Ana Castillo's first novel, The Mixquiahuala Letters¹ consists of 40 letters the Chicana Teresa writes to her friend Alicia. The letters take an inventory of “the cesspool twirl of our 20s” (17) immediately preceding the time of their composition. Teresa tries to set this decade into perspective,” to gather the pieces of the woman who was my self.” (108), in particular. The emphasis is on “was.”

Applying the terminology of Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), the critic Alvina E. Quintana said that in The Mixquiahuala Letters the “protagonist's existential well-being is dependent on culture.”² We have to add that for two women with mixed ethnic backgrounds extensively traveling within the U.S. and Mexico this means defining themselves with and against two or even three cultures in which the role of women is either restricted or largely ambiguous at best. In the novel this effort is closely connected with the ups and downs of Teresa's and Alicia's relationship as told in Teresa's monologues disguised as dialogues. The two women live somewhat emancipated from their social contexts. They share a Hispanic background but they also exhibit major differences. Teresa once calls Alicia “the privileged girl of the suburbs” (42) and “some WASP chick or JAP from Manhattan's west side” (44), while she herself takes pride in being “a peona by birthright comfortable without chair or table but squatted” (44).

Letter One drives in some of the signposts of this friendship and of Teresa's character both by deliberate portrayal and by ‘uncontrolled’ self-revelation. The subsequent thirty-nine letters explain, confirm, modify and develop this initial information on the last ten years by documenting many individual efforts to come to terms with various aspects of this period by applying different perspectives, by employing prose, poetry, dream and myth, by making new beginnings and eventually asking the reader to draw his/her own conclusions about the nature of the cross-cultural experience. Thus the mode of presentation reflects the difficulties involved in this search for meaning, its fragmentary character, its diversity and subjectivity.³

Teresa introduces herself as a thirty-year-old intelligent, experienced, eloquent, corny and resourceful Chicana who, as a kind of benevolent mentor wants to introduce Alicia to the standards by which she and any other female will be measured by her Mexican-American family in California. After the imminent encounter the two plan to go to Mexico. Alicia emerges from this letter as a fairly naive outsider who needs assistance like the well-intentioned liberal Anglo reader even farther removed from the clash of cultures under investigation. This fairly passive role designed for Alicia is slightly impaired by Teresa's wish for an emancipated conspirator once in a while spoiling the smooth interplay of male-dominated challenges and responses both in the U.S. and in Mexico. But as much as she wants to shape Alicia as a replica of her own role, she also warns her against total rejection of the other culture, especially of the courageous struggle and suffering of women in it. This comprises her own efforts to establish an honest balance between detachment and closeness. Thus, from the outset she gives Alicia a marginal, yet significant place in a system of power structures to be forever tested and hopefully rearranged here and there.

The topics discussed in Letter One mainly refer to the restricted role of women in Teresa's extended family in which some spaces open up whenever the males cannot temporarily exert their power because of their physical or mental absence, or when they considerably violate the traditional codes of behavior as demonstrated by the five male role models given. Teresa systematically exposes these violations to the outsider with the fairly mean intention of using her family for her own ends. At the same time she anxiously guards her people from an overbearing Alicia whose cross-cultural inexperience could create confrontations and also question vital segments of Teresa's identity.

The period concluded in Letter One and recorded in detail in the subsequent thirty-nine letters started with a fundamental crisis triggering off a search for new values together with Alicia. They met when they “enrolled at a North American institution in Mexico City for a summer to study its culture and language” (18) including a weekend in Mixquiahuala,

a pre-Columbian village of obscurity, neglectful of progress, electricity notwithstanding. Its landmark and only claim to fame were the Toltec ruins of Tula, monolithic statues in tribute to warriors and a benevolent god in self-exile who reappeared later on Mayan shores, and again, on the back of a four-legged beast to display his mortal fallibilities.⁴

(19)

