[In the following essay, Gómez-Vega examines the character traits that define Sapogonia's anti-hero, Máximo Madrigal, and the true hero(ine), Pastora.]

The characters in Ana Castillo's Sapogonia evolve out of a cultural mind set defined by sexual identity. In this novel, Castillo creates Máximo Madrigal, the “anti-hero,” a character who functions within an intrinsically male-identified culture in order to expose his lack of human connectedness as the direct result of his living by a male myth that values the mythological male hero's separation from the community as an individual rather than his fusion into the whole. Through this man's eyes, Castillo presents Pastora Velásquez Aké, a woman who epitomizes the Latin male's “myth” of the female. She is seen as an aloof, distant, unattainable beauty, as a castrating bitch who demands male sacrifices, and as a passive sexual object who nevertheless can destroy the man who dares to enter her. However, even as she is defined by Máximo Madrigal's dehumanizing view of women, Pastora emerges as the antagonist who questions the anti-hero's values and as the feminine force who forges connections with other people as the only answer to the male anti-hero's inability to connect.

One of the first male “myths” addressed by Sapogonia is Octavio Paz's claim in El laberinto de la soledad that “el hombre es nostalgia y búsqueda de comunión (man is nostalgia and search for communion)” (175). Castillo provides in Máximo Madrigal an anti-hero as the novel's apparent hero, a man who represents neither nostalgia nor the search for communion. In fact, Máximo's journey through the novel can be seen as a journey away from communion into solitude, and at the core of this journey lies his inability to see women, especially Pastora, as individuals with whom communion is achieved not only through sexual intercourse but also through human intercourse. From the moment he leaves his family home without regard for his family's safety to the time towards the end of the novel when he leaves his wife, Máximo Madrigal is clearly a man who cannot sustain any human connections. Although his journey seems to assume a purpose when he goes in search of his father, what he finds is a man who, like himself, lives a random, disconnected life.

Máximo's search for his father reveals Castillo's commentary on the story of La Malinche and the Mexican man's complex feelings about her. Máximo, like Pastora, springs from a mixture of Spanish and Indian people. His grandfather on his mother's side conquers an Indian wife by first assaulting her, perhaps even raping her, and then later returning to marry her. The chapter in which the grandfather conquers the “indita” reveals a collapsing in Máximo's mind of his grandfather's and his father's behavior towards women. While Máximo claims to be telling his grandfather's story as the grandfather and a friend stop at the spot where “Mayan virgins were once drowned as offerings to the gods” (106), he says “it was here that my father [my italics] and his friend stopped” (106). He inadvertently says “father” rather than “grandfather,” an indication that in this man's life the roles of all men collapse into almost stereotypical sexually defined male behavior.

The story of the Indian girls' conquest, as told by Máximo, becomes a matter-of-fact account of the events without regard for the girls' feelings. One is told that “the young women had been virgins,” which not only indicates that they had not known sex, but that they had not been touched by non-Indian hands. In the grip of the Spaniards, however, the Indian girls submit. Máximo says that “the one my grandfather had, tried to run, but seeing she was done for, submitted without a whimper or complaint” (106). The only comment one gets of the Indian girl's feelings concerning the rape relates entirely to the worth of a deflowered virgin in a male-dominated society. Although the grandfather does not understand what the Indian girl is telling him “half in Quechua and half in Spanish,” he gets the general drift that “because she was no longer a virgin, she had lost her worth” (106). However, whether the deflowered Indian girl's lack of worth is part of her Indian culture or part of what the Spaniard understands from what he hears is a debatable issue. In a male-dominated world, a woman's worth is defined by how she is seen by the men around her, just as La Malinche's basic act of survival has been traditionally interpreted by Mexican males as an act of betrayal, an act that devalues her. The young Spaniard interprets the woman's grief through his own cultural interpretation of women's worth, which assumes that a deflowered virgin has lost her value.

