We pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth designed to keep us in our place.

—Salman Rushdie, Shame

In this paper, I examine the formation of home through ideas of tourism and exile, homesickness, and houses, in Ana Castillo's second novel, Sapogonia. I claim that the protagonist of the novel, Máximo Madrigal, manipulates and borrows others' spaces to form a memory of a myth which might serve as a remnant of home from the past. I show that for Máximo, home as a migrant concept consists not only of a moving place but also of moving memories that “ground” that place.

As a starting point, it is useful to interrogate two models of home and houses offered by Alfred Arteaga in Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (1997) and by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space (1994). Much has been written on the impact of Bachelard's writing on Sandra Cisneros's work;¹ allegedly Cisneros was driven to write her first novel, The House on Mango Street, in answer to a seminar discussion of Bachelard's Poetics. Cisneros writes, in response to Poetics, “what did I know except third-floor flats. Surely my classmates knew nothing about that. That's precisely what I chose to write: about third floor flats, and fear of rats, and drunk husbands sending rocks through windows, anything as far from the poetic as possible” (1987, 73). Cisneros's statement can be seen as a call to critics to recognize not the lack of the poetic in her work, but the way in which her writing, and the writing of other Chicana and minority women in America, redefine the poetics of home and memory as a migrant one. Furthermore, the statement shows the need for the Chicana writer to articulate her own theory of home and space. I choose to develop this theory of home as one that is in opposition to Bachelard's writing, combined with elements of Arteaga's discussion of Aztlán and the borderlands.

Arteaga offers a precise model of two alternating and opposing conceptions of space for the Chicano/a people. Aztlán, as the mythical home of the Aztecs, is located as the ancient homeland: “to be a Chicano and to live in Aztlán is to have historical precedence over Anglos in the Southwest; it is to declare a historical fact of descent” (Arteaga 1997, 9). The “Plan Espirituel de Aztlán,” drawn up in 1969 in the first Chicano National Conference in Denver, declared Aztlán as the Chicano homeland, pointing out that it answers the “call of our blood” and evoking a rural existence: “Aztlán belongs to those who plant the seeds, water the fields, and gather the crops, and not to the foreign Europeans” (Arteaga 1997, 12). The Aztlán represented here speaks to the male Chicano, the “brotherhood,” and locates itself within American political borders, so that what is called for is a cultural nationalism rather than a political one: “The conceived homeland is ambiguous enough to arouse passion, yet not mandate revolution” (Arteaga 1997, 14).² What I would like to take from the concept of Aztlán as a homeland is its understanding that the notion of a “return” to it is not needed because one is already there, and the idea that “it functions as the national myth in a manner similar to the myths of any people” (Arteaga 1997, 14). We can see elements of racial memory and pride being sown here, however, that will be appropriated by Chicana and Latina writers later on, such as Castillo, and interrogated, as she constructs, in Sapogonia, a hero and heroine unable to “settle at home” anywhere.

For Arteaga, the borderlands, in contrast to Aztlán, offer a “poorer conception of homeland because one never knows where the real borderland ends and the metaphoric one begins” and although Aztlán is a myth, “the borderlands is an argument” (Arteaga 1997, 18). Yet it is the combination of myth and argument developed from this that precisely offers a fertile ground for beginning to consider ideas of home and memory for Chicanas and other minority women writers in America. The state of relations and differences that the borderlands represent indicates the need for movement-as-home, but the myth that a homeland offers represents the importance of belief and of storytelling that come to make up a nation. To combine argument with myth in the formation of a homeland is to leave all myths of that homeland constantly open to reinterpretation and reappropriation, and Castillo's portrayal of Pastora in the text demonstrates an alternative response to such myths, that Chicana and Latina writers attempt to subvert. To build one's own myths is, therefore, akin to being the architect of one's own home in the here and now, and the impossibility of return to a country that one is in exile from is resolved when that return becomes represented by the movement of that country to the present location and time, through memory. As Iain Chambers has suggested, once we are led away from nostalgic dreams of going home to a mythic, metaphysical location, we enter the realm of theorizing a way of “being at home” that accounts for “the myths we know to be myths yet continue to cling to, cherish and dream” (Chambers 1990, 104). If the community clinging to the myth has also been active in building and renewing that myth, an understanding of home will be found in migrancy and displacement.

