SOURCE: “The Multiple Subject in the Writing of Ana Castillo,” in Americas Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 65–72.

[In the following essay, Yarbro-Bejarano comments on the three perspectives often used in Castillo's works. Castillo writes alternately in first-, second-, and third-person perspective, but because of her experiences in a multi-ethnic world, her first-person writing style has a myriad of voices.]

In her book Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldúa speaks of the political reality of the U.S./Mexican border and also of the psychological, sexual and spiritual borderlands that form “wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”¹ These borderlands are not only external but internal, marking out the rifts and splits of our “shifting and multiple identity.” My use of the term “borderlands” to refer to the multiple subjectivity constructed in Castillo's texts responds to a need to delve into the writings of Chicanas themselves for the theoretical tools with which to analyze their work. As we enter the 1990's, we are faced with the appropriation and mis-appropriation of the discourse on difference. Some ramifications of this mis-appropriation are the use of the term “difference” or “women of color” as a euphemism for culture which erases differences of power and experiences of racism that led to the political identification of women of color as women of color in the first place. Or the proliferation of differences, for example including “career choice” or “individuality” among race, class, culture and sexual practice, as if any difference is as good or innocent as any other difference. This collapsing of orders of difference in such a way as to depoliticize it, this talk of difference with no talk of racism or power makes the term function as a synonym for the Other, other and different because not the same, the same as white people. For this reason it is important to search for alternative strategies to “difference,” ones that will not reinscribe women of color in a relationship of otherness to the dominant Same.

In her article “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called My Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” Norma Alarcón theorizes the construction of the Chicana subject across and through a multiplicity of discourses in relation to the unified female subject of much white feminist theory.² My project here is to explore the artistic strategies that construct this multiple subject in three texts by Ana Castillo. Castillo's subjects enact the “border” or “mestiza consciousness” of which Anzaldúa speaks. Her texts open up what Homi Bhabha calls a space of “translation,” “neither the one nor the Other,” a third space of flux and negotiation between colonized and colonizer.³ These subjects speak from a multiplicity of positions that at times compliment and at times contradict one another. Their subjectivity is a weave of differences, contradictory and potentially transformative.

While this multiple subject recalls that of postmodern theory, Guillermo Gómez Peña of the Border Arts Workshop noted its historical specificity when he said “we've always had postmodern, only ours was involuntary.” As Alarcón points out, many of the positions from which the Chicana subject speaks are occupied in relation to racial, class and cultural conflicts and divisions. Aida Hurtado, in her article “Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women and Women of Color,” reminds us that the median income for women of Mexican descent in the U.S. is ＄4,556, that of white women ＄15,575.⁴ In Castillo's writing Chicanas struggle to understand themselves in relation to what Alarcón calls a “multiplicity of others”—the individual women and men of their culture and of other cultures as well as entire racial, class and cultural groups. To see the consciousness of these subjects as what Alarcón calls “the site of multiple voicings” is necessarily to see their establishment in a context of domination and resistance.

The three texts I would like to consider are the epistolary novel The Mixquiahuala Letters, 1986; Castillo's second novel Sapogonia, 1990; and her latest book of poetry My Father Was a Toltec, 1988. Although Sapogonia appeared in print after Toltec, it was finished long before work on Toltec was completed, and this is the order in which I prefer to discuss the texts.⁵

The speaking/writing subject of The Mixquiahuala Letters occupies the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico, the third space of translation and negotiation Chicanos inhabit between the violence of racism in the U.S. and the violence of rejection as “pochos” in Mexico. While the journey to Mexico as idealized homeland appears in other Chicano narratives. Castillo's text reveals the gender specificity of this experience. Not only is Teresa viewed as a “pocha,” she is perceived as sexually available, as whore, because she is traveling “alone” (that is, in the company of another woman, Alicia).

The text also explores the borderlands of sexuality and gender between women and women, and women and men, focusing on the nature of the bond between Teresa and Alicia. Much of their bonding, both positive and negative, is established through their relationships with men and their internalization of various discourses on femininity and sexuality. They compete for men, Alicia perceiving Teresa to be at an advantage as the more traditionally attractive of the two; both are loyally there for the other when one relationship after the other fails. Teresa struggles with the limits set on their relationship by the internalized and real devaluation of women. She saves Alicia from threatened rape, in spite of her knowing “there is little in the end i can do. i have a vagina too” (78). She would like to convince Alicia of her beauty, which she praises in the homoerotic Letter 14, but knows hearing it from Teresa would not help: “They were only the words of another woman” (46).

