A noticeable feature in Mexican American literature is the suggestion, at once implicit and explicit, that culture, history, and setting are the decisive factors determining identity and destiny. The shared history of two nations—Mexico and the United States—which is the inheritance of Mexican Americans, provides evidence to support this suggestion and also marks a partial focus for Mexican American literature. Nearly three hundred years of subjugation under Spanish rule has left indelible marks on Mexicans. Pure Indian bloodlines have given way to generations of mestizos (the mixed offspring of Indian and Spanish blood); the building of Spanish churches atop great pyramids and above hundreds of temples has placed Christianity astride the ancient pre-Columbian gods, thus nearly obliterating (or, at least, disguising) old beliefs. One obvious result of such a process of oscillating from self-rule to subjugation back to self-rule, of shifting from a polytheistic to a monotheistic faith, is loss of identity. In its more recent history, Mexico's loss of nearly half of its territory to the United States has only accentuated the problem of identity among its inhabitants. Mestizos and Criollos (descendants of Europeans alone) alike acquired under their new rulers novel classifications: “Mexicanos” in California, “Tejanos” in Texas, and “Nuevo Mexicanos” or “Hispanos” in New Mexico. Such general problems also become personal; through the evolutionary psychological process called “scripting,” external problems of subjugation and persecution became internal to this ethnic body. As a result, the already male dominant order among Hispanics has become even more persecutory. Thus, while Mexican-American writers enjoy the enviable resources of their intricate past—from cultures that have left behind them an art and an architecture that are testaments to human ingenuity—they also have the complex task of redefining themselves. Authors such as Rudolfo Anaya have felt the urgency to recreate their identity, to begin anew, particularly by addressing that cultural variant of the concept of primogeniture that subjugates women.

The works of Rudolfo Anaya—Bless Me Ultima, Tortuga, and The Silence of the Llano—deal primarily with this search for the self. They explore the defeats and triumphs of Mexican-Americans through the love/hate interactions of his male and female characters. As these characters attempt to reveal themselves both in their relationships to one another and in their singularity as individuals, they also battle to understand themselves, to understand the call of the “ancients” that courses through their veins. Thus, they are preoccupied with the myths that force them into rituals which may ultimately connect them to their past. Such a connection is imperative to self-definition. “Myth,” as Anaya himself has defined it, “is our umbilical connection to the past, to the shared collective memory.”² It is this “shared collective memory,” which “resid[es] in the blood,”³ that Anaya's male and female characters alike attempt to share with us. In the story “The Silence of the Llano,” for example—from the collection of stories of the same name—we meet Rafael, who lives on the vast expanse of the llano, the plains surrounded by mountains. Rafael leads a solitary existence, traveling occasionally to town “to swap stories”⁴ and to “break the hold of the silence” (p. 4) of the llano. This is the land of his forefathers; it is the land of his hurt. At fifteen, he buried his parents following a blizzard that took their lives. Rafael's lonely existence changes as he meets and marries his beautiful wife, Rita, and brings her back to the llano. He tills the arid soil, plants trees, makes a garden, and impregnates his wife. Seasons change; a daughter is born; and Rita dies following childbirth. Rafael abandons his daughter, who is raised by the midwife whom he had called in to save his wife. This tragedy, instead of cementing a closer unity between father and daughter, creates a breach of communication that lasts for sixteen years: the garden dies; the child grows up, reaches puberty, and is raped by outsiders. Following this violation, Rafael communicates with his daughter, names her Rita, and turns the soil of the garden one more time. In this story, Anaya weaves the llano and his characters into an enigmatic mass. The llano is harshly silent and possessive. Its expanse hides human history; its solitude captures human souls; its silence mutes human tongues. It is the symbol of the shifting, ever-changing quality of its inhabitants, a microcosm reflecting their emptiness, the distance and isolated self, their fears and their challenges. The townspeople “whispered that the silence of the llano had taken Rafael's soul” (p. 3), but they also know that it is home which beckons him. Rafael flees not to town in order to survive the loss of his wife but deep into the llano.