In Sapogonia, Ana Castillo has created a metaphorical country set in Latin America, from which all mestizos originate. The story follows the travels of an expatriate of Sapogonia, Máximo Madrigal, who moves from his hometown to Paris, from there to Barcelona and Madrid, and then to various locations in North America. During this time, he meets and comes to know his father in Spain, travels in America, and becomes obsessed with Pastora Ake, an American woman of Spanish and Native American blood who tries to escape all his attempts to control her. The text alternates between a first-person and a third-person narration of events, a process which is, I will argue, significant in demonstrating Max's vacillating position as both an exile and a traveling tourist. In this reading of the text, I suggest that Máximo Madrigal needs to be seen as a dual tourist-exile figure who narrates his own heroic adventures only to have his narration and invented heroism constantly interrupted by pangs of exilic homesickness, both for his homeland Sapogonia and inspired by his disturbing relationship with Pastora. He is thus positioned as a lighthearted tourist who gets struck by intense and melancholy homesickness. Max wavers on the line between exile and tourist, and through his narrative, a rewritten myth of home and memory is created.³ I begin with a discussion of Sapogonia—the country—itself, and from that develop a reading of Max's tourism, his promiscuity as a tourist, the relevance of the text's various slippages between first- and third-person narrators, and its definition of the “antihero.” I then turn to an analysis of Max's relationship to the land, both in terms of his personal relations to his grandfather and father, and his consideration of father/mother lands. Finally, I trace the ways in which he becomes homesick for a woman and a country, and briefly look at the ways in which Pastora herself breaks various cycles of myth.

THE SAPAGONIAN TOURIST-EXILE

What is significant in Castillo's creation of Sapogonia is that as a homeland based on a borderland consciousness, it merges the mythical Aztlán with the contemporary and argumentative borderlands. Described as “a distinct place in the Americas where all mestizos reside, regardless of nationality, individual racial composition, or legal residential status” (1), Sapogonia represents a situation where, as Saldívar writes, “culture is understood in terms of material hybridity, not purity” (Saldívar 1997, 19). In Sapogonia, Castillo has not only housed people of mixed European and Native Central or South American blood but has also distinguished them as natives of the country. That is, the borderland mestizo no longer originates from more than one place, but instead has a single and pure place of origin: Sapogonia. But that pure origin of Sapogonia is itself based in hybridity, so that hybridity becomes the origin of one's race. In a brief description of Sapogonia's history, the reader learns that the country has undergone slavery, genocide, immigration, and civil uprising, and Max's first departure from Sapogonia occurs alongside his anticipation and fear of another civil overthrow. On his return to Sapogonia halfway through the text, Max notices the markings of civil dispute and unrest, saying, “what was new to my eyes, the eyes of a new generation of adults, was the foreboding presence of the military among civilians” (86). Thus, Max abroad represents the duality of the tourist-exile figure. Although on his initial departure from Sapogonia he leaves with his friend El Tinto in disguise and escapes the mounting political tension, he himself is not at any personal risk. El Tinto, whose brother has just enacted the ancient myth of becoming un desaparesido due to his involvement with the university periodical, is perhaps more at risk, but Max, as the protagonist, performs a borrowing of El Tinto's exilic status and mingles it with his own tourism. His tourist self delegitimates his self-imposed exilic despair and homesickness, reminding us both that his exile is self-imposed, and that the comparative luxury of his bohemian lifestyle in Europe is financed by his grandfather in Sapogonia. Thus, he remains a visitor even while he is a migrant in that he borrows and chooses the lifestyle of the immigrant, lives among immigrants, but always with a touristic awareness of the self-imposed exile he has undertaken, with some of the privileges of choice.

As a country that asserts itself as home to mestizos, Sapogonia locates the ambiguities and difficulties of living on the border, both metaphorically and politically within its own borders. It is a borderland Aztlán, a mythical country that creates a diasporic homeland. Thus, the creation of Sapogonia can be seen as an attempt both to demythologize the distant Aztlán that remains fixed in a specific historical heritage and cultural past, and to mythologize the arguments and differences of Arteaga's borderlands to give rise to an active political nation that functions like any other through its own myths and imagined communities. As far as the ruling metaphor of this nation is that it locates hybridity as its origin, it also performs the impossibility of a static home that is fixed to a particular place, and with the figure of Máximo Madrigal, sets up the possibility of a migrant and moving existence as the only ultimate home. Sapogonia, set in the homeland of the migrant Máximo, acts as a rewriting of the traditional Aztlán myth, in which the specificity of a return to a location is interrogated and demythologized.

Against this backdrop of his homeland, two layers are at work in the text. First, Máximo's double narrative represents the dual nature of his tourist-exile status, and interrogates both his relationship to home, and to his homeland Sapogonia. The third-person narrative situates Máximo Madrigal as the quintessential roaming traveler, a blundering and arrogant hero figure on a vaguely articulated quest that alternates between sometimes attempting to find himself, his father, or Pastora, but at other times not looking for anything in particular. He eventually settles down more or less temporarily in America and becomes a considerably well-known sculptor. The switches between the first- and the third-person narratives demonstrate a particular edginess to this travel narrative, in that the hero is simultaneously the narrator of his own heroic escapades and the participating hero in them. This, as I will go on to demonstrate, has significant implications for the construction of the tourist exile as an antiheroic figure. As Caren Kaplan has argued, tourism has been seen to stress the mystique surrounding exile and modes of travel associated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Máximo, in his authoring of himself, self-consciously poses as an artist in exile, a state of displacement which allows for considerable “aesthetic gain through exile” (Kaplan 1996, 36).