The Spanish young man later returns to marry “his Mayan lover by the customs of her people, and then [takes] her south to his father's house where he then [marries] her by the Church” (107). Like the original conquered Indian woman, La Malinche, the “indita,” must submit her body and mind to the conquering Spaniard, and this pattern of conquering women that begins with this grandfather becomes the standard by which men in this family behave. Máximo will repeat his grandfather's deed when he uses Pastora, a mestiza like himself, exclusively as a sexual object. His own father also repeats the deed when he uses Máximo's mother as a sexual object and then leaves her behind so that he can return to Spain. The pattern of abuse and misuse of women is a cultural legacy that runs deep in Máximo's blood.

Pastora, Máximo's female counterpart, seems to personify Octavio Paz's version of the Mexican woman who “simplemente no tiene voluntad (simply has no will of her own).” In her relationship with Máximo, Pastora appears to represent the male myth of the woman whose “cuerpo duerme y solo se enciende si alguien lo despierta (body sleeps and only awakes if someone awakens it).” She seems to be the passive woman who “nunca es pregunta, sino respuesta, materia fácil y vibrante que la imaginación y la sensualidad masculina esculpen (is never a question but an answer, an easy and vibrant matter that masculine imagination and sensuality sculpt)” (El laberinto 33). It is no coincidence that, in Sapogonia, Máximo Madrigal has become a sculptor by the time he meets Pastora. His most important work throughout the novel seems to be his creation of the myth of Pastora as a woman who accepts him, unquestioningly, physically and emotionally, without making demands on him. This is the Pastora whom the reader sees through Máximo's eyes. Without Máximo, however, Pastora can be seen as a vibrant, fully committed individual who risks her own life to help others.

Pastora, when Máximo first sees her, is described to him as a lesbian, as a woman who “in the next minutes … [yanks] off [Máximo's] testicles, figuratively speaking” (25). Máximo's first perception of Pastora becomes the myth through which one must judge her. He tells the story through which the woman's life is presented. The reader who chooses to believe Máximo's definition of Pastora as a man-eater must ignore the life she presents for herself through the omniscient narrator's story and through her own narrative when she is in jail. Máximo automatically sees her in sexual terms as someone “with a terrific aloofness” who is capable of castrating “a man with a glance” (25) or as a lesbian who has no need of men like him. Both views reveal his inherent inability to recognize the woman as an individual separate from her sexual function, but the reader cannot ignore the fact that, although Máximo is the most predominant narrator in this novel, his perception of Pastora is not totally reliable. As a Sapogonian male, Máximo cannot see beyond the myth of the female propagated by Paz and embraced by other men of his ilk. His version of a woman's character is nothing more than an extension of the female myth being exposed by Castillo.

Close examination of Pastora's character reveals that she is, in fact, not a passive woman. In her involvement with Máximo, she is fully aware that “they were each sources of destruction for the other” (110), but she chooses to maintain the connection with Máximo as disconnected as it is. She chooses not to play the role of the female who clings but to allow this man to come and go in her life without any discernible boundaries. During the duration of their relationship,

there were times when one, in the pit of loneliness, utilized the telephone to call the other, but it ended there. Neither spoke of the wish that the other might satisfy his/her need of consolation. During such brief communication, it was certain that the receiver of the call would put the other off. ‘I have work.’ ‘I was asleep.’ Then silence, as redundant as the hum on the telephone line when the call ended.

(110)

Pastora's relationship with Máximo is defined by its lack of connection, by the casual consistency in its inconsistency, because she seems to know without being told that Máximo is not capable of connection. He comes in and out of her life at will, and she seems to play the role of the passive female who waits for her man and accepts what he has to offer on whatever terms.

Passivity, however, is hardly the term used by Castillo to define Pastora's reaction to Máximo. According to Castillo, in this relationship,

each went her/his own way, parted without the vulgar promises and gestures of tentative lovers. No one knew when the next contact would be, neither dated to suggest it. It all depended on the other's will to resist. These were lovers who, instead of surrendering to the physical heat each felt for the other, engaged in mutual submission to the intrigue, which could only be sustained by the refusal of each to reveal more than one or two secrets with each sporadic meeting.

(110)

Pastora's relationship with Máximo is not a passive one, but it is an unemotional, almost intellectual one; it is also one of “mutual submission,” which implies that, like Máximo, Pastora does indeed have a choice when she chooses to submit. She provides to him the same lack of connection that he expects from her because, for her, the “attraction to Máximo lay at times more in their capacity to share their knowledge and the drive for such. On this level, their souls were equal” (110).

