible to acknowledge a direct connection between her faith and the rejection she suffers as a woman who loves women because Catholicism is so much a part of her sense of self.

(Massacre 139)

The “choice” this ethic forces on Mexican Catholic lesbians, Castillo suggests, is to reject their culture and religion or to reject themselves.

Offering a representation of lesbian desire as empowering and sanctifying, So Far from God repudiates the sexist/heterosexist belief that it is evil for women to claim their sexuality and take pleasure in it. This representation is constructed by using the narrative conventions of apparitional literature to organize Caridad's performance of lesbian desire in her encounters with the beautiful woman. In initial encounters, the woman occupies the position of the divine figure while Caridad operates as the vision recipient. This configuration is suggested by Caridad's astonishment at her first sight of the woman. Summoned into the chapel by doña Felicia, Caridad “could do nothing but think of the woman on the wall” (76). Unconvinced that the sight of a woman could induce such overwhelming desire, Caridad ascribes her feelings to the affects of the hot sun: “Maybe she had sunstroke and had just imagined her. She was exhausted and nearly dehydrated and surely she could not have experienced what she felt throughout her entire body just from the sight of a woman!” (76). A second vision of the beautiful woman, however, offers proof that the woman is real and that Caridad's desire is authentic:

But as soon as they were outside, coming around from the back of the church, she saw the woman in question, more real than before, still on the wall. Moreover, the woman on the wall was looking over her shoulders in Caridad's direction!

All the while, Caridad kept sneaking glances over at the woman on the wall who, as far as she could tell, was unabashedly staring at her as well.

(76)

Significantly, the two women's gazes intersect, a moment that parallels the juncture in apparitional narratives when the vision recipient looks directly at the divine figure. This intersection of the women's gazes catalyzes a multi-valenced set of transformations that have far reaching consequences in terms of character and plot development and as a response to the idea that lesbian identity and desire constitute cultural betrayal.

Having her gaze reciprocated by the lesbian is crucial to Caridad's development as a character and the telling of her life's story. Like vision recipients in Roman and Mexican Catholic apparitional narratives, Caridad is transformed. Gazing upon the lesbian and having her gaze returned is healing, for it restores her ability to love. It cures Caridad of the heartsickness caused by male transgression, her betrayal and abandonment by her husband, Memo, that had led to so many loveless sexual encounters with men: “for the first time in years, since way before the attack, her heart was renewed, moved by another human being” (79).

Caridad's recovery, literally a recovery of desire, leads to another transformation, her sanctification, for Caridad is beatified by popular acclaim at the end of a year-long pilgrimage that she is prompted to undertake by the sight of the lesbian. When she returns, Caridad is venerated as la Santa Armitaña.⁷ The spectacular nature of these transformations, miraculous healing and sanctification, suggests that the intersection of lesbian gazes is analogous to the exchange of gazes featured in apparitional narratives—it has supernatural force. Likewise, lesbian desire is shown to have parallel consequences to encountering a divine being. On one hand, the beautiful Chicana lesbian is herself divinized, both in Caridad's perception and by the narrative devices framing the story. On the other hand, Caridad plays a role in the community reminiscent of Juan Diego's and vision recipients in other more conventional apparitional narratives.

In spite of its spectacular motivation and ending, Caridad's pilgrimage has an ordinary enough beginning. Seeking to understand her inexplicable desire for a woman, Caridad sets out to meet her. She asks doña Felicia to approach the woman: “Will you go up to that woman for me and ask her where she thinks she knows me from … if that's why she keeps looking at me?” (78). However, the woman has disappeared from the wall. When doña Felicia points out that the crowd of worshippers at the Santuario makes it impractical to seek out and speak with the woman, Caridad prostrates herself in prayer-like despair:

Caridad sat back down. Her whole body was affected by a stranger and she couldn't explain why. And now the woman on the wall was lost to her in the thick of the crowd. In total despair, sitting on the ground with her legs tucked beneath her, she threw her body forward, arms stretched out, and let out a deep sigh of despair like a prayer.

(78)

Significantly, this despairing, full-body genuflection honors the beautiful Chicana lesbian rather than Our Lord of Esquipulas. The woman clearly has replaced the Black Christ and Chimayo's healing earth as the object of Caridad's attention, of her adoration. That Caridad literally as well as metaphorically worships the lesbian is confirmed for the reader when the narrator refers to the beautiful Chicana as “Woman-on-the-wall.” Later, this appellation is expanded to “Woman-on-the-wall-now-on-a-hill” and “Woman-on-the-wall-later-woman-on-a-hill-with-someone-else.” Like the titles given divine figures in apparitional literature, these names for the lesbian are derived from the site(s) where she appeared.

