[In the following essay, Vallejos contends that the quest for paradise is a central thematic concern of Rain of Scorpions.]

Much Chicano fiction can be seen as a search for values in a world that is hostile to those values. In the case of the Chicana artist, the hostility is twofold. She is the target of both racism and sexism. It is no wonder, then, when a Chicana's literary expression is rooted in dissatisfaction. One outstanding case in point is Estela Portillo Trambley's collection of short fiction and drama, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings.

One aspect of Portillo Trambley's writing which distinguishes her from many male Chicano writers is her criticism, not only of American society, but of some Chicano traditions and social structures as well. Dissatisfied with the inferior position of women advocated by many Chicano traditionalists, Portillo Trambley turns to ancient mythical structures as models of an ideal balance in the cosmos. This original balance, she seeks to inform her readers, precedes and excels the inequity she exposes in traditional Mexican customs and social structures that aggrandize men at the expense of women. She also uses this primordial model as a basis for criticizing American corruptions of it, such as the exploitation of the land and workers by American industry in the novella Rain of Scorpions. Portillo Trambley envisions a paradise—an ideal state of mind and spirit—that turns to ancient mythical models as a basis for urging reform in both Chicano and American social attitudes and structures.

In applying the paradise motif to Rain of Scorpions, one can place most of the stories within it in either of two categories: those illustrating the failure to find paradise and those illustrating the successful quest. Paradise in Portillo Trambley's writings is a vision of cosmic wholeness within human consciousness. The author posits for her readers an ideal world where conflicting elements—male and female, reason and instinct, order and chaos—coexist in dynamic balance. In some stories she suggests this balance by creating characters who recognize and accept this world view. In others she creates characters in social environments that deny such a world view and demand the subjugation of one element by its opposite. When such an imbalance occurs, the result is destruction.

This world view is derived from ancient Nahua cosmology, for the opposing forces of Portillo Trambley's works are remarkably similar to the ancient Mexican belief that the world is governed by the struggles for supremacy among the four sons of Ometeotl, the gods of the four directions. The domination of one god and his attendant qualities over the others is responsible for the cosmic cataclysms in the Nahua myth of the Five Suns.¹ In Rain of Scorpions destruction occurs on a microcosmic level, for it is men and women, not gods, who inhabit her fictive world and give it motion.

Motion is fundamental to interpreting the work of Estela Portillo Trambley, for the paradise of her vision is dynamic, not static. While a balance between opposites is crucial to the attainment of wholeness, this balance is paradoxically achieved, not through harmony, but through struggle. In these works destruction inevitably leads to regeneration in essentially the same way the destruction of one sun in ancient Mexican myth resulted in the creation of a new one. Thus, despite the tragic fates of some of her characters, the tragedy often becomes a source of affirmation, for the author is by no means a nihilist. Like the ancient Mexicans, she expresses a belief in the unending cyclical regeneration of the universe.

An example of Portillo Trambley's treatment of the paradise motif is “The Trees.” Containing elements of both ancient Mexican cosmology and Western myth, the story's symbolism alludes to the Garden of Eden.

“The Trees” is literally and figuratively the story of a fall from paradise. The main character, Nina Ayala, is a destructive woman who disrupts the harmonious Eden of the Ayala family, leading to its fall and, ultimately, her own suicidal fall from a cliff. The Ayalas' world before Nina's intrusion is described as a paradise where harmony prevailed:

Don Teófilo Ayala was sole owner of six hundred fertile acres. He had four sons who worked in love and harmony with him from dawn to dusk to help with the creation of life's fruit. The simple laws amongst them were not vain, or seeking profit for self. It was a wholesome venture of unity where trust and giving came first. The profit in money was but an aftermath, never the due course or the ultimate incentive. The apple trees came first; they represented a task of God and for God, and in this belief the brothers worked.²

An important variation on the Eden motif is the revelation that even before Nina's arrival, the Ayalas' “Eden” was inherently flawed. Its very structure, a patriarchal order, is inequitable and thus doomed to final disintegration.

The family, with its elementary tie to the earth, had established a working patriarchal order. The father and sons lived for a fraternal cause, the apple orchards. Their women followed in silent steps, fulfilled in their woman ways. If ambition or a sense of power touched the feminine heart, it was a silent touch. The lives were well patterned like the rows of apple trees and the trenches that fed them. Men and women had a separate given image until Nina came.

(p. 13)

Furthermore, the patriarchal order of the Ayalas depends upon the power of the father. Thus, when Teófilo dies, the cohesive family order is suddenly thrown into chaos: “Unwittingly, he had willed the lives of his sons who had obediently followed his direction. A dependency was left behind with the death of the father. Someone needed to take strong reins. None of the brothers dared” (p. 14).

