SOURCE: “The Cultural Politics of Dislocation and Relocation in the Novels of Ana Castillo,” in MELUS, Vol. 23, No. 1, Spring, 1998, pp. 81–97.

[In the following essay, Walter analyzes how characters in Ana Castillo's novels are often subjected to struggles for identity and for freedom from oppression.]

Now, I-woman am going to blow up the Law … in language.

(Cixous “The Laughing Medusa” 887)

By creating a new mythos—that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we behave—la mestiza creates a new consciousness.

(Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera 80)

Ever since the initial success of vanguard Chicana writers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Estela Portillo-Trambley, Gina Valdés, Bernice Zamora, Lucha Corpi and Alma Villanueva in the late 1970s and early 1980s and throughout the boom of Chicana literary output from the mid 1980s until now, Chicana writers have used the written word in order to “reveal” and “change,” that is, they have been engage writers in one way or another.¹ According to María Hererra-Sobek, Chicana writers have been making “daring inroads into ‘new frontiers’ … exploring new vistas … and new perspectives” which reveal “new dimensions” for both Chicano and mainstream American literatures (10–11). Focusing upon Ana Castillo's novels, The Mixquiahuala Letters, Sapogonia, and So Far from God, this essay addresses the politics of dislocation and relocation as a key aspect of the interacting social and cultural practices and ideological discourses that constitute the narrative's signifying process.

In Borderlands/La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa describes the border space as “a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” a space “in a constant state of transition” (3). Those who live in the Chicano borderlands, this interstitial cross-cultural space, are “plagued by psychic restlessness … torn between ways … a product of the transfer of the cultural and spiritual values of one group to another” (78). I want to suggest that Castillo's characters, male and female, are border subjects positioned between cultures and in search of an alternative to their lived “nepantla” state of invisibility and transition.² In terms of her female characters, this state is aggravated by what Castillo calls in Massacre of the Dreamers “double sexism, being female and indigenous,” that is, by the Chicana's identity as man's specularized Other,³ a subject-position conditioned by racism and misogyny. Castillo, I want to demonstrate, uses writing to reveal and change the mestiza's imposed “subject-position,” which, according to JanMohamed, can be defined only “in terms of the effects of economic exploitation, political disenfranchisement, social manipulation, and ideological domination on the cultural formation of minority subjects and discourses” (9). In this process her narrative problematizes the “ethos” and “worldview” of Chicano and Anglo-American cultures through the aesthetic creation of a new mestiza consciousness, a repositioning of the marginalized subject by means of a counter-hegemonic discourse that establishes what Göran Therborn has called a narrative “alterideology” (Identity of Power 28): a narrative “dialectic of difference”⁴ as socially symbolic act with an ideological utopian function intent on finding imaginary solutions to existing social conflicts. This utopian function—an impulse of liberation and salvation—embraces the relation between both the individual and the collective and life as it is lived and experienced imaginatively. Hence, I want to argue that Ana Castillo's narrative instantiates counter-hegemony (culture/ideology) as a substance of Chicana/o thinking and is therefore, in Frederic Jameson's terms, “informed by … a political unconscious … a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community” (The Political Unconscious 70). It becomes, as it creates, what Bhabha based on Jacques Lacan has termed the place of “the signifying time-lag of cultural difference” (The Location of Culture 237).

In The Mixquiahuala Letters Castillo describes a Chicana's search for identity in the borderlands by foregrounding “the psychic restlessness” which characterizes the protagonist's endeavors to deconstruct her imposed identity as man's Other and create an authentic consciousness. The novel, an indignant outcry against the Chicana's fragmented and alienated existence in a racist, patriarchal order—an outcry that characterizes the narrative style, structure, and theme—centers on the experiences of two Chicanas, Teresa and Alicia, living and traveling in the United States and Mexico. Playing Julio Cortázar's game without sticking to his rules, Castillo uses a fragmented epistolary style—40 letters written by Teresa—and invites the reader to read in different, nonchronological ways.⁵ This device, the use of multiple perspectives and a protean, lyrical prose revealing both the conscious and unconscious levels of Teresa's mental life break with the chronological order of the narrative and connote free choice and otherness. Style and structure furthermore intimate the implicit author's renunciation of authority and, based on the theme, suggest a radical deconstruction of the symbolic order as a solution to Teresa's identity crisis and search for selfhood. This mode of presentation reflects two basic interacting “structures of feeling”⁶: the confusion / anxiety / crisis of being “torn between ways” that characterizes life in the shifting space of the borderlands and the desire to transcend this state, to put the fragmented pieces of one's colonized identity together—structures conditioned by what Erlinda Gonzales-Berry has described as “the discrepancies between women's desires to act and define themselves and the world's reception and suppression of those desires” (237).