The isolation of the llano provides Anaya with the playing field that his characters use to resolve their passions and their innermost fears without outside intervention or interference. Both father and daughter are tethered to the gravitational center of the llano, and that is their unnatural yet mutual bond. Here the roles of male and female are played out to resolution. Rafael abandons his daughter because, at the primary level, she is, to him, symbolic of lost love (the death of his wife) rather than the reflection of the mother. But there is also an implicit sinister undertone: the Hispanic male's fear of the female, as temptress, the source of animal attraction that gnaws away at social defenses. Both father and daughter contend with this subliminal perversion as they sleep in close proximity. As the girl reaches puberty and feels the “warm flow between her legs” (p. 16), she becomes “aware of her father” sleeping “on the bed at the other side of the room” (pp. 16–17). Her breasts grow; her hips widen; and she understands “the great mystery of birth which she had seen take place around the llano” (p. 17). As she observes the hen with her chicks, she realizes that “there is life in the eggs” (p. 17) and remembers seeing “the great bull mount one of the cows” (p. 17). In her dreams, “she saw the face of the man who lived there” and “was to be called father” (p. 20). She is awakened by the cry of the owl, and so is her father, but “each lay awake, encased in their solitary silence, expecting no words, but aware of each other as animals are aware when another is close by” (p. 21). The daughter is aware that “the coyote was drawing near” (p. 21). Then come the outsiders, followed by rape.

Rafael rushes home, drawn by the “cloud of dust” (p. 21), and finds his daughter virtually naked. She points to the “stain of blood” (p. 23) on the sheet and raises her hand, calling out for the first time “Rafael” (p. 23); he notices “the curves of her breast rising and falling” (p. 23), and he flees, riding his horse hard. The dream, the outsiders, the rape, and the name “Rafael” merge into a macabre synthesis. Male figures—father/rapist—become inseparable even as the mythological harbinger of bad omen, the owl, sounds a prophetic warning that fails to protect her. Thus, the girl becomes a victim of her anatomical weakness; as Octavio Paz laments in The Labyrinth of Solitude, “despite the vigilance of society, woman is always vulnerable. … [T]he misfortune of her open anatomy exposes her to all kinds of dangers, against which neither personal morality nor masculine protection is sufficient.” Ironically, the girl, as a result of being orphaned, abandoned, and raped, now qualifies for what Paz calls the “compensation mechanism” available in the myth of the “long-suffering Mexican woman.”⁵ This “compensation mechanism” operates in Rafael when “the ghost of his wife … the beauty of her features … [blur] into the image of the girl” (p. 24). The female duality of mother as giver of life and as temptress is also resolved here. The possibility of incest is countered by the rape, freeing Rafael from viewing his daughter as temptress. What remains is the merged image of mother/daughter, which provides Rafael with a religious escape.

Among Hispanics, according to Alan Riding, the myth of the long-suffering woman is “exemplified” by the pure image of the Virgin of Guadalupe as “personified by each” Hispanic's “own mother.”⁶ Therefore, the process of rejuvenation begins when Rafael names his daughter Rita, after her mother. The girl herself has undergone self-purification: “she bathed her shoulders in the cold water, bathed her body in the moonlight” (p. 25). Both Myth and religion are involved in this purification. As Rafael brings his daughter into existence by the act of naming, “a new dawn” (p. 25) appears in the east. Genesis, thus re-established, also forces a new form of communication between father and daughter, between male and female. Since Rita has grown up in virtual silence, she is unfamiliar with the language of her father, the language of males that nearly destroyed her. She recalls only the sounds of a select number of words that she has heard as a child from the mid-wife, Doña Rufina. Rita spoke them “aloud just to hear the sound they made as they burst from her lips, ‘Lumbre’ … ‘Agua’ … ‘Tote’” (p. 18). Language and action, thus transferred in matrilineal form, subvert the traditional concept of patriarchal dominance and transference of language. Rafael must now learn to converse with Rita on her own terms; he must learn to “imitate the call of wild doves … and wild sparrows” (pp. 18–19).

On the llano, a new man/woman relationship begins. The silence of the llano that had taken Rafael's soul is retrieved a second time by a female, first by his wife and now by his daughter. At the birth of his daughter, Rafael had felt betrayed, both because his wife had died giving birth to his child, but also because the birth of a daughter raises the question of his masculinity: a female issue cannot continue the family name. His misfortunes had led him to brood that “he was a man who could not allow himself to dream” (p. 16), but he escapes from this self-pity and undergoes a vital transformation in his acceptance of his daughter. He promises to “turn the earth,” and he asserts that “the seeds will grow” (p. 28).

