Mestiza Consciousness:
Not Without An Education
The importance of education in the development of Gloria Anzaldua’s concept of a mestiza consciousness
Saskia Nivard (1712934) American Studies
Master Thesis
Thesis Supervisor: dr. M.E. Messmer Wordcount: 16923
July 30, 2010
Table of Contents
Introduction Page 3
- Chapter One Page 12
Esperanza Cordero: The Hope of Mango Street
- Chapter Two Page 22
Richard Rodriguez: A Split Identity
- Chapter Three Page 29
Richard Rodriguez Revisited: The Man in the Middle
-Chapter Four Page 37
The Last Frontier for Cherrie Moraga
-Chapter Five Page 45
The Cuban-American Nightmare
Conclusion Page 57
Bibliography Page 59
Introduction
The racially hybrid character has frequently been used in American literature to destabilize fixed racial categories of “whiteness” and “blackness,” but according to Gloria Anzaldua the tendency to privilege racial purity is still prevalent in white America long after slavery and segregation have ended. In addition, the rising number of Latino people, who are often referred to as “unmeltable ethnics” as they have so far successfully escaped the Anglo-
American assimilationist impulse, has complicated and added a new dimension to the concept of racial and ethnic hybridity in America. In her most influential book Borderlands, Anzaldua develops a new and enabling concept of Chicana hybridity, which aims to deconstruct “the symmetry and duality of [Anglo] and [Latino], inside/outside” (Bhabha 165). Anzaldua proposes her concept of hybridity as a new form of mestiza consciousness. It addresses the various forms of discrimination and oppression the mestiza experiences, but also proposes a way to actively transcend them. This however is a very painful, but ultimately rewarding process.
In her book, Anzaldua writes about the experience of living in the physical
borderlands between the American Southwest and Mexico, which she claims is comparable to experiencing the conflict between fixed cultural, psychological, sexual, and spiritual
categories of identity. Anzaldua describes the U.S.-Mexican border as a “1,950 mile long open wound/dividing a pueblo, a culture” (Anzaldua 24). According to Anzaldua, it is at this unnatural boundary, where the Anglo and the Latino worlds meet and are simultaneously split, that a third, hybrid consciousness, a border consciousness can be developed. The people living in this area reflect and embody the tensions created by this unnatural boundary: “The
prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half breed, the half dead; in short those who cross over, pass over, go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (Anzaldua 25).
Anzaldua’s concept of the mestiza develops from the internal struggle experienced by these people, including herself, belonging to multiple and contradictory collectivities:
Chicana, woman, and lesbian. The mestiza is constantly confronted with clashes and contradictions between two or more cultures and experiences this as a cultural war in her psyche. Anzaldua describes this process as follows: “The coming together of two self- consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision” (Anzaldua 100). This choque has far reaching consequences for the mental and emotional well being of the mestiza: “Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness”
(Anzaldua 100). The conflicting information and points of view, which the mestiza perceives leave her paralyzed, and she is unable to take responsibility for her life and to become an autonomous individual. To survive this conflict, the mestiza has to develop a tolerance for contradictions and ambiguities by deconstructing cultural binaries and creating what Homi K.
Bhabha has termed a “third space” (Bhabha 53). Anzaldua states that:
in attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its severed parts. That third element is a new
consciousness— a mestiza consciousness and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm….The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality .…A massive
uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is
the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war. (Anzaldua 102)
Anzaldua envisions the mestiza consciousness as a dismantling of all dualistic thinking. This consciousness, in her view, not only dissolves the borders between Anglo and Latino cultures, but also between fixed psychological, sexual, linguistic, and spiritual categories of identity, which she sees as the source of all violence. For Anzaldua, a mestiza consciousness will eventually eradicate sexism, homophobia, religious fanaticism, racism, and their ensuing injustices.
