When ethnic or minority literatures first appeared in the United States during the 1960s, writers may have felt it necessary, even essential, to validate the existence of their works. Through the demarcation of specific characteristics they legitimated a new kind of writing, making it more accessible and perhaps even more palatable to an uninitiated, “foreign” (Anglo-American) audience. Their minority category dictated very rigid parameters that for Chicanos and Latinos were mostly determined by content (political-didactic) and heritage (Mexican American and Puerto Rican). Because of the need to claim “the right of formerly un- or misrepresented human groups to speak for and represent themselves in domains defined politically and intellectually as normally excluding them” (Saldívar 1990, 4), they pioneered a mapping of spaces within the territory of U.S. literature, where canon consists mainly of American literature along with a series of peripheral literatures including minorities and other underrepresented groups, among them women. Latina writing, that is, literature written by Latinas, is thus marked by its double outsider status.

At the end of the 1990s, “the arrogance of political geography backfires in the boundless defiance of the cultural remapping” (Flores and Yúdice 1990, 60). Cultural re-mapping in the United States is a way of invalidating the critical categories that use territory as a starting point, as expressed in Gilles Deleuze's use of “deterritorialization” and his concept of “minor literature” (1996). The “strategic essentializing” that entails a mapping of enclosed spaces or territories must give way to a conceptualization of the writing by women and ethnic groups in their own right, without the learned compartmentalized spaces of previous categorizations. Instead of thinking about oppositional or antihegemonic marginalized literature, we should conceive of a literature characterized by an uncompromising quest for self-affirmation. This is precisely one of the main characteristics of writing by Latinas, where we see a search for identity that is a way of asserting the particularity of Latinas' existences in the United States, existences marked by inequalities stemming from the often ignored categories of race, class, and gender. Latinas experience these inequalities differently than men and respond to them differently. “The Chicana identity is also a rebellion against ‘patrón politics’ that will ‘devour’ us, and against ‘popular masculine cultural notions’ that define women in terms of male fantasies. In rebellion … the Chicana finds ‘not only pleasure and fulfillment, we find our dignity, our face and heart, our sense of humor and our creative energy’” (Córdova 1990, foreword).

For Latinas the need to produce a self-definition stems from a definite site located within their own cultural heritage and inscribed within specific historical circumstances. This need is materialized through and in a writing that serves as a vehicle to define a reality, a woman's reality, a mestiza reality.¹ Such an identity, reality, and positioning draws from both cultures and creates a unique space in which a Latina can belong and grow without the need for constant opposition.

For Juan Bruce Novoa, “Latino” is an ethnic marker that connotes a U.S. mainland space of residence (Bruce Novoa 1992, 114). Legal status (citizenship) and educational level mark Latinas' positionality and its particularities. Positionality refers to a set of circumstances that inform the site from which Latinas speak, a place and space in which there is a constant (sometimes forced) dialectic interaction between Anglo and Latino, between English and Spanish, between North America and Spanish America, a place where boundaries collapse.

I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge
the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs
of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultural because
I am participating in the creation of yet another culture,
a new story to explain the world and our participation in
it, a new value system with images and symbols that
connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento,
I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only
has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light,
but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark
and gives them new meanings.

(Anzaldúa 1999, 81)

Latinas' experiences are defined by the condition of in-betweenness and straddling in which they claim their space. Living with a leg on each side of both cultures is part of a daily existence and is manifested in a variety of cultural practices. Literature is perhaps one of the most transparent means through which Latinas' in-betweenness is manifested, and Judith Ortiz Cofer and Sandra Cisneros provide us with powerful and salient examples.

Judith Ortiz Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico. She is a professor of English at the University of Georgia in Athens. She is the author of Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood, a collection of essays; The Line of the Sun, a novel; and The Latin Deli, a collection of stories, essays, and poems. Sandra Cisneros was born in Chicago. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is the author of The House on Mango Street, a novel; Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories, a collection of short stories; and Loose Woman and My Wicked, Wicked Ways, both collections of poetry.

In the two collections of poetry considered here, My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Cisneros and The Latin Deli by Ortiz Cofer, the condition of in-betweenness in which Latinas live is visibly marked by three aspects: language as a resource, the highlighting of women's issues as a means of self-affirmation in creating a new space, and writing as an empowering tool.