The indignity of women at the hands of men is even more vivid in the story “The Road to Platero.” This is the story of Carmelita, who is raped by her father, now her husband, and bears a son from that sexual violence. The setting is again the desolate llano. Carmelita's horrifying experience has left her a bitter woman. She oscillates between memories of her father's love and her father's violence. She had been at one time “his jewel, his angel, his only daughter.”⁷ The terrible irony is that this is Carmelita's dream of what a father ought to be. The unfortunate reality is that to her father, Carmelita was and still is woman to be violently possessed. The females in this large family of vaqueros are reduced to animal levels. Carmelita's son recalls: “of all the women in Platero, my mother is the youngest. She is thin, her hair is long and black, her skin is smooth. … I have seen the vaqueros admire the sleek, beautiful mares and I have seen them look at my mother” (p. 34). As the vaqueros return home along the country road, riding their stallions, their women scurry to the windows, and “in the corral the mares paw the ground nervously” (p. 33). Except for the boy, the men and women know Carmelita's dark secret. The women remain silent, and the men drink for courage and to forget.

There are two images for Carmelita of the man who has fathered her son: one that remembers him as “a real caballero,” and the other as the one who violated her and her dreams. Because of this violence, the father loses identity for her and remains nameless. (As does “Mr.” in Alice Walker's The Color Purple.) Carmelita refers to this “m[a]n-creature” simply as “he” or “him” or “the man.” Her father/husband is aware of this loss of his identity; he is aware that as the daughter died in the rape, so did he. This is an insult to his masculinity and renders him spiritually and morally impotent. Unable to forget, and having lost respect and identity, the father/husband attempts to relieve his guilt onto Carmelita: “‘your sin is too dark to be forgiven … your sin is the sin of hell, and you will do penance by serving me forever,’” he tells her (p. 37). The male in this repetitive cycle of violence is trapped in the sins of his fathers. Carmelita's whispered love to her son is a warning and an assertion of this fact. “‘I have submitted to that beast,’ she tells the boy, ‘only to protect you my son, but you are a man like any other man. Will, you, too raise your spurs and rake your mother's flanks when you are grown?’” (p. 33).

Carmelita, like Rita, is the long-suffering woman. But, unlike Rita, her reconciliation with her father is violent. The story begins with a metaphysical triangulation: “‘Love came, death came, then you were born, my little son … ’” (p. 31), a tragic continuum which renders women inferior to men. Carmelita stoically resigns herself to this state of inferiority as she tells her son, “‘yes, we are slaves of our fathers, our husbands, our sons … and you, my little one, my life, you will grow to be a man … ’” (p. 33). She realizes that this is more a curse on her son than a blessing, and in her resignation she finds the source of redemption. As she kills her father/husband, exclaiming, “‘Now for you, my son’” (p. 39), Carmelita herself dies from a deep spur wound to her throat. Her sacrifice provides her son with a new beginning, as “peace” settles over the llano, and the “horseman who haunted the road” (p. 39) to Platero disappears.

In the role of the long-suffering woman, both Rita and Carmelita provide credence to Octavio Paz's observation that to Hispanic men the “inferiority” of women “is constitutional and resides in their sex, their submissiveness, which is a wound that never heals.”⁸ Women, thus dehumanized, are naturally destined to be violated. In this process of continued sexual violation, men themselves are caught in the web of their ancient gods. The Aztec hero Huitzilopochtli was “born in an instant” from the woman Coatlicue (“snake skirt”), who already had four hundred sons and one daughter who was their leader. Huitzilopochtli decapitates his sister with a snakehead scepter, thus achieving triumph over female authority and becoming protector of the wandering Mexicas.⁹ According to the version of the myth in the Popol Vuh, “Why the Earth Eats the Dead,” the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl created the earth by quartering Hungry Woman.¹⁰ In a variant of the myth of the Corn Woman's Marriage, the woman bears a son who grows up and marries his own sister, and the world is populated by their incestuous offspring.¹¹ Even the coyote that both Rafael and his daughter recognize before the rape has its origin in the myth of the trickster Kauyumari. In order to control the reproductive process of females, Kauyumari (meaning “coyote” or “wolf”), at the command of the sun god, places “teeth in the women's vaginas” (la vagina dentada). As a result, the men—including Kauyumari—are mutilated. However, the coyote Kauyumari's sexual desire is “so great that his missing organ promptly regenerates.”¹² In order to survive future castration, the coyote clears away the teeth in the woman's vagina with “a blunt instrument, usually a stick of wood.”¹³ Imbedded in such mythologized violence against women is the power that they have always held over men and their male gods. Women are both mothers, originators of the world, and temptresses whose vaginas are traps that fathers, husbands, and sons fall victim to. The violence perpetuated against Rita (the daughter) and Carmelita by the “men-creatures” (“Road,” p. 32) is a perverted and futile attempt at subjugation. In fact, such painful experiences strengthen their resolve, their resiliency. Through suffering, Hispanic women become “invulnerable,”¹⁴ and they “remain,” as Riding points out, “the pivot of the family.”¹⁵ Rafael's daughter, Rita, does win her father's recognition, and Carmelita's act of parricide suggests the end of male violence. Her sacrifice promises a better future for her boy.