Interrupting and thus delegitimizing this lighthearted travel narrative is the second layer in the text: that of the homesick exile. The homesickness, which works against the grain of the tourism, incorporates both what could be read as traditional longings for a distant homeland, and a more disturbing and affective sickness that is located around and inspired by Max's relationship with Pastora Ake. Positioned as a lighthearted tourist who is nevertheless struck by intense and melancholy homesickness, Máximo Madrigal wavers constantly on the line between the two, and through his experiences, a rewriting of the myth of home emerges. In the following section I examine the idea of Max as a tourist and as a travel writer, before I go on to look at how this is interrupted by the homesickness latent in the text.

THE PROMISCUOUS TOURIST: NARRATING ANTI-HEROISM

As a traveler, Máximo becomes the promiscuous tourist who performs a search for home, and for the articulation of the American dream. After deciding to go to North America, he imagines how “he would arrive, get lost in the Romanesque arena of anonymous characters and freaks found in the streets of Manhattan, and … concentrate on seeking that promised fortune” (62). Kaplan says that the tourist aims “to realize fantasies of erotic freedom,” (Kaplan 1996, 54) but Kristeva has written that “the shattering of repression is what leads one to cross a border and find oneself in a foreign country,” and that “tearing oneself away from family, language and country in order to settle down elsewhere is a daring action accompanied by sexual frenzy …” (Kristeva 1991, 30). Máximo Madrigal's borrowing of homes is based on his determination to cease all attachment to his past. Through his promiscuity, he performs a “shattering of the former body” that Kristeva also describes as part of the exilic process (Kristeva 1991, 30), legitimating himself as a traveler who constantly leaves behind his past and cannot live in any time but the present tense. For example, he is able to leave his girlfriend Hilda easily because of this particular disassociation between past and present:

already he thought of [Hilda] as something that had been rather than still existing somewhere else … To Max, Hilda was nonexistent. All that Max left behind ceased to exist, was unreal, like the celluloid on which a whole story was told; it was all imaginary, pictures contrived and pieced together for the sake of entertainment.

(74–75)

In the text, what would be devastating events for the exile, are instead articulated by the lighthearted tourist as mere excursions and diversions. For example, when Max is suddenly deported while working in a restaurant in Los Angeles, he writes that he “was deported to Tijuana and … stayed to sight-see for a few days” (82). This is the jaunty tone of an unperturbed narrator who is unconcerned for the real safety of his character because of the innate certainty that as a hero nothing can go wrong for him. This persists throughout, so that when Max decides to return to the United States with a valid student visa and consequently has to undergo much red tape and bureaucracy, we learn that “undaunted in the face of perpetual obstacles, our principal character in this tale made two trips to the capital before he was issued a passport” (111). On his way to America, Max has to spend time in Mexico where he gets his papers organized and works at a temporary job. Even at this point, on the threshold of a migrancy that could determine the status of his exile, he becomes distracted and spends a few months on the beach, “unable to resist the fabulous beaches, outdone only by the European and American beauties basking on white shores. Máximo stayed on in the peninsula for a month” (112).

The way in which the tourist-status of Máximo is undermined and thwarted by his inevitable self-exile can be demonstrated through the definition of an antihero at the start of the book. It is Pastora who describes the antihero, and this is significant in that it is ultimately Pastora who, in representing homesickness for Max, makes it impossible for Max to be a hero in the travel-narrative sense of the word, and indeed, later on explicitly refuses to see him as one, saying to him “you are less of a god than you think” (148–49). Pastora describes the antihero as someone who “in mythology and legend, [is] a man who celebrates his own strength and bold exploits.” That is, rather than defining the antihero as a person who lacks heroic qualities, Pastora turns the antithesis of hero into someone who celebrates those qualities himself. What is negated is not the presence of specific qualities but the presence of an audience and perspective of outsiders and followers. An antihero is thus a man who establishes himself as a mythical figure, a legend, and Max becomes the embodiment of the antihero every time his first-person narrator slips into the third-person; that is, every time Max's “I” decides to tell a story about himself in the third person, he positions himself as a hero in his own narrative. The question of origins is also pertinent here; in slipping between the first and third person, Max succeeds in being both the hero and thus the central origin and source within the legend, and the narrator of that legend; he is the author and originating storyteller of the myth.