In Borderlands, Anzaldua claims to defend the most oppressed and victimized of all races, ethnicities, genders, classes and sexual orientations, because for her, it is clear that as long as Chicanas or homosexuals are oppressed there will be discrimination against all weaker groups in society. However, this is also the point at which Anzaldua’s attempts at
empowering all socially and culturally oppressed groups become more problematic. In her book, Anzaldua highlights the importance of knowledge and education several times. She argues, for example, that it is vital for the liberation of all oppressed minorities and the development of a mestiza consciousness to know one’s own and each other’s history: “The whites in power want us people of color to barricade ourselves behind our separate tribal walls so they can pick us off one at a time with their hidden weapons; so they can whitewash and distort history. Ignorance splits people, creates prejudices. A misinformed people is a subjugated people” (Anzaldua 108). At the same time, Anzaldua acknowledges that education is not available for everyone: “As a working class people our chief activity is to put food in our mouths, a roof over our heads and clothes on our backs. Educating our children is out of reach for most of us” (Anzaldua 39). This, in my view, constitutes the central problem in Anzaldua’s approach that may substantially compromise its usefulness for a number of
disempowered cultural groups. Her approach, while seemingly all-inclusive, remains a highly class-based one.
One of the reasons for this problem is the fact that Anzaldua’s identity concept is, as she has always acknowledged herself, primarily based on her personal experience as a mestiza living in the borderlands of the American Southwest and Mexico. She chronicles a more inclusive and personalized history of these borderlands by providing the Mexican perspective on the Mexican-American war, the signing of The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the ongoing exploitation of the Chicano. By recounting the exploitation of her parents by big Anglo corporations, which had cheated small Chicano landowners into losing their land, Anzaldua speaks out for the Chicano both on an individual and a collective level. Anzaldua is the first in generations to leave her community and to receive a university education. While neither of her parents received a high school education, her father eventually valued his children’s education enough to leave his family settled in one place and to travel by himself to the ranches where work was available. Anzaldua acknowledges the importance of knowledge and education in her life: “books saved my sanity, knowledge opened the locked places in me and taught me first how to survive and then how to soar” (Anzaldua 19). By receiving a university education Anzaldua has been able to escape the poverty and sexism experienced in the isolated peasant community in which she grew up and by transcending her working class background she has acquired a position to empower the most oppressed through her writing.
Another level on which Anzaldua’s personal experiences inform her theoretical perspective is her ability to develop a critical stance towards all cultures. She defends the Chicano culture against criticism from non- Mexicans, but at the same time criticizes those aspects of Chicano culture that confine half of the population to the bottom rung of society.
Despite the fact that Anzaldua felt that she “grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a member of a colonized people in our own
territory)” (Anzaldua 19), she also maintains that she grew up in such an extremely isolated Mexican peasant culture and did not associate with Anglos until university that she felt comfortable enough to leave and criticize her Mexican community: “I fear no betrayal on my part because, unlike Chicanas and other women of color who grew up white or who have only recently returned to their native cultural roots, I was totally immersed in mine” (43). Anzaldua experiences the Chicano culture as extremely oppressive of women and ascribes this to the male-female hierarchy characteristic of a patriarchal culture. Anzaldua especially defends the Indian side of Chicano identity and exposes the injustice inflicted on the Indian woman over the centuries. According to Anzaldua, men have made cultural and religious rules that
terrorize women and prevent them from becoming self -autonomous individuals: “The ability to respond is what is meant by responsibility, yet our cultures take away our ability to act—
shackle us in the name of protection” (43). Anzaldua points out that education and a career offer women the possibility to escape the traditional gender roles assigned to them, but underlines the fact that this does not remove the emphasis that Chicano culture places on being a wife and mother.
Anzaldua scrutinizes all three cultures (white, Mexican, and Indian) that define the experience of the Chicana. She chronicles the development and suppression of Chicano Spanish, which she says is a border tongue, “a variation of two languages,” “neither espanõl ni ingles, but both,” “a linguistic mestizaje” (Anzaldua 77). For Anzaldua, her ethnic identity is irrevocably tied up with her linguistic identity. They cannot be separated. Anzaldua feels that as long as her language is not accepted, she is not accepted. For this reason she exposes the linguistic terrorism experienced by Chicanas at the hand of Anglos, but also confronts the way Chicanas use language differences against each other.
