[In the following essay, Candelaria considers Portillo Trambley's legacy as a feminist, provides an appreciation of her work, and assesses her place in Chicana literature.]

When she died in 1998, Estela Portillo Trambley, a native of El Paso, Texas, left a public legacy of writing, storytelling, and several decades of teaching influence that I admire greatly and find solid as cuentos and important as cultural artifacts. At the same time I find her literary legacy ideologically complicated and complicating, as important legacies often are.¹ It is this tension between respect for Trambley's obra and my struggle with some of the thematics and signification of some of her representations that in part first drew me to this collection's theme of “millennial anxieties” for, after nearly three decades of working to promote appreciation for raza letters, I find that the notional possibilities associated with “The Millennium” as an idea offer a timely opening for the kind of reconsiderations and appraisals that are associated with the genre of homages, which is one aim of this essay. Intrinsic to the idea of The Millennium and, especially, to writing about that idea is retrospective reflection as a strategy for prospective thinking. In other words, the millennial idea is a trope that demands a backward glance in order to see forward. Ultimately, The Millennium simultaneously symbolizes the end of an era and the beginning of another, even as it is but a continuation. In the Bergsonian sense of the “real time” of memory and experience² The Millennium is, of course, a manufactured marker of duration just like the Chinese, Jewish, and Mayan calendars, to name three which do not mark the end of the second millennium as in the Western Gregorian tradition.

Accordingly, my essay converges with this anthology's timely interrogation of Chicana/o cultural studies within the cusp “between” centuries through its examination of the work of a woman who personified the lived experience of border crossing as an originary, original, and originating personal and material practice. In this I think she is a genuine cultural foremother. This collection's concern with millennial issues of transition parallels my concern with situating and, more precisely, with appreciating (i.e., both valuing and understanding) the body of her work in the broader field of U.S. Latina/o and feminist thought, particularly since Trambley died in the postererías del siglo XXI.³ Further, my title's opening phrase, “engendering re/solutions,” also addresses the idea that Trambley's writing emerged out of the temporal and spatial precipice of the Chicano Movement—what Velez Ibanez calls “The Great Chicano Cultural Convulsive Transition Movement” (128-136)—with its attendant anxieties concerning material and cultural pasts. The ideological preoccupation with political dogma, identity formation, and their effective expression underlie Trambley's drama and fiction.

In this essay I propose that Trambley's work, like the movement itself, exhibited a concomitant utopian interest with engendering solutions to problems of political exclusion, socioeconomic abjection, and canonical erasure. My title pushes the pun of “engender” to denote the process of conceiving, birthing, and creating and also to connote the semiotics of gender inflection. The title similarly exploits the pun embedded in “re/solution” as referring at the same time to something resolved and resolute and also to something that needs to be re-solved or re-addressed. Importantly, depending on context and usage, the noun “resolution” can signify a formal, public declaration (e.g., the resolutions averred in the Declaration of Independence) and a private promise (e.g., a self-improvement program like a New Year's resolution), as well as a collective commitment to heal the wounds of discord (e.g., many NACCS [National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies] resolutions).

This essay examines the nature, and problematic, of Trambley's “feminist legacy,” particularly in terms of her pioneering presence as a woman of the Chicano Renaissance. In my view, Trambley's combined work comprises a significant number of enduring short stories (including the celebrated tale of feminist coming of age, “Paris Gown” [1973]); several full-length dramas that have seen stage production in the United States and abroad (including the controversial, lesbian-themed The Day of the Swallows [1971] and Sor Juana [1983]); the novel Trini (1986), and other writings. As the first female recipient of the Premio Quinto Sol awarded by the germinally influential El Grito and (to my knowledge) as the first Chicana to dramatize lesbianism for the stage, her intellectual impact was at least in part strongly sociological and historical (Lukens: 697). But first, I think, it was literary. Certainly, in terms of her representations of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity/race and their intersection with the related material issues and nodes of social class and power, Trambley inscribed her point of view in unflinching and memorable tracings of one woman's Chicana imaginary. Characterized by a hybrid consciousness of Mexican-Texan biculturality, Spanish-English bilingualism, and resistance to the entrenched vestiges of conquest and colonialism, Trambley expresses the mestizaje of her imaginary through a pointed and unflinching concern with gender relations in the full compound meaning of the term, i.e.) sex roles, sexuality, orientation, and identity, patriarchy, personhood, and power, etc.