Teresa experiences a cultural crisis of dislocation which I propose to read within the context of the following questions: who am I-Chicana living in the United States? How do I-woman relate to the other, male and female? Teresa “was no longer prepared to face a mundane life of need and resentment, accept monogamous commitments and honor patriarchal traditions and wanted to be rid of the husband's guiding hand, holidays with family and in-laws, led by a contradicting God, society …” (22–23). The novel's epigraph, taken from Anais Nin's Under the Glass Bell, introduces Castillo's outcry against a system that reduces women to objects of men's will: “I quit loving my father a long time ago. What remained was a slavery to a pattern.” Father, church, husband, the three pillars of a system that stifles Teresa's self-determination, are on trial in the novel. In several letters Teresa denounces what Luce Irigaray has described as “the natural substratum” of “the [hierarchically structured] patriarchal social body,” namely, “woman-as-other”: (Je, tu, nous 45).

A woman takes care of the man she has made her life with, cleans, cooks, washes his underwear, does as if he were her only child, as if he had come from her womb. In exchange, he may pay her bills, he may not. He may give her acceptance into society by replacing her father's name with his, or he may choose to not. He may make her feel like a woman, or rather, how she has been told a woman feels with a man or he may not.

(112)

The narrative initiates Teresa's redefinition of selfhood as growth in consciousness from this subaltern position, this “periphery of authorized power and privilege,” (Bhabha 2) in a deconstructive process; a process that reveals and challenges her experience of otherization and thereby opens an in-between space—a space separating the I-woman from the ‘woman-as-other'—that gradually becomes a place of emergence, a terrain for insurrection, an interstice where Teresa's new mestiza consciousness is negotiated as a strategy of representation. The necessity for this redefinition, which implies a renegotiation of culture, ideology and society, is nowhere better expressed than in the following statement: “In rage, i tore open the worn shirt to reveal flesh: ‘i was a woman,’ i shouted, ‘but i was first human’”(97). One could argue that this exclamation is an emblem of the novel's politics of dislocation and relocation: a Chicana who through writing reveals the psychic wounds inflicted upon her by a racist, sexist and classist order, turning her into a stranger, into man's and society's “Shadow-Beast,” (Anzaldúa Borderlands 17) and “speak[s] from the cracked spaces … con voz del abismo … to subvert the status quo,” employing her voice as a strategy of resistance to hegemonic cultural constructions (Anzaldúa “Haciendo caras, una entrada” xxii–xxv). By using her voice in a gesture of defiance, insisting upon her right of self-determination, Teresa moves from silence into speech, from invisibility into visibility: an act of cultural revision intent on transforming the “abismo,” this unhomely liminal space, into a home.

Unable to find a satisfactory solution to her double dislocation, Teresa, together with her friend Alicia, travels to Mexico, the mythical homeland which she has only known from stories told by her grandmother, in order to satisfy her “yearning spirit, the Indian in me that had begun to cure the ails of humble folk distrustful of modern medicine; a need for the sapling woman for the fertile earth that nurtured her growth.”⁷ Mexico, however, as Teresa gradually realizes after two journeys, embraces her with its indigenous roots—“i sometimes saw the ancient Tenochtitlan, home of my mother, my grandmothers and greatmother, as an embracing bosom, to welcome me back … 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 …” (92, 95–96)—and strangles her with its machismo at the same time. While the journeys to Mexico do not provide her with clear-cut answers, the mere fact of moving within nepantla signifies a radical change from mere interrogation to initiation. Traveling and writing about this experience enable Teresa to rethink and renegotiate individual and collective cultural values of the Chicano border experience. In this process, she creates her own migratory in-between space in which self-definition is initiated in an ambivalent way and no definite answers and solutions are found. Female bonding—one of the principal messages of Castillo's poetry⁸—and relationships with men are problematized and render the shifting and multiple forms of existence in the borderlands. The “dialectics of attraction and repulsion”⁹ characterizing the friendship between Teresa and Alicia as well as their relationships with men, reflect the “struggle of … Self amidst adversity and violation” (Anzaldúa Borderlands Preface) and refract the social and psychic dislocation from which the possibilities of consciousness-raising and reconstruction of identity emerge. A possible solution to the gender war, hinted at in the short moments of sexual pleasure shared with emancipated men—“We licked our wounds with the underside of penises and applied semen to our tender bellies and breasts like Tiger's balm” (100)—resides in the education of boys (in this specific case Teresa's son) and/or the re-education of men: “… he should be taught to look after himself, mend his own clothes, cook, clean up and do his share. He should be allowed to do whatever it was that little boys liked to do but he should also be sensitive … Vittorio must learn … to grow up to be a decent companion to a woman” (130). I am inclined, then, to read this alternative as a counter-hegemonic utopian move intent on changing what Lacan termed the Symbolic Order.