This simultaneous authoring of and participation in his own legend becomes the only way for the exile to tell his own story, because running against the desire to be a hero, and to narrate his travels (to be different), is the need to remain invisible (to assimilate). At one point in the text, Máximo is waiting at the bus station when he notices two immigration officials who stop two women (who we, together with Max, learn are Pastora and her friend Perla) and ask for documentation. The women arouse suspicion because they are dressed in their native garb as a contrast to Max who fears being found un-documented but is pale and “dressed in denim pants and his sheepskin coat” (76). As an illegal immigrant and a tourist, he has achieved a third status, that of an anonymous native of the place in which he stands at that present moment. Max is presented as chameleon-like throughout: “Máximo changed with his environment as the chameleon became the color of the leaf or a rock to protect it from being detected easily by a predator” (80). The officials attract his attention by calling him “buddy” and returning his ticket to him, which he had accidentally dropped on the floor. The moment in which he turns and responds to the interpolation “buddy” is also the moment he realizes that “he had been able to get past the immigration officials, right below their noses, without arousing the least suspicion” (76). The interpolation embeds him in a discursive matrix where “hey buddy” means “you're one of us.”⁴ As long as he remains silent and does not reveal his “foreign” accent—he responds to the returned ticket with a nod of his head—he can perform both the nationality and camaraderie that the officials impose on him and demonstrate his exilic status. After this, Max feels “a curious sense of freedom … that came to the person whose identity had been completely erased” (76) and he watches the immigration officials hound a “small man with a mane of black hair … his collar up, as if wishing he were invisible” (77). Max, who needs this anonymity and invisibility, is forced to limit the audience of his heroic tales to only himself. In other words, the only way to reconcile being a hero with being anonymous and invisible is to become the antihero that Pastora describes, in which he narrates his exploits to himself. Pastora, who meets Max in the second part of the book, disrupts his antiheroic performance because the homesickness she inspires in him makes him wish for visibility, for a past and for an affective memory of that past. She thus destroys the fine line he has been able to maintain between being a travel narrator describing his own touristic exploits and a native of Sapogonia undergoing self-imposed political exile.

THE ATTACHMENT TO LAND

Max also compares his own touristic antiheroism with his stately and heroic grandfather, and his absent and much built up father. When young, Max believed his father to be “a grand man in or about Galicia, Spain, an enchanted place way across the body of massive water that separated us” (8). The search for his father begins with a self-consciously heroic and epic tone: “I bought a train ticket to Madrid the next morning, and a few days later I was on my way in the dramatic search for my father” (43). Of his grandfather Max says, “I adored my grandfather … I often thought he was larger than life, a man whom I could never replace on the ranch, nor would I have wanted to” (54). Throughout the text his grandfather is carefully located in one place, the ranch, and an inextricable connection is made between the land and heroism.⁵ We learn that even as a young man, his grandfather “preferred to return to his country … so that he might learn the business of running the ranch. He wanted to have his hands blackened with the soil of the land” (99). As an advocate for a rural existence, much like the Plan Espiritual de Aztlán, his grandfather represents the filial link to the land, and an origin that Máximo rejects in favor of travel and tourism. His grandfather says to him “you, I can tell, have no intentions of staying … the earth is not in your blood” (93). To fight for the land, as Max's dead uncle did, or to feel an intimacy toward it, is to demonstrate a heroism that Max cannot copy.

Máximo's intimate love for the land does eventually emerge, however, and is translated into the migrant's reappropriation of the traveling tourist-exile. As a sculptor in Chicago, Max sends for the sculptures he made while in Sapogonia and on their arrival, he finds that they are completely ruined. But the loss, he explains, would have been overwhelming if the sculptures had been lost because, he says, “I had used wood from my grandfather's land” (265). Max thus rewrites the myth of an attachment to land by quite literally transplanting that land, and setting it down elsewhere. His use of the ranch's wood for his artwork demonstrates the way in which the place follows the migrant, rather than the migrant returning to the place and calling it home. The notion of a return home is thus reworked; as for this native of the borderland, a return comes to mean an uprooting and transplanting of the land, a change for the land, rather than a return, through nostalgic flashbacks to the past, to an unchanged terrain. The “place” of Sapogonia becomes raw material for varying artistic production and creativity, rather than a fixed source of previously given meaning. The migrant thus refuses to leave the past as having “passed” through this transplanting of place, and the understanding of time as a separation of past and present is collapsed. Time is renegotiated so that the present is able to become familiar through the presence of an object from the past (the wood from the ranch in Sapogonia), and the memory inspired by looking at the sculpture challenges the onset of nostalgia because it is focused on an object that is simultaneously old and new: the old wood has a new form. The familiar, or the home, is thus translated as a place in being brought forward in time and space to the present.

Sapogonia is also partly an examination of the workings of one's relationship to the home country as alternately paternal and maternal. The text progresses to show Máximo moving from an attachment to his homeland as his fatherland—whereby he focuses mostly on the patriarchs in his family—to an attachment to Sapogonia as a motherland, a mother and a home, through his possessive obsession with Pastora. By the end, when Pastora herself becomes a mother and bears a son, she and Max both perform a denial of parenthood, in refusing to interpolate themselves as “mother” and “father.” As Pastora says to Max, “my son is not a continuation of you or me, who've considered ourselves exceptional individuals among the species, but a continuity of the species, a simple and humble fact” (304). She then adds, “there are no mothers and no fathers” (304). Alongside Pastora's rejection of an origin linked to lineage, Max states that it is his goals that are “a way of preserving his notion of immortality, much more than a son, who grows to become a stranger, or worse, betrays you, your ideals” (305). Máximo himself, as a tourist, has demonstrated this same strangeness that alienates him from his grandfather's Sapogonia. One's native home, in this context, becomes foreign to its own children, and one's children become strangers to their home (their parents and/or their land). The myth of homeland and heroism is thus rewritten as one of travel and rootlessness, in which the origin is always and only traceable as far back as its narrative origin, that is, its authorial voice. The origin, the primary source and beginning of something, the location of ancestry or parentage, is translated into a hybridity of narration.