Crucial to Trambley's representations of gender/race/class identity markers is her situating of her fiction within specifically identifiable geographies like, for example, contemporary Mexican and North American villages, Tex-Mex border towns, Paris, and colonial Mexico, as well as within a variety of recognizable everyday spaces like family dwellings of middle class, poor, and rich, as well as in cantinas, industry settings, and outdoor garden and nature landscapes. Despite her meticulous attention to the details of locale and physical space, Trambley places the portrayal of fully dimensioned characters at the center of her stories (Dewey: 55; Gonzalez: 318-320). The dramatic conflicts and stresses of daily life compressed in her vivid characterizations dominate the front stage of her narrative fiction, thereby voicing her comprehension of the sexualized and gendered tangle of personal motivations and tango of social behaviors that make up human relations (or what Cixous describes as the project of l'écriture feminine, the resisting of the phallocentrism of closed binary structures [“The Laugh of the Medusa”: 15]). Like Cixous, Portillo Trambley challenged through her work and what we know of her life the received notion that necessarily binds logocentrism, the language-centered capacity for self-expression, in an inseparable yoke with phallocentrism, the male-identified and masculinist imperatives of “Western Civilization” (Cixous, “Laugh”: 15-21). Whether in the tragedy of The Day of the Swallows or the stories in the first edition of Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (1975), Trambley represents the social practices associated with desire, love, courtship, and sexuality as an agonistic contest of conflicting desires which, in the frontera of her imaginary, are fired by the narrowest of masculinist norms (cf. Alarcón: 55; Butler, Bodies That Matter: 123-124) She suggests that the conventions and language of love and romance have been so inf(l)ected by the conflict that women and men of whatever identity and orientation face that they are constrained to express feeling and passion within the narrowest vocabulary of macho-dominant/hembra-subordinate terms (cf. Pérez: 69; Butler, Bodies That Matter: 67-88; Marcus: 263-265). Similarly in her novel, Trini, and her completely revised second edition of Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories (1993), she explores the effects of such a narrow lexicon of intercourse in all its meanings on personal human relations and society as the basis of authentic community, or what Anzaldúa calls the new consciousness of “la mestiza” (765-770).

At the center of her plots Trambley constructs protagonists struggling to express the actual experience of their material lives within society's suffocating grammar of gender relations and who, in that struggle, discover their creative individuality.⁴ Ultimately, the creativity and individuality of her protagonists provide new wor(l)ds of self-reflecting power which usually eventually lead to reintegration into their family, neighborhood, village, and/or social matrix on their own terms. In this, I see Trambley situating the plot and thematics of her stories in the border zone of received gender dichotomies. For instance, Clotilde in “The Paris Gown” and Beatriz in “If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle …” personify the heroics of Trambley's protagonists. The action of her stories typically generates another zone of expression outside the codes of orthodoxy to voice the author's concern with constructing textured mestiza/o worlds of self-reflecting power as in, for example, Refugio and Chucho's relationship in “Pay the Criers” and the ecopoetic theme of Rain of Scorpions (Eagar: 3-7, 57) It is this other expressive zone, or counterdiscourse, that I suggest forms another zone of potential human connectedness, una frontera de Yo-soy-porque-Somos to challenge, resist, deflect, defy, denounce, distort, and, perhaps especially, explode the received patterns of gender rigidities forced upon women and men from the moment of the first natal cry.⁵