According to Anzaldua, being female and a lesbian, women and especially the queer have a special role to play in the world. Anzaldua maintains that the most effective way
women can revolt against patriarchal culture is through their sexual behavior. Personally, she chooses a lesbian identity as a protest against the despot duality that governs Mexican-
American culture and claims it is “a path of knowledge—one of knowing (and of learning) the history of oppression of our raza. It is a way of balancing, of mitigating duality” (Anzaldua 41).
In addition to this she calls homosexuals “the supreme crossers of cultures” as they are present in every culture and their role is thus to unite and link people from all races (Anzaldua 84). It is striking to note that she identifies one of the most discriminated minorities, the colored homosexual, as the most enlightened of all peoples and so reverses established power relations. Anzaldua’s own lesbianism “is neither centered nor essentialized,” but represents
“that which makes home impossible, which makes her self non identical” (Yarbro 20). Yarbro observes that Anzaldua, by a textual move, privileges lesbianism and makes homosexuality like the Coatlicue state, a state of mind that produces a higher level of consciousness (Yarbro 19-21).
This higher level of consciousness, however, comes at a high price. Anzaldua names two important stages in this psychological process, la facultad and the Coatlicue state.
According to Anzaldua, not conscious reason, but pain and fear stimulate the development of a sixth sense, la facultad:
Those who are pushed out of the tribe for being different are likely to become more sensitized (when not brutalized into insensitivity). Those who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world are more apt to develop this sense. Those who are pounced on the most have it the strongest—the females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, the outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign…. It’s a kind of survival tactic that people, caught between worlds, unknowingly cultivate. (61)
Anzaldua defines the second stage, called Coatlique, as the unconscious force that compels the mind to make meaning of past experiences. It follows only after all other defense strategies have been used to avoid confronting one’s fear and shame: “My resistance, my refusal to know some truth about myself brings on that paralysis, depression—brings on the Coatlicue state” (70). La Facultad and the Coatlicue state both represent experiences, or events that break through one’s habitual way of thinking and lead to an increased
consciousness of the self. Anzaldua compares being an artist to living in the borderlands. She believes the process of writing helps her to transform herself and others. While writing Anzaldua experiences many blocks (Coatlicue states), which she says “are symptomatic of a larger creative process: cultural shifts. The stress of living with cultural ambiguity both compels me to write and blocks me” (Anzaldua 96).
On a personal level, one can thus argue that Anzaldua has managed to overcome the contradictions she experiences in her life by developing a new system of meaning in which her painful experiences as a hybrid are relevant: “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” (Anzaldua 103). In her book, Anzaldua succeeds in conceptualizing her own reality of multiple forms of oppression, which in turn produce a “theory in the flesh.” Yarbro, however, is one of the critics who notes the complications that can arise from this: It is one thing to choose to recognize the ways one inhabits the “borderlands” and quite another to theorize a consciousness in the name of survival, to transform “living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience” (Yarbro 8).
Although Anzaldua formulates a theory in which she gives voice to the most poverty- stricken and oppressed people, it is highly questionable whether these extremely marginalized groups will ever be able to experience their hybridity in the same manner as Anzaldua does.
Anzaldua was only able to develop her concept of mestiza consciousness after she had
transcended her working class Chicano background. For those, however, who remain stuck in poverty, the experience of being a cultural hybrid may be entirely different, because they lack the very educational prerequisites identified by Anzaldua as necessary to creating a mestiza consciousness. Hagenbuechle, for example observes that hybridity for the lower social classes and those living in third world cultures “may lead to tremendous difficulties and profound cultural confusion” (Hagenbuechle 380). In addition to this, Lipsitz notes that, “mixed race identity can be a source of great personal pain and considerable political disempowerment”
unless it is accompanied by tools to negotiate it. (Lipsitz 20).
In my dissertation I will draw on Anzaldua’s concept of the mestiza consciousness to explore the representation of hybrid characters in a selection of Latino/a literary texts, specifically Mexican-American and Cuban American texts. I will argue that even though Anzaldua insists that she speaks for all oppressed and victimized groups, her concept of hybridity proposed in Borderlands is predominantly open to middle class and educated people and therefore remains unrealistic and unattainable for most of those on the lower social level as they are more concerned with surviving poverty, violence, and discrimination in the physical borderlands than transcending cultural, psychological, sexual, and spiritual borders.