In terms of what Edward Said has described as “being at home in a place” (The World 8). Teresa's problem remains unresolved. A vision, expressed via dreams and imagination, however, hints at a utopian solution to her existence-in-crisis: in line with Anzaldúa's survival strategies in the borderlands, Teresa is depicted as becoming “a crossroads” where her individual struggle transcends the horizon of Chicano culture and conjoins the one of the oppressed, marginalized people “of mixed blood, people of the sun and earth” (Borderlands 95). Even though Teresa feels empowered by this dream, the roads to be traveled as well as the destinations to be reached are undefined, vaguely recognizable. Given the fragmentary character of style and structure and the narrative's undecidability—that is signification exists as meaning-possibilities in an unresolved, ambiguous state¹⁰—The Mixquiahuala Letters can be seen as the aesthetic creation of a strategical interstitial space-in-process that instantiates counter-hegemony as cultural politics of dislocation and relocation from the margin with the intention of facilitating a renegotiation of ideological and cultural values. In this sense, the novel supports Frantz Fanon's claim that the process of decolonization and liberation is always initiated in a “zone of occult instability,” an atmosphere of crisis and anxiety. The novel's importance, therefore, does not so much reside in the ways and outcome of the liberatory struggle, but rather in the fact that such a struggle is necessary and, as Teresa's case demonstrates, that one has to become conscious of its necessity. Hence, the image of the ‘opaque window’ and the ‘weapon’ illustrates “the need to know what one's needs are.”¹¹

In Sapogonia Castillo succeeds in broadening the issues of gender and race in the borderland experience. By focusing on Máximo, a sculptor from Sapogonia (a fictitious country somewhere in the Americas), and his affairs with women, Castillo delves into the male and female psyche in order to reveal and problematize not only the difficulties of survival in the borderlands but also, and most importantly, effects of a borderland existence on individuals. Máximo could be seen as Teresa's male counterpart insofar as he is another border subject experiencing an existential crisis. Máximo, who leaves his country torn by civil war, begins his migratory odyssey in Europe and finally comes to the United States, establishing himself as a successful artist. Yet Castillo emphasizes the underside of this success story, namely, the alienated and fragmented psyche of a man who sells his soul to the American Dream, (ab)uses women and denies his indigenous roots. Throughout the narrative Máximo is delineated as a reified antihero, a symbol of postmodern man who, on account of his attitude and way of thinking, contributes to the perpetuation of the patriarchal order and the implicit objectification of woman's existence. Furthermore, Castillo uses this male protagonist and his experience to render an image of the border subject's estrangement from his natural roots, from a wholesome cosmic relation to nature and reality, or to use Cixous's phrase, his “lacking earth and flesh.”¹² Unlike Teresa, who by shouting “i was a woman … i was first human” reclaims her womanhood and humanness in an act of renaming and possession, Máximo internalizes the value system of the dominant culture—the frenzy for commodities, money, fame and individual recognition based on a highly competitive spirit—and thereby accentuates what Castillo called the “spiritual split in his collective psyche.”¹³