To deploy this hypothesis more fully in this essay, I examine one of Trambley's thus far largely ignored short stories, “La Yonfantayn,”⁶ first published in 1985 and later revised for inclusion in the 1993 edition of Rain of Scorpions. That is, I read the narrative for its representation of desire and sexuality and how the characters respond to the gender inflections of conventional courtship, love, and romance. I am specifically interested in decoding the author's use of mimicry and minstrelsy in this narrative. By “mimicry” I refer to imitation for comedic purposes, especially of a parodic and caricaturing nature; by “minstrelsy” I refer to the use of a form of blackface—the disguises by non-African Americans intended to caricature, lampoon, and stereotype African Americans, their origins, and their culture (as in the well-known denigrations of “Amos’n’ Andy,” to name one example). By analogy, as a critical concept for interrogating signs and codes of cultural iconography, “minstrelsy” refers as well to other disguises of ethnoracially different groups for parody and/or derision (Lott, 230). Familiar examples of this non-blackface form include Carmen Miranda as Latina bimbo, Gilbert Roland as Latin lover, Marilyn Monroe as dumb blonde, and Flip Wilson's Geraldine as airhead female and/or drag queen. These representations share one important feature: they typically depict the subjects they are portraying by exaggerating one gender-specific and/or ethnicity- or race-specific characteristic into an extreme caricature that distorts the complex multiple dimensions of their subjects into a flattened stereotype. They also share another key feature: an audience united by what writer Richard Wright describes as “the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in the theater, that is the minstrel technique that makes the ‘white folks’ laugh” (251) The “white folks” in the case of this essay refers to any self-identified person or group that does not or cannot identify with, show empathy for, or respect the full humanity of (in the respective examples cited above) Latinas and Latinos) women generally and blond women specifically, or gay men.

The central question I pursue in this reading of “La Yonfantayn” is, does the mimicry in the story constitute a form of minstrelsy that negatively stereotypes the main characters and their culture? In considering this, I necessarily discuss the terms and problematic of Trambley's deployment of ethnic, gender, and class markers with particular emphasis on how the characters negotiate what Trambley represents as the constricting grammar of gender relations. My focus is on her use of exaggerated stereotypes of conventional gendered femininity and masculinity in her portrayal of the story's two main characters, the Mexican American Alicia and the immigrant Mexican Buti.

“La Yonfantayn” recounts the meeting and courtship of forty-two-year-old Alicia Flores, an overweight property-owning Mexican American widow of independent means, who becomes infatuated with Buti, a womanizing heavy-drinking immigrant from Chihuahua, Mexico, who has decided it is time to quit a life of macho philandering and to settle down, especially if he can do so with a wealthy widow. In personality, Alicia is an assertive task-oriented actor who, at least on the surface of first reading, appears vain and self-absorbed, partly because of her obsession with the old romantic movies she watches on television and with the glamorous movie stars she tries to emulate. These old-fashioned movies from the 1940s and '50s offer her both an escape from the reality of her unexciting middle-aged life as a plump, quickly fading sexual persona and a template of sophisticated conduct for her to imitate as a means of improving what she sees as the dull material facts of her lived experience. Likewise, Buti's personality reveals a self-centered pleasure-seeking middle-aged bachelor who is still trying to make his mark in a capitalistic world that perceives him to be a somewhat ridiculous junk seller when, in his overly optimistic, even Panglossian mind, he prefers to think of himself as an entrepreneur engaged in a legitimate “antique business” (Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories: 104).

The plot of this simple boy-meets-girl tale of romantic pursuit is complicated in several crucial ways, however. First, it actually reverses the familiar conventional outline by presenting instead the plot of girl connives to meet boy, girl pursues boy, he resists, she insists, and after upheaval and conflict, they in the end finally unite sexually as a couple. This reversal contributes to the story's dramatic conflict by placing Alicia in the dominant position of romantic pursuer and Buti in the subordinate place of the desired prey. Nevertheless, since at first he wants to marry her to fulfill his gold-digging greed, he only pretends coyness to ensure that her desire for him will be whetted. For example, to her carpe diem demand on their first date that they quit wasting time on false chivalry and just go to bed with each other, he insists, “Our love is sacred. It must be sanctified by marriage” (106). This heightens the tension between them because Alicia is not accustomed to being rejected when she plays her Chicana femme fatale game of sexual pursuit. After this hard-to-get role playing as foreplay, Buti suddenly realizes that he wasn't really “playing a game anymore. … [She was] the kind of woman he would want to spend the rest of his life with” (107).