When Castillo justifies Pastora's relationship with Máximo as an examination of “their capacity to share their knowledge and the drive for such,” she is referring to carnal knowledge, which is in fact the only knowledge shared by Máximo and Pastora. As an active participant in this sharing of “knowledge,” Pastora shatters the myth of the passive female whose sexuality must be defined by men. She goes against the grain of what is expected of her in the Sapagonian/Latin culture that allows sexual freedom for the male but denies it to the female. She in fact defies cultural taboos and chooses to share the knowledge and the drive for this knowledge as any male character would, and this is something that many critics (who may be far more influenced by the “myth” of female sexual passivity than they realize) find objectionable.

In “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo,” Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano argues that Pastora relates to Máximo on his terms, as if she were his toy, his sexual object, and that she allows this relationship to define her. Yarbro-Bejarano therefore accuses Pastora of “complicity with the objectification of woman necessary for this construction of masculine identity” because she is “deeply attracted by her relationship with Máximo” and “hooked on her own objectification as enigma and object of desire. As female subject, she both desires the Other and desires to be desired as Other” (69). Yarbro-Bejarano, however, provides no evidence that Pastora is an accomplice in her own objectification. What she sees of Pastora is the vision offered by Máximo of the woman who is capable of castrating “a man with a glance” (25) or capable of swallowing him. Pastora herself offers an answer to Yarbro-Bejarano's accusation when she tells Perla that

Latino men always thought that a woman who allowed herself to be thought of sexually and denied any reason to feel shameful of it and had none of the inhibitions or insecurities with relation to commitments as it was considered women should—had to be a witch.

(125)

Her point is that men who could not understand a woman who chose to be sexual simply called her names. They interpreted her difference as a social and cultural transgression, and basically placed the burden of difference on her. Like those men, Yarbro-Bejarano places the burden of complicity in the creation of female objectification on Pastora when her only sin seems to be that she accepts Máximo's sexual offerings for what they are, disconnected encounters.

Pastora recognizes that “Madrigal … always had and always would prefer that she remain a mystery, a personification of sensual fantasy” (Sapogonia 215), but this does not mean that Pastora herself is a mystery. She is only a mystery to the man who does not care to know her, the man who acknowledges women only through his own vision, much like the vision offered by the short love poems that his name represent. The “madrigals” idealized women. They spoke poetically of the love of women who lived in the poet's imagination, women who probably never existed and therefore emerged as mysteries. Likewise, Máximo's version of Pastora is his own creation, but it is a creation based on little knowledge of its subject. Although their encounters run the length of the novel, Máximo “had only made love to [Pastora], at best, a dozen times” (267). But through the years,

He had to continue returning to explore her, knowing with each cycle he would never fully create her. It was Máximo alone who concocted Pastora and he did not ever want to know the formula.

(311)

Not wanting to know the formula, Máximo never learns about the two years that Pastora spends in jail nor about the vision of his Mayan grandmother that she has while she is in prison. He knows practically nothing about her life, and he criticizes what little he knows about her music. By the end of the novel, he does not even know if Pastora's son is his child or her husband's child.

The problem created by Yarbro-Bejarano's interest in Máximo's objectification of Pastora and what she calls Pastora's “complicity” in this objectification is that it victimizes the woman. It assumes that, because Pastora refuses to question Máximo's objectification of women, she accepts it. This argument does not acknowledge that Pastora has very little control over Máximo's objectification of her. She cannot determine how he looks at her; what she can do is recognize his behavior for what it is. As a Sapogonian, a Latin, she knows the socio-cultural background from which he springs. She knows what it is to be the máximo madrigal, the most objectifying man, and she chooses to let him into her life. However, whether or not she is an object, she is still the one who chooses to be an object. Máximo's Mayan Mamá Grande has no such control. Her life is decided for her by one man's actions. Pastora not only opens the door of her bedroom to Máximo, but leads an independent life without him. The objectification of women examined in Sapogonia is an integral part of the message inherent in Castillo's novel about the meaning of myths created by men like Máximo, whether they come in the guise of madrigal poets or philosophers like Octavio Paz.