Castillo sets Máximo's “spatial and social confusion”¹⁴ against an alternative mode of thinking, living and relating, a mode personified by Mamá Grande, Máximo's grandmother, and Pastora, a Joan Baez-type singer and activist. Earthy women with a cosmic worldview, they embody the potential for change. Mamá Grande familiarizes Máximo with the mytho-magical worldview of his indigenous ancestors, a cyclical worldview based upon “the inborn awareness of equality with other living things on earth,”¹⁵ and warns him not to “deceive woman … not to use woman like an animal” (104). Mamá Grande, a woman who has visions, sees into the future, and appears after her death as a living spirit, exists in a timeless, mythical present. In these passages of the novel, Castillo uses a magico-realist discourse to express a worldview that goes beyond the rational empirical categories of reality, including the visualized ones, those categories in which dreams are transformed into a visible and tangible reality. This type of weltanschauung is characterized by a harmonious and dynamic relationship between man and his surroundings; a relationship in which man plays an active role and in which significations can constantly assume new dimensions.¹⁶ This dynamic harmony is carried by a discourse that naturalizes the supernatural categories of reality, that is, both levels of the discourse, the natural and the supernatural, are harmoniously intertwined, producing what Roland Barthes termed an “effet de réel” (Le bruissement de la langue 174). Throughout the episodes in which Mamá Grande's spirit appears to Máximo and Pastora this naturalization is achieved by three principal devices, namely, a matter-of-fact style, authorial reticence and the characters' reaction; neither the characters nor the narrator show signs of hesitation and / or surprise with regard to the supernatural categories, accepting them as vital parts of their belief system: “‘¿Mamá Grande?’ I uttered. It was an eerie meeting from the start. She didn't move any closer, but stood where she was. … ‘How good that you came back, son,’ she said. Yes it was the voice of Mama Grande, but she remained still as if her feet were dug in the ground where she stood. She wrapped her shawl tighter about her little body as if she were cold. ‘I knew you would come back soon’” (220). This magico-realist texture signifies, on the one hand, the transcendence of binary oppositions characterizing the rational and patriarchal Western metaphysics of presence and, on the other, a revaluation of the indigenous worldview as an integral element of Chicano culture.

This indigenous mytho-magical worldview with its sense of fluidity, its harmony between the material and the spiritual, is further personified by Pastora. Paradoxically it is Máximo who, while denying his own indigenous roots, calls her “Coatlicue”; Coatlicue, the Aztec snake goddess, the symbol of fused opposites, “the eagle and the serpent, heaven and the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror” (Borderlands 47). It is through Pastora-Coatlicue, a woman who ‘gives and takes’ life, that Castillo re-creates the Aztec goddess as an incarnation of contradictory cosmic processes. Máximo, who describes Pastora's supernatural powers as witch-type magic, is enchanted, irresistibly attracted and repelled by her beauty and sensuality, that is, he experiences what Anzaldúa has termed “the Coatlicue State,” a contradictory sensation, a nepantla death-in-life and life-in-death existence/crisis:

Pastora was a witch, an unequivocal bruja who'd undoubtedly used her wicked powers to hex him. … Somehow, she had managed to take something so vital and potent from his being, like the umbilical cord his grandmother had severed with her teeth the dawn he was born. … Pastora Ake had severed something in him with her bare teeth, like a savage monster acting upon a primal female instinct, because what bound him to her was unquestionably physical,. …

(172)

Like Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth and Bhabha in The Location of Culture, Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera delineates this space/sensation/state of betweenness and transition as a possible place of emergence, “a prelude of crossing” from darkness to light, invisibility to visibility, confusion to “knowing,” in short, as a place where strategies of representation, empowerment, and change can (and are necessary to) be developed. It is in this sense that I read Máximo's incapacity to make meaning out of his experience: “When I made love to Pastora, I wasn't even on earth. … I lost my substance, became the molecules of which my body was made and became formless and erratic, unlike with the women with whom I felt I could challenge anything. I was Goliath … with them, and the clever David did not exist. With Pastora I was only a man” (296). Pastora's matriarchal powers provoke Máximo's fear and confusion, a feeling of “vulnerability” (296), precisely because they undermine his image of male conquistador. Relishing his patriarchal inheritance as Spanish Goliath while denying not only his indigenous roots but also his willingness to be “only a man,” Máximo fails to cross from confusion to knowledge, or as Gayatri Spivak would say, to deconstruct his textuality, and is lead to destruction. Máximo's possible rebirth is thwarted by his inability to undo the patriarchal effects of power, as Michel Foucault would say, which constitute him and act through him.¹⁷ By dividing Pastora-Coatlicue's contradictory powers and foregrounding her life-taking forces, Máximo deprives himself of a possible recreation through her: “Awesome Coatlicue. … She was the blood that appeared on your penis the first time you entered a woman who was menstruating and you feared it would curse you. She was the breast that, without milk, still comforted. She was the dark tunnel through which you passed and began your first memory of this world” (312).¹⁸