Also complicating the standard boy-meets-girl plot is the extent to which Alicia lives a virtual life (Rodriguez, “Introduction”: 5) as an obsessive consumer of old romance movies. Sealed within her fantasy existence she identifies with Hollywood's leading ladies to such a degree that she even absorbs scenes from the silver screen into her everyday life in a way that blurs the boundaries between the materially real and the manufactured experienced-as-real (cf. Williams: 202-204; Bourdieu: 360). For example, snippets from film dialogue continually enter her thoughts and conversation, as when she subjects herself to the trouble and inconvenience of wearing false eyelashes because she “remember[s] Lana Turner with her head on Clark Gable's shoulder, her eyelashes sweeping against her cheeks. Max Factor's finest, Alicia was sure of that” (Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories: 100). Or, in a pivotal moment in the story, she is inspired “to forgive” Buti because of a scene from a late-night movie in which Joan Fontaine goes “to Clark [Gable] to ask forgiveness, [and] to say she was wrong” (108). With causal effectuality, Fontaine's meekness on the screen turns Gable into “a bowl of jelly,” suddenly causing Alicia to realize the efficacy of “[a]ll that feminine submissiveness” (108) and to reconsider her desire—as she suggestively puts it—“to always be on top.” It is at this point that she reverses her solely self-serving demands and dominant position by electing to run to Buti in the middle of the night and fling her contriteness at him with scripted “[w]ords straight from the movie” (109).⁷

This summary of the text's dramatic conflict and ensuing complications serve to link the key forms of mimicry in the story to this essay's consideration of whether it and the story's other elements of humor constitute a form of “brownface” minstrelsy. Some argue that the imitative parodies of mimicry and minstrelsy are damaging because they constitute a form of “cultural malpractice” that misrepresents the markers of gender, ethnic, and race identities and their intersecting nodes (Lott: 231; Williams: 210-212). Accordingly, my reading of “La Yonfantayn” detects in it two major kinds of mimicry: imitation by the characters of dominant culture Euro-American gender and ethnic stereotypes, and imitation by the author of ethnic and racial stereotypes. The first category, mimicry by the characters of dominant culture traits, which they regard as ideals, divides naturally into those portrayed through the Alicia persona and those through Buti's persona.

As the plot summary indicates, Alicia defines herself in relation to the Hollywood movies that obsess her and also in relation to the cosmetics industry that provides her only means of imitating the movie stars on the screen. For example, the very first glance the reader has into her personal imaginary is in the third sentence in the story: “She wanted to be pencil thin like a movie star. She would leaf through movie magazines, imagining herself in the place of the immaculately made-up beauties that stared back at her” (Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories: 99). Alicia pursues her girlish fantasy of transformation into a beautiful princess for her charming prince by imitating an extreme commercial stylization of femme fatale beauty. This manufactured image of perfect external beauty is based largely on retrograde aristocratic standards that emerged from a caste system that allowed, for instance, The Queen—or whoever was considered the state's highest ranking female authority—the wealth and privilege of being idle and unmarked by the imperatives of quotidian work and sweat (Kolbenschlag). Related to this example of Alicia's mimicry are her notions of love and romance, which she also squeezes out of the tube of Hollywood movie scripts. In other words, her personal imaginary of feminine and sexual identity take the form of dominant culture norms as presented in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood scripts which themselves are corrupted variations of the already corrupt social doxa of the “Pretty Woman” as “Queen.” Their cartoon versions of physical beauty, unspontaneous courtship, and sublimation of erotic sensuality teach Alicia a mechanics of social intercourse that her fantasies elevate into a flawed ideal standard of personal identity.