In his work as a sculptor, Max authors and shapes forms based on an original, yet locates himself as the creator and father of that work of art. In this way, he is able to position himself both as an origin who provides a home for his art, and as a traveler who finds a home in the art. Like the first person Max who provides a place and home for the legend of his third person Max, he is both parent and child, demonstrating the freedom of being an exile and “a foreigner … from nowhere, from everywhere, citizen of the world …” (Kristeva 1991, 30). For the migrant tourist, home comes from positioning the self temporarily as an origin, and from positioning that self as representative of a beginning. The hybridity that makes up Max's origins allows the hierarchy of origins to break down. That is, there is no longer a prior attachment or right to a particular place, history, or parent. Instead, every element of the tourist exile is in itself an origin, a beginning, and an end.

As a traveler and anonymous wanderer, Max is a borrower and trespasser of homes, women, and land, and in being a borrower, he finds that returning the home is easy because he has refused it a place in memory. The happiness that comes with the freedom of invisibility is based on the lack of origins to weigh him down from the past, and the knowledge that as his own creator, he can simply speed on into a future and make more homes. Two episodes illustrate his borrowing of origins and the ease with which he returns them to the past. First, after bidding his father farewell in Spain, Max goes to America, where he tracks down Hilda, a girl who fell in love with his father Pío twenty years earlier, did not consummate her love for him, and who continues to send him Christmas and birthday cards each year. Max begins a relationship with Hilda that clearly originates in an unrequited relationship from the past. Hilda has been “given” to Max by his father as a specific gift: “One night Pío made another gift to me, the gift of a woman,” and Pío assures Max that “when she sees you, she'll love you with the same adulation that she showed me twenty years ago” (59–60). Eventually however, Hilda's “adulation” develops into a “possessiveness [which] was no longer guised in caring or protectiveness over a naive foreigner. The obsession that motivated the string of cards sent to a man she had not seen in more than twenty years lapsed over to the fear of losing the surrogate” (69). In her relationship with Max, Hilda herself performs a homesickness for the home (Pío) she was never allowed to know, and demonstrates the making of a home as possession. Prior to his escape from Hilda, Max is the possession in a borrowed home, both the imagined fatherland and the child of that land.

The second instance of borrowed origins occurs when Max arrives in New York. There, he describes seeing his father's face “on every face on New York City streets, every hustler, every immigrant worker in the subway …” (60). In doing this, he constructs a father figure in every immigrant's face, creating the immigrant class as a part of his own lineage, and constructing a sense of origin that enables him to feel less strange in a foreign land because every stranger's face is in fact his father's face. This “homing” of his foreign environment is a temporary laying down of roots, a borrowing of the immigrant status of migrancy for his own origins. This constructed origin of immigration is, importantly, a hybrid one, in that “Asian-faced or East Indian” (60) they are all his father. Finally, in seeing Pío's face everywhere, Max repeats the act of fathering over and over again, and the act of making himself a “son” to that father(land) in the streets of New York, thus inventing himself again as a hero in a legendary myth. This performance of fathering and of making an origin occurs only in the “now,” making the telling of a nation's story or history particular to the present and making it work against the possibility of recording it in memory. It only exists through myth and retelling, where it is always subject to change. Hybridity, once again, replaces the purity of origin. Max is told the story of the hero for light entertainment, and the erasure of the past allows for extensive tourism and borrowing of homes. The “whole story” that Max imagines, with himself as the central hero, illustrates his construction of origins that leave no impressions, and of the past as always entirely “passed.” His determination to experience time only in the present is a denial of nostalgia, but it is also an intricate denial of home, because the erasing of past events and history means an erasing of memory. Without memory to make associations between the past and present, the here and elsewhere, there is nothing to make the present time or place familiar in any way, and it is ultimately the familiarity which presents itself in the form of Pastora that makes Max susceptible to homesickness.

HOMESICKNESS AND MYTH

Kaplan, in writing on the exile and the tourist, says that “the exile is homesick at home or away,” and despite being a carefree tourist, Max experiences occasional pangs of homesickness that seem nostalgic and focus on the familiar: either Sapogonia (that is, a specific place), or Pastora, a woman whom he reads as a metaphor for his motherland. His particular longing for a home is filtered retrospectively, through memory. For example, during his stay in Sapogonia after his grandparents' funeral he says that “I'd begun to refer to Sapogonia as my country for the first time in my life. Home as represented by a territory set off by political borders became Sapogonia when it not only gave to me, but took away” (255). Typically, he knows Sapogonia to be his home only when it can represent itself as a loss and an absence. This retrospective nostalgia, in which he mourns the loss of knowledge of home, as well as the loss of a home never experienced in the present tense, also occurs when, at the beginning of his travels, Max sleeps with Catherine, the daughter of a woman that he and El Tinto stay with on their arrival in Paris. He writes, “I felt nostalgia for the virgin after penetration. Why couldn't I love her and let her remain whole, as she had been loved by the mother? Why in the process of loving woman, did man have to nullify something so profound that it was no longer physical?” (32).⁶ Here, Max experiences the presence of something only after its absence and loss. The wholeness and purity he describes as having been there before penetration signifies a beginning, reminiscent of the origins of motherly love. Catherine's body is described as being “trespassed” on (32), and Max is the tourist who treads all over someone else's motherland or home.