For Teresa this trip did not mean an easy exchange of one culture for another, a miraculous homecoming, as her mother imagined,⁵ but rather a complicated effort of gaining a new perspective not only on the temporary actual environment but also on her life in the U.S.: “Life [in Mexico] is balanced. Even New York makes sense” (17).⁶

From the outset Mexico reveals itself as a fairly slippery terrain for two women suffering from the oppressions of U.S. society. Teresa chose this country as her home after the separation from her husband, when she felt “a definite call to find a place to satisfy my yearning spirit, the Indian in me; … a need for the sapling woman for the fertile earth that nurtured her growth” (46). In another letter she is more precise:

i sometimes saw the ancient Tenochtitlán, home of my mother, grandmothers, and greatmother, as an embracing bosom, to welcome me back and rock my weary body and mind to sleep in its tumultuous, over populated, throbbing, ever pulsating heart.

(92)

Generally, Teresa portrays two aspects: The first one comprises exotic, idyllic small town scenes e.g. in Mixquiahuala pervaded by a sense of timelessness but also of the perpetual immediacy and extreme closeness of life and death, destruction and recreation.⁷ Alvina E. Quintana has described this as follows: “The nostalgic past refers to the idealization of old customs, largely a patriarchal interpretation of Mexican cultural traditions and history.”⁸

Among the ruins of ancient civilizations Teresa also feels an “intense devotion to the culture that had preceded European influence” (49), of being “transposed back in time” (48). In a dream she draws the picture of an archaic community in a Mexican provincial town where

The people were of mixed blood, people of the sun and earth … i too was of that small corner of the world. i was of that mixed blood, of fire and stone, timber and vine, a history passed down from mouth to mouth since the beginning of time when God, finding Himself lonely one eon of a day, decided to make a companion out of clay.⁹

(95–96)

The person thus created of course is “brown, firm, and strong” (96), giving the dreamer “a sensation of pride and belonging” (96). The scene is rudely interrupted by troops approaching to destroy the pastoral setup which the soldadera Teresa rushes to defend with the gun in her hand. This letter is introduced by her confession “i too suffer from dreams.” (95), underlining the pains of such image making and role playing.

The second aspect of Teresa's Mexico is related to the experience of the two women never acknowledged as insiders rather as “two snags in its pattern. Society could do no more than snip us out” (59). Above all the fact that Teresa and Alicia are traveling without male companions stigmatizes them as transgressors who are even refused the protective measures Mexican culture offers as poor reward for a fairly low status.¹⁰ Mexican women are described as readers of cheap romances denying them individuality and confirming “the unrelenting customs of the fierce people who never gave in” (58). Still, Teresa does not stop relating herself to such patterns of behavior. She e.g. “tolerated the inexplicable obstinacy,” (49) or, though she does not admit this to her friend, she knows that it is not her physical appearance that makes her more attractive than Alicia for Mexican men but her docility as part of her heritage,¹¹ because “i was part of that culture that wouldn't allow me to separate” (21).

Such cautious self-acceptance occurs among a whole series of disappointments, of “myth[s] involving Mexican tradition dissipated before our eyes” (93). She once locates herself “in the midst of decadence and absurdity, destitution drawing ever near” (74)¹² and before leaving the country she sighs: “i'd had enough of the country where relationships were never clear and straightforward but a tangle of contradictions and hypocrisies” (54). But against all odds Mexico keeps the status of a homeland, though quite a paradoxical one: “Mexico. Melancholy, profoundly right and wrong, it embraces as it strangulates” (59).¹³ Significantly enough, the novel takes its title from the pastoral small town of Mixquiahuala.

