SOURCE: "'A Deep Racial Memory of Love': The Chicana Feminism of Cherrie Moraga," in Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings, edited by Asunción Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, 1989, pp. 48-61.

One of the most pressing and current feminist debates in the U.S. is the long-standing complaint that U.S. Third World women have lodged in regard to the continued racism within Anglo-American feminist circles; the accusations tend to focus on the latter's failure to acknowledge, take into account, or address the issues of women of color. Even the most well-intentioned feminists find themselves being asked about, and thus responding to, the questionability of women's liberation when an entire population is oppressed. During the seventies, a new genre of Chicana poetry emerged that began to address some of those issues; in them, the Chicana speaker rails against the Anglo-American women's liberationist for her condescension, her lack of sensitivity, and her choosing of the agenda for all women. Such is the context for Marcela Lucero's poem, "No More Cookies, Please":

    WASP liberationist
    you invited me
    token minority
    but your abortion idealogy
    failed to integrate me.
    Over cookies and tea
    you sidled up to me and said
    'Sisterhood is powerful.'

¹

Certainly Chicanas were not alone in their evaluation of the Anglo-American feminist movement. In Black activist and academic circles, to mention only a few, open debates with some of the most widely respected feminist theorists in the Anglo-American world took place; again, the accusations focused on white women having co-opted, generalized, condescended to, or ignored the perspective of women of color. These debates were public, as we can appreciate from Audre Lorde's "Open Letter to Mary Daly" and Barbara Smith's "Towards a black feminist criticism,"² and served as a springboard to openly raising the questioning that remains controversial today. Because of these and many other initiatives, some Anglo-American feminists began to appreciate that their presumptuousness about the "liberation" of "minority women" was actually preventing any meaningful dialogue from taking place between white and Third World women. Likewise we learned that our own problematized definition of liberation was not a model to be imposed on others. Nothing could be clearer than Chicana poet Bernice Zamora's recent affirmation: "I'm not a feminist because I wish not to imitate the North American white woman."³

Those of us who are bilingual (and many of us who are not) have noticed one of the few Spanish words that fully and completely integrates itself into everyday English is "machismo." More dramatically, we have begun to hear a feminine form, macha, a tough, patriarchally-defined woman who is not necessarily of Latina heritage. We are familiar, too, with the complaints of Anglo-American women traveling in Latin American countries, about what they have called "the rampant machismo," and their testimonies that read like diatribes against a culture they claim to love. They wonder aloud how their Latin American counterparts can tolerate it. Likewise, we hear the defenses of these cultures; machismo is just as prevalent in the U.S., but with greater degrees of subtleties; a far higher percentage of women are doctors and lawyers in Latin America than in the U.S., a fact that has been true for most of the century and is not simply the result of the liberation movements of the seventies. There is a respect for the older woman in the Latin American culture that the U.S. would do well to learn and practice as well.⁴

A further complication of the question was incorporated into a Chicana's response to the machismo from which she personally suffered. Such has been the case in poems like "Machismo Is Part of Our Culture":

     Hey Chicano bossman
     don't tell me that machismo is part of our culture
        if you sleep
     and marry W.A.S.P.
        You constantly remind me,
        me, your Chicana employee
     that machi-machi-machismo
     is part of our culture.
        I'm conditioned, you say,
     to bearing machismo
     which you only learned
     day before yesterday.
        At home you're no patrón
        your liberated gabacha
        has gotcha where
        she wants ya.
        y a mi me ves cara
        de steppin' stone.
     Your culture emanates
        from Raza poster on your walls
        from bulletin boards in the halls
        and from the batos who hang out at the barrio bar.
     Chicanismo through osmosis
     acquired in good doses
     remind you
     to remind me
     that machi-machi-machismo
     is part of our culture.

⁵

In Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, "Para un revolucionario," the speaker must remind her "carnal" that she, too, is Raza and would like to share in the dream of the revolution that, up until that time, he had only offered to his hermanos:

     Pero your voice is lost to me, carnal,
     in the wail of tus hijos
     in the clatter of dishes
     and the pucker of beans on the stove.
     Your conversations come to me
     de la sala where you sit,
     spreading your dream to brothers,
     where you spread that dream like damp clover
     for them to trod upon,
     when I stand here reaching
     para ti con manos bronces that spring
     from mi espíritu
     (for I too am Raza).