I argue that writings by Latinas cannot be considered, as Deleuze would have it, “a minor practice of a major language” (Deleuze 1986, 18). The uniqueness of the space refers to an experience of in-betweenness and is represented in literature and not by literature. In other words, this literature is a practice of everyday life, not just a representation of that life.² Uniqueness marks the Chicana identity of Cisneros and the Newyorican identity of Ortiz Cofer. And it is the language differential that first denotes that uniqueness.

Both Cisneros and Ortiz Cofer acknowledge their bilingualism/interlinguism as an integral part of their identities, one of the main roads in which their itineraries, as opposed to frontiers or boundaries, between and inside two cultures get inscribed. Ortiz Cofer uses Spanish to define a particular set of characteristics that she cannot articulate in English, as in the case of her description of the goods one can get at the Latin Deli:

When they walk down the narrow isles of her store
reading the labels of packages aloud, as if
they were the names of lost lovers: Suspiros,
Merengues, the stale candy of everyone's childhood.
Slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper

(Ortiz Cofer 1995, 3)

Spanish is a medium, a conduit that enables these writers to experience and comprehend more fully, but it is also a burden since, in a way, it has to compete with English, the everyday language of the outside world. This playful and painful duality represents separation and assimilation at the same time.

The ability to create and produce in one language with the imprint of both languages is not a sign of “a language affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization,” as suggested by Deleuze (10). There is no deterritorialization here, because English belongs to the poet's repertoire just as much as Spanish, if not more.³ This language use goes beyond a mere hybridity; it is the mark of a transnational subject that constantly acknowledges the interrelations between the historical and the social, the diachronic and synchronic axes of identity. At times, Ortiz Cofer's voice can be vociferous, as in the case of the poem entitled “Changeling” where the poet, as a child, dresses up as Che and tells of feasts “to celebrate victories para la libertad” (Ortiz Cofer 1995, 38). This fleeting freedom disappears when her mother orders her to put on girl's clothes and “to return invisible, as myself, to the real world of her kitchen.” Socially defined roles, expressed through language, are once again a core theme in the poem “The Lesson of the Sugarcane,” though here it is the father who curtails the girl's freedom. We see the sharp contract between her mother's description of sugarcane as “nada más dulce” (36), and her father's response that “Cane can choke a little girl: snakes hide / where it grows over our head” (36). The religious beliefs of childhood and the description of El Ángel de la Guarda as a comandante (63), a soldier who was supposed to protect her from bad dreams but who she felt was as indifferent to her fears as all other adults, is another example of a particular use of language.

English and Spanish are not juxtaposed, they are incorporated into each other, giving us the impression that Ortiz Cofer, like the eponymous character of “Paciencia,” “weaves an endless pattern of intersecting lines” (90). Ortiz Cofer weaves in both languages and creates a pattern where cultural in-betweenness and political consciousness produce a vivid tapestry of Latinas' existence as women who “return from afar, from always: from ‘without,’ from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond ‘culture’” (Cixous 1980, 247). In fact, when referring to her poem “Latin Deli,” Ortiz Cofer says, “I don't put in Spanish words as decoration. They are used to transmit a special kind of reality, to communicate to my English-speaking reader, to say, ‘Yes, this is a different reality, but you can understand it by paying close attention’” (Kallet 1994, 69). Rather than being a materialization of a “patois,” or her own “third world” (Deleuze, 18), this language reflects a reality inscribed within the borders of the United States, enriched by the collapse of the language borders and barriers and the incorporation of intersecting cultural lines.

It is evident that for a large proportion of U.S. society the daily language is double, and that existing in only one of them is unsustainable and impossible. By using both languages, Latinas create a new space, a new territory where they reaffirm and reinscribe their Hispanic cultural and historic traditions within the U.S. cultural milieu, and therefore they propose a culture that is different from the traditional.

Cisneros makes a different use of her talent with both languages. Her poetry is generally not charged or sprinkled with Spanish words. Rather, Spanish is incorporated through the creation of new expressions that have English appearance but Spanish flavor, in such a way that Cisneros's use of Spanish changes the meaning of English. “Now I am learning how you can say something in English so that you know the person is saying it in Spanish” (Rodríguez Arande 1990, 74). The idea of “deterritorialization” is once more negated. Language is an essential component of cultural understanding and coexistence. It is only through and inside one culture that the other can be understood, not as separate entities but incorporated into each other. Latinas exist in both languages and in both cultures. In My Wicked, Wicked Ways, Cisneros uses Spanish only in the last two poems. In “14 de julio,” as in almost all of her poems, there is a narrative and a political/spiritual message or agenda. Here she addresses “Independencia y Cinco de Mayo,” affirming her uncompromising intention to be brave and independent and “unashamed” in the future.