Yarbro-Bejarano concludes her article by saying that “Sapogonia is a fascinating text that explores male fantasy, its potential for violence against women and the female subject's struggle to interpret herself both within and outside of this discourse on femininity” (69). The problem with Yarbro-Bejarano's article is that it neglects the novel to make a political statement. Sapogonia's female character is not struggling to define herself. If anything can be said about Pastora, it is that she seems to have a firm grasp of who she is and what she wants. And by the end of the novel she has chosen not only to be politically active, but emotionally involved with the man who fathers her child. Pastora's choices make some people uncomfortable because she chooses community rather than individuality. She chooses to mother a child rather than dedicate herself to “the struggle,” whatever that may be in the critic's mind, but her choices are quite consistent with the expectations of a people who value community over individuality.

Máximo's choices in Sapogonia are considerably more questionable than Pastora's choices could ever be. In his erratic, sometimes incomprehensible behavior, he represents the traditional Latin male whom popular culture has come to recognize as the type of man who “loves them and leaves them” without ever getting too emotionally involved. Although he lives with several women through the novel, he does it for convenience, to further his career. In his forward motion from woman to woman, he is in fact repeating the pattern of disconnected sexual encounters begun by his grandfather without bothering to assume the kind of personal, moral responsibility that his grandfather assumes. Máximo does not want human connections or responsibilities; he wants simply to play the sexual game that he started as a young man of conquering the woman who does not want him. He even admits to being conscious of “the constant thrill Pastora [gives] his relentless ego by not allowing herself to be the conquest” (173) that other women have been. Pastora, the female recipient of his sexual favors, has learned to accept his detachment and use it as her own. She turns the female passivity of which Paz speaks into such an aggressive act that Máximo feels compelled to murder her with her own scissors.

Pastora's definition of the anti-hero at the beginning of Sapogonia provides the background against which her own character must be judged. It defines the anti-hero in terms previously used to define a hero as “a man who celebrates his own strength and bold exploits” as “any man who notes his special achievements,” and as “the principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic work” (3). In Castillo's poem by the same name published in Women Are Not Roses, another dimension is added to the anti-hero's character. He is not only the man who brags about his exploits, but he is also the man who

always gets the woman
not in the end
an anticlimax instead
in the end
spits on her
stretched out body
a spasmodic carpet
yearning still
washes himself
doesn't know why
it is that way searching
not finding finding
not wanting wanting more
or nothing
in the end the key is
to leave her yearning lest
she discovers that is all.

(24)

The anti-hero in Castillo's poem is a man who is not in a “búsqueda de comunión (search for communion)” as Octavio Paz suggests in El laberinto de la soledad. Instead, he is a man who can only offer sexual intercourse and does so with the fear that the women whom he favors with his gift will one day find out that there is more to life than what he can give. That is the reason why Máximo's first introduction to Pastora as a lesbian becomes a significant footnote to the relationship that develops between these two characters. Whatever misconceptions the reader may have about lesbians, the one constant is that, sexually, lesbians have no need of men. When sex is all that Máximo can offer, one must wonder not about the objectification of women but about the myth of who needs whom in male/female relationships.

Since Pastora, who has no need of Máximo but still plays a significant role in his life, is the antagonist to his “anti-hero,” one must conclude that she is the “hero” of the novel. In The Feminization of Quest-Romance, Dana A. Heller examines the role of the female hero in contemporary literature as she defines “heroism from a female perspective” (9). Heller acknowledges the feminist critics' awareness that “women's images have not been shaped by women themselves but by men,” and she argues that

As soon as a female protagonist becomes the subject of the quest, she sacrifices this man-made aspect of her identity. Her feminized search requires an authentic ‘private image,’ an image that will ultimately benefit both the individual woman and a society where men and women hold equal power.

(12–13)

The most prominent image of Pastora provided to the reader in Sapogonia is the one created by Máximo, but that image is the stereotypical one of the female who passively accepts the male's definition of who she is. The subversive image presented by Pastora herself, through her life, reflects Dana A. Heller's concept of the female hero, the hero whose quest embodies “the opposite impulses of separation and connection.” Unlike Máximo's detached anti-hero who severs connections as soon as the connections become too close for comfort, Pastora's version of the hero is one “who enables self-discovery through the forming of nurturant, reciprocal bonds with others” (Heller 13).