The implicit deconstruction of the patriarchal order, which appears as the novel's political unconscious in the temporal/spatial break in between the signs, the said and the unsaid, this caesura that reveals Máximo's disjunctive experience and is the place of a possible utopian counter hegemonic revision, is based on female agency, a (mythical) revaluation of woman's life-giving powers, a rendering visible of the female body and mind as text, as discourse that reclaims the indigenous matriarchal social structure and way of thinking and asserts/demands a radically new male and female consciousness and subject-position. The strong images of the two earthy women suggest not only that a new mestiza consciousness has already emerged but also, and most importantly, that this consciousness carries a potential for change—a change of ideology and culture, that is, lived hegemony.¹⁹

Whereas Sapogonia and The Mixquiahuala Letters emphasize the postmodern alienation and fragmentation of individuals in the borderlands, their dislocation in an interstitial cross-cultural nepantla space, So Far from God can be regarded as an aesthetic attempt at tracing a state of selfhood that involves collective self-definition, a place among one's people. In this process, Castillo uses a counter-hegemonic worldview and mestiza consciousness as imaginary solution to what Norma Alarcón has called “the crisis of meaning as women” and, I would add, to the postmodern crisis of meaning as human beings, the “desyoización” of the individual.²⁰

In So Far from God Castillo creates community—defined by Tomas Rivera as “place, values, personal relationships, and conversation”²¹—by means of a “speakerly”²² magico-realist narrative texture. The driving forces of this process are women: women who think, dream, act and relate in what Anzaldúa has called a “pluralistic mode,” transcending binary oppositions, a rational “dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness,” in an effort to heal “the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts” (Borderlands 80). The keyword of this worldview, carried as in Sapogonia by a discourse in which the natural and supernatural categories of reality are harmoniously intertwined, is faith: a faith that facilitates a dynamic relationship between human beings and their surroundings and an implicit magico-realist conception of the world in which the imaginary is regarded as factual reality.²³ Faith is the fundamental principle which underlies La Loca's resurrection, Caridad's miraculous recovery and predictions, Felicia's holistic treatments, and the appearance of living (mythical) spirits. This peculiar type of faith, which is revised and actualized through female agency,²⁴ is the driving force behind the collective activism and the implicit alternative mode of living and relating outlined in the novel; a counter-hegemonic mode conceived as possible solution to the postmodern fragmentation and dislocation experienced in the borderlands.

This magico-realist worldview, whose fundamental essence resides in “the interconnectedness of things” (242), is expressed by means of a “speakerly” texture in which a skaz-like discourse, being at work in and acting on the actual discourse, an unnamed narrator, who as a storyteller represents both a communal and an individual voice, and the use of multiple points of view and perspectives re-create and interweave individual and collective experiences as the novel's political unconscious. A telling example of this fluid dialogical texture is the episode in which Sofi, La Loca's mother, announces to a comadre her plan to run for mayor of Tome. On entering Sofi's house, just before the actual dialogue between the two women, the comadre, whose namelessness suggests her collective identity, is lost in thoughts about Sofi and her family. Introduced by the phrase, “… for when she repeated the story later to the other comadres …” (133), her reflections take on a highly oral tone: she seems to speak to herself and the community at the same time. Phrases such as “You know, la pobre Sofi …,” “But everyone understood …” (133), “Everybody still remembered …,” and “nobody … had been able to explain …” (135), lend an oral coating to this interior monologue, a “speakerly” texture in which the above-mentioned rhetorical devices exist not only “as representations of oral narration” but also “as integral aspects of plot and character development.”²⁵ By means of this polyphonic discourse the community of Tome is created in a time-space continuum in which a condensation and a concretization of the temporal and spatial indexes constitute a radical present-ation of time in space and space in time. The effect upon plot and character development can be called accretive insofar as Sofi's decision to run for mayor is accompanied and, as the unfolding story shows, supported by the rest of the female population and leads to the construction of an alternative, economically self-sufficient community (146–48). In other words, women are the driving force behind the creation of an alternative space of living, thinking and relating based on justice and equality; a process made possible by a worldview whose accretive dynamics are created and expressed on the level of discourse by orality and the mode of magical realism.