Despairing but undeterred, Caridad sets out to find the beautiful woman. Spotting her on a hill, Caridad climbs toward her and greets the woman and her companion. Caridad falls in love when the lesbian returns her greeting which, says the narrator, becomes “the most dramatic moment in Caridad's life thus far” (80). Overwhelmed, Caridad retreats down the hill and, accompanied by doña Felicia, leaves el Santuario. Once home, Caridad is obsessed by the memory of Woman-on-the-wall. Unable to sleep, she cleans house without cessation. Intervening, doña Felicia suggests that she pray for enlightenment. Caridad prays until she passes out two days later. Revived by doña Felicia but still unenlightened, Caridad sets out for a mineral bath at Ojo Caliente [Hot Eye] but never arrives there. Instead, she retreats to an isolated cave in the Sangre de Cristo mountains where she first felt lesbian desire.

Despite a search effort and the prayers of doña Felicia, it is a year before Caridad is discovered by doña Felicia's godson, Francisco el Penitente, who, as his name indicates, is a member of the same fraternity as the man who found the statue of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas at Chimayo. Francisco and three of his fellow Penitentes spot Caridad as they are riding horseback in the mountains. What follows is a feminist-lesbian miracle, for Caridad emerges from her cave empowered to resist the ecclesiastical, patriarchal control embodied in Francisco and his fellow Penitentes:

“You're coming with us!” one of the brothers said sternly. …

Caridad shook her head. The man dismounted from his Arabian steed and went over to her to pull her firmly toward his horse. She resisted and let herself drop on the ground. He bent down to take her up in his arms, figuring she would be even easier to get on the horse without any resistance but he couldn't lift her. “What the … !” he said, dumbfounded at how heavy she was although she was only half his size.

The other man joined him and finally Francisco el Penitente and yet the young woman could not be budged. The first brother, irate that his strength seemed no match for such a slight person, motioned to yank her along by the hair.

(86–87)

Francisco piously interprets Caridad's strength as a sign of holiness: “Stop,” he calls, “It is not for us to bring this handmaiden of Christ back. … Can't you all see that? It is not our Lord's will” (87). But Caridad is nothing like any “handmaiden of Christ” depicted in Roman and Mexican Catholic discourses. In fact, Caridad's refusal to obey the men radically revises the model of female obedience and submission to patriarchal authority personified in the female saints and virgins who populate Roman and Mexican Catholic apparitional narratives.⁸ Caridad resists the men rather than surrendering to them and is miraculously strengthened because of it.

The news “that a woman hermit was living in a cave … and that she resisted with passive yet herculean strength three men who tried to carry her home” spreads quickly. Revised in the repetition, the dimensions of Caridad's resistance are amplified to the extent that she is portrayed as a female warrior before whom men bow in supplication:

The three men whom Caridad resisted by making herself into lead weight turned into a score of men as the story spread. Francisco's humble gesture of delivering a prayer for her well-being became the act of many men brought to their knees before the holy hermit, all begging forgiveness for their audacious attempt at manhandling her. It was said that she lifted the very horse that the hermano [brother] had tried to force her to mount—with him on it—but out of benevolence brought it back down safely without so much as spooking the horse with her defiant magic.

(87–88)

A series of exaggerations and embellishments thus amplifies the challenge to male authority depicted in the story of Caridad's “rescue”: Caridad's strength is magnified; the number of men is increased; and the men are depicted begging for forgiveness. In addition, Caridad's original gesture of passive resistance—refusing to mount the horse—is portrayed as the more aggressive act of lifting the horse and rider. Rather than merely adding detail to the story, this revision is a play on the commonplace sexual metaphor in which riding signifies heterosexual intercourse. Not only does Caridad refuse to mount (ride), but she mounts (lifts up) the horse with its male rider still in the saddle. When read in the context of the embedded sexual innuendo, Caridad's active resistance to the male rider bespeaks a woman in control of her own sexuality, a control that she gained through the agency of lesbian desire. This representation of a physically and sexually empowered woman contrasts radically with the community's belief, revealed when she was attacked by the malogra, that Caridad colluded in her own sexual violation by men. Hence, the story of Caridad's “rescue” replaces this image of Caridad with the vision of a woman defying traditional heterosexist constructions of gender.

The farther this story of female empowerment spreads, the greater impact it has on the community. During Holy Week the local population forsakes their churches to make pilgrimages to Caridad's cave:

[H]undreds of people made their way up the mountain to La Caridad's cave in hopes of obtaining her blessing and just as many with hopes of being cured of some ailment or another. Not only the nuevo mejicano-style Spanish Catholics went to see her but also Natives from the pueblos, since for more than a year Caridad's disappearance had been a mystery through the state and her spartan mountain survival alone seemed incredible.