⁶

We also learned that sexuality and its free choice and practice—a major component of white feminism—was simply not a unilateral agenda for women of color, or not always prioritized as it was with white feminists. Rather, we began to see that it had to be viewed concurrently with other issues such as class, ethnicity, cultural norms, traditions, and the paramount position of the family. This issue alone resulted in difficult lessons for white women who had not yet begun to perceive the complexities of being a Latina woman in the U.S., let alone a Latina feminist.

For all of these reasons, Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasópor sus labios is a timely and important work.⁷ It is a compendium of nearly a decade of Moraga's works that includes short fiction, poetry, and testimonial essay. Two of those essays, whose length comprise the majority of that book, contain the essence of Moraga's thinking, incorporating dreams, journal entries, and poetry as part of her testimonial discourse. One of the essays in particular, a work she has entitled "A Long Line of Vendidas," addresses some of the issues I have just mentioned and will be the focus of this essay.

The naming of this essay (a title appropriated, whose meaning is then reassigned, an ironic and contemporary use of the term "vendida") not only connects Moraga to a mestiza Chicana past but also questions, reevaluates, and finally takes issue with it. As we shall see, the customary uses of the vendida myth are restructured in Moraga's analysis in order to forge a reevaluation of the Malinche legend from which it derives.

The entire collection begins with the words: "Este libro covers a span of seven years." From the outset, the speaker prepares the reader for the bilingual text that ensues: the trajectory of the light-skinned Chicana whose paternal Anglo surname⁸ helps her pass for white in a culture that demands conformity from her. Submerged into this dominant culture, alien to her maternal Chicana heritage, Moraga uses the act of writing as a process of concientización in order to reclaim her Chicanismo. The writer's relationship with her text, as a medium by which to define and articulate herself, parallels a process of withdrawal and then renewal; that is, her separation from both family and culture lasts until she is eventually led back to these heritages as the política (radical political woman) of the last essay whose feminist, lesbian consciousness offers us a theoretical basis for some of the above-mentioned issues.

Her purpose, she tells us in the introduction, is not merely artistic or literary, but rather political "because we are losing ourselves to the gavacho" (p. iii). In this sense, the book itself becomes a kind of sacrificial offering, thereby aligning it with other Latin American testimonial texts whose purposes are to counteract or give voice to a certain historical circumstance by the act of writing or converting oneself into what René Jara has called, "testigo, actor y juez."⁹ That which Moraga witnesses, acts upon, and judges is the confluence of the two social movements that inform her discourse: the women's movement and the Chicano movement.

In an act that places her within her historic and literary moment, Cherríe Moraga (like so many Chicana/o writers) draws upon, conjures, reinvents, and reinterprets Mexican myth and pre-Hispanic heritage. Like other Chicana writers of her generation (and certain Mexican writers of the previous one). Moraga begins her own analysis by a contemporary Chicana feminist application of the Malinche myth and its personal significance to her. While Moraga is not original in her desire to reassess Malinche, her view of the myth does offer a sharp departure from contemporary Chicana re-evaluations. In both literature and criticism, Malinche's mythical presence has affirmed the fact that neither Mexicans or Chicanos (although for different reasons in each case) have made their peace with her. When Chicana writers began their re-assessment, almost all of them spoke in counterpoint to Octavio Paz' landmark essay, "Los hijas de la Malinche," calling themselves instead "las hijas de la Malinche."