The first three chapters in Sapogonia provide important information about Máximo Madrigal, the principal male character, anti-hero, and occasional narrator of the novel. Chapter one provides a clear example of the extremes to which this man will go in order to keep from connecting with people, an act that Pastora, his antagonist, holds dear. The novel in fact opens as Máximo admits that he has stabbed a woman to death with a pair of scissors. The woman, unknown to the reader at that point, is Pastora, whom Máximo compares to an alley cat who has “conditioned” (8) him to act a certain way. After Máximo stabs the woman, “the yellow spotted cat leaps out at him” (9) and attacks him. The implication created by the analogy between the woman and the yellow cat is that Máximo has come to need the woman more than she needs him. Castillo explains that

Once, he lured a yellow spotted cat into his house with a fish fillet. He left the kitchen window open all summer. At the same hour every day the yellow spotted cat would jump through and have its dinner, leaving without so much as a thank you. But if he happened to be sitting at the table, he was allowed to reach a hand out with ever so much finesse and pet its thick coat, causing the cat to stretch its back into a hump and close its eyes for three intimate seconds. Then it jumped out the window. His Five-Minute Cat he called it.

By the end of the summer, he had been conditioned to have the cat's fillet waiting, and he sitting quietly at the table, if he were to stroke it at all.

(8)

Like the cat, the woman has somehow conditioned the man to need her, and Máximo cannot accept such a need in him. His solution to such a problem is to kill her. However, through this ritualized killing of his antagonist, Máximo provides the concluding act in what Northrop Frye defines in Anatomy of Criticism as “the passage from struggle through a point of ritual death to a recognition scene discovered in comedy” (187) that is also an integral part of romance. Unknown to Máximo, Pastora has lived through a social and emotional struggle and through the recognition scene provided by his grandmother's apparition in a dream sequence. The ritual death confirms the cycle that enhances the reader's understanding of Pastora as the real hero of Sapogonia.

Although the relationship between Máximo and Pastora is not as simple as the analogy of the yellow spotted cat implies, his essential urge to not need her is simple and somehow related to his paternal line. In this man's family, seamstresses play a peculiar feminine role. His father's name is Pio de la Costurera (Pio of the Seamstress), which means that, for some reason, there is no male last name associated with the father, who, by Máximo's own admission, “was not present at [his] birth” (9). The father's name also influences the son through one of the meanings of the word Pio, which is “an ardent desire that one has for something,” a meaning which relates the father's name to the son's story as Máximo desires Pastora, a sometime seamstress, whose name associates her with his father's mother and later in the novel with his own mother, who by the end of the novel has moved to Chicago and has also become a seamstress. Thus Máximo, the grandson of the seamstress, stabs Pastora, a sometime seamstress herself, with her own scissors. The man who, like Máximo, wants to disconnect himself from his female source must kill Pastora, the woman who embodies the womanly link, the connection.

Chapter two records Máximo's Mamá Grande's assertion that Máximo's “life was merely a series of dreams” (12) which are understood by Máximo as “dreams of revelation and prophecy, and those dreams that manifest [his] present” (11). The dreams reveal Máximo's connection to his Mamá Grande, and in a bizarre twist they also reveal Pastora's connection to Máximo when Mamá Grande appears to her three times. Even before Máximo knows what has happened to his grandparents, Pastora, in jail, has three dreams in which an Indian woman appears to her. After the third dream in which the old woman's “cotton nightgown was blood soaked” (196), Pastora realizes that she will never see the old woman again. Máximo, however, sees his grandmother when he visits the ranch. Her visit with him at that point is not a dream but an apparition through which the woman tells him what to do about the bodies rotting in the bed-room. The old woman returns to set her lands in order.