Although their relationship is described as a “love affair,” not devoid of homoerotic attraction, other barriers rise up in the borderlands of race, culture and class and combine with those related to gender and sexuality to prevent the establishment of real intimacy between the two women. Letter 13 begins “Alicia, why i hated white women and sometimes didn't like you” (43), and ends with the balancing of Alicia's class- and skin-privilege against her perceived inferiority in physical attractiveness. The contradictory positioning of Teresa's subjectivity is seen in the juxtaposition of these two letters. In one she loves Alicia's beauty; in the other she hates her for her privilege and assigns herself superiority on the basis of attractiveness to men.

Teresa feels betrayed by Alicia's ignorance of Mexican culture that places the women at times in physical jeopardy, as in Letter 23. Teresa's betrayal of Alicia also has to do with cultural difference. Teresa “lies” to Alicia, letting her believe that men are more attracted to her for her body, while she knows that it is because she is docile. In spite of her rebellious independence and even hostile indifference to men, she struggles with the internalization of maternal and cultural discourses on submissive femininity. After she has been left by Alexis, the one man she allowed herself to open up to, she frames a picture she has drawn “of a woman whose eyes bulge comically and whose hair is aflame, but who sits with hands restrained on her lap. She wears a rebozo … and the face is her own Indian one” (113).

While the text uses the image of the mirror to speak of the relationship between the two women, their mirroring of each other works paradoxically against their identification, due at times to the inaccuracy of the representation. In the other each sees the reflection of her own need and dependence from which she must avert her gaze. Yet they love each other more than men, and are “driven to see the other improved in her own reflection” (23).

Just as Teresa's subjectivity is multiple and cannot be reduced to any one of a number of contradictory positionings, the text itself insists on polyvalency and resists the closure of dominant narrative. The reader is presented with a multiplicity of endings: the author informs us Cortázar-style at the beginning that the letters may be read on their own or in any order, and offers three possible combinations. As published, the ending foregrounds the bonding between the two women through failed relationships with men. On discovering that her lover has killed himself, Alicia cries out Teresa's name (although we must remember the writing subject's control of the narrative event, i.e., Teresa reconstructs the event in this way). The other endings, labeled the conformist, the cynic, and the quixotic, represent other possible ways of living out different strands of Teresa's subjectivity—the confirmation of maternal and cultural dictates in the conformist, safely recuperated within the traditional, extended Mexican family; the confirmation of women's betrayal of women in the cynic, as Alicia takes off for Puerto Rico with Teresa's boyfriend; and the quixotic preparations for yet another trip to Mexico in the version that ends with the first letter, in spite of or perhaps because of all they have learned. The text's meaning is in no one of these endings and in all.

The epistolary form, in which Teresa as writing subject seeks self-understanding through the sifting and reconstructing of experience, opens up a space for other genres, such as poetry, and also for other points of view. By including a poem from Alexis' point of view, Teresa practices a kind of “textual revenge.” Having spurned her, he is forced to witness her dazzling entrance into a club on the arm of a dashing escort (115–17).

Sapogonia presents a similar project of negotiation with and translation of male narrative form and male point of view. The text offers a plurality of narrative positions: a selectively omniscient third-person narrator, a second-person narrator and the “I” of the male subject, Máximo Madrigal. The parodic intent of the text is visible in the definition of the anti-hero offered by the female character of the novel, Pastora Velásquez Aké, before the novel even begins. In this definition, the anti-hero is indistinguishable from the hero: “1. In mythology and legend, a man who celebrates his own strength and bold exploits. 2. Any man who notes his special achievements. 3. The principal male character in a novel, poem, or dramatic work” (3).