This accommodative tendency complies with Teresa's temporary return to her husband, the birth of their son Vittorio, and her intention to take them all to Mexico for a visit,¹⁴ though only five letters later she leaves her husband again.¹⁵ As an alternative to Alicia's detachment¹⁶ Teresa formulates her attitude towards Mexico and life in general:

you resented me enough for having an edge on society's contradictions by admitting to their enforced power over us, and you didn't need to believe i also had an edge with something as irrational as ghosts, demons, and God Himself by virtue of my own admittance, …¹⁷

(86)

As indicated earlier Teresa's quest for identity and a home is closely connected both with the image of Mexico and the evolution of her friendship with Alicia. In Letter Thirty-Six Teresa assesses a distinct change in their relationship: “For the first half of the decade we were an objective one, a single entity, nondiscriminate of the other's being” (122). And here again, Mexico functions prominently, this time as a sort of catalyst, when she characterizes Alicia's present situation as “… what I found was the carrion of what vultures in Mexico had discarded” (122). Consequently, with the progress of the letter writing Alicia's Hispanic background is more and more disregarded whereas her European roots are emphasized.¹⁸ At this point we have to keep in mind that all the information we get on her is from Teresa. So it might well be that Alicia is deliberately shaped as a person such as Teresa needs to serve her purposes in her own search, though she maintains that she is writing “to stir your memory” (47).

In Mexico Alicia's strong, but sometimes inconsistent feminist convictions close the doors to a large section of experience¹⁹ and, above all, neglect Teresa's urgent desire for a sense of belonging. Alicia's merely superficial and romantic fascination with Mexico, “her paradise niche” (29), ends in exchanges of stereotypical responses²⁰ which she easily compensates and shrugs off in an artist's exorcism, a disturbing mixed-media show of angry papièr maché dolls.²¹ Teresa once complains “You refused to have your shield penetrated” (58). And one of the most bitter accusations against this free-wheeling life style is included in Letter Thirty-Five devoted to Alicia's strategy to get a cheap abortion at the age of seventeen by going to a clinic with the welfare card of a friend of a friend “posing as the Puerto Rican woman who had already borne fatherless children.” (120) and being sterilized consequently. Teresa exposes her art not as emancipatory but as “a personal statement of violation and fear” (121) and sardonically closes this episode: “Maybe that Puerto Rican woman with the five children went on to have yet another child? Who knows?” (121). This is far from the kindness Teresa demonstrates when speaking about her rather quaint Mexican friend Alvaro Pérez Pérez, though here her irony cannot be suppressed either:

We were drawn to each other by the Indian spirit of mutual ancestors … and finally i believed that beneath this rebellion was a sensitive human being with an insight that was unique and profound. (This is a woman conditioned to accept a man about whom she has serious doubts concerning his legitimate status with the human race.)

(48)

The novel ends with the reinstitution of Teresa as Alicia's “self-appointed guardian” (78). Alicia has become totally dependent on her pathetic lover Abdel who eventually commits suicide in her apartment after she threatened to leave him. Oddly enough Teresa reconstructs Alicia's confrontation with this death as if she had been a witness dictating Alicia's emotional responses, a desperate curse and a call for help: “MOTHER OF GOD, HELP! TERESA? … ABDEL, YOU SON OF A BITCH! Motherfucker, why didn't you just leave?” (132). Teresa has shaped herself a new/old companion for the fourth decade of her life to be re-introduced into the cross-cultural experience because “at the end of a journey, one comes home for one purpose: to start over” (128). Now Letter One can be composed to prepare yet another trip to Mexico²² starting the next cycle of cross-cultural encounters with the potential of another record in letter or book form.

Let us now return to the nature of the cross-cultural experience in The Mixquiahuala Letters. It is not a fusion of cultures and certainly not a locus amoenus as Teresa indicates when she compares her Mexico to that of other people:

… were they happy because they had no need to question irregularities in the way they were treated? Had they survived the summer in Mexico by not becoming part of its heart-wrenching/spirit-drenching madness?

(22)

The cross-cultural experience is non-prescriptive and not easily transferable as in the novel it is bound to a distinct and strong personality and her evolving many-faceted relationship with another character.