A related example of dominant culture mimicry occurs through the use of lines of motion picture dialogue to replace actual spontaneous conversation.⁸ Both Alicia and Buti borrow lines of dialogue in two key scenes. In the first, Alicia is so excessively moved by a sentimental scene of contrition featuring Joan Fontaine begging “forgiveness” from Clark Gable that she rushes out of her house in her nightclothes to throw herself at Buti and beg his forgiveness. She says to him. “‘I want to be forgiven. How could I have doubted you? I'm so ashamed …’ Words straight from the movie” (109). He recovers from his surprise and eventually enters her virtual Hollywood reality (i.e., fantasy) by literally sweeping her off her feet with one of the screen's most famous lines ever: “‘Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!’ He winked at her and threw her on the bed” (110). The well-paced theatrics of this doubly climactic moment in the plot disclose the author's adroit skills as a dramatist, her first calling as a writer (e.g., in The Day of the Swallows and later in Sor Juana and Other Plays). They also reveal Portillo Trambley's desire to expose both the effects and the efficacy of Hollywood's virtuality as a public curriculum of instruction on physical beauty, gender roles, and sexual relations—described elsewhere in this essay as the tangle and tango of private and public interactions (cf. Cortes: 24-32; Keller: 34-58; McLuhan: 5-15).

Portillo Trambley's skills and literary aims connect to the second broad category of mimicry identified earlier, that is, the imitation of ethnic, racial, and gender stereotypes by the author. Since the story and all the characterizations are constructed and propelled by Estela Portillo Trambley, there clearly is a degree of irony in even making this distinction. My point in doing so is that readers with “suspended disbelief” usually begin the first reading of any fictional narrative by engaging the narrative on its own terms. This requires that the characters' motives and actions be considered first within their fictive words and worlds within the story before attempting to decode them through the filter of the world of material experience that I share with the author (and, of course, with you, the reader of this essay), for this would remove them from their only (virtual, or fictive) actuality. But there are elements in any given fiction that are not filtered through characterization and that therefore, during the first stage of reception, reading, and critical inquiry, can only be attributed to their creator's agency. These include such elements as setting, point of view, figurative imagery and tropes, and the like. It is in these that I am interrogating the underlying premises of the author's mimicry of ethnic and racial cultural stereotypes. (Crucially important here is recognizing that issues of mis/representation are perceptual—like beauty and humor—for their underlying assumptions reside in the eyes and minds of the beholders. Thus, the interpreter—in this essay, I, the reader—has the burden of proof regarding whether a given work or performance constitutes minstrelsy.)

Examples of potentially ethnocentric minstrelsy in this group include Trambley's representation of the Chicano and Mexican males as either “a yard boy,” in the case of Rico; as tequila-guzzling machos in the case of Buti and Don Rafael; or as crooked “federales” types in the case of the police who throw Buti and Don Rafael in jail. Rico's name, of course, can only be interpreted as providing ironic humor since, as Alicia's hired help, he's anything but “rico.” Concerning Buti's name Alicia laments that it's “a ridiculous name” even as she drools that he's “a gorgeous hunk of a man” (Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories: 100). Adding to the parody is Buti's occupation as a junk seller with pretensions of grandeur, a self-described antique dealer, an awareness that calls to mind his name's English homophone, “booty” meaning a storehouse of loot and treasure.⁹ In Spanish, “Buti” calls to mind the vulgar buffoonery of butifarra, i.e., pork sausage, and butiondo, an “obscene” something or someone. Only the truly wealthy landowners, Alicia and Don Rafael, are spared the diminished authority and, by extension, the diluted dignity implied by the use of diminutive nicknames. Trambley characterizes Buti's persona by the way he's perceived at his favorite cantina, El Dedo Gordo. “At the Fat Finger everybody knew Buti. That's where he did the important things in his life—play poker, start fights, pick up girls, and … drink until all hours of the morning” (101). Taken together and in isolation, these examples suggest an at least patronizing tone toward Buti and Alicia and their pathetic circumstances and, at worse, a defaming depiction of minstrelsy.