Paz' work underscores the need for Mexicans to examine their history in order to elucidate answers to their questions of identity. Paz sees Malinche as the ultimate Mother figure, but neither the Great Mother embodied in the female deities of the Aztec empire nor the Virgin Mother as represented by Guadalupe. Rather, she is the mythical, even metaphorical mother, her flesh serving as a symbol of the Conquest, the rape of Mexico.¹⁰

The well-known story is as follows: Malinche's mother, in an act of respect or fear toward her new husband, sold her daughter into slavery so that the son born of the new marriage would inherit both the title and the crown due the young Malintzín Tenepal (Malinche). When Hernán Cortés arrived in Tabasco, Malintzín was among the group of young women presented to him. Because Malinche grew up in the Valley of Mexico, she spoke Nahuatl; her residence with the Tabasco Indians made her bilingual. Soon thereafter she also learned Spanish and with this, the Spaniards renamed her doña Marina. Thus, by the time she set off with Cortés (actually to return home), she had already been offered twice as an object of exchange by the weaker of two parties in order to assuage any possible violence by the stronger.

This act, inspiring countless poems by both Mexican and Chicana writers, has offered as many points of view. Perhaps because Malinche is associated with the Aztec past, mestizaje, and violence of the Conquest, she may also be read as a metaphor for the silencing of the Indian voice that encased this act. Thus, in Rosario Castellanos' poem "La Malinche," for example, the poet puts words into Malinche's mouth, making her the speaker who now protests her use as an object of exchange, a currency traded for coffee beans, a colonized object who berates the woman responsible for the transaction—her mother. Although sympathetic to her plight, by such a characterization Castellanos simultaneously allows the reader to imagine Malinche's voice while still casting her as a victim.¹¹ Thus, the victimization of Malinche does not represent a contrary view to many male writers of her generation.¹²

Chicana poet Lucha Corpi also writes about her as a victim in her series, "Marina Poems." In the one entitled "Marina Mother," the speaker sums up Malinche's dilemma by addressing herself to Malinche's mother:

     Tú no la querías ya y él la negaba
     y aquel que cuando niño ¡mamá! le gritaba
     cuando creció le puso por nombre "la chingada."

¹³

If these poets seem to indicate a Malinche vindication (and they are seconded by what can now be called a Chicana tradition of writers, critics, and historians such as Norma Alarcón, Cordelia Candelaria, Adelaida del Castillo, and Marcela Lucero-Trujillo),¹⁴ others have written about how painful it is to be Malinche or her daughter ("como duele ser Malinche"),¹⁵ or how they long for her to redeem them, or to finally speak in her own voice, as in Sylvia Gonzales' "I Am Chicana":

     I am Chicana
     Waiting for the return
     of la Malinche,
     to negate her guilt,
     and cleanse her flesh
     of a confused Mexican wrath
     which seeks reason
     to the displaced power of Indian deities.
     I am Chicana
     Waiting for the coming of a Malinche
     to sacrifice herself
     on an Aztec altar
     and Catholic cross
     in redemption of all her forsaken daughters.

¹⁶

In a later Chicana rendition of Malinche, the speaker is Malinche herself, Malinche the feminist, Malinche who addresses herself to Cortés after his refusal to marry her, even after she bears his child:

     Huhn-y para eso te di
     mi sangre y mi pueblo!
     Sí, ya lo veo, gringo desabrido,
     tanto así me quieres
     que me casarás con tu subordinado Don Juan,
     sin más ni más
     como si fuera yo
     un kilo de carne
     —pos ni que fueras mi padre
     pa' venderme a tu antojo
     güero infeliz …
                           !!!
     Etcétera
        etcétera.

¹⁷

For Moraga, then, beginning to write, that is, an articulation of her Chicana identity, must include a re-evaluation of the problematic "role-model" Malintzín, the "traitor" and "chingada" she was taught to hate, mistrust, and never, under any circumstances, emulate. Even the Chicana who is unaware of Malinche's historical role "suffers under her name," Moraga claims. By underscoring the inherent contradiction in Malinche's dilemma (and, by association, all Mexican and Chicana women's), Moraga also confronts her own problem and resultant pain: the daughter betrayed by a mother who showed preference for her male children. What makes Moraga's assessment different is that in this case the daughter, in turn, is accused of betraying her race by choosing the sex of her mother as the object of her love. On the one hand, the importance of family and the closeness and attachment of the mother/daughter relationship is "paramount and essential in our lives" because the daughter can always be relied upon to "remain faithful a la madre" (p. 139). But the converse is not always the case; while the fidelity of the daughter is expected, the mother, who is also socialized by the culture, does not always reciprocate. It is here that Moraga parts company with other Chicana writers.