While the female child acquires first stoicism and then strength from suffering, the male child battles for an identity independent of the female, be she mother, wife, or lover. His search for selfhood forces him into the community of men or “tribes,” as in the case of the young boy in “Salomon's Story.” Salomon leaves the pastoral beauty of his father's land and joins a group of youngsters who call themselves “a tribe.”¹⁶ He is an initiate in this fraternity, and the initiation requires that he kill the first animal that the tribe encounters. Salomon and the tribe venture into “unknown territory” (p. 57) along the river bank and eventually encounter a “giant river turtle” (p. 56). He is handed the tribal knife and following frenzied cries of “‘Kill it,’” he severs the head. But their celebration is short lived; the turtle rises and moves towards the river. Salomon thrusts his hand in the gaping hole of this female turtle in a desperate attempt to turn it over but is driven backward into the river by the power of the creature. As the turtle disappears into the depths from which it came, the tribe abandons the young initiate. Salomon “left the river, free of the tribe, but unclean and smelling of death. That night the bad dreams came, and then paralysis” (p. 61). Salomon responds to what he calls his “destiny” (p. 55). He has left his father, “a good man” who “kept the ritual of the seasons, marked the path of the sun and the moon across the sky, and … prayed each day that the order of things not be disturbed” (p. 55). But it had been a “wild urge” in his “blood” that “drove” him from his father (p. 55). In killing the turtle, Salomon violates the “order of things”; he disconnects the continuum of life, the primeval link between water and earth represented by the turtle. Unwittingly, he is guilty of usurping the gods of his own mythology: According to one Mesoamerican myth, the gods, in order to fertilize the earth, engaged in bloodletting around a turtle altar,¹⁷ and the ancient Mayans believed that the maize god was resurrected through the turtle shell.¹⁸ The young hunter pays through paralysis to atone for his unconscious transgression; like Tieresias, he is “forced by the order of [his] destiny” (p. 56) to be a storyteller. “Salomon's Story” is fatalistic; Salomon is “doomed” when he answers his “wild urge.” He cannot acquire an identity independent of patriarchal control, and any attempt to do so can lead only to tragedy.

However, seen within the context of the novel Tortuga, from which “Salomon's Story” has been extracted, the message may seem less disquieting. The characters in this novel are grotesques, disfigured and crippled children waiting out their lives in a hospital. Into this scene, a young boy arrives paralyzed from a broken back. He acquires the name Tortuga—“turtle”—when the doctor puts him in a hard body cast with only his legs and arms protruding. Lying on his back in a state of metamorphosis, the young boy comes to symbolize the paralysis of all the children as they struggle to prevail against a vast, meaningless, and unresponsive world. Viewed as a turtle, however, he is a symbol of life, of time and history. Tortuga's body cast—covering his breast and back—is analogous to the ephod worn by the high priest of Israel (I Samuel, 2:18), who was God's spokesman of justice and judgment (Exodus, 28:15). Salomon makes Tortuga the audience for his story, the spokesman who must tell the others of the “meaning of life and death” (p. 38). By attaching himself to Tortuga, the only patient who eventually walks out of the hospital, Salomon finally breaks from his “forsaken … initiation” (p. 58). The fatalistic vision of life is exchanged for one of hope and the future. Tortuga himself begins anew: on his way to his parents’ house, he stops at the home of his love, Ismelda, the actual catalyst in his healing process.