But the reader discovers that the stereotypes are not all there is to these droll protagonists. The author's pointed use of language in the title underscores the complex way that Portillo Trambley challenges conventional sex and gender roles and, thereby, hybridizes consciousness. It also represents the most singular and prominent usage of mimicry in the story. Drawn from the story's penultimate scene, the title itself can serve as a gloss for decoding the use of mimicry and minstrelsy in the entire tale.

Buti's eyes began to shine. She was beginning to sound like the Alicia he knew and loved. “Why should I be like some dumb old movie star?”

“Don't you see?” she held her breath in desperation. “It's life …”

“The late late show?” He finally caught on—the dame on television.

“You were watching it too!” She accused him, not without surprise.

“Had nothing else to do. They're stupid you know.” …

“That proves to me what a brute you are, you insensitive animal!” She kicked his shin.

“Well, the woman, she was kind of nice.”

“Joan Fontaine …”

“Yonfantayn?”

“That's her name. You're not going to marry her, are you?” There was real concern in her voice.

“Yonfantayn?” He could not keep up with her madness.

“No—that woman up in Raton [New Mexico].”

(109)

By entitling her story with the character Buti's mispronunciation of the Hollywood actor's name, Portillo Trambley immediately signals readers to take note of the story's multiple border and border-crossing realities. The scene stresses Buti as a heavily accented Spanish/English Mexican bilingual, and Alicia as an unaccented English/Spanish Chicana bilingual. As indicated in the introduction of this essay, Trambley lived on the frontera and her accumulation of writings embodies borders and border crossing as an originary (i.e., primal), original (i.e., fresh and innovative), and originating (i.e., from the root sources) lived experience. Thus, what might appear as defaming mimicry within one narrow North American attitude or narrow Mexican attitude proffers an alternative reading if it is decoded as part of the materially real frontera phenomena of more plural, authentically transcultural, transnational, and certainly multilingual border experiences. Consequently, even though the story presents social behaviors and self-images in Alicia and Buti that sometimes, at least on the surface, appear as caricatures, the narrative also, importantly, depicts the perversions and shallowness of social norms and Hollywood movies, both of which are driven by commercial desires and objectives.

What saves “La Yonfantayn” from ethnocentric minstrelsy is that the objects of parody, Alicia and Buti, remain only superficially “white-washed,” for their characterizations are balanced with other central facets of character and conduct, while oppositely, the objects of derision in the story—i.e., unbridled money making, Hollywood, the hypocrisy of monocultural “American Dream” values—are emphatic and unredeemed. Ultimately, Buti is revealed to be more than the sum of the parodic parts of macho minstrelsy and certainly greater than the cartoon which emerges from first reading. Buti possesses a personal imaginary too, but unlike Alicia's, which emerges from the curriculum of filmic popular culture (Cortes: 24-25), his arises from conformity to the majority patriarchal culture. For instance, his dreams of success as a rich businessman reflect a personal desire perverted by the mythic American Dream and the attendant requirements of his new homeland's culture of conspicuous consumption. “Buti … tried so hard to become a capitalist in the land of plenty to no avail” (Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories: 102). His lack of success in his view is not because he lacks the talents and skill. He declares that he “know[s] the principles of good business—contacts, capital, and a shrewd mind. But where in the hell do I get the contacts and the capital?” (102).

Similarly, Alicia is more than the sum of her cosmetic parts, from painted toenails to false eyelashes. She, for example, does not identify with the minor characters or males in the movies, but with those leading “ladies” who land the objects of their desires, whether career, wealth, or romantic partner. Because the young Alicia worked hard to marry well and to invest and manage her sufficiency and wealth after widowhood, she will not jeopardize her independence or security—even for the “gorgeous” Buti. Thus, the irony is that Alicia doesn't alter or disguise her sense of femininity even as she enacts her manifest role as a genuinely confident, tough, and independent achiever.