Influenced by her children—La Loca's and Caridad's faith in an expanded reality, Esperanza's rebellious restiveness, and Fe's suicidal materialist attitude—Sofi becomes the emblem of female activism. Her daughters show her that it is possible and necessary to make choices in life and that life itself should be “defined as a state of courage and wisdom and not an uncontrollable participation in society” (250). While the possibility of change is articulated and actualized through a culturally specific faith in an expanded reality, its necessity is made explicit through what Sartre called “dévoiler,” that is, the revelation of past and present Chicano experience in New Mexico: the encroachment of Anglo culture and its devastating impact on the Chicano way of life, the loss of land and identity. The necessity for activism, then, is a matter of survival as is demonstrated by Fe's selling out to the American way of life and thinking²⁶ and by the factory workers' ignorance of “what was going on around them” (189). Against this background of ongoing cultural imperialism (aggravated by internalization) and the ensuring fragmentation of the individual, I read Castillo's creation of community—the collective activism that results in progressive change symbolized by “the sheep-grazing” and “wool-weaving cooperative,” selling “hormone-free meat” to food co-ops run by and for the benefit of the people of Tome (147–48)—as a utopian solution to the loss of identity, assimilation and the spread of Anglo culture.²⁷

I want to suggest that this is not only community but also “cultural revolution” in the making. The counter-hegemonic discourse that Castillo employs in her three novels—a rhetoric that deconstructs the marginal position of the mestiza in the Chicano borderlands and recreates, via concrete utopia,²⁸ a new mestiza consciousness as an organic process of interrelated individual and collective experiences—is a discourse of radical cultural liberation: it does not only “blow up the Law” (Cixous) and create a “new mythos” (Anzaldúa) but redefines relationships, lifestyles, and the conception of reality from a Chicana perspective.²⁹ While The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapogonia initiate what Spivak has called “subaltern insurgency,”³⁰So Far from God adds to the initial moment of negation, an individual existence in a state of crisis, one of affirmation, a communal existence in the borderlands. The three novels can be seen as examples of liberating fiction precisely because they offer a humanizing vision by attempting explanations, interpretations, and alternative solutions to the postmodern nepantla existence in the Chicano borderlands without glossing over the “intracultural conflict.”³¹ The journey from The Mixquiahuala Letters to So Far from God, a movement form interrogation (dislocation) to initiation (relocation), stages the search for selfhood as an examination of self through both individual and collective history, linking it to a search for place among one's people.

If, according to Said, the word culture suggests “an environment, process, and hegemony in which individuals (in their private circumstances) and their works are embedded,” if it “is in culture that we can seek out the range of meanings and ideas conveyed by the phrases belonging to or in a place, being at home in a place,” and if culture “is used to designate not merely something to which one belongs but something that one possesses” (The World 8–9), then this search for selfhood in Castillo's novels implies a revolutionary cultural redefinition; a redefinition that aims, on the one hand, at what Foucault has described as “the insurrection of subjugated knowledge,” the rediscovery and rectification of knowledge and experience suppressed by the dominant system and its ideology (Power/Knowledge 81) and, on the other, at a radical transformation of our sense of being, living and thinking. The politics of dislocation and relocation, seen as the political unconscious of the novels, instantiate counterhegemony in the Chicano borderlands through an affirmation of otherness—an otherness not imposed but recreated: an identity based on difference with the capacity to relocate, a “differential consciousness”—whose nature shifts from individual separateness to collective multiplicity—that posits no “ultimate answers, no terminal utopia … no predictable final outcomes”³² but transcends hegemony via concrete utopia, a strategic use of deconstructive différance that traces the necessity for change and anticipates the possibility of an alternative lifestyle. By locating the agency of change in the mestiza—the re-creation of woman as creator who has a vision, is not “afraid to speak that vision” (Saeta Interview), and, most importantly, acts accordingly. And by restoring their indigenous roots, Castillo invests her female characters with a historicized and politicized consciousness—a nonessentialized consciousness based on a radical mestiza subjectivity, that is, a subversive position of intelligibility and mode of knowing necessary for the transformation of cultural practices—as strategy of empowerment and liberation.³³ For that reason I read her politics of dislocation and relocation as resistance Xicanisma that envisions the mestiza consciousness as “a crossroads sin fronteras,” (Borderlands 195) a “locus of possibility” (Sandoval 14), a motivating force behind “the development of an alternative social system” (Castillo Massacre 22). The deconstructive nature of this undertaking resides in the revelation of the necessity for insurgency/activism³⁴ without legitimating the envisioned results as transcendental truths: a “talking back” whose echoes do not spiral down into abyme but create a “real state of emergency” (Benjamin 257) that carries the possibility of “new life and new growth,” (hooks 211) or to use Heidegger's phrase, “something begins its presencing” in the Chicano borderlands (Bhabha 1).