The letter form stresses its fragmentary and dynamic qualities in a constant interplay of opposites and recurrent cycles of closeness and detachment called by the late Dieter Herms the “dialectics of attraction and repulsion.”²³ and by Gloria Anzaldúa in her Borderlands/La Frontera “one's shifting and multiple identity and integrity”²⁴ Norma Alarcón has related these features to post-modern phenomenology by pointing out:

In a sense, the significance of any one thing is highly unstable and much depends on the angle of vision … she is undergoing and inquisition that makes her both the subject of her narrative and the object of someone else's.²⁵

(102)

It is not chic, but a very tough form of existence, not of one's own choice but imposed upon a person by the social pressure of the monologic myths of uniformity and symmetry, of purity and unambiguousness, combining with the human urge for self-exploration, requiring a permanent emotional and intellectual alertness, the ability and readiness to construct and deconstruct one's own position. This also includes the defense of individual choice against overdetermination by the collective. Such efforts ask for a forceful character willing to struggle with ambiguities and to accept painful defeats. Gloria Anzaldúa has said that “It's not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. Hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape.”²⁶

In Teresa's letters an attitude of ironic detachment, of objectifying the past, of taking control²⁷ predominates turning her into a somewhat lonely, monologic person though as the ideal mediator who is versed in more than one culture, she lives in one but has her home elsewhere, always striving for the dialogue. For Teresa hers is both a position of pride and humbleness to resist the temptations of an elitist attitude. She feels “driven to see the other improved in her own reflection” (23). The final plan of going to Mexico again is suggested after Alicia's assumed break with an affair denying her individuality and potential growth through new experience. Teresa once comments on the last ten years with Alicia: “So much was possible then” (27). Mexico promises a challenge for a multiplicity of human faculties, an opportunity for a new cycle of essential encounters, an escape from “the critical accusations of the word dealers” (97), and the renewal of their friendship to carry them through the fourth decade of their lives in a U.S. American social context.

And because the novel does not argue in favor of a fusion, we should not neglect the American components of Teresa's and Ana Castillo's ideology.²⁸ Among the virtues needed to bear the cross-cultural life we find Calvin's or Kant's moral imperative and the lessons of Benjamin Franklin, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and the rugged individualist Theodore Roosevelt implied in the text. Finally we can also once in a while hear Woody Guthrie singing a medley of “Ain't Got No Home,” “Hard Ain't It Hard,” “I Ain't Going to Be Treated This Way,” “I See a Better World A'Comin', Yes I Know.”

Notes

1. Ana Castillo. The Mixquiahuala Letters (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1986). All subsequent quotes in the text have been taken from this edition. Ana Castillo published two more novels, Sapogonia (1990) and So Far from God (1993), dealing with the major themes of the work of 1986 from different perspectives. Basic information on the author is available in Patricia de la Fuente, “Ana Castillo (15 June 1953–),” in F. A. Lomelí and C. R. Shirley, eds. Chicano Writers. Second Series (Detroit, 1992), 62–65 and in Wolfgang Binder, ed. Contemporary Chicano Poetry II: Partial Autobiographies (Erlangen, 1985), 28–38.

2. “Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novelist as Ethnographer,” in H. Calderón and J. D. Saldívar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands (Durham and London, 1991), 75.

3. In her preface Ana Castillo even suggests alternative readings of the novel for the conformist, the cynic, and the quixotic by changing the sequence of the letters. The book is dedicated to the “memory of the master of the game, Julio Cortázar,” the Argentinian experimental surrealist writer (1914–1984) and his rejection of the conventional linear plot structure as best practised and denominated in Rayuela (1963).

4. Unfortunately the quite promising motif of the God moving through various cultures is not further explored in the novel. Mixquiahuala forms a stark contrast to the “extroverted and ultramodern metropolis” (69) Veracruz which Teresa also calls “Babylonia with its vestiges of doom with every encounter” (85).