While other writers focus on Malinche herself as if they were her actual daughters, Moraga prefers to direct her analysis toward Malinche's mother, likening her to her own. A case in point is that, for both Malinche and Moraga, brothers were their mothers' choice. In order to show her "respect [for] her mother" (p. 90), the young Moraga was required not only to wait on her adolescent brother and his friends, but also to do so graciously.

The legacy of Malinche also lingers for any woman with the audacity to consider her own needs before those of the men of her family. By placing herself (or any woman, including her daughter) first, she is accused of being a traitor to her race (p. 103). By fulfilling her daughter's desire and need for love, the mother is also labeled la chingada. Her "Mexican wifely duty" means that sons are favored, husbands revered. "Traitor begets traitor," Moraga warns: like mother, like daughter. Malinche's mother, then, was the first traitor (mother) who begot the second one (daughter).

While Moraga stresses the daughter's inevitable pain with the discovery of this truth, she equates that pain with Malinche's: "What I wanted from my mother was impossible" (p. 103). In this respect, she focuses on Malinche's relationship with her mother: a daughter betrayed. All of these factors contribute to the cultural messages the young Chicana learns about herself and ultimately internalizes: that is, the "inherent unreliability of women" and female "natural propensity for treachery" (pp. 99-101).

Moraga continues the Malinche analogy by stressing her own identity as the product of a bicultural relationship: the daughter of a white father and a brown mother. "To be a woman," a brown woman, and a Chicana entailed reclaiming the "race of my mother." It meant loving the Chicana in herself and in other women; it meant departing from her mother and Malinche's model and "embrac[ing] no white man" (p. 94). It meant finally returning to the race of her mother through her love for other women—her Chicana lesbianism. Although Moraga acknowledges that her mother may be a "modern-day Chicana Malinche" (p. 117) by marrying a white man, she herself, the "half-breed Chicana," in a departure from both these predecessors and a transgression of all standards and norms, chooses a sexuality "which excludes all men, and therefore, most dangerously Chicano men" (p. 117). It is an act that labels her as the worst traitor of all, a "malinchista," one who is swayed by foreign influences. Her conclusion, paradoxically, brings her back to her people, the people of her mother: "I come from a long line of vendidas" (p. 117), she confesses, although she is obviously giving a new and perhaps reclaimed meaning, if such a thing is possible, to the word vendida.

In this new vocabulary, vendida refers to how Moraga is perceived rather than how she perceives herself. Similarly, it allows its author to poke fun at such labels. The term, like "bruja" and "loca," used specifically to trivialize women's experience, can now be seen as an act of female empowerment. Such appears to be the case for Moraga. In order to avoid being classified in this manner, she must be servile to one man and she must denounce her sexual love for women. In order to be the socially accepted Chicana, even if she is a politically active radical, she must not question the foundational basis of her loyalty and commitment to la causa, a commitment that, in Moraga's view, also entails an unswerving heterosexuality, a sexual loyalty to the Chicano male (p. 105).

Moraga reports that the current debate among Chicana women focuses on how to "get their men right" (p. 105) rather than on questioning the premises of what Adrienne Rich has called "compulsory heterosexuality."¹⁸ The Chicana feminist who critiques sexism in the Chicano community finds herself in a personal, political, and racial bind. She will be called vendida if she finds the "male-defined and often anti-feminist" values of the Chicano community difficult to accept. She will be accused of selling out to white women, of abandoning her race, of having absorbed the struggle of the middle class, of being malinchista, "puta," or "jota" (p. 98), even if she is heterosexual; it is greatly exacerbated if she is not. Thus, her role is not only the gender-neutral one of joining her man in earning a living and struggling against racism, but is also the gender-specific one as cultural nurturer, responsible, among other tasks, for the socialization of children. If she then cares to "challenge sexism," she will undergo this particular struggle single-handedly because this juggling act will also require that she "retain … her femininity so as not to offend or threaten her man" (p. 107). In this sense, Moraga sees her in the same light as the "Black Super-woman," the myth that only black women themselves were able to dispel.