With Pastora, Max's homesickness emerges as that of the exile that he realizes is always within him. Although he mistreats her, she mistreats him too, diluting the stereotyped “macho” paradigm of their relationship. Ibís Gómez-Vega, in her analysis of the text, claims that Max is not capable of making connections, and that Pastora is, breaking the myth that Max has of her as a typically passive Latina woman. I read Max's relationship with the past, however, as one of struggle (with nostalgia, homesickness, and rootlessness), rather than of complete absence or diffidence. He continually experiences and makes connections between his exilic state (in New York, for example) and his memories of his parents and grandparents, between Pastora's music and his childhood in Sapogonia. Although it is true to say that a great deal of Pastora and Max's relationship is based on carnal knowledge, the text suggests other connections between them. For example, connections on a mystical level are implied when Pastora, during her time in jail, has visions of Max's dead grandmother. The fact that she is unable to tell Max about this does not signify a lack of intuitive connection between them as much as a difficulty in communication.⁷ Max refers to Pastora as a disease: “Everything was going well again in my life when … I got the symptoms: Pastora was festering beneath my skin once again” (285). For Max, Pastora is Sapogonia, and to enter a relationship with her is to enter a homely and uncanny relationship with an unfamiliar space that is also home. In his courting of Pastora, Max nurtures a familiarity with her that is unlike all his previous conquests of women: “I saw her a good many times so that finally I felt I had never seen her for the first time at all, but had always been aware of Pastora on the periphery of my existence. It seemed her name had come to me in veiled fragments, perhaps in dreams or conversations I'd overheard” (135).⁸ From the start, then, Pastora takes on an unusual temporal significance for Max in that she seems to exist both in his past and in his present. Once they are together, they each reveal themselves as a history of familiar territory for the other: “intimate childhood memories easing from a half-conscious state … all so familiar to the other as to call up … a momentary recognition” (157). Later on, Max differentiates between Pastora and other women, saying that with other women he feels he can challenge anything: “I was Goliath himself with them” but “with Pastora I was only a man” (336). Importantly, Pastora will not let Máximo sustain his heroism because around her he desires visibility: “I tried to make myself visible” (135). Pastora's initial refusal to notice him, and her subsequent refusal to need him all work to undo his heroism. By then, however, his invisibility and anonymity are destroyed, and his home becomes the constant and nagging presence of homesickness that is Pastora, both in her absence and her presence.

Just as Max's previous relationships with women defied memory, the one with Pastora precisely roots itself more in memory than in the present moment. In trying to cure himself of her, Max “escaped from her to every woman as unlike her as he could find. … Meanwhile, he remembered her. He remembered her especially when he worked, when he welded, when he stared at what might be no more than the beginning of a wall, a crosspiece in an iron fence, and in his mind's eye saw it take form” (6). Memory invokes Pastora even through difference (Max seeks women “unlike her”), a sense of beginnings and origins is created, and of their physical relationship only “the recollection would remain the trophy” (157). Memory defines a performance that is sustainable only in the present, and inspires their time together with a constellation of past and future absences and presences. Along with memory, Pastora brings to Max the experience of affectiveness that works to make whichever place he is in at that moment into a home. Pastora's music reminds him of Sapogonia without the nostalgia of loss, but with the embrace and touch of a home transplanted to the present in that moment: “her performance … had carried him to heights and depths he had only recalled during his childhood in Sapogonia, the thrill of riding bare horseback, when his grandfather took him out to deer hunt” (145). The familiarity of home, which is only appreciated in retrospect, after its loss, can in this way be reenacted in the present.

Pastora is also depicted through images of edifices and houses. For Max, in her haughtiness, she seems to exist behind some kind of a wall, and he determines that “he was about to defy that opaque wall from which behind she observed the world and all its inhabitants” (146). Max constructs Pastora as living in a separate building, as entering and exiting, and as being permitted or denied access. Thus, entering Pastora, in the sexual and emotional sense, also means entering a house that might serve as an actual home. Although he entertains the notion of wondering “what would life be, packing his bags, showing up at her door, surrendering once and for all?” (192); the “surrender” of himself to any definite house or place is something he fears too much. He fears Pastora's basement apartment “where one had to reach out to the cold walls in the dark descent of the cement steps to her door” (184). Max, we learn “was afraid of stairs. He had always been afraid of stairs, especially this kind that led to attics and creaked when no one else was around” (176, emphasis in original text). The explanation given for this fear is that as a child, Max's friend Mario told him of an incident when Mario's brother Guillermo saw the ghost of their dead grandmother going up the stairs and crying out to him. The uncanny connotations that stairs carry for Max are based on his uncertainty about what realm they lead to, and the extent to which the place to which they lead will remain unchanged. The dual nature of Pastora's familiarity and strangeness leads Max to fear settling in a home that is uncanny in its homesickness.