Notes

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Qu'est-ce que la litterature (Paris: Gallimard, 1948) 30: “L'ecrivain engagé sait que dévoiler c'est changer et qu'on ne peut dévoiler qu'en projetant de changer.”

2. Rosario Castellanos translated the Aztec expression ‘nepantla’ as “terra intermediária … terra de ninguém.” See Gunter W. Lorenz, Diálogo coma America Latina (Sao Paulo: EPU, 1973) 194.

3. See Luce Irigaray, Speculum de l'autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974).

4. See Ramon Saldivar, “A Dialectic of Difference. Towards a Theory of the Chicano Novel,” MELUS 6.3 (Fall 1979): 73–92.

5. Umberto Eco called this type of novel “open work.” See Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979) 63.

6. Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1997) 22–27. See also Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994) 14, 52.

7. Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters (Binghampton, NY: Bilingual Press, 1986) 46. All further references will be included in the text.

8. See also Castillo's statements in Partial Autobiographies, Interviews with Twenty Chicano Poets, ed. Wolfgang Binder (Erlangen: Palm & Enke, 1985) 37.

9. Dieter Helms, “Developments in the Chicana Cultural Movement and Two Works of Chicana Prose Fiction in 1986: Estela Portillo's Trini and Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters,” Minority Literatures in North America: Contemporary Perspectives, eds. W. Karrer and H. Lutz (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1990) 153.

10. This narrative fragmentation and undecidability has been described by Heiner Bus as “a constant interplay of opposites and recurrent cycles of closeness and detachment.” See Heiner Bus, “‘i too was of that small corner of the world’: The Cross-Cultural Experience in Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986)” 11 (Manuscript presented at the Conference of the Association for the Study of the New Literatures in English, Munich, Germany 1993).

11. Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990) 29.

12. Helene Cixous, “The Place of Crime, the Place of Forgiveness,” in The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. Susan Sellers (London/New York: Routledge, 1994) 152.

13. Castillo, Massacre 169. She argues that “the alienation of” man's “own connection to living matter” set in with the “dominance of man over woman's psyche” and is one of the basic constitutive elements of “man's view of woman as ‘other.’”

14. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1991) 54. In the era of late capitalism when geographical and cultural borders give way to globalism, transnationalism, and transmigrational borderlands, in our postmodern mass-mediatized world, human emotions are walled up. This, I would say, is one of the principal implicit messages underlying Máximo's role in the novel.

15. Ana Castillo, Sapogonia (Tempe: Bilingual, 1990) 16. Further references will be given in the text. According to Castillo it is natural that women represent this weltanschauung and that it is translated into their writing because “nosotras las mujeres no pensamos linearly. We think in the spiral, or … in circles … that's the only way that I could think of writing.” Jacqueline Mitchell et al., “Entrevista a Ana Castillo,” Mester 20.2 (Fall 1991): 155.

16. For a detailed analysis of this topic see my Magical Realism in Contemporary Chicano Fiction (Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1993) 13–21 and 129–37.

17. Castillo links his state of confusion and resultant attitude to the collective male profanation of Coatlicue, a process that began when, according to Anzaldúa, “the male-dominated Aztec-Mexica culture drove the powerful female deities underground by giving them monstrous attributes and by substituting male deities in their place.” Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands 27. Máximo continues this tradition and the novel shows how he does not only other Pastora-Coatlicue through his attitude but himself too.

18. Unlike Sixo in Morrison's Beloved, Máximo, unable to share love, does not regard Pastora as a friend of his mind, a woman capable of gathering the pieces of his fragmented identity and giving them back to him “in all the right order.” See Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Signet, 1989) 335.