The text executes a series of maneuvers that position women readers to not identify with Máximo, yet Pastora is only partially available for identification. Her multiple and contradictory subjectivity is at once revealed and concealed by the narrative. Although she and Máximo share an imaginary shaped by mestizo culture and history, they are very differently positioned in relation to that culture and history as political subjects and as woman and man. Máximo's subjectivity is constructed in opposition to Woman as inaccessible enigma and vagina dentata. His masculinity is defined contradictorily in relation to his desire for primordial unity, imaged by the textual fusion of Pastora and Coatlicue, pre-Columbian goddess of the union of opposites, and his terror of the absorption of his identity in that unity. A visual example of this particular dynamic of masculine identity in Chicano culture is David Ávalos' hubcap sculpture “Straight-Edge Razor Taco,” depicting female genitalia whose labia are represented by a razor.⁶ Máximo needs to see Pastora in this way to maintain a fixed sense of identity; paradoxically, she is threatening to him if she does represent wholeness and threatening to him if she does not. Castillo's text recognizes the potential violence towards women that lies just beneath the surface of this scenario: the feared and desired razor can easily be turned against the woman. The novel begins and ends with Máximo's murder of Pastora. The final episode is presented as a dream, but at the beginning of the novel Máximo had revealed that in his life the boundaries between dream and reality are blurred, and that his dreams are of two kinds: those that reflect his present and those that are prophetic (11).

Certain passages in the novel and especially the Epilogue that closes it reveal Pastora's complicity with the objectification of woman necessary for this construction of masculine identity. Although various alternative narratives are available to her—for example, what is perceived by others as her lesbian life with Perla, an alternative that recurs in an explicitly sexual relationship with Mary Lou while Pastora is in prison—she is deeply attracted by her relationship with Máximo, hooked on her own objectification as enigma and object of desire. As female subject, she both desires the Other and desires to be desired as Other. Her enigmatic opacity also functions as a shield from intimacy in ways that remind the reader of Teresa—both contemptuously independent of men and dependent on them.

Her attraction to an opposite kind of life with Eduardo, the political activist, culminates in the stable marriage complete with male son idyllically presented in the Epilogue, In an ironic writer like Castillo, this scene reads almost like a parody of the Holy Family (Eduardo is even a carpenter). And there is a snake in this paradise. Pastora knows that sooner or later Máximo will call again and sooner or later “it would all begin again” (311). She will continue being his “celluloid fantasy,” his Coatlicue. Of course the reader is privy to Máximo's prophetic dream and knows the dangers involved for Pastora in playing this role. Sapogonia is a fascinating text that explores male fantasy, its potential for violence against women and the female subject's struggle to interpret herself both within and outside of this discourse on femininity.

As Alarcón points out, the linguistic status of the speaking subject of much Anglo-American theory is taken for granted. The silencing of women of color writers involves the enforcement of dominant linguistic conventions. Toltec's bilingual format—not code-switching but a mix of monolingual poems in English or in Spanish—is part of Castillo's struggle for interpretive power, reclaiming the space of literary authority.

Even more than in Letters or Sapogonia, in Toltec the multiple “I” is apprehended in various positions of racial and economic dominance that create a sense of group identity based on shared culture and historical oppression.

As Hurtado remarks, in much writing by women of color, “the (white) Man” is visible mostly in different state apparatuses. The poem “Me and Baby,” chronicling a futile wait in the welfare office, reveals the economic conditions that break down the dichotomy between public and private for poor women. Hurtado points out that, “the American state has intervened constantly in the private lives and domestic arrangements of the working class … There is no such thing as a private sphere for people of color except that which they manage to create and protect in an otherwise hostile environment” (849). This is quite different from certain white and middle-class feminist projects of projecting private issues into the public sphere (850).

As desiring and speaking subject, the “I” of the poetic texts explores a subjectivity of marginalization—what it means to be poor; what it means to be hated by others for no reason of unique self-hood, but only because of skin color and culture; what it means to be the daughter o-pub-f a Mexican woman and a Mexican man. This exploration takes the reader through the first section, “The Toltec,” focusing on what was received and rejected from father and mother, through the second section, “La Heredera,” pursuing that inheritance in the ways heterosexual desire and the heterosexual woman have been culturally defined, and through the third section, “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain,” in which female bonding and lesbian desire are presented as non-utopian possibility.