In order to be a Chicana feminist, then, it is not enough for Moraga to examine the lost pages of history in order to reclaim female heroes, though this is one of its essential ingredients. Too often, these female luminaries are presented in relation to their men instead of in their own right. Calling this the "alongside-our-man-knee-jerk-phenomenon,"¹⁹ Moraga asserts that the most valuable work being done in Chicana scholarship is that which puts "the female first, even when it means criticizing el hombre" (p. 107). She finally concludes that learning to do a self-study of one's culture, learning to read it critically, is not analogous to betrayal of that culture (p. 108).

In that vein, she takes issue with Chicana historians, guilty of the "knee-jerk phenomenon," who have attempted to trivialize the white women's movement as having nothing to offer them. Perhaps, because it was precisely within this movement that Moraga herself sought refuge and found it, she is particularly sensitive to this charge. Although her essay does not reveal this personal information, and the entire book could hardly be read as an apology to white feminism, it does contain a list of activities in which feminist women of color have been working at the grass-roots level for a decade: sterilization abuse, battered women's shelters, rape crisis centers, health care, and more (p. 106). Thus, she is quick to note that the use of white male theoreticians, such as Marx and Engels, is perfectly acceptable within the Chicano community but, paradoxically, the use of white female theoreticians is not, either within the Chicana or Chicano community. "It is far easier for the Chicana to criticize white women who … could never be familia, than to take issue with or complain … to a brother, uncle, father" (pp. 106-7).

The heterosexual Chicana who criticizes her male counterpart or relatives will jeopardize her chances of receiving male approval, be it through her son or her lover: an approval necessary to being a política, an approval that allows access to, or a taste of, male privilege, an approval that will procure her a husband. She is what Evangelina Enríquez and Alfredo Mirandé have identified as the "contemporary vendida."²⁰ This situation is further exacerbated if she is not heterosexual, although these authors do not discuss this point. Moraga explains that only the woman intent on the approval can be affected by the disapproval (p. 103). The lesbian, on the other hand, not subject to male sanctions and out of his control, will often serve as an easy scapegoat; weaknesses in the movement can be blamed on her, the model she sets for other women being a dangerous example. Her decision to take control of her own sexuality, as well as her independence, likens her to the Malinche model we discussed earlier. She is a "traitor" who "succumbs" to the foreign influences that have corrupted her people (p. 113).

In a study of the cultural stereotypes typically available to Chicana women, Shirlene Soto, for example, has noted that the figures most often used—Malinche, La Llorona and the Virgin of Guadalupe—have historically been models to control women, a point with which Moraga concurs. Soto, like Enríquez and Mirandé, also fails to address the issue of how much more poignant and true all those statements are when there is a clear sexual rejection of the male, as in Moraga's case. Nevertheless, sexual rejection does not necessarily signify a cultural one.

Viewed as an agent of the Anglos, the Chicana lesbian is seen as an aberration, someone who has unfortunately caught his disease. For these reasons, perhaps, Moraga believes that control of and over women cannot be based or blamed entirely on these so-called inherited cultural stereotypes but rather on the institution of obligatory heterosexuality. Nowhere in print had any Chicano or Chicana addressed lesbianism or homosexuality in their theoretical analyses of liberation. For this, Moraga would have to turn to the Black feminists, the same women, she asserts, who had served as role models for the Chicana feminist movement in its formation. "If any direct 'borrowing' was done, it was from Black feminists" (p. 132) and not from the white feminists normally blamed for infiltrating the Chicana feminist movement. Until she had this example, then, her sexuality had isolated and estranged her from her race: "It seemed to me to be a Chicana lesbian put me far beyond the hope of salvation" (p. 125). Yet she recognizes now that because one aspect of a culture is oppressive, it does not mean "throwing out the entire business of racial/ethnic culture" that is essential to identity (p. 127).