In the same way, although Buti doesn't have to seek role models on television because patriarchal realities surround him with successful men (e.g., Rico, Don Rafael, the policeman), like Alicia he does subscribe to aspects of the American Dream myth in his goal to be a rich capitalist. But also like her he elects to identify with a resourceful Chicano entrepreneur, Don Rafael, and to work hard (as the piñon-picking episode in Raton, New Mexico, attests) instead of abandoning all traces of his Mexican self-hood. Nor does Buti change his sense of personal identity as a macho even as he performs his reversed role as the pursued and not, in this case, pursuer. Trapped by orthodox gender imagery and patriarchal iconography, both characters manage to negotiate a space of mutuality and authenticity that defies their “game” of courtship (107) and create new rules of engagement in both the military and the romantic sense. The conclusion is constructed to underscore that the outcome of their romance is inspired by authentic passion and desire, even if their style of courtship reflects the ubiquitous (popular) culture around them, and despite the uncertainty of not knowing whether their stagey clinch at the end represents the artifice of a happy Hollywood ending.

In “La Yonfantayn,” then, Trambley in the early 1980s tackled head-on some of the most painful, anxiety-producing aspects of gender relations, just as she had in the earliest stages of her writing career. By not avoiding machismo and sexuality she strode onto the stage of raza creative literature and found it to be a temporal and spatial precipice of the Chicano Movement with its own anxieties—or, at least, its own distinctive intracultural, transnational perturbations—of politics and identity. She wrote her unique expressive zone, or border discourse, as a means of suggesting another zone of potential human connectedness, una frontera de Yo-soyporque-Somos. In this story like many of her others, Portillo Trambley engenders the seeds of her distinctive re/solutions to some of the generic problems of female inequality, political exclusion, socioeconomic abjection, and canonical erasure. Through the techniques of role reversal, humor based on parody and satire, and the destabilizing effects of a raza mestizaje that is simultaneously entwined with and resistant of dominant society's social curricula of popular culture, she generates fresh inflections of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality and thereby ruptures reductionist versions of Chicana/o identity from the literalism of patriarchal monotheism. This as much as anything in Trambley's impressive obra constitutes an unignorable feminist legacy for the millennial mestizaje of the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. Examples are legion of the paradoxical nature of literary artistic accomplishment that (seemingly incongruously) unites extraordinary insight and skill with (seemingly) antithetical personal qualities, especially when considered in distant hindsight. Extreme examples of the paradox include Edith Wharton and Ezra Pound as anti-Semitic, Ernest Hemingway and Oscar Zeta Acosta as sexist, Gertrude Stein and Robert Frost as abusive spouses, Richard Rodriguez and Linda Chavez as mestizo-bashers, et al.

2. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher and 1927 Nobelist in literature whose theories were absorbed by Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, Stein, Picasso, Borges, Paz, García Márquez, and others, distinguishes between the common apprehension of time as measurements of duration—what he labels “le temps scientifique,” or scientific time—and the intuited apprehension of time which is experienced and remembered—what he calls “le temps réèlle” or real time (see Time and Free Will, 1971, and The Creative Mind, 1945).

3. Trambley's birthdate is variably recorded, but 1936 is most often used. Two well-known Chicano literary scholars who knew her well and respected her accomplishment have told me that she was at least a decade older, a point that may be relevant in contextualizing her obra generationally and culturally.

4. Compare such similar antinomian characters as Emma Bovary, Jane Eyre, the doctor's wife in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the housewife in Rosario Ferré's “La muñeca menor” [The Youngest Doll], and, perhaps quintessentially, the historical personage, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [Asbaje y Ramirez de Santillana: 1651-1695].

5. I identify this (in unpublished poetry) as our individual (g)rito de dolores de partir (not de “parto,” i.e., pain of childbirth), a play on words about the pain of psychological and political estrangement.

6. “La Yonfantayn” was first published in Revista Chicana-riqueño (1985), but it was revised for the second edition of Rain of Scorpions (Bilingual Review Press, 1993), the text I am citing here.