19. Norma Alarcon, “Making Familia From Scratch: Split Subjectivities in the Work of Helena María Viramontes and Cherrie Moraga,” in Chicana Creativity and Criticism: Charting New Frontiers in American Literature, eds. Maria Hererra-Sobek and Helena María Viramontes 157.

20. Carlos Fuentes used the term to describe the “disintegration of the human personality.” See John King, “Carlos Fuentes: An Interview,” in Modern Latin American Fiction: A Survey, ed. John King (London: Faber and Faber, 1987) 142.

21. Tomas Rivera, “Chicano Literature: The Establishment of Community,” in A Decade of Chicano Literature (1970–1979). Critical Essays and Bibliography, eds. Luis Leal et al. (Santa Barbara: La Causa, 1982) 9–17.

22. For the definition of a “speakerly text” see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Zora Neale Hurston and the Speakerly Text,” in Southern Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Jefferson Humphries (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990) 150.

23. On the role of faith in a magico-realist worldview see Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1984) 7 and Mircea Eliade, Mito y realidad (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1968) 19. On the imaginary as factual reality see Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon, 1992) and Miguel Angel Asturias' statements in Lorenz, Diálogo 256–257.

24. See, for example, the episode in which La Loca's actions and statements challenge Father Jerome's patriarchal Christian notion of faith (22–25), or the scene in which Felicia says to Caridad, “… you healed yourself by pure will” (55). Ana Castillo, So Far from God (New York: Plume, 1994). Further references will be given in the text.

25. The fundamental difference between Their Eyes Were Watching God and So Far from God lies in the interplay of orality and magical realism that characterizes the creation of community in Castillo's novel—a difference which serves as the basis for my elaboration on Gates' definition.

26. Fe is the emblem of reification, the transformation of all human functions into commodities, and her role in the novel stresses what Lukács described as the “dehumanized and dehumanizing function of the commodity relation.” See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1971) 83.

27. It could be argued, then, that Castillo rewrites faith—the fundamental principle of this process—as a political force of subversion and a strategy of subaltern representation and empowerment as it is the faith in an enlarged reality—a magico-realist worldview—that functions as the in-between space which provides the terrain for an articulation of cultural difference.

28. Ernst Bloch, in Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1985) 163–65, defines a “concrete utopia” as being based on “imaginary ideas which extend existing things to the future possibilities of their difference and betterment in an anticipatory way.” According to Bloch, this type of utopia, unlike abstract utopias, expresses hope based on reality. My translation.

29. Kenneth Burke called this rhetoric “negativism,” that is, the creation of counter-values through a process of negation as ideological struggle on the discursive level. See Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Berkeley: U of California P, 1968) 111.

30. Defined by her as “an effort to involve oneself in representation, not according to the lines laid down by the official institutional structures of representation.” Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Talk,” in The Spivak Reader, eds. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean (London: Routledge, 1996) 306.

31. Bruce-Novoa argues that Chicana writers of the first two decades of contemporary Chicano literature have revealed “the fissures in the interior circle.” “The dialogue between the sexes” used by contemporary Chicana writers to problematize their invisibility and articulate the problems of self-representation (and the implicit necessity to refashion themselves and society), continues to play an important role in Castillo's creative work as is attested by her stories in Loverboys (1996). Juan Bruce-Novoa, “Dialogical Strategies, Monological Goals: Chicano Literature,” in An Other Tongue, ed. Alfred Arteaga (Durham: Duke UP, 1994) 240.

32. Chela Sandoval, “U.S. Third World Feminism: The Theory and Method of Oppositional Consciousness in the Postmodern World,” Genders 10 (Spring 1991): 23.

33. A strategy that moves from what Williams called an “alternative practice” in The Mixquiahuala Letters and Sapogonia to an “oppositional practice” in So Far from God. See Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1997) 41–42.

34. This necessity, which is the core of what Castillo calls “conscientizacion” (Massacre 10; 220) and constitutes one of the basic subtexts of her novels, is maybe best expressed in the following remark by the narrator in So Far from God: “Every single step of launching off the cooperative took a lot of effort, a lot of time, and mostly a lot of not only changing everyone's minds about why not to do it but also changing their whole way of thinking so that they could do it” (146).

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