Into this false Eden, a male-dominated social order where there is harmony without balance, Nina enters and undoes the unity of the Ayala brothers, bringing total destruction to the valley: “… the Garden of Eden became a desolation” (p. 23).

Despite the final desolation of “The Trees,” Portillo Trambley leaves no doubt in her readers' minds that there is more to the story than the destruction of a false Eden. This story, like several in Rain of Scorpions, begins with prefatory statements which provide an interpretation of the story that is akin to ancient Mexican cosmology, for it denies the prospect of final cosmic destruction and nothingness. Instead, it affirms a belief in a better world rising from the ashes of its predecessor:

The dead valley. Tombstones sprouted on a hill … a dead stream. … Clusters of dry weeds … jumbled skeletons of brush. … There was no desperate plea for life in this deadness, but it was far from nothingness. A nothingness … can the mind and heart conceive of such a thing? Even dead valleys cling to traces of something. This something is new because it is now an instance of process. The process, in this case, was a part of eager lives until … human error? Nature's error? No one ever thinks in terms of nothingness or is in terms with nothingness. All is part of the change in process, errant and eternal.

(p. 11)

Death and destruction are essential parts of the unending cycles Portillo Trambley calls “change in process.” Their crucial role in the restoration of balance and the creation of a new and better world is suggested in the comparison of Nina to the Quinteco apple: “There is a quality in experience that is very much like the Quinteco apple. It is the quality of creation, of innovation, of that something new. The newness itself, nevertheless, be it creation or destruction, finds its way of changing people, apples, ways” (p. 12). The result of change is the quality Portillo Trambley sees in a true paradise: balance. The ideal balance the author envisions is suggested in the Quinteco apple's physical properties. “Its softness had the quality of mangos in ripeness, and its green sweetness surprised at intervals with streaks of gentle, bitter strains that calmed the fullness of the sugar … a bittersweet goodness of surprise” (p. 12). Like Portillo Trambley's paradise, the apple's multiple symbolism encompasses the fertility of the Ayalas as well as the changes toward equality represented by Nina.

This vision of a world in which men and women are resilient and in union with the cosmos recurs in many variations throughout Portillo Trambley's writings. Her best work, The Day of the Swallows, explores this theme negatively in a lyrical dramatic style reminiscent of Garcia Lorca's Bodas de Sangre and La Casa de Bernarda Alba. The play's central character is driven to lesbianism by a male-dominated society just as Nina is driven to an inordinate thirst for power by a social order that has denied that to her. Both characters become unbalanced as a result of a social order that is itself inequitable and unbalanced.

Another story from Rain of Scorpions following this pattern is “If It Weren't for the Honeysuckle.” Beatriz, the protagonist, kills the brutally oppressive Robles as an assertion of her right to freedom. However, her act of defiance against a social order that negates women is excessive, for it negates and excludes men. In the final analysis, Beatriz replaces an unbalanced order based on violence with another, equally violent and unbalanced. Her obsessive order is described as “something without roots … something lost in the course of evolution” (p. 109).

In this story, as in “The Trees,” characterization is developed archetypally as a set of antitheses. One may visualize their structure as a scale in which the overbalance of one characteristic (e.g., masculinity, darkness, reason versus femininity, light, instinct) leads to overcompensation of the other, a catastrophic tipping of the scale in the opposite direction. In these cases, the ideal balance, the wholeness, the paradise Portillo Trambley envisions, is lost.

In other works within Rain of Scorpions the search for balance and wholeness is achieved and kept intact. The best examples of this are “The Burning” and the title work. Both stories, especially Rain of Scorpions, portray characters on a successful journey toward oneness, and in both this destination is represented in paradisiacal imagery.

Lela, in “The Burning,” is a Tarahumara Indian from Batopilas with the magical healing powers of a curandera (p. 90). Her personal history is presented as a quest for a “larger self” that she cannot find in her native village (p. 92). Lela first comes upon this “larger self” by entering into communion with her “little gods.” The following passage describes this communion as a euphoric discovery of paradise:

One day, she had walked too far towards the pines, too far towards a roar that spoke of rushing life. She followed a yellow butterfly that flitted towards a lake. As she followed, she looked for little gods in the glint of the sun, and in the open branches that pierced the absoluteness of the sky. …

When she had reached the lake, she stepped into the water without hesitation. … She began to swim more rapidly towards the turn that led to the cradle of the roar, the waterfall. …

She remembered the grotto behind the waterfall. It had been her hermitage of dreams, of wonder. Here her oneness had knitted all the little gods unto herself until she felt the whole of earth—things within her being.