5. Cf. 93.

6. In Letter Twelve she will call New York City one of these “cities infamous for alienation of the human heart.” (42) and later in the novel “that eclectic city of yours” (117). One principle of her approach to the various phenomena is formulated in Letter Thirty-Nine referring to her changing attitudes towards her son Vittorio: “There are days when i want to shout for all to see the miracle. i confess, they carry me through those when i want to deny his existence” (128). Teresa repeatedly expresses her desire to relate to any one of her local and social contexts: “The truth is i just like to get into my environment” (13). But this rather cautious, more or less matter-of-fact justification of closeness clearly distinguishes itself from her comment in the same Letter One on her retarded but thoroughly amiable cousin Peloncito who does things not only “because it's what the others are doing” but because “he wants to belong” (13). In Letter Fifteen Teresa comments on her and Alicia's perception and evaluation of Mexico: “Wearily, you muttered, never having been able to pull apart its entanglement in your memory. You sensed, in the end, it all had to have meant something, that, if we were able to analyze, it would be pertinent, not just to benefit our lives, but womanhood. i nodded, alert, having already begun to open the sealed passages to those months. ‘i'm writing about it,’ i confessed. You shuddered, went to bed” (47).

7. Cf. 49.

8. A. E. Quintant, op.cit., 76. Teresa uses the terms “nostalgic” and “nostalgia” (cf. e.g. 59 and 84).

9. Note the very similar creation myths in Afro-American folklore!

10. Cf. 59: “We would have hoped for respect as human beings, but the only respect granted a woman is that which a gentleman bestows upon a lady. Clearly, we were no ladies.”

11. Cf. 113.

12. Also “in the homeland of spiritual devastation” (55). In Letter Thirty-Four Teresa complains about “our miserable experience across the land of beauty and profound intrigue” (118).

13. Mexico is still a reality to be preserved and protected from overreactions: “We were timid because of our foreignness and tried our best to remain as inconspicuous as possible, as if our presence suddenly discovered might cause our new surroundings to vanish” (69). Cf. also Juan Bruce-Novoa, “Mexico in Chicano Literature,” Revista de la Universidad de Mexico 29:5 (1975), 13–18; reprinted in RetroSpace (Houston, 1990), 52–62.

14. Cf. 62 and 119.

15. In this letter she concedes that even her feelings for her child underlie considerable fluctuations. Cf. 128.

16. Cf. e.g. 81.

17. In Letter Thirty-Seven she combines this statement with her permanent existential search of identity: “i want to take my ghosts, Alicia, confront them face to face, snarl at them, stick out my tongue, wiggle my fingers from the sides of head, nya-nya!” (124).

18. Towards the end of the novel Teresa hopes that her friend's European trip “will lead you to a place you'll want to go back to and call home too” (119). This expectation follows Teresa's description of the abortion of the child from her Spanish lover Alexis, “not a man conflicted with mestizo blood and inferiority complexes of the evident sort” (104), and her bitter revenge in Letter Thirty-Three featuring a scene of humiliation in her poem “Epilogue” presented in his conquered perspective (cf. 114–117).

