[In the following essay, Dewey places The Day of the Swallows within the Chicano literary tradition.]

An analysis of Estela Portillo Trambley's Chicana drama, The Day of the Swallows (1971),¹ presents numerous ambiguities that surround the unifying theme of woman in relation to her psychocultural and physical environment. These ambiguities become clarified through the interpretation of the central character of Doña Josefa, the town high priestess of charity and love. A declaration is made for the theater-going public in general and the Chicano community in particular; any human being stifled in the natural unfolding of her/his life can either rebel or submit. Though the dramatic circumstances of the play are at best shocking and mystifying, Doña Josefa represents an explosive interruption, variance, and change in the midst of temporal and cultural uniformity. Her acts are apparently evil, her ultimate suicide the final unmasking, and yet the dialectical undercurrent of ritualized good behavior (as opposed to ritualized bad) works effectively to expose the central thesis of woman trapped against her own will.

This revisionist reading intends to more clearly define what critics, the public, and readers have found difficult: interpretation, categorization, and placement of this work within the trajectory of Chicano literature. It would appear that the poetic, magic, and lesbian elements of the play place it outside the mainstream of the agitprop and consciousness-engendering theater techniques that dominate Chicano drama. Rhetorically, Luis Leal asks: “Are we to say then that such works as Rudolfo Anaya's novel Bless Me, Ultima, Estela Portillo's drama, The Day of the Swallows, and others not dealing with social protest do not belong to chicano literature?”² Or, as stated more fully by Jorge Huerta:

In discussing any Chicano art, we cannot ignore the burning question which has followed the Movimiento since its inception: What makes a work of art Chicano? Is Day of the Swallows a Chicana play simply because it was written by a Chicana from El Paso? Even though there are no Chicano politics in her play, is it yet Chicano since it deals with Mexican or Chicano characters?³

Not dealing with social protest the critic states, or in the absence of any Chicano politics, yet, how can a woman's suicide in the face of an entire town's condemnation of her lesbian love not be considered a symbolic protest, a protest “staged” against both the violence that leads to her own death and the farce of the lie that she lived? Perhaps this is the culmination of theater for social protest: when the codes of both violence and a patriarchal value system that can entrap free expression of humanity are exploded in full view in the tragic self-drowning of a woman driven beyond the very limits of social acceptance. Politics and social protest challenge the use, manipulation, and negotiation of power; thus defined, most human behavior and its subsequent artistic rendering are inherently political. Portillo herself provides an important revelation for resolving this apparent dilemma vis à vis the “political” nature of her play, for she confesses in a 1980 interview:

When my first book was rejected, someone told me to do fiction. I had just seen the movie The Fox, from the D. H. Lawrence story, and someone said, why don't you write something like that and make a million? I'm always thinking of a buck. So in a month and a half I wrote The Day of the Swallows and I put everything in. The plot is about lesbians; I knew nothing about them, but I was going to sell it. Well, it got published, it appeared in four anthologies, I get invited to talk about it, it gets analyzed to death, and it's a play I wrote in a very short time and for a terrible reason. I was just being mercenary.⁴

When Portillo exposes her own intentionality in The Day of the Swallows as one intrinsically linked to a driven need for economic survival (commented on more fully in this same interview), she curiously prescribes lesbian love as a selling point. The sensationalism of so-called “deviance” within dominant culture is keenly perceived by a woman whose own personal lifestyle and culture live restricted and often mute(d).⁵ Portillo is quite conscious and astute when assessing the market, gaining publication and notoriety as a result. Yet intuitively, perhaps, she creates theater of tragedy⁶ around a central character who integrates both a culture she admittedly knows nothing about with one she knows intimately. In the end, both lesbians and Chicanos live marginal and often repressed lives and create culture and community vivified by strong political consciousness.

Portillo's play cannot escape comparison with the work of Federico García Lorca. It is with his words that this work can perhaps best be defined:

Theater is a school of sorrow and laughter and a free platform where men [sic] can criticize old or erroneous morals and explain with vivid examples the eternal norms of the heart and of the feelings of man [sic].⁷

Also, Lorca explains:

Theater is the poetry that rises up from the book and becomes human. And on becoming so it speaks and yells, cries and despairs. Theater requires that the characters who appear in the scene wear a suit of poetry, and at the same time that they display their bones and blood.⁸

Lorca's concept of theater, then, is of intimate poetic truths, dramatically translated to teach, illuminate, and reveal the perpetual movement of life and its eternal questions. His theater attacks social conventions through poeticized imagery that often pushes the dramatic protagonist to a violent death as a result of sexual frustration. It is in this sense that a brief consideration of Lorca's last play, La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936)⁹ (a defiant literary forebear), be made in order to illuminate the conceptualization of The Day of the Swallows.