Although Pastora's body and land is something Max has to “surrender” to, he is otherwise the “Cortés of every vagina he crosses” (160). The image of a woman's body as a territory to be conquered and as a home space to be borrowed while visiting takes on a political edge. For example, Max needs a green card to stay in America, and he acquires this green card by marrying Laura Marie Jefferson, a woman who has helped his career take off due to her contacts at the Museum of Progressive Art.⁹ The metaphor of Cortés conquering land and women is enacted by Máximo's ability to gain citizenship through marital and sexual relations with a woman. Her body becomes the geography of the land he adopts as home, and which in turn nourishes him as a son. Pastora's body, however, which seems to defy frequent trespassing, is portrayed as mythical due to the parallels drawn between herself and the goddess Coatlicue. It thus exists beyond the confines of a geographical nation with politically drawn borders. At one level she becomes a reworking of the Chicana temptress/seductress figure who is impossible to conquer and who consumes men. Anzaldúa writes that “Coatlicue is a rupture in our everyday world. As the Earth, she opens and swallows us, plunging us into the underworld …” (Anzaldúa 1987, 46) while Tey Diana Rebolledo describes Coatlicue as both a goddess and a monster who, when portrayed as a decapitated earth goddess, comes to resemble land.¹⁰ Jésus, Max's acquaintance, says of Pastora, “I think she's a witch” (143), and later on, Max similarly mythologizes her: “Coatlicue, he said to himself, tonight she was a goddess incarnated … tonight Pastora was dust particles and ether” (144). When he dreams of Pastora as Coatlicue with her face painted red and yellow, and he wakens to ask “are you Coatlicue as I've dreamt?,” Pastora responds “have you been so conceited as to believe Coatlicue your mother? You are less of a god than you think” (148–49). To imagine himself as Coatlicue's son is to imagine himself located within a particular legend that is told and retold, and to imagine himself as an offshoot of that myth. Pastora as Coatlicue offers Max a way of placing his attempt at a heroism that is based on a legend rather than on the travel narrative myth that cannot find expression for the homesickness he has encountered through Pastora. Later on, Pastora's marriage to Eduardo, and her motherhood, makes even this placement in the Coatlicue myth unsustainable for Max. He has particular difficulty in coming to terms with a deity giving birth to a mortal and thinks, “Pastora ceased to be the exalted celestial being. Pastora now labored and toiled like every woman” (300–301). Pastora has rewritten the Coatlicue myth in that she represents a corporeal Coatlicue, who is subordinate to the experiences of the flesh. She undoes the specific traditional myth of a celestial being and instead makes mythological the concept of a real woman. That is, the myth can now represent a corporeal toiling woman like Pastora.

To bring all the issues I have discussed together, I see the text as one that begins as a travel narrative in which Max performs the role of the antihero, telling the story of the invisible but heroic exile. In Part 2, however, this travel narrative is interrupted through Max's meetings with Pastora. The myth of antiheroism is destroyed because Pastora demands visibility and constantly cuts down his attempts at both mythologizing her, and through his proximity and familiarity with her, mythologizing himself. Demythologizing thus occurs at the level of storytelling; and parenting, origins, and father/mother lands are further demythologized when Max and Pastora together, at the end of the book, come to believe in no fathers and no mothers, and to deny “place” as a location for setting down roots. Instead, they see themselves as a species that travels and dislocates itself continually. In this way, Max and Pastora are true hybrid Sapogonians.

As Tey Diana Rebolledo says, “Mythology often functions as a collective symbolic code that identifies how we should live. Cultures use myths and the stories of heroines and heroes to create role models” (Rebolledo 1995, 49). The particular transported and renewed myths of these borderland migrants dissolve the rigid paradigms of role models through their translation into other locations and other cultures. They work against nostalgic dreams of going home to a mythic location, and instead, theorize a way of being at home in which it is the arrival of the past place to the present which replaces the migrant's return to place through nostalgia and longing. Homesickness, for this borderland consciousness, is thus not a question of longing for a lost home or the realization of the construct of that home.¹¹ Instead, homesickness is the underlying familiarity of the always-borrowed “home-space” in the present, because it incorporates not a reminder of loss, but a manifestation of a new and purposefully built structure or edifice. The incorporation of old and new is in effect the rewriting of an old myth, or the appropriation of an old legend for new purposes. The myths, transportable, are carried by migrants, and come to represent both homesickness (as a borrowed familiarity rather than disease) and renewal.

Notes

1. Among others, Ellen McCracken (1989), and Julian Olivares (1996).

2. Gloria Anzaldúa develops a space that is a queer Aztlán: queering the queer so that Aztlán no longer exists in an impossible past nor in the never-here future, but in the here-and-now present. Three years after the conference, the Aztlán plan was written down in a more gender-sensitive way.