Chapter three reveals, in a matter-of-fact narrative, Máximo's admission that he “forces” himself upon a girl who does not want him and that he tries to strangle his girl friend when she tells him, “Your friend is much better than you” (14) at sex. When Máximo examines the reason why he forces himself on the girl, two of the basic ingredients that make up his character are revealed. The first one is his obvious lack of connection with people. He simply acts without concern for others. The second one is that he is insulted by knowing that a woman does not want him. He admits that

In all honesty, I hardly know why I took that girl by force. It wasn't as if I couldn't have had any other girl that I wanted without a struggle, but somehow it occurred to me to choose this one and once I realized that she didn't love me, that she didn't even like me, it was too late. I was committed to having her.

(13–14)

Máximo concludes his telling of the rape story by stating his belief that his “grandfather understood this and I believe so did her brothers” (14). The “this” which needs no explanation in Máximo's male culture is his flimsy justification for his violent behavior toward women and a direct result of his second basic character trait. Máximo rapes the girl when he realizes that she does not love him, that she does not even like him, but he acts upon this knowledge knowing that men understand and accept this behavior. The fact that the girl admits to not liking him negates his existence, his self-worth, and, to him, her total negation of his person is a serious insult punishable by making that self felt.

Having committed the rape, Máximo is beaten by the girl's “brothers [who] were like mad dogs when they caught up with him” (13). As the brothers beat him, his own grandfather interferes and saves him from being killed, but leaves him “half drowned on the river bank” (13). The irony of this little anecdote is that the rape becomes something to be settled among men. In a culture that values women as extensions of the men behind whom they stand, what the girl thinks or feels is never mentioned; it is not important. Even the Mamá Grande, when Máximo gets home and is being cared for by his mother, comments not on the rape that he commits but on the fact that her earlier prophecy concerning his having drowned in a previous life or his having drowned somebody (“A mí me parece que en una de tus vidas te ahogaste … o si no, tú ahogaste a alguien”) has come to pass. “You see? I told you” (13), she tells him. It is his story that matters, not the girl's story, and Mamá Grande's earlier statement that Máximo is a very old soul (“tú eres un alma mu-uuy vieja”) links Máximo's story of violence against women with other men's stories, especially that of his own grandfather who, one later learns, assaults his own wife the first time he sees her. Thus, Máximo has every reason to believe that his “grandfather understood this” (14), the Sapogonian male's way of dealing with women.

In “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo,” Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano continues her social commentary on the works of Chicana writers when she argues that “as we enter the 1990's, we are faced with the appropriation and mis-appropriation of the discourse of difference” (65). She refers to the uses of terms like “difference” and “women of color” as euphemisms “for culture which erases differences of power and experiences of racism that led to the political identification of women of color as women of color in the first place” (65). She adds that

this collapsing of orders of difference in such a way as to depoliticize it, this talk of difference with no talk of racism or power makes the term function as a synonym for the Other, other and different because not the same, the same as white people. For this reason it is important to search for alternative strategies to ‘difference,’ one that will reinscribe women of color in a relationship of otherness to the dominant Same.

(65)

From her politically focused interpretation of human relations and her concept of the “Other,” Yarbro-Bejarano examines how Ana Castillo defines her “subjects,” the characters in her texts, and especially in Sapogonia. She argues that “Castillo's subjects enact the ‘border’ or mestiza consciousness' of which Anzaldúa speaks” (65) in Borderlands. She claims that Castillo's “texts open up what Homi Bhabha” in “The Commitment to Theory” “calls a space of ‘translation,’ ‘neither the one nor the Other,’ a third space of flux and negotiation between colonized and colonizer. These subjects speak from a multiplicity of positions that at times compliment and at times contradict one another” (qtd. in Yarbro-Bejarano 65–66).

Without actually registering an opinion about Castillo's use of this multiplicity of positions, Yarbro-Bejarano says that “Sapogonia presents a … project of negotiation with and translation of male narrative form and male point of view,” and she adds that “the text offers a plurality of narrative positions; a selectively omniscient third-person narrator, a second-person narrator and the ‘I’ of the male subject, Máximo Madrigal” (68), but the reader is left wondering how the “negotiation with” and the “translation of” the male point of view actually function within the novel or what they actually negotiate or translate. Yarbro-Bejarano simply slips into her next point, the political argument concerning Máximo's and Pastora's ancestry, when she claims that “although [Pastora Velásquez Aké] and Máximo share an imaginary (sic) shaped by mestizo culture and history, they are very differently positioned in relation to that culture and history as political subjects and as woman and man” (68).