Lorca's play sets up the territory of myth and psyche in much the same manner as Portillo's, thus striking interesting parallels. Here, a barren and stark white house, dominated and domineered by the central protagonist of Bernarda, creates the foundation for a drama about women incarcerated both physically and emotionally. The five sisters have been confined to black dresses for a rigorous and lengthy mourning period following the death of their father. All sisters participate in the ritualistic activity of embroidering sheets for a future wedding. The monstrous matriarch, Bernarda, forbids her daughters free interchange with men and imprisons them in this sterile environment without even access to conversation with would-be suitors. In contrast, Bernard's mother of 80, María Josefa, flashes intermittently across the stage, professing the need for expressed sexuality. She embodies the freedom represented by the chorus' refrain of Act II, “open up all the doors and windows you women who live in the pueblo” (p. 1487), and frequently expresses herself with words that image flowing water. It is the youngest daughter, Adela, who most yearns to break through the constraints upon her womanhood and sexuality. The playwright has not named Adela, or any of the other characters, without pointed symbolic intention. Adela becomes the embodiment of the Spanish verb “adelantarse” (to go ahead, to move forward) and drastically pushes forward against her mother's constant beating down of any emotional release.¹⁰ The impoverished understanding of society based on tradition, on the dread of public opinion, and the inherent claustration of woman is exploded full force in the representation of Adela. In her inability to accept the restraint of the mourning period, she puts on a green dress (the lush fertility of evergreen nature) and continues forward to an inevitable death, punishment for her rebellious personality. A fateful discovery of her rendezvous with a sister's fiancé in the corral (where mares are locked up and the stallion runs free) results in her hanging suicide. Bernarda, upon insisting that her daughter died a virgin, asserts the final word of the play, which is also her very first: “¡Silencio!” The silence of hanging lifeless, the silence of woman unexpressed, and the silence of stagnation are but a few of the counterbeats of thought that spring forth from this shocking ending. As the play states directly, “To be born a woman is the greatest punishment” (p. 1486).

La casa de Bernarda Alba and The Day of the Swallows are compelling literary analogues. Lorca's play enlightens our perception and understanding of Portillo's and, perhaps, shapes the very writing of it.¹¹ To wit, The Day of the Swallows meets all of the Spanish poet's dramatic requisites: a need for protest and a poetry of self-expression, uninhibited by the codes of language and human behavior within societal and traditional norms. Ritual, naming (“Josefa”), tradition, symbols, virginity, silence, and suicide run parallel throughout the two plays. The Day of the Swallows opens on a symbolic level and continues to build in tension and mystery by means of a rich web of poetic imagery and ritualistic myth. Alysea, Doña Josefa's companion, hides a bloody knife as Clemencia arrives to deliver milk. Eventually, we learn that Doña Josefa has cut out a young boy's tongue with this knife after he has witnessed her lovemaking with Alysea. Thus, with the curtain's rising, the signs are presented for the audience's perception of a greater truth; the milk/nourishment/female source is delivered in the wake of a violent act against man, whose tongue/phallus/male source has been removed by the hand of a rebellious and crazed woman. The boy's words have been silenced; his ability to generate a conversation that could condemn Josefa has been cut off immediately prior to a milk delivery that symbolically reiterates female generative power.

All dialogue and dramatic development continue to trace symbolic meaning. Doña Josefa lives in a “thoroughly feminine” (p. 208) house of order and beauty. Besides performing charitable works for the town of Lago de San Lorenzo, she embroiders lace of her own intricate design. She worships light, the moon, her “magicians” (p. 221), and the swallows soon to arrive at her exquisite garden, seen through the “orb” (p. 208) of a tree in the French window. Her home, or center, is described with these traditionally mandalic images, alluding to the higher truth of transcendence or personal growth of the greatest kind—arrival and union. The images include complicated lace patterns that repeat endlessly and possibly converge on a central point, the orb of the tree, the lake that names the town and provides its most important ritual, the small tree house made to welcome the homeward-bound swallows, the garden of light. The yearly ritual feast of San Lorenzo, for which Doña Josefa has been chosen to lead, serves as the platform for her ire and personal critique of society's closed system. Each year the town's virgins bathe in the lake with the assurance of a future husband and the hope of a marriage “made in heaven” (p. 208). As the dramatist's notes indicate, “The tempo of life, unbroken, conditioned, flavors its heartbeat with dreams and myths. … No one dares ask for life” (p. 207). The dream, the myth, is a falsehood. Stagnation and stasis are bound up in tradition.¹² Ritual can signify a perpetual present, a group rather than an individual meaning. Anthropologist Victor Turner discusses rites of passage as characteristic of liminality, or ambiguous states of transition from one cultural realm into another:

Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols … likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun and the moon.¹³

These beings that exist in a liminal state may possess nothing, go naked, behave passively or humbly, and experience intense comradeship and egalitarianism.¹⁴ Josefa dramatically recognizes the “betwixt and between” of the ritual feast of San Lorenzo, the passivity and even death of a life's course that offers no choice or variance in its direction toward “sacred marriage.” She challenges the ritual definitions in her break with the cycle of predictable societal norms; she rebels in her love of women and in her refusal to accept allegiance to man as her ultimate responsibility and fulfillment. In the end, Josefa denies the town her leadership in this virginal rite of passage when she takes her own life. The truth she knows and compares to that of Santa Teresa cancels out the “truth” of the myth. As a young girl, she had refused to bathe in the lake and had chosen the moonlight as her lover, with whom she would bear the children of light. She had seen clarity, not the dream, and had accepted herself in unified oneness. Portillo herself elucidates this point most definitively when she writes:

What is tradition to a man differs in varying degree from what is tradition to a woman. The traditions of men are closely woven to codes, ethics, or nationalistic mores. A woman listens to her heart. She relives the reconstruction of reflection and remembrance with clear intuition. Thus the tradition that most moves a woman is inherent evolution, the nesting instinct, the mating instinct, and the simple order in some survival pattern. A woman touches, senses, feels, and then says, “This I know.” The circuit of that knowing usually is very personal, thus very universal.¹⁵

As a consequence of this denial of cultural and sexual socialization, Doña Josefa moves and speaks in opposition to men. Having rescued Alysea from prostitution, she takes her as her lover and refers to man's love as a “violence” (p. 220). “Men don't love, they take” (p. 227). Though her good deeds for all the townspeople are alluded to, her conversations reveal a personal vindictiveness toward male intentions. All male characters in the play, save the priest, are presented unidimensionally and in a negative light as users of women, as temporal providers, as deceivers. Paradoxically, the male characters provide equally intense portrayals of women, establishing a structural axis of contrast and tension. Eduardo, who has already discarded one lover and now courts Alysea, announces that “no one in their right mind turns down a marriage proposal” (p. 217). Thus, a woman who rejects marriage is crazy. Don Esquinas speaks of women as “stupid” (p. 232) and loves “the man's way” (p. 233) with secret liaisons. Young David watched the women lovers with “horror” (p. 241). In depicting such unilateral sexual opposition, the author sets up her central figure for the ultimate sacrifice. Though Josefa's character would seem ultimately ambiguous, given the contrast of her public and private selves and her violent silencing of the boy David, her dramatic function works consistently within a simplistic paradigm for social change; once the oppressor has been defined, one rebels openly or subversively. Doña Josefa's violent act and subsequent suicide are not so much admissions of guilt and human frailty as they are the dramatic climax within the societal set-up; rather than suffer the revelations of being a criminal and “degenerate pervert” in a structure designed in opposition to her innermost being, she destroys herself. She is the final sacrificial lamb at the doorstep of aborted change because she is isolated and alone in her attempt to combat the myth of stereotypical lives.

The theme of sacrifice is quite common in Chicano theater and literature, as well as in Portillo's own works. In her story “The Burning,” a woman healer, believed to be a witch, is burned at the stake while already dying of a high fever. In another story, “The Apple Trees,” a woman commits suicide after transforming herself into a power-hungry capitalist, unsuitable to her family. Josefa's suicide can best be analyzed within this framework of sacrifice, with close attention given to the signs pointing the way. Josefa criticized Alysea for her plans to run off with the untrustworthy Eduardo, a man whose God and life are “out in the open” (p. 216), in the free and green. She warns: “You are like all the rest. You insist on being a useless, empty sacrifice!” (p. 235). In like fashion, the doña is repelled by the entreatment of the virgins to marriage; they sacrifice themselves rather than live freely and openly. They have no other choice, just as Josefa does not in the final scenes. As a child, she had been terrorized by a group of young boys who had killed numerous swallows for fun. As in a ritual sacrifice, a bird's throat was cut over a pinned-down Josefa, allowing the blood to run into her mouth: a bird killed at the hands of the powerful. This incident, and the final scene, give title to the play. The swallows have been sacrificed and yet they return with the perpetual motion of the cycles and seasons.¹⁶

Just as in the theater of García Lorca, the human condition is exaggerated through a poetic imagery that often cuts at the very bloodpulse of a given emotion or response. Josefa, without guilt, dressed in white and with her hair loose, drowns herself in the lake of cyclical ritual. She has silenced the world of reprimand by removing a tongue and removing herself:

ALYSEA:
His eyes told me. You and I were all the terror in the world.
JOSEFA:
No. The terror is in the world out there. Don't say that!