7. Compare Sedgwick's useful intergenre intertextual reading of gender as represented in Gone with the Wind, novel and movie, and the distortion and erasure of the material experience of race and class in the central plot treatment of desire and sexuality (in “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles”).

8. This very common borrowing from filmic icons of popular culture has contributed many new idioms to the repertoire of American English. For example, “I'll make you an offer you can't refuse” or “Okay, go ahead, make my day” or “Sorry, Toto, this ain't Kansas,” ad infinitum.

9. Compare Redd Foxx's television sitcom character or Lucille Ball's and Carol Burnett's portrayals of janitors, and in a much earlier prototype, Charlie Chaplin's silent-film version. This comedic type, the menial picaro with dreams of wealth and glory, reflects an ostensibly “past” classism that resonates in the present because of the residual caste stratifications and practices that divide social classes.

Works Cited

Alarcón, Norma. “Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” In An Introduction to Women Studies, ed. J. W. Cochran, D. Langston, and C. Woodward. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall-Hunt, 1988.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind [orig. L'energie spirituelle, 1919]. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946.

———. Time and Free Will [orig. Essai sur les données immediates de la conscience, 1889]. Authorized trans. Frank L. Pogson. New York: Humanities Press, 1971.

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Sport and Social Class.” In Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, 357-373. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York and London: Routledge, 1993.

———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Christian, Barbara. “The Highs and Lows of Black Feminist Criticism” [1989]. In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 51-56. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa” [1975]. Trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 347-362. 2nd ed. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

———. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. Trans. Sarah Cornell and Susan Sellers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

Cortes, Carlos E. “The Societal Curriculum: Implications for Multiethnic Education.” In Education in the 80's: Multiethnic Education, 24-32. Washington, D.C.: NEA, 1981.

Dewey, Janet. “Dona Josefa: Bloodpulse of Transition and Change.” In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writings and Critical Readings, ed. Asuncion Horno-Delgado, Eliana Ortega, Nina M. Scott, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.

Eagar, George D. “The Chicana Female Hero and the Search for Paradise: Estela Portillo-Trambley's Archetypal Discourse on Liberation,” Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 1996.

Gonzalez, Laverne. “Portillo Trambley, Estela.” In Chicano Literature: A Reference Guide. ed. Julio Martinez and Francisco Lomeli, 316-322. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1984.

Keller, Gary D., ed. Chicano Cinema: Research, Reviews, and Resources. Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Review Press, 1985.

Kolbenschlag, Madonna. Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models [1979]. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Perennial Library, 1988.

Lott, Tommy L. “Black Vernacular, Representation, and Cultural Malpractice.” In Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, ed. David Theo Goldberg, 230-258. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994.

Lukens, Margaret A. “Estela Portillo-Trambley.” In The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States, ed. Cathy N. Davidson, Linda Wagner-Martin, et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Marcus, Jane. “Storming the Toolshed.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 263-279. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.

Pérez, Emma. “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor.” In Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, ed. Carla Trujillo. Berkeley, Calif.: Third Woman Press, 1991.

Portillo Trambley, Estela. The Day of the Swallows. In Contemporary Chicano Theatre, ed. Roberto Garza. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976.

———. Rain of Scorpions and Other Stories. Tempe, Ariz.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, c. 1993.

———. Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings. Berkeley, Calif.: Tonatiuh International, 1975.

———. Sor Juana and Other Plays. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1983.

———. Trini. Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingue, 1986.

Rodriguez, Clara, ed. Latin Looks: Images of Latinas and Latinos in the U.S. Media. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1997

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Gender Asymmetry and Erotic Triangles” [1985]. In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl, 507-532. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Vallejos, Tomas. “Estela Portillo Trambley's Fictive Search for Paradise.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 2 (1980): 54-58.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. Border Visions: Mexican Cultures of the Southwest United States. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Williams, Rosalind. “The Dream World of Mass Consumption.” In Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, 198-235. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Wright, Richard. “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” Epilogue to Native Son [1940]. New York: HarperCollins/Perennial Classics edition, 1998.