Today, catorce de julio,
a man kissed a woman in the rain.
On the corner of Independencia y Cinco de Mayo.
A Man kisses a woman in the rain
and I am envious of that simple affirmation.
I who timidly took and timidly gave—
you who never admitted a public grace.
We of the half-dark who were unbrave.

(Cisneros 1993, 101)

“14 de julio” explicitly articulates self-affirmation and also acknowledges the imperative need for a change in the constitution of a cultural space where she has been “unbrave.” Catorce de Julio is Bastille Day, it is a day where the ideals of libertad, igualdad, fraternidad were first strongly and massively articulated. Independencia refers to Mexico's independence from Spain, September 15, 1821. Cinco de Mayo refers to the 1862 French invasion of Mexico, and the defeat of the French in 1867. Independencia and Cinco de Mayo—dates used in Mexico and the United States to commemorate victory and freedom—are joined by the author in one significant embrace. The invention of the word “unbrave” signals Cisneros's playful and courageous use of a language that is and is not her own.

The last poem of this collection, “Tantas Cosas Asustan, Tantas,” is written in a Spanish that is “a very warm and tender language, and it is a very intimate language” (Rodríguez-Arande, 75).

Tantas cosas asustan. Tantas.
Los muertos y los vivos.
Lo que la oscuridad no nos permite ver
Y lo que nos permite.
Dioses que siempre fueron y serán.
La inmortalidad.
No uno por uno.
Pero todos juntos.
Como una lata de canicas.

(Cisneros 1993, 102)

Yet walking through things that “asustan” is not enough; Cisneros attempts to reposition herself as a subject fully cognizant of the relationship between everyday practices (like “pasos sobre un patio” and “el silencio”) and the struggle for a new interpretation of those practices. In this case, as before, language is not a problem but a tool—we might even say a weapon—for asserting positionality. Spanish here defies translation, as Cisneros herself points out. “When I tried to translate it into English, it sounded wrong to me and I have to leave it in Spanish” (Rodríguez Arande 1990, 75).

If we think of the idea of highlighting women's issues as a means of self-affirmation, it would appear that Ortiz Cofer is constantly attempting to recreate cultural icons. By the mere act of representation she tries to expose the ideology behind the cultural construction of these women. Describing women's lives in their traditional roles is a way of saying, “Look at this and act on it.” And it can also be interpreted as saying, “This is what our culture is, try to understand.” These two readings take into account the two different readers—Latino and Anglo—of her work. Within the cultural constraints of the United States, she embarks on a self-reflective scrutiny, trying to fill the gap between both points of view. There is both a collective value and a political agenda in this message, but there is also a personal voice that is the subject located in a definite space of the private. “What woman hasn't flown / stolen? Who hasn't felt, dreamt, performed the gesture that jams sociality? … Who, by some act of transgression, hasn't overthrown successiveness, connection, the wall of circumfusion?” (Cixous 1980, 258).

Cisneros is also an engaged feminist poet trying to open up the one-way road imposed by two fixed role models: La Malinche and La Virgen de Guadalupe. These two figures are recurrent images in Chicana literature. They are female profiles that have traditionally represented treason, transgression, and mestizaje in the case of La Malinche and transcendence and salvation in the case of the Virgin.⁴ The comparison and contrast between La Malinche and La Virgen de Guadalupe replicates the whore/virgin dichotomy that patriarchal thought has imposed on women. But it does so in a specific historical and cultural setting. Cisneros recognizes that the cultural icons of womanhood are internalized ideas, and she exposes them without subtleties, perhaps intent on reconstructing and rewriting them rather than rejecting them. This is precisely what she does in her poem “Moon in Hydra”:

Women fled.
Tired of the myth
they had to live.
They no longer wait
for their Theseus
to rescue, then
abandon them.
Instead
they take
the first boat out
to Athens.
Live alone.
No longer Hydra women
bound to stone.

(Cisneros 1993, 61)

The women who are the subjects of this poem are obviously foreign, since the poem is part of her section called “Other Countries.” But it is relevant to point out that the condition of womanhood directly reflects the poet's own choice, as well as the condition of Chicanas. For Cisneros this is a school of the streets (Jussawalla 1992), where she can enter a man's world and do what she is not supposed to do. In the case of “In a redneck bar down the street,” the poet uses the beat and rhythm of street language to convey the bar atmosphere:

My crazy
friend Pat
boasts she can chug
one bottle of Pabst
down one swing
without even touching
teeth grip
swing and it's up in
she glugging like a watercooler
everyone watching
boy that crazy
act every time gets them
bartender runs over
says lady don't
do that again.