In chapter one I will discuss Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street whose main character Esperanza successfully embodies Anzaldua’s concept of the mestiza and is able to transcend all dualisms. Most of the other female characters, however, are not so fortunate, and I shall demonstrate how unlikely it is for them to experience and use their hybridity in a constructive way as they are limited by sexist gender roles forced on them by abusive males and by their continuous struggle against poverty.
In chapter two I will discuss the first part of Richard Rodriguez’s autobiography, Hunger of Memory, in which he recounts his inability to reconcile his private Spanish
working class background with the public American middle class identity to which he aspires.
I will demonstrate that Rodriguez is unable to develop a mestiza consciousness because, unlike Anzaldua, his main desire as a working-class scholarship boy is to move up the social ladder by receiving an Anglo-American education, and to reach this goal he is willing to sacrifice the Mexican part of his identity. In this way, he does not deconstruct the Anglo- Mexican dualism but evades its tension by assimilating into Anglo-culture.
In chapter three I will analyze the third part of Rodriguez’s autobiography, Brown:
The Last Discovery of America, in which he finally acknowledges the necessity and potential usefulness of the concept of hybridity. I will demonstrate that once he is an established middle class man, Rodriguez has the freedom to own up to his homosexuality, which opens up the way for him to develop a mestiza consciousness.
In chapter four I will examine Cherrie Moraga’s autobiographical collection of poetry and essays entitled The Last Generation, in which she speaks for all indigenous landless cultures. I will demonstrate that Moraga is in the process of developing a mestiza consciousness, but is limited by her inability to accept the Anglo-American culture and her place in it while it continues to dominate lower class, poverty stricken indigenous peoples.
In chapter five I will examine Cristina Garcia’s novel Dreaming in Cuban, which features the lives of three generations of Cuban women. The first two generations are tormented and severely limited by oppression, violence, poverty and sexism and therefore cannot begin to contemplate the luxury of transgressing cultural boundaries and changing their lives on the basis of a new mestiza consciousness. The only character that is able to develop this new consciousness is Pilar Puente, who has grown up in a middle class family in America.
Esperanza Cordero: The Hope of Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street chronicles a year in the life of the narrator Esperanza Cordero, a young Mexican-American girl living in the barrio. It recounts
Esperanza’s transformation from a child into an adolescent and the accompanying awareness of her social reality. Esperanza is determined to escape the poverty, racism, sexism and violence with which she is constantly confronted in her neighbourhood. Her love for books and her writing talent are portrayed as an empowering source through which she can improve her socio-economic status. Esperanza, like Anzaldua in Borderlands, is in the process of discursive self-formation while writing her stories. It is through reflecting and writing about her experiences on Mango Street that she discovers her personal identity and freedom. De Valdes points out that “the liberation of Esperanza through her writing draws from a rich tradition of a writer’s self creation” (9). Although some critics have criticized Esperanza’s wish to leave her working class Mexican community for a more Anglicized middle class life, it is important to point out that Esperanza does not intend to be confined to either Latino or Anglo-American culture. Her aspirations for better social conditions are not a denial of her Chicana identity. She says: “One day I’ll own my own house, but I won’t forget who I am or where I came from” (87). Eventually, Esperanza is able to transcend all dualistic thinking and to leave Mango Street, but realizes that she will feel the need to return: “For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (110). In this chapter I will argue that due to her talents as a writer, Esperanza is the only woman in her community able to translate Anzaldua’s theory into practice, while most other women in her community are not so fortunate and are unable to experience their hybridity in a constructive way as they are limited by sexist gender roles forced upon them by abusive males, and by their continuous struggle against poverty.