(pp. 91-92)

Lela's discovery of paradise, a balanced spiritual and mental magnanimity, is contrasted with the smallness of the people in the pueblo. As she lies on her deathbed, the women of the pueblo have decided that she must burn because she is a bruja (witch), “the enemy of God!” (p. 90). Lela's vision encompasses the totality of life and this is unacceptable to their orthodoxy. “One tried soul stood up to speak, ‘Many times I see the light she makes of darkness, and that light is a greater blackness still.’” Another woman adds, “Yes, she drinks the bitterness of good and swallows, like the devil-wolf, the red honey milk of evil” (p. 89). Because the curandera never converts to Christianity, the people of the village are hostile and fearful of her, despite her many acts of kindness.

The main source of their hostility is her devotion to “little gods,” imperfect, but approachable and lovable in their humanity. Unlike the omnipotent Judeo-Christian Yahweh, Lela's gods have much in common with those gods dear to the ancient Aztec commoners,³ and the comical Pueblo divinities described by ethnologist Alfonso Ortiz.⁴

They did not rule or demand allegiance. The little rural gods of river, sky, fire, seed, birds, all were chosen members of each family. Because they sanctified all human acts, they were the actions of the living, like an aura. They were a shrine to creation.

(p. 91)

This humanness of Lela's gods is unacceptable to the townspeople, for it is a profanation of their sober, Christian God. One woman condemns Lela: “She took our holy saints, Mary, Joseph, and many others and made them obscene. … Drinking saints! Winking saints! Who can forgive the hideous suggestions of her clay devils?”(p. 95). Having reached a spiritual and mental paradise through her “little gods,” Lela draws a conclusion: “Her larger self told her that the miracle of the living act was supreme, the giving, the receiving, the stumbling, and the getting up” (p. 95; emphasis added).

The story concludes on a note of supreme irony. While she is dying, a fact unknown to her executioners, preparations are made to burn her in her house as punishment for her alleged witchcraft. Ironically, Lela's last wish is to be cremated rather than buried. “If only … if only I could be buried in the tradition of my fathers … a clean burning for new life. … Oh, little gods, take me back to my fathers …” (p. 96). Meanwhile, the flames surrounding her house have begun to rise and through the petty maliciousness of the townspeople, Lela's dying wish is granted by her very executioners. Their enactment of a ritual reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition ironically becomes a Tarahumara funeral rite. The story concludes with a strong suggestion that Lela is moving into a new form of life, a paradise like the one she has already found: “The little gods were racing to the waterfall” (p. 96).

A similar discovery of paradise also occurs in Rain of Scorpions, which develops most extensively the paradise motif in terms of Indian cosmology. Like “The Trees,” this novella presents a world view derived from Indian religions while drawing upon Biblical symbol and motif.

On the most superficial level, Rain of Scorpions is a variation of a story line common in children's literature: the treasure hunt. The hunt in this novella, however, is not for gold or jewels, but a map to paradise. The oppressive economic and ecological conditions of Smeltertown anger Fito, a veteran of the Vietnamese war who has lost his leg and acquired cynicism in its place. Consequently, he attempts to organize the people of this small mining town near El Paso, Texas, against their oppressors by unrealistically proposing an exodus from the town to shut down the smeltering plant and draw national attention to the problem. Prompted by this far-fetched scheme and the townspeople's objections that they have nowhere else to go, five boys decide to search for the “green valley,” a paradise described to them by Papa At, an old man whose memory is rich in Indian legend. They hope to find the legendary map to the “green valley,” so the people will have somewhere to go (p. 133). The boys mistake the “green valley where the nature gods live,” Papa At's “answer to chaos,” (p. 118) for an actual geographic location.

The boys seek a mythical solution to a social problem: “… they must find the map to the green valley. If the smelter fumes were poisonous, the green valley would be the ideal place; it would be the promised land for the people of Smeltertown” (p. 143). This notion, however, is revealed to be simplistic and illusory. In Rain of Scorpions Portillo Trambley makes no attempt to come up with magical solutions to such complex problems. She posits a paradise on a much smaller level, leaving the solutions of social problems to others. Portillo Trambley suggests that one cannot find the “promised land” for an entire population until one has found it within oneself. The quest for paradise must be made on a personal level.

Interwoven with the quest for paradise in Rain of Scorpions is the Great Flood motif borrowed from Genesis. In the interplay of these two Biblical themes, Portillo Trambley reconstructs in fiction a world view that is rooted in the same Indian cosmology developed to a lesser extent in “The Trees.” Rain of Scorpions envisions a paradisiacal world of oneness in the balance of opposites and presents a cyclical and dialectical world view, one of endlessly alternating destruction and regeneration.