3. Critics have read Sapogonia in various ways that tend to focus mostly on Max's “badness” and machismo. Juan Antonio Perles Rochel considers the narrative switches of the text when he states that Castillo draws, in Max, “a rootless Latino immigrant in search of an impossible identity, the picture of pathological masculinity, and thus does not wish easy identification with the character” and he considers Pastora eventually “the true heroine and model of empowered femininity” (Rochel 1997, 130). Ibíz Gómez-Vega's reading (Gómez-Vega 1994) also sees Pastora as the heroine of the text, and Max as failing in this role because he lacks the ability to make connections to the past. Although Gómez-Vega offers an excellent analysis of the text, I see a gap precisely in her declaration that Max cannot experience nostalgia: my interpretation of the text finds nostalgia and memory in Max's character. Her reading also depends on seeing Pastora and Max's relationship as a purely carnal one, a slippage which I shall attend to later on in this section. A last important element of the text is that of the level of dream versus reality along which the events function. Elsa Saeta draws attention to the fact that for much of the novel, we cannot know if events are dreamed or if they actually occur (Saeta 1994). This important consideration blurs boundaries between the real and the dream, and affects the extent to which the characters are trust-worthy or reliable as narrators of their own desires, activities, and lives. Although here I choose to focus on the tourist-exile figure of the hero in my analysis, I am aware that in the text everything is filtered through a series of potentially unreliable narrators, and that to an extent, the reader can never fully know the other characters of the text. Overall, although I do not wish to dismiss a sympathetic reading of Pastora, I read Max as more multidimensional and problematic than most critics have. Elyette Benjamin-Labarthe (1996) gives an interesting psychoanalytic reading of the text, seeing both Max and Pastora as heroic, claiming that they are involved in a sadomasochistic, narcissistic relationship that is only realized through the frustration of hatred. Taking an interesting angle, Benjamin-Labarthe reads the text as divided into “white” and “nonwhite,” where both Pastora and Max harbor internalized desires for whiteness, and she particularly cites Pastora and Perla's relationship as one where the former is attracted to the latter's whiteness, even though Pastora adopts the “Chicana” label that allows her to celebrate brownness.

4. Althusser's assessment of the policeman's hailing or interpellation of the subject suggests that the individual hailed almost always turns around at the sound of the “hey, you there,” and that this hailing of individuals exemplifies the existence of ideology. In this ideology, the relationship between two individuals is established at the moment of interaction. An authority figure's “you there” interpellates the subject as about to be interrogated and examined. (Althusser, 1994, 131). The fact that the Immigration and Naturalization Service officials wrongly interpellate Max as one of them, as a member of their community, suggests that there are cracks in the ideological system, cracks in which masked, anonymous performers, liars, or exiles reside.

5. Importantly, Max's grandparents are shot inside their own house, thus showing how the civil uprisings of the country enter and disrupt the interior private space of citizens.

6. In a similar vein, Sandra Cisneros writes about a man's regret in loving a woman: “If I knew the words I'd explain / how a man loves a woman before love / and how he loves her after / is never the same. How the two halves split / and can't be put back whole again” (Cisneros 1994, 63).

7. This argument still leaves open the question that some critics ask, that is, who the hero of the text is. Those who view Pastora as the hero do so because she goes against the grain of what is expected of her, demanding sexual freedom and promiscuity. However, some, like Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, see Pastora as entirely passive, insisting that she relate to him on his own terms, as a sexual toy (1992, 69). A decision about the hero of the text is not crucial in my analysis, but I would agree that Pastora's subversive impulses move her to separate and connect memories in her quest for community. Max, on the other hand, is preoccupied with a more individualistic quest, but insofar as his quest overlaps with Pastora's, he also undergoes experiences of connection and memory. Calling Pastora the hero of the text, in short, should not eliminate the complexities of Max's relationship with her and with his past. I would go so far as to say that the text even shows the fragility of applying the concept of hero to a borderland place, because the hero narrative normally requires a natural and naturalized context that is missing in a border text.

8. Max's experience of Pastora in dreams is part of the undecidable dream tone of the whole text. The dream intrusion here is symptomatic, for example, of the tourists being haunted by his suppressed home (his Other).

9. It is perhaps significant that Laura's surname, Jefferson, is that of the founding father, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. The Jefferson that represents the giving of a green card carries echoes of the document that originally created the American state. Thomas Jefferson himself designed and built his own house.

10. “When her adversaries had mutilated Coatlicue—says the myth—her hair turned to grass, to trees, to flowers. Her skin was transformed into fertile soil, her eyes to holes filled with water, wells and springs. Her mouth changed into great caves, which offered shelter to men. Out of her nose were formed hills and valleys …” (Rebolledo 1995, 50). This depiction of Coatlicue as land furthers the interpretation of Pastora as a manifestation of Sapogonia.

11. Rosemary Marangoly George writes “the sentiment accompanying the absence of home—homesickness—can cut two ways: it could be a yearning for the authentic home (situated in the past or in the future) or it could be the recognition of the inauthenticity or the created aura of all homes” (George 1996, 175).

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