Such a questioning brings us to the ambiguous title and subtitle of her book. Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios. By choosing to represent the book bilingually, she again likens herself to Malinche, her bilingual and trilingual forebear. "Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios" suggests that a silence is about to be broken, though the multiple possibilities of "sus" (her, his, their, your) do not reveal exactly who will break it: Moraga? Malinche? Chicana lesbians? All of them? In this way, her essay approximates the titles of Latin American women's testimonial discourse: "Let me speak!" "They Won't Take Me Alive," "Tales of Disappearance and Survival," All of these indicate a strength, a fortitude, and a resolve to break silences and assert one's voice. In the case of so many of Moraga's Latin American counterparts, a lack of education has impeded their single-handed publishing of their own testimonies; thus, many will contain a "co-producer" to actually write their discourse. For Moraga, the education is not a problem; in her case, bilingualism is the impediment.

Having learned what has mockingly been called "kitchen Spanish" or "Spanglish," yet also needing to be fluent in English in order to operate within the dominant culture and obtain the education that her mother encouraged her to pursue, Moraga confesses to her anglicization; it was a means to achieve her much-desired independence. In this sense, there is also a linkage; her reacquaintance with her Chicano roots required a return to Spanish, required a knowledge of it, implied an attitude on the part of the speaker who refused to be humiliated any longer by her bilingualism/biculturalism with such terms as "nolingual."⁷

When Moraga discovers a bicultural group whose most comfortable language is what I prefer to call "bilingual" (bilingual as a noun as well as an adjective), she finally is in a position of not feeling shame for "shabby" English or "incorrect" Spanish. Having come from a home where English was spoken, Moraga acknowledges that this claim on, and longing for, her Spanish "mothertongue" had no rational explanation. After all, she did not have her language stripped from her, as had so many children of the Southwest. Here, it is more appropriate to consider it the ancient language of her heart. In this sense, language is not simply a means of communicating ideas, passions, feelings, and theories, but is also symbolic, representing, among other emotions, love for one's culture. As it becomes a touch-stone for that culture, especially in circumstances of exile, one must also relearn its nuances as one learns to accept the entirety of one's culture, both its positive and its negative. "I know this language in my bones … and then it escapes me" (p. 141). Humiliated and mortified, Moraga must call the Berlitz language school in New York City in order to return to her Spanish, to her love of her mothertongue, to a love for her mother, to her love for her culture, to her love for her raza, to her "deep racial memory of love." "I am a different woman in Spanish. A different kind of passion. I think, soy mujer en español. No macha. Pero mujer. Soy Chicana—open to all kinds of attack" (p. 142). One of these attacks, no doubt, is the accusation that she does not belong and does not speak the language of her mother, even if she feels it in her bones. She articulates the contradiction she faces with one of her journal entries after the Berlitz episode: "Paying for culture. When I was born between the legs of the best teacher I could have had" (p. 141). The painful journey she embarks upon in order to discover this truth allows her a return to her mother, to her people, to "la mujer mestiza," to a new awareness of what it means to be Malinche's daughter.

notes

1. Marcelo Christine Lucero-Trujillo, "No More Cookies, Please," in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States, ed. Dexter Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 402-3.

2. Lorde's "Open Letter to Mary Daly," in Sister Outsider, in which she discusses the "history of white women who are unable to hear Black women's words, or to maintain dialogue with us" (Trumansburg, N.Y.: The Crossing Press, 1984), 66, and Smith's not knowing "where to begin," in "Toward a black feminist criticism," in Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Judith Newton and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York, London: Methuen, 1986). 3.

3. Parul Desai, "Interview with Bernice Zamora, a Chicana Poet," Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal 2, no. 1 (Summer 1985): 29.

4. Olivia Espin, "Cultural and Historical Influences on Sexuality in Hispanic/Latin women: Implications for Psychotherapy," in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 155.

5. Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo, "Machismo is Part of Our Culture," in The Third Woman, 401-2. The fact that the same author exemplifies both positions, that is, the turning away from both the Anglo-American feminist and the Chicano macho, indicates her articulation of a new voice that will incorporate a feminism specific and appropriate to her Chicana reality.

6. Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Para un revolucionario," in The Third Woman, 381-83 (for you with bronze hands).

7. Cherríe Moraga, "A Long Line of Vendidas," in Loving in the War Years: Lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983). All subsequent passages will be from this edition and the page numbers will be contained within parentheses after each passage.

8. Moraga offers no example of what this surname was but leads us to imagine that in discovering her Chicana roots, she also molts the paternal name in favor of the maternal one.

9. René Jara, "Testimonio y literatura," in Testimonio y Literatura: Monographic Series of the Society for the Study of Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Revolutionary Literatures, no. 3, ed. René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986), 1.

10. Octavio Paz, "Los hijos de la Malinche," in El laberinto de la soledad (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973), 59-80.

11. Rosario Castellanos, "La Malinche," in Poesía no eres tú (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1972), 295-97.

12. Most notable are the views of Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz.

13. Lucha Corpi, "Marina Madre," in Palabras de Mediodia/Noon Words, trans. Catherine Rodriguez-Nieto (Berkeley: El Fuego de Aztlán Publications, 1980), 119. I prefer my own translation of these verses: "You no longer loved her and your husband denied her / When the child that used to call her 'Mamá' / grew up, he called her 'whore.'"

14. Norma Alcarcón, "Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision through Malintzín/or Malinche: Putting Flesh Back on the Object," in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed., ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Women of Color Press, 1983), 182-90; Aledaida del Castillo, "Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective," in Essays on La Mujer, part 1, ed. Rosaura Sánchez (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Center Publications, 1977), 124-49; Marcela Christine Lucero-Trujillo, "The Dilemma of the Modern Chicana Artist and Critic," in The Third Woman, 324-31; Cordelia Candelaria, "La Malinche: Feminist Prototype," Frontiers 5, no. 2 (1980); Rachel Phillips, "Marina/Malinche: Masks and Shadows," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 97-114; Shirlene Soto, "Tres modelos culturales: La Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche y la Llorona," fem, 10 no. 48 (Octubre-Noviembre 1986): 13-16.

15. These exact words appear in two early Chicana poems, "Como duele," by Lorenza Calvillo Schmidt, and an untitled poem by Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, both in Chicanas en la literatura y el arte, ed. Herminio Ríos-C. and Octavio Romano-V. (Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1973).

16. Sylvia Gonzales, "I Am Chicana," in The Third Woman, 422.

17. Angela de Hoyos, "La Malinche a Cortez y Vice Versa (o sea, 'El Amor No Perdona, Ni Siquiera Por Amor')," in Woman, Woman (Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985), 54. (Hmph, and that's why I gave you / my blood and my people! / Yes, now I see it, you uncouth gringo / you love me so much / that you'll marry me off to your subordinate, Don Juan / without a second thought / as if I were a piece of meat / Well, even if you were my father / to go selling me at your whim / you stupid gringo … / !!! / Etcetera / Etcetera).

18. Adrienne Rich. "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," in Women: Sex and Sexuality, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Ethel Spector Person (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 62-91.

19. Cherríe Moraga is perhaps one of the best known Chicana writers outside the Chicana community. She is widely anthologized and the one who most white women quote as a representative Chicana voice. The "alongside-our-man-knee-jerk-phenomenon" appears in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. Treichler's A Feminist Dictionary (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), 41. On the other hand, she is hardly ever anthologized by Chicano critics, which may have been one of the reasons for an essay such as this one. The Mexican feminist magazine, fem, however, has regularly published her poetry. See their issue on Chicanas (10, no. 48 [Octubre-Noviembre 1986]).

20. Evangelina Enríquez and Alfredo Mirandé, "Liberation, Chicana Style: Colonial Roots of Feministas Chicanas," De Colores: A Bilingual Quarterly Journal of Chicano Expression and Thought 4, no. 3 (1978): 15.

21. Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Una cuestión de identidad: ¿Qué significa un nombre?" in Imagenes e identidades: El puertorriqueño en la literatura, ed. Asela Rodríguez de Laguna (Río Piedras, P.R.: Huracán, 1985), 283-88.