The explanation provided by Yarbro-Bejarano focuses on the notion that “Máximo's subjectivity is constructed in opposition to Woman as inaccessible enigma and vagina dentata,” the notion that a woman's vagina has teeth that chew on the man who enters it, and that “his masculinity is defined contradictorily in relation to his desire for primordial unity, imaged by the textual fusion of Pastora and Coatlicue, pre-Columbian goddess of the union of opposites, and his terror of the absorption of his identity in that unity” (68). However, it is Máximo's terror of his absorption into Pastora's vagina, her world, that provides the most insight into his character. Although Máximo tells Pastora, “Sometimes, I believe I am Huizilopochtli, ‘Sun of the Aztecs’!” (Sapogonia 121), he acts more like a victim than a sun king. The day he admits to Pastora that he imagines himself a sun king, he suffers chest pains. As he suffers from chest pains, the specific part of the anatomy which the Aztecs made hollow and set on fire, Máximo prays to Xalaquia, the maiden who is sacrificed to Coatlicue. At his moment of weakness, when he feels that Pastora “had swallowed him in his entirety and left him to suffocate inside her entrails” (122), Máximo identifies with a sacrificial victim rather than with the victimizer, although his male legacy, his lineage, has prepared him to identify with power rather than with weakness.

Pastora's choices throughout Sapogonia, unlike Máximo's choices, involve making connections. As a hero of a feminine quest defined by Dana Heller in The Feminization of Quest-Romance, “her specific ties to community, family, and loved ones empower—rather than restrict—her capacities” (13). From the first time she appears, she is said to be “consumed” by the depression caused by her inability to restrain “herself from reflecting on the child she would have had that spring” (17). Unlike Máximo, who seems to have no emotion other than self-preservation, Pastora mourns the lost connection. Later, it is Pastora who invites “Perla over and [lets] her into her life” (21). The relationship between the two women is so close that others around them perceive it as a lesbian one even when it is not.

Pastora also chooses to connect when she not only agrees to perform on behalf of Nicaraguan immigrants, but to help transport “illegal” aliens to safe houses. For her commitment to the cause, she serves two years in jail after she is caught transporting Eduardo's wife, an undesirable, into the city. While in jail, she befriends Mary Lou and maybe becomes her lover. She also keeps in touch with Yvonne, an old friend, and returns to Eduardo after she is out of jail and he is no longer married. Eventually, she bears a child and completes the cycle begun when the novel opens and she is seen mourning the loss of another child. For Pastora, life is a series of connections, although the man who attempts to define her says that she “was tall and slender, with a terrific aloofness” (25). Clearly, in Sapogonia, “aloofness” is defined along gender lines. Máximo sees aloofness in a woman who is totally defined by her connections to other people.

Vernon E. Lattin, in “The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction,” argues that contemporary Native-American and Mexican-American writers are “rejecting the phenomonological limitation of writers like Becket and Kafka, where the dissolution of the hero's quest is the form” and are creating instead a fiction in which “the protagonist [returns] to wholeness and mythic vision and [transcends] the limitations of both society and time” (639). If this is the case, the hero of Ana Castillo's Sapogonia can be no other than Pastora, the one who creates connections and thereby debunks many of the myths that men like Máximo create about women like her. It is Pastora who, by choosing to marry Eduardo, creates a connection that, unlike any of Máximo's marriages, bears fruit. Máximo, the anti-hero, after finally finding his father and learning thereby very little about himself (because he fails to recognize the importance of the women, the seamstresses, in his life), seems to have no purpose other than to keep alive in his own mind the myth of Pastora as a man-eating, sexual object who wants him.

Works Cited

Castillo, Ana. Sapogonia. Tempe, AZ: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 1990.

———. Women Are Not Roses. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1984.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1957.

Heller, Dana A. The Feminization of Quest Romance. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.

Lattin, Vernon E. “The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction.” American Literature 50.4 (1979): 625–40.

Paz, Octavio. El laberinto de la soledad. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959.

Yarbro-Bejarano, Yvonne. “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo.” The Americas Review 20.1 (1992): 65–72.