Anaya's stories are not an indictment of Mexican-American culture. Rather, they provide images that are part of their collective memory. Anaya's “men-creatures” of the Llano remind us of Samuel Ramos’ description of the pelado in his book Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico: to the pelado, his “sexual organ becomes symbolic of masculine force.”¹⁹ “It suggests … the idea of power. From this he has derived a very impoverished concept of man. Since he is, in effect, a being without substance, he tries to fill his void with the only suggestive force accessible to him: that of the male animal.”²⁰ In provoking this recollection of the male as animal, Anaya asserts the fact that the future is not an isolated moment in time; it is linked to the past. Only by addressing the neurosis of the past can the perfections sought for the future be achieved. Anaya believes that “history moves us toward perfection through small epiphanies.”²¹

In his story the “Silence of the Llano,” his male character does experience an epiphanic realization. In finally recognizing his daughter as a part of himself to be loved and not coveted, he breaks from the ranks of the “men-creatures,” from the pelado. Rafael realizes, as Paul Smith points out in The Body Hispanic, that “the ground on which man takes up his position is, inevitably, woman.”²² If the paradoxical nature of woman as mother and temptress troubles Hispanic men, this lack of understanding also reveals their own contradictory nature. Rosalind Coward in Female Desire states that there has been intense investigation into the enigmatic nature of women, when “in reality,” it is “men's bodies, men's sexuality which is the true ‘dark continent’ of … society.”²³ Perhaps in the past of Mexicans, “a mute and ancient past” as Carlos Fuentes terms it,²⁴ confronting this contradictory aspect of men's sexuality was not an option. But in Anaya's stories, it is. Both male and female characters in his stories are forced into confronting their individual sexuality, and in the process they create new beginnings. The men realize that the women cannot be muted through oppressive acts. Parricide is not an option but an exigency of life necessary to counter the perditious effects of sexual violence. Recognizing each other and attempting to overcome the traditional dichotomy between the sexes are part of the sexual dialectics of Anaya's stories.

Notes

1. Farhat Iftekharuddin, “Gender Roles in Rudolfo Anaya's The Silence of the Llano,” Journal of Modern Literature, XX, 1 (Summer 1996), pp. 121–128. © Foundation for Modern Literature, 1996.

2. Rudolfo Anaya, “Aztlan: A Homeland Without Boundaries,” Aztlan: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, eds. Rudolfo A. Anaya and Francisco A. Lomeli (University of New Mexico Press, 1991), p. 236.

3. Anaya, Aztlán, p. 236.

4. Rudolfo Anaya, “The Silence of the Llano,” The Silence of the Llano: Short Stories (TQS Publications, 1982), p. 3. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

5. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude and the Other Mexico, Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude, Mexico and the United States, The Philanthropic Ogre, trans. Lysander Kemp, Yara Milos, and Rachel Phillips Belash, (Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), p. 38.

6. Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, (Vintage, 1986), p. 8.

7. Rudolfo Anaya, “The Road to Platero,” The Silence of the Llano, p. 32. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

8. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p. 30.

9. John Bierhorst, The Mythology of Mexico and Central America (William Morrow, 1990), p. 159.

10. Bierhorst, p. 149.

11. Bierhorst, p. 169.

12. Bierhorst, p. 169.

13. John Bierhorst, The Mythology of North America (William Morrow, 1985), p. 125.

14. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, p. 3.

15. Riding, p. 9.

16. Rudolfo Anaya, “Salomon's Story.” The Silence of the Llano, 1982, p. 55. All subsequent references will be cited parenthetically.

17. Mary Miller and Karl Taube, eds. The Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya: An Illustrated Dictionary of Mesoamerican Religion (Thames and Hudson, 1993), p. 75.

18. Karl Taube, The Legendary Past: Aztec and Maya Myths (University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 67.

19. Samuel Ramos, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico, trans. Peter G. Earle (University of Texas Press, 1962). p. 59.

20. Ramos, p. 61.

21. Anaya, Aztlán, p. 241.

22. Paul Julian Smith, The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 5.

23. Rosalind Coward, Female Desire: How They Are Sought, Bought and Packaged (Grove Weidenfeld, 1985), p. 227.

24. Carlos Fuentes, “How I Started to Write,” Myself With Others: Selected Essays (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988), p. 9.