19. One of aspects demonstrating this is Chicano/Mexican Catholicism (cf. e.g. 24–25, 70, and 82–84). Cf. also “… not concealing your intolerance of the indulgences of others … what was clearly your unsociable spirit.” (87) and her statement that she “felt betrayed by your ineptitude to grasp that in the lion's den one doesn't play by one's own rules” (78). For Alicia the encounter with Mexico was obviously less essential and existential than for Teresa. Cf. e.g. the imagined symbolical New York scene after her return from Mexico with two bags of souvenirs: “Your legs and arms were useless and the bags dropped like anchors on the unwashed linoleum, the pattern of which had faded a generation before” (43). Because, on one hand, Alicia in unison with Teresa sought “approval from man through sexual meetings” (39), and, on the other, denies men (cf. 79) and feels alienated from them (cf. 105), Teresa openly criticizes her feminist concepts with reprimands like “All you had sought in Babylonia was a good time at a man's expense.” (78) or “your curiosity of the laws that guide men” (40). For some basic definitions of white and Chicana feminism consult Norma Alarcón, “Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision through Malintzin/or Malinche: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in Ch. Moraga and G. Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back (New York, 1983), 182–190 and “The Theoretical Subjects(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” in H. Calderón and J. D. Saldívar, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands (Durham and London, 1991), 28–39. María Linda Apodaca, “A Double Edge Sword: Hispanas and Liberal Feminism,” Crítica 1:3 (1986), 96–114. Marta Cotera, “Feminism: The Chicana and Anglo Versions,” in M. B. Melville, ed. Twice a Minority (St. Louis, 1980), 217–234, Dieter Herms, “La Chicana: Dreifache Diskriminierung als Drittweltfrau,” Gulliver 10 (1981), 79–93, and Consuelo Nieto, “The Chicana and the Women's Rights Movement,” La Luz 3:6 (September 1974), 10–11 and 32. A direct reference to the U.S. feminist movement can be found in letter Twenty-Five (cf. 86).

20. Cf. her affair with Adán, the Indian caretaker, Acapulco (cf. 26–30) and her image of Mexico: “oceans, casitas, dreams and follies of gringas and suave Latin lovers” (118). Cf. also how Teresa describes the fading out of Alicia's acknowledgement of her gypsy background which could provide interesting fields of contact with Teresa's idea of Mexico: “You told me that gypsies are an oppressed dark people who nevertheless live celebrating death through life. That was all you knew about gypsies … Your parents had never wanted anything to do with that mongrel race, the lost tribe, and fought in America for American ideals” (25).

21. Cf. 117–119.

22. Cf. 124: “Maybe we can plan a visit, a visit to make a new plan.”

23. Developments in the Chicana Cultural Movement and Two Works of Chicana Prose Fiction in 1986: Estela Portillo's Trini and Ana Castillo's Mixquiahuala Letters,” in W. Karrer and H. Lutz, eds. Minority Literatures in North America: Contemporary Perspectives (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 153. Cf. also his comments on the novel in his Die zeitgenössische Literatur der Chicanos (1959–1988) (Frankfurt am Main, 1990), 180–189. In letter Twenty-Two Teresa refers to the dangers of extreme detachment: “Months of miles of moving continuously away from the familiar had worked their evil on our minds and emotions” (69).

24. “Preface” to Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, 1987).

25. In a round table discussion Guillermo Gómez Peña has stated: “… we've always had postmodern, only ours was involuntarily.” (As quoted in Yvonne Yarbo-Bejarano, “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo” (66).

26. “Preface” to Borderlands/La Frontera. G. Anzaldúa's book has been recognized as a major text describing ‘the border’ as “a specific place of hybridity and struggle, policing and transgression” (cf. James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, P. Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies (New York, 1992, 109; also Hector A. Torres, “Experience, Writing, Theory: The Dialectics of Mestizaje in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” in J. Trimmer and T. Warnock, eds. Cultural and Cross-Cultural Studies and the Teaching of Literature (New York, 1991), Ada Savin, “Course and Discourse in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza” in G. Fabre, ed. Parcours Identitaires (Paris, 1994), 110–120 and Alfred Artega, “Beasts and Jagged Strokes of Color: The Poetics of Hybridization on the U.S./Mexican Border,” in A. Artega, ed. An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands (Durham, 1994). Since Teresa's identity in considerably determined by her transgression of borders much of The Mixquiahuala Letters can be understood as an illustration of Gloria Anzaldúa's book.

27. This is certainly a result of her idea: “To be rid of it, i must create distance …” (64).

28. For a discussion of the interaction between ethnic and mainstream concepts cf. Robert Coles, “Minority Dreams, American Dreams,” Daedalus 60 (1981), 29–41.