(87)

Significantly, traditional religious practices in the region are disrupted by the spectacle of a woman successfully living outside patriarchal society for a year and subsequently defying male attempts to re-impose control over her. Caridad's cave replaces the Santuario de Chïmayo and local churches as sites of worship. Caridad is sanctified by the community's application to her for blessing and healing just as recipients of divine visions and extraordinary curanderas are popularly venerated. In Caridad's case, however, her transformation is achieved through the agency of lesbian desire.

This phenomenon attracts media attention. By the time the story is reported in the newspapers, Caridad's beatification for feminist resistance to male authority is consummated in the imagination of the community:

[T]he daily newspapers had reported the pilgrimage to her mountain with “eyewitnesses” who had supposedly seen her. Some claimed to have been touched and blessed by her and still some others insisted that she had cured them! One man said that when he laid eyes on her, he saw a beautiful halo radiate around her whole body, like the Virgen de Guadalupe, and that she had relieved him of his drinking problem. One woman showed the press a small scrap of cloth that she said she had torn from la Santita Armitaña's robe.

(90)

These reports shift Caridad from the position of vision recipient to divine figure. Caridad, the reports claim, miraculously cures physical and social ills. She, like the Virgen de Guadalupe, is said to emanate a gold, glowing light. The Mexican Catholic community subsequently borrows traditional forms and practices used to venerate the Virgen de Guadalupe and Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas and adapts them to its worship of Caridad. Hence, commonplace items associated with Caridad are treated as sacred relics just as the faithful collect and cherish saints' artifacts and other articles such as holy medals, prayer cards, statues, etc. As a result, veneration of a feminist, lesbian curandera replaces worship of figures such as Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas and the Virgen de Guadalupe whose sanctity is licensed by ecclesial authority. This revision of religious iconography, discourses and practices argues that Mexican Catholic forms of spirituality and lesbianism are compatible rather than oppositional. Consequently, Mexican Catholic lesbians need not feel compelled choose between religion/culture and self.

In addition to being designated a feminist-style saint in the tradition of Mexican and Roman Catholicism, Caridad comes to be associated with a legendary female warrior, Lozen, figured in New Mexican, Native American discourses. When her story circulates beyond the immediate area of Chimayo to Sonora where, the narrator tells us, the Yaqui live, Caridad is acclaimed as the ghost of Lozen, an “Apache mystic woman warrior.” Lozen, according to the narrator, was the sister of chief Victorio “who had vowed ‘to make war against the white man forever’” (88). The only woman among thirty-eight male warriors, Lozen alerted the company when the enemy approached: “being warned herself first by the tingling of her palms and her hands turning purple” (88). Like Caridad, Lozen is said to have travelled through the wilderness alone. Lozen's strength during this journey was derived from her spirituality: “When left by herself, Lozen turned toward the four directions and sang to her god Ussen to guide her through the wilderness” (88). Learning of Caridad's similar, year-long sojourn in the mountains, the Yaqui attribute her ability to resist Francisco and his fellow Penitentes to being Lozen's spirit-memory rather than the handmaiden of Christ.

The appropriation of Caridad's story by each of these discourses clearly executes a multi-directional parody of various social and discursive conventions. Framing a lesbian love story in the conventions of Roman and Mexican Catholic apparitional literatures satirizes these discourses and the social practices associated with them. Likewise, ironically exaggerating—burlesquing—the hyperbole that marks media and oral storytelling parodies these discourses as well.

Nevertheless, serious claims about subject constitution are articulated in the passages dedicated to Caridad's first lesbian love and its consequences for her and the community. The story of Caridad in So Far from God revises/lesbianizes images of women proffered by three discursive traditions: Mexican/Mexican-American curanderismo, Mexican Catholic marianismo, and Native American accounts of resistance against Euro-American aggression. It textualizes the oral tradition that some curanderas are lesbian. It revises Mexican Catholic narratives used to socialize Chicanas into traditional gender roles by projecting the spectacle of a feminist/lesbian saint. Finally, it lesbianizes the model of female identity articulated in Native American discourses by figuring Caridad the spirit of the Apache warrior Lozen. Consequently, multiple and diverse subjective modes available to Chicanas—the curandera, the saint, and warrior—are conflated in the figure of Caridad through the agency of lesbian desire. As a fictional character, therefore, Caridad actualizes Castillo's contention “that lesbians can “remain true to a … Mexican/Chicana/Latina/India/Mestiza … socio-political identity” while exploring their “erotic selves” (Massacre 45). This, in turn, demonstrates that lesbianism and Mexican-American identity are overlapping categories, mutually inclusive rather than exclusive and refutes the idea that homosexuality constitutes ethnic betrayal. Hence, So Far from God makes a space for lesbians in the Mexican American community.