In the first chapter entitled “The House on Mango Street”, synonymous with the title of the book, the theme of socio-economic disadvantage is immediately introduced as a predominant problem in this Chicana community. The adolescent protagonist Esperanza voices her disappointment with her parents’ newly bought red house: “Bricks are crumbling in places, and the front door is swollen you have to push it hard to get in,” even though it is a slight improvement upon the succession of inadequate rented and shared accommodation which preceded this move (Cisneros 4). Any feeling of improvement Esperanza may have had, however, is dashed by the remark of a new found friend who will remain so “only till next Tuesday” since she is moving out of the area because “the neigbourhood is getting bad”
(Cisneros 13). Esperanza’s shame of her socio- economic circumstances had already been poignantly felt in an episode when a passing nun displayed her horror and disbelief at the conditions in which the child lived: “Where do you live? she asked. There, I said pointing up to the third floor. You live there?....The way she said it made me feel like nothing” (Cisneros 5). The longing for a beautiful house on a hill is encouraged by trips she takes with her parents on Sunday to luxurious suburbs where her father works during the week. However, she does not enjoy these trips for long: “I don’t tell them I am ashamed—all of us staring out the window like the hungry” (86). Although Esperanza is embarrassed by her situation, it is this shame which makes her determined to change and improve it and to one day “have a house. A real house. One I could point to. But this isn’t it” (Cisneros 5). Esperanza’s longing for a white house “with trees around it, a great big yard and grass growing without a fence”
represents her quest for freedom and liberation from the social and economic restrictions her sad red house stands for (4). Esperanza does not want to identify with Mango Street as there is
“too much sadness and not enough sky” (33).
De Valdes points out the larger significance of Esperanza’s yearnings: “the house she seeks is, in reality, her own person” (3). During the year Esperanza lives on Mango Street she
experiences different phases in the development of her identity. Although her name means
“hope” in English, Esperanza understands her name to have negative connotations in Spanish and associates it with passivity and victimization: “It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing” (10). Her wish to baptize herself with a new name, “something like Zeze the X,” represents her rebellious character and her strong desire to transform her future and that of Mango Street (Cisneros 10). Although Esperanza would at first prefer to deny any ties with Mango Street as long as its circumstances have not improved, she is told that “You will always be Mango Street. You can’t erase what you know:
You can’t forget who you are” (105). Her eventual acceptance of her background becomes evident when she creates space in her dream house for passing vagrants. Esperanza will not forget what it is like “to be without a house,” unlike those living in comfortable homes with no experience of poverty: “People who live on hills sleep so close to the stars they forget those of us who live too much on earth” (86). Esperanza eventually realizes that her
experiences on Mango Street provide the source for her writing career and thus her ability to transcend her origins. By recording the otherwise obscure lives of the women living around her she gives a voice to their experience. Furthermore, her writing helps her release the pain she feels: “I put it down on paper and then the ghost does not ache so much” (110).
In addition to the issue of poverty, The House on Mango Street strongly highlights Anzaldua’s identification of sexism as being the main problem for the Chicana. In search of her identity as a Chicana, Esperanza observes and befriends the women on her street but decides that she cannot accept the subservient position held by most of them and that she desires a better future for herself. Esperanza is surrounded by “abused, defeated and worn- out” women and recognizes that they are systematically suppressed by a patriarchal society (de Valdes 2). She identifies partly with her great-grandmother after whom she was named,
being impressed by the story of the wild young horse woman who refused to marry: “She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse—which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female-- but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don’t like their women strong” (Cisneros 11). She realizes, however, that this behaviour is not accepted by Mexican society as her grandmother was eventually carried off with a sack over her head and forced into marriage. Esperanza is determined not to become a victim like her grandmother: “I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window” (Cisneros 11). It is Esperanza’s awareness of the Chinese/Mexican lie that gives her the possibility to escape it, in this way echoing Anzaldua’s claim that “awareness of [the] situation must come before inner changes, which in turn come before changes in
society” (Anzaldua 109).
Esperanza looks at other young girls and women in her street, but finds their
happiness and well being to be mostly dependent on their fathers or (future) husbands. The only way for them to gain approval and some independence from their parents is through marriage. Marin is a bit older than Esperanza, “wears dark nylons all the time and lots of make- up” to draw attention from boys: “What matters, Marin says, is for the boys to see us and for us to see them” (Cisneros 27). Like Esperanza, Marin wants to improve her situation, but believes men and marriage are the only way to do so: “Marin says that if she stays here next year, she’s going to get a real job downtown because that’s where the best jobs are, since you always get to look beautiful and get to wear nice clothes and can meet someone in the subway who might marry you and take you to live in a big house far away” (Cisneros 26).