(Cisneros 1993, 33)

Although the poem is visibly political, it is not a “collective assemblage of enunciation” (Deleuze 1986, 17) where the agency takes on a machine-like performance. Entering a man's world is a political and personal act. It is transgressive because it upsets the balance of a public place and a public behavior; it rejects passivity and rigid roles and does not take into account the ideals of femininity of the popular culture.

While Ortiz Cofer uses history and memory as the source of her writing, Cisneros uses them to expose and criticize an ideology in which woman is always the object and can never occupy the subject position unless elevated to the category of “wicked.” Cisneros shows us women remembered because they did not occupy their assigned places. Such is the case, for example, of the women described in a poem suggestively entitled “His Story,” in which she tells the reader about her father's version of the family's history. According to that version, the author is:

An only daughter
whom no one came for
and no one chased away

(Cisneros 1993, 38)

Drawing from the personal to represent and to present the political is a way of articulating the political. Cisneros links her feminism to what she calls her class. In her poetry, she exposes the incongruities of what is considered a traditional Mexican woman. Cisneros's women can be fierce, and sometimes victimized, but they are always highly aware of their position and the role they choose to occupy. In “Letter to Jahn Franco-Venice” she reflects on the position of subject-object:

Bought.
Always that metaphor somehow or other.
And what was I
except an item not for sale.
Well.

(Cisneros 1993, 49)

Latinas' condition of in-betweenness is also clearly manifested in writing as an empowering tool. Writing is:

An act that will also be marked by woman's seizing the occasion to speak, hence her shattering entry into history, which has always been based on her suppression. To write and thus to forge for herself the antilogos weapon. To become at will the taker and initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process.

(Cixous 1980, 250)

For Ortiz Cofer and Cisneros, writing operates as a tool. It is through writing that the poet activates history and memory to produce a new way of defining women and of inscribing Latinas in the United States.⁵ This new writing activates a different culture, a culture where there is “recognition and celebration of a matriarchal heritage” (Horno-Delgado, Ortega, and Saporta Sternbach 1989, 12) that needs to be articulated. This is a new writing in an acquired language, but one that is not exclusive or preferential since it shares the space with Spanish. As Hélène Cixous (1980) articulates:

To admit that writing is precisely working (in) the inbetween, inspecting the process of the same and of the other without which nothing can live, undoing the work of death to admit this is first to want the two, as well as both, the ensemble of the one and the other.

(254)

Ortiz Cofer's literary women wish they could do unwomanly things, like “volar,” though in the end they will have somebody say: “Aquí descansa una mujer que quiso volar” (1995, 32).⁶

For Cisneros as well as Ortiz Cofer, writing not only allows them to reappropriate their cultural heritage but also provides the space for a re-vision of that heritage in light of a new and pressing specific historical circumstance: being Latinas living in the United States. Writing inside a culture that marginalizes them as individuals and being outsiders in their own cultures as well, these poets try to restore balance, to debunk the traditional patriarchal mythology. They address the importance of the written word and the variety of obstacles they have had to overcome in order to generate spaces for new forms of expression. Ortiz Cofer describes her inner struggles in a short essay in her book entitled “5:00 A.M.: Writing as Ritual,” where she explains:

Empowerment is what the emerging artist needs to win for herself. And the initial sense of urgency to create can easily be dissipated because it entails making the one choice many people, especially women, in our society with its emphasis on “acceptable” priorities, feel selfish about making: taking the time to create, stealing it from yourself if it's the only way.

(Ortiz Cofer 1995, xx)

For Cisneros, writing takes on a completely different meaning, because the poet has established writing as a priority and makes her decisions and conditions her life around it. Rather than allocating a specific time as a ritualistic experience, Cisneros decides to break the norm of acceptable priorities.

She lives alone now.
Has abandoned the brothers,
the rooms of fathers
and many mothers.
They have left her
to her own device
Her nightmares and pianos.
She owns a lead pipe.
The stray lovers
have gone home.
The house is cold.
There is nothing on TV.
She must write poems.