(p. 235)

As in Aztec thought, this sacrifice contributes to the movement of the universe. Blood has been shed. The final metaphor bursts wide open in its revolution against the norm with its rebellious peace. A woman in a cultural strait jacket can become a monster; a human being can, too. A woman in a societal strait jacket can take her own life; a human being can, too. The metaphor is one for change, for dramatic change, in a world programmed for conflict between the sexes.

Notes

1. Estela Portillo, The Day of the Swallows, in Contemporary Chicano Theater, ed. Roberto J. Garza (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976). All quotations from this play, cited by page number, are found in the main body of the text.

2. Luis Leal in The Identification and Analysis of Chicano Literature, ed. Francisco Jiménez (New York: Bilingual Press, 1979), 3.

3. Jorge Huerta, “Where Are Our Chicano Playwrights?” Revista Chicano-Riqueña 3, no. 4 (1975): 35. Arthur Ramírez, in “Estela Portillo: The Dialectic of Oppression and Liberation,” Revista Chicano-Riqueña 8, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 113 n.3, makes a similar point: “far from being devoid of politics, The Day of the Swallows is highly charged politically—with the particular ideology of a Chicana feminist.” This article also corroborates the portrayal of Josefa as a “liberating” representation.

4. Juan Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 170.

5. I admit to being upset when I first discovered Portillo's revelation. As a lesbian, I am dismayed, yet hardly mystified, by the sensationalizing of literature and art (through the metaphor of lesbianism) for the sake of selling to an insatiable, voyeuristic, and homophobic public. But how many artists, filmmakers, and writers dare confess their intentions so honestly? As a Chicana writer, Portillo found herself unrecognized and unpublished; as a skilled woman with a family to hold together, she found herself without the means for economic sufficiency. The more I ruminated on my discovery, the more the issue became completely clear. Overshadowed by dominant, partial, and repressive cultural values, all women, women of color, lesbians, are displaced and marginalized, and Portillo knows this both personally and politically. She recognized the portrayal of a lesbian character as the lightning rod for her story. In the end, I found her highly symbolic representations to be subversive.

6. Refer to Alfonso Rodríguez' “Tragic Vision in Estela Portillo's The Day of the Swallows,” De Colores: Journal of Chicano Expression and Thought 5, no. 1-2 (1980): 152-58, for a full analysis of this play as classical tragedy.

7. Federico García Lorca, “Charla sobre el teatro,” in Obras Completas, (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967), 150. “El teatro es una escuela de llanto y risa y una tribuna libre donde los hombres pueden poner en evidencia morales viejas o equívocas y explicar con ejemplos vivos normas eternas del corazón y del sentimiento del hombre.” All translations found in the text are mine.

8. García Lorca, “Conversaciones literarias,” in Obras Completas, 1810. “El teatro es la poesía que se levanta del libro y se hace humana. Y al hacerse, habla y grita, llora y se desespera. El teatro necesita que los personajes que aparezcan en la escena lleven un traje de poesía y al mismo tiempo que se les vean los huesos, la sangre.”

9. Garcia Lorca, La casa de Bernarda Alba, in Obras Completas. Quotations from this play, cited by page number, are found in the main body of the text.

10. Jean Smoot's documentation of usage of this name/verb in A Comparison of Plays by John Millington Synge and Federico García Lorca: The Poets and Time (Madrid: José Porrúa Turanzas, 1978), 155-56.

11. Estela Portillo's literary knowledge and breadth of reading is extensive. Though she does not specify Lorca within the litany of names she gives Bruce-Novoa in her interview (Chicano Authors: Inquiry by Interview, 168), it would seem probable that she knows Lorca's work well.

12. Olivia Castellano, “Of Clarity and the Moon: A Study of Two Women in Rebellion,” in De Colores: Journal of Emerging Raza Philosophies 3, no. 3 (1977): 25-31, for her analysis of ritual, stasis, myth, and Josefa as a figure of rebellion.

13. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 95.

14. Ibid.

15. Portillo, in the introduction to Chicanas en la literatura y el arte, ed. Herminio Ríos and Octavio Romano (Berkeley: Quinto Sol, 1974), 5.

16. Portillo could be alluding indirectly to the Greek myth of Philomela. Here also swallows, cut-out tongues, and victimized, sacrificial women are configured. Consult Robert Graves, The Greek Myths: I (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1955), 165-68, and Edith Hamilton, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1953), 270-71.