The key word, a concept which joins the paradise and the Great Flood themes, is chaos. The very title, Rain of Scorpions, signals the importance of this concept. It is this curious freak of nature that helps the central characters, Fito and Lupe, find balance and wholeness. The “rain of scorpions” is actually a mudslide caused by a downpour which unearths a large nest of scorpions and carries the dead creatures along in its inundation of Smeltertown. This catastrophe joins Fito and Lupe in a symbolic restoration of balance between two people made unbalanced by misfortune. Lupe is a fat young woman who finds consolation for her unattractiveness in reading and eating; but her excessive reading is as unhealthy as her overeating. “The reading of too many books had grown into a madness, and that madness had grown wings” (p. 128). Fito's madness is his bitterness toward American society for sending him to a war that has taken his leg. This ultimately leads to his hatred of women after he is rejected by his beloved because of his war injury. Both Lupe and Fito are incapable of expressing their desires and feelings as a result of their misfortunes, but through the chaotic “rain of scorpions” they discover new feelings and the ability to express them. As the Biblical flood did for Noah, this flood provides the occasion for Lupe and Fito to begin anew. For Fito it is an end of bitterness: “She searched Fito's face and found the beginnings of peace” (p. 164). For Lupe it is a joyous shedding of her storybook illusions. “She stroked his head and knew that theirs would never be a great love story. … She felt very alive. She didn't want to be Cleopatra anymore. She wanted to be Lupe loving Fito the way she knew how” (p. 165). Chaos, in the form of a flood, has brought paradise to Lupe and Fito.

Moreover, chaos is revealed to the five young seekers of paradise as a sacred and essential aspect of nature. While Fito and Lupe are not spared the ravages of the flood, the boys unknowingly find deliverance from the “rain of scorpions” in the cave where the map of the “green valley” is supposed to be hidden. The boys' correspondence to Noah is suggested by the description of the rock next to the opening into the “crystal room,” where the map had been left by the legendary Indio Tolo. The passage to this part of the cave is a small cleft near “an arklike boulder” (pp. 151-52). When the boys enter the “crystal room,” they discover chaos and in this chaos is beauty and sacredness. In the middle of this “room” is a stone resembling an altar: “They looked at the huge red stone shaped in tiers of small columns holding smaller skeletal arms of stones like a web … chaos finding order in stone” (p. 156). In the “crystal room,” described as “a maze of stone” (p. 156), the boys discover the sacredness of chaos: “It demanded the silence of a cathedral … it demanded the awe for godly things” (p. 154). This “room” is testimony in rock to the chaotic order of divine creation:

The rest of the boys were thinking about living in the cave … wild thoughts, free thoughts, thoughts of earthmen who know there is a wild god in the world, for the order of things lies in changing chaos, leaving only the most intricate patterns. Chaos of Man or chaos of Nature, it is a part of a deep wildness from a time when earth was taking form and creating changing life, all an orderly chaos.

(p. 155)

After Miguel finds the map, he discovers, not the directions to a geographical site, but a simple Indian word, “KEAR,” which he later learns is equivalent to the English word, “YOU” (p. 177). The “promised land” he and the other boys have found is a oneness within themselves and the world: “Miguel felt outside himself; his senses were crystallized. … Miguel felt a whisper inside himself, ‘That's me … the stone, the light, the slab’” (p. 158). When his senses “crystallize,” he is mystically becoming one with the chaotic crystal formations in the cave. Through the acceptance of his place in the totality of the universe, his sensibility has crystallized along with his senses.

Through the all-important element of chaos, Portillo Trambley's fiction discloses the passage to her visionary paradise. It is reached through an individual's inner acceptance of all aspects of life and awareness of being part of this “all.” The search for paradise in Rain of Scorpions, sometimes successful and sometimes not, is a return to the primordial past, to the moment of creation. By holding the primordial wholeness of creation up as a model, Portillo Trambley makes her criticisms of social orders that are dead harmonies and not vital balances: “The balance existed before men tampered” (p. 135).

At the same time she looks forward to future possibilities, to a world where both men and women can be complete and healthy—a world where no one is denied the freedom and ability to find a “larger self.” For this reason, Rain of Scorpions, like The Day of the Swallows, is a timely literary work dealing with important contemporary social issues, most notably the Chicana's struggle for liberation.

However, as serious examination of her writing reveals, Estela Portillo Trambley is important not just because she grapples with the issue of the Chicana's struggles; the ideas she offers go beyond social criticism. Portillo Trambley leads her readers to unique explorations of extraordinary philosophical considerations relating to the social issues she explores. Thus, she should be considered a noteworthy figure in contemporary letters, as a woman, as a Chicana, as a thinker, and as an artist.

Notes

1. Miguel León-Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1963), pp. 35-43.

2. Estela Portillo Trambley, Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (Berkeley: Tonatiuh International, 1975), p. 12. All further references will hereafter be cited by page number in the text.

3. Alfonso Caso, The Aztecs: People of the Sun, trans. Lowell Dunham (Norman, Okla.: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1958), p. 8.

4. Alfonso Ortiz, The Tewa World: Space, Time, Being, and Becoming in a Pueblo Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 166.