Notes

1. I wish to make explicit my position in relation to Chicano/a scholarship and literature. I am a Euro-American feminist and lesbian rearing a Mexican-American daughter. Hence, my critical perspective is shaped by the anomalous experience of being simultaneously inside and outside Chicano/a culture.

   This paper is written primarily for a non-Chicano/a audience unfamiliar with Chicano/a discourses. Consequently, translations from Spanish to English are provided in the text.

   I also wish to thank my colleagues, Jane Campbell, Theresa Carilli, Julie Hagemann, Janet Jackson, Zenobia Mistri, and Robert Selig, for their generous assistance on this project. Their insightful comments have contributed significantly to my reading of Ana Castillo's So Far from God.

2. Such veneration of curandero/as is not uncommon. They are commonly considered holy figures and, as Ortelli explains, can be revered as saints. Consequently, some theologians think of curanderismo as competing with institutional religions for devotees. In contrast, most practitioners of curanderismo consider themselves collaborating with institutional religions to sustain the good health and spirituality of their clients. For most, curanderismo is a vocation to which they are called by God. A variety of studies show that consulting curandero/as about both spiritual and physical concerns is commonplace because, in part, curanderismo is grounded in the premise that spirituality and materiality are integrally linked.

3. I refer to the belief that some curanderas are lesbians as primarily an oral tradition because only once have I seen it explicitly stated in Chicana fiction, critical scholarship, or in sociological studies of curanderismo. Moraga, in The Last Generation, includes curanderas in a list of lesbian and gay Chicano/as who play a significant role in the community: “Somos activistas, académicos y artistas, parteras y políticos, curanderas y campesinos [We are activists, academics and artists, midwives and politicians, healers and farm workers]” (164–65). The healer, of course, is a prominent figure in contemporary lesbian culture, and lesbian and gay social histories such as Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Words give healers a central place in the “mythic/spiritual/religious aspects of Gay culture” (120). Grahn identifies lesbian and gay healers and rituals in contemporary and historic cultures: ancient Greek, Celtic, Native American, African, Caribbean, etc.

4. The ironic explanation offered by the narrator of So Far from God is that with the appearance of Nuestro Señor de Esquipulas at Chimayo, “the Catholic Church endorsed as sacred what the Native peoples had known all along since the beginning of time” (73).

5. El Santuario de Chimayo also is featured in one of the poems, “La Despedida” [“The Final Verse”], in Moraga's Last Generation. In this poem, El Santuario is described as a place of healing and renewal where spiritual rebirth is made possible by the holy earth: “Soy la santa [I am the saint] / five feet of human / dimension and heart. / I birth electric / from the flames of the faithful. / Their burnt offerings singe / my cracked desert lips. Holy water / lagrinas [tears] stain my ashen cheeks” (48).

6. The following version of the story of Juan Diego and the Virgen de Guadalupe is taken from A Woman Clothed with the Sun: Eight Great Appearances of Our Lady in Modern Times, edited by John J. Delaney. According to an account written in Nahuatl (c. 1560), in December 1531 the Virgen de Guadalupe appeared to an Aztec-Mexican field worker named Juan Diego at Tepeyac, a hill where a temple dedicated to the Aztec mother-goddess formerly had stood. Speaking in Juan Diego's dialect, the Virgin charged him with petitioning the Spanish Bishop-elect of Mexico City, Juan de Zumarraga, to build a church at Tepeyac in her honor. When Zumarraga refused, the Virgin again appeared to Juan Diego, instructing him to repeat the request. This time, Zumarraga asked for a sign from the Virgin. When the Virgin appeared a third time, she caused exotic Castilian roses to grow on the cold, barren hill and simultaneously appeared to his dying uncle, Juan Bernardino, curing him and announcing her name. Furthermore, her image was imprinted on the tilma [an Aztec-style cape] in which Juan Diego carried the roses to Zumarraga. A chapel and a hermitage for Juan Diego were built on the hill at Tepeyac; eight million Native Mexicans were baptized between 1532 and 1538. Until his death in 1548, Juan Diego received pilgrims at the hermitage where he recounted his story and displayed the tilma. Juan Diego continues to be honored in celebrations venerating the Virgen de Guadalupe, who has been named the patron of the Americas by the Roman Catholic church.

7. This term conflates two words, arma and ermitaña/o. Arma translates as weapon or arm while ermitaña/o is a hermit. Consequently we can understand La Santa Armitaña as a play on words that refers to Caridad's pilgrimage as well as to the physical strength (symbolic of her empowerment) that she acquires during this year.

8. Female martyrs who died rather than renounce their faith or acquiesce to sexual aggression, of course, did engage in acts of resistance, but in order to obey, fulfill, and perpetuate the teachings of ecclesial authorities.

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