The final poem of this section, “I Am the Daughter/Mother Who Has Learned,” reveals the poetic project of self-understanding and self-naming as neither one nor the other but multiple: as daughters/mothers/lovers to unlearn what has been learned about gender and sexuality and open up the space for women loving women: “Released to nowhere, / we can return / to each other / baptized with new names / like nuns sanctified / by virtue of / having named ourselves” (49).

As in the other two texts, narrative structuring adds to the play of multiple subjectivity. The book is divided into four sections culminating in “In My Country,” which is made up of poems of social protest. This structure privileges the positioning of the multiple female subject in the collective struggle of a group against racial, cultural and economic domination. At the same time, the production of the collective “we” of the third section, for example in the poem “We Would Like You to Know,” seems to depend on the prior accounting of self in the first three sections, including the self as gendered through different cultural discourses and including the lesbian self. Besides the collective “we” denouncing stereotypes of Mexicans in “We Would Like You to Know,” there is the male “I” of “Tomás de Utrera's First Day of Spring” meditating on death in Amerika, very different from the parodic construction of Máximo's “I” in Sapogonia or from the textual revenge visible behind Alexis' “I” in Letters.

The book ends with the title poem of the final section, “In My Country,” a utopian vision of a world that has put an end to multiple oppressions. The final lines of this poem read “In my world the poet sang loud / and clear and everyone heard / without recoiling. It was sweet / as harvest, sharp as tin, strong / as the western wind, and all had / a coat warm enough to bear it” (75). This final text privileges another aspect of the multiple subject of Toltec: the writer who pens the texts and constructs the collective “we” and the other “I”'s—female and male. In “A Christmas Gift for the President of the United States, Chicano Poets, and a Marxist or Two I've Known in My Time,” the Chicana writing subject identifies literary authority with male and white-skin privilege. The poem underlines the difference Hurtado examines between women of color and white women in relational position to the source of power. While white women are subordinated through seduction, they at least occupy what Hurtado calls the “spectator's seat”; the Chicana and her language, subordinated through rejection, are “barred from all public discourse” (848):

My verses have no legitimacy.
A white woman inherits
her father's library,
her brother's friends. Privilege
gives language that escapes me.
Past my Nahua eyes
and Spanish surname, English syntax
makes its way to my mouth
with the grace of a clubbed foot.

(53)

The appropriation of literary production and authority as male, white and privileged cancels the Chicana as subject; the Chicana who writes does not exist: “so these are not poems, i readily admit, / as i grapple with non-existence, / making scratches with stolen pen … / Rape is not a poem. / Incest does not rhyme” (52–53).

“Christmas Gift” and “Esta mano” capture the psychic and material violence done to women of color, as well as what is necessary to overcome the opposition to a Chicana writing. In “Christmas Gift,” the writing subject declares: “Something inherent resists / the insistence that i don't exist” (53). The poem “Esta mano” undermines the dichotomy of the body and writing in ways that are very different from the jouissance of some French feminist writers, showing rather the pain of the process: “¿poemas? / no tengo / poemas / tengo / esta mano que / escribe” (71). Language fragments under the strain of writing this particular mestiza body which is self and other at once: “… este verso sería / de ella—la otra / … Su cuerpo que es / su petate, piso, caja, cárcel, casa, / canasta, campo, columpio, costal, co / mal, tamal, topacio, tan tin tan / to que aguantar tendrá que brotar / poemas, Ilorar poemas, vomitar y orinar poemas (71–72).

Writing the Chicana “I” questions the authority of dominant discourses, and resists the appropriation of the knowing subject either male or female that “forgets” race and class oppression. Chicana writers', like Castillo's, struggle to claim the “I” of literary discourse is inseparable from their struggle for empowerment in the economic, social and political spheres.

Notes

1. (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987): vii.

2. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras. Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldúa, ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1990): 356–69.

3. “The Commitment to Theory,” New Formations 5 (Summer 1988): 10–11.

4. Signs 14:4 (Summer 1989): 836.

5. The Mixquiahuala Letters (Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Press, 1986); My Father Was a Toltec (Albuquerque: West End Press, 1988); Sapogonia (Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Press, 1990).

6. In the catalogue for his show “Café Mestizo” at Intar Gallery, in which the piece is reproduced, the artist refers to it as “the management's impersonation of La Malinche” (Café Mestizo. New York: Intar Gallery, 1989, inside front cover.)