(Cisneros 1993, 37)

The writing process is not only a self-affirming, identity-creating quest but also a way of disrupting learned and expected roles. Writing is a way of redefining the boundaries that seem to enclose Latinas. It opens up a space for a new reality in which women can “fill in the omissions” [of history] (Horno-Delgado 1989, 13), expand and thrive between the gaps, and expose the contradictions of history, society, and culture. Writing, then, becomes a practice for asserting a positionality: that of being a Latina in the United States. For Ortiz Cofer and Cisneros the United States is home. There is no sense of exile or displacement but rather a need to reconfigure the boundaries of a space that has been arbitrarily marked. If territory is a space of containment and belonging circumscribed by political geography, the poetry of Sandra Cisneros and Judith Ortiz Cofer becomes the cultural proof that pertenencia is much more than what can be contained by a map.

Notes

1. The term mestiza has many meanings, the most common of which is hybrid. It has been used pejoratively to refer to a woman of mixed (or unknown) descent. I am using it here as Anzaldúa defines it in her ground-breaking and by now classic Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (St. Paul, MN: Consortium, 1999; 2d ed.), where she explains that

   Because I, a mestiza
   Continually walk out of one culture
   and into another,
   because I am in all cultures at the same time,
   alma entre dos mundos, tres, cuatro,
   me zumba la cabeza con lo contradictorio.
   Estoy norteada por todas las voces que me hablan
   Simultáneamente.

   (77)

   Anzaldúa goes beyond the notion of mestizaje as mere mixture of races and cultures and advances the notion of mestizaje as a new consciousness where “the work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended” (80). “The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else” (79).

2. Flores and Yúdice refer to the languages that Latinos use in their daily lives and conclude that the ways in which Latinos use them—bilingually/interlingually—are in fact practices of everyday life. In this sense, they are more a practice than a representation. I have extended the concept to cover Latina literature.

3. Moreover, neither is there a deterritorialization in the geographical sense, because Puerto Rico is a land that historically has been Hispanic and only in the last 100 years has been absorbed by the United States.

4. Chicanas have reevaluated and reappropriated these images. See Norma Alarcón, “Chicana Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984).

5. In a Melus interview with Acosta-Belén, Ortiz Cofer says: “I feel that there is an invisible umbilical cord connecting us [referring to the women in her family] and in my case, it became a literary umbilical cord. I feel that the life of the imagination began with the women of my family” (Acosta-Belén 1993, 93). What Ortiz Cofer refers to is the close relationship between herself and her mother, aunts, and grandmother during her childhood years in Puerto Rico.

6. In her now classic “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous refers to the concept of flying as a “woman's gesture—flying in language and making it fly. We have all learned the art of flying and its numerous techniques; we've lived in flight, stealing away, finding when desired, narrow passageways, hidden crossovers” (258). Like Cixous, Ortiz Cofer uses “volar” to refer to the power of language to make us fly. In the same poem, “Volar: To Fly,” she explains, “you will recall telling me / that you once dreamed in Spanish / and felt the words / lift you into flight” (32).

References

Acosta-Belén, Edna. 1993. “A Melus Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Melus: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 18(3): 83-97.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2d ed. St. Paul, MN: Consortium.

Bruce Novoa, Juan. 1992. “Ritual in Judith Ortiz Cofer's The Line of the Sun.” Confluencia: Revista Hispánica de Cultura y Literatura 8(1): 61-69.

———. 1991. “Judith Ortiz Cofer's Ritual of Movement.” The Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA 19: 3-4, 88-99.

———. 1999. Retrospace: Collected Essays on Chicano Literature. Houston: Arte Público Press.

Cisneros, Sandra. 1993. My Wicked, Wicked Ways. New York: Knopf.

Cixous, Hélène. 1992. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

———. 1980. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In New French Feminisms, ed. by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press.

Córdova, Teresa, et al., eds. 1990. Chicana Voices: Intersections of Class, Race, and Gender. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Flores, Juan, and George Yúdice. 1990. “Living Borders/Buscando América: Languages of Latino Self-formation.” Social Text 24: 57-84.

Horno-Delgado, Asunción, Eliana Ortega, and Nancy Saporta Sternbach, eds. 1989. Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Jussawalla, Feroza F., ed. 1992. Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.

Kallet, Marilyn. 1994. “The Art of Not Forgetting: An Interview with Judith Ortiz Cofer.” Prairie Schooner 68(4): 68-75.

Ortiz Cofer, Judith. 1995. The Latin Deli. New York: W. W. Norton.

Rodríguez Arande, Pilar. 1990. “On The Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros.” The Americas Review: A Review of Hispanic Literature and Art of the USA 18(1): 64-80.

Saldívar, Ramón. 1990. Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.