Marin does not value a career in itself, but views it as a means to find a suitable husband who can make her a respectable wife and mother and can provide her with a big house. Esperanza, however, realizes that a good education and a career offer her the possibility to be
independent from men and to develop a meaningful purpose in her life.
In the beginning, Esperanza admires one of her classmates, Sally, because she likes the way she dresses and because the boys think she is beautiful. Sally’s father however says:
“to be this beautiful is trouble” and thus confines her to the house and beats her to prevent her from running off with boys and bringing shame to the family (Cisneros 81). Esperanza’s mother won’t allow Esperanza to dress similarly to Sally, because “to wear black so young is dangerous,” based on her assumption that black clothes will make her more attractive to men (Cisneros 82). The remarks by both parents illustrate Anzaldua’s point that in Mexican culture women’s sexuality is perceived as a threat and that women need to be protected from others, but mostly from themselves. Sally’s father enforces traditional Mexican gender rules by beating up his daughter daily, and Esperanza’s mother transmits the rules through warning her daughter. Sally is a different person at school and at home; before going home she removes her make-up, pulls her skirt straight and doesn’t laugh. She is not allowed to develop a personal identity. To escape her father’s beatings and gain his approval, Sally marries “in another state where it’s legal to get married before eighth grade” (Cisneros 101). However, as Leslie Petty observes, this does not improve Sally’s situation much: “The house of her
husband is just as limiting as the house of her father” as she is again confined to a house she is not allowed to leave (Petty 127). Although Esperanza at first envies Sally’s beauty, because of the attention she receives from boys, Esperanza soon realizes that her own identity is defined by much more than men’s approval. Thus from this moment on, she focuses on developing her talents as a writer and receiving as much education as she can, to escape a life of confinement to a husband and household.
Minerva, another one of Esperanza’s friends, is only slightly older than she is, but is stuck in an unhappy marriage with two small children to feed. Her husband has left her several times and comes back only to beat her and leave her again. Minerva writes small poems after she has put her children to bed and exchanges them with Esperanza. In spite of
this intimacy between them, Esperanza feels powerless to help her friend: “Next week she comes over black and blue and asks what can she do? Minerva. I don’t know which way she’ll go. There is nothing I can do” (Cisneros 85). Although Minerva has a talent for writing poetry she is prevented from developing this any further by her abusive husband and her responsibility as a mother. In contrast, Esperanza, still living at home with her parents, has the time and space to focus on studying and writing.
As in the case of Gloria Anzaldua, Esperanza feels the need to leave home in order to
“find her own intrinsic nature buried under the personality that had been imposed on [her]” by the restraining gender roles and the confining poverty (Anzaldua 38). The restrictions which Esperanza experiences on Mango Street are transformed into wishes for a house where she
“could sleep and wake up and never have to think who likes you and doesn’t like you…. And no one could yell at you if they saw you out in the dark leaning against somebody without someone thinking you are bad, without someone saying it is wrong, without the whole world waiting for you to make a mistake” (Cisneros 83). She dreams of a house where she isn’t responsible for anyone else and does not have to clean up after others, “a house quiet as snow, a space for myself to go, clean as paper before the poem” (Cisneros 108). Esperanza does not intend to be confined to the role of housewife and mother: “I have decided not to grow up tame like the others who lay their necks on the threshold waiting for the ball and chain” (88).
Like Anzaldua, Esperanza is a rebel and does not intend to fulfil the expectations of others just because she is a woman: “I have begun my own quiet war. Simple. Sure. I am one who leaves the table like a man, without putting back the chair or picking up the plate (Cisneros 88). Esperanza’s defiance, according to Anzaldua, however, is not a way of life, but only a step towards liberation from patriarchal domination (Anzaldua 100).
During the year living on Mango Street Esperanza experiences two traumatic events, which change the way she perceives the world, and eventually lead her to develop a mestiza
consciousness. In the story “The Monkey Garden” Esperanza recounts her disillusionment with both, the morality of her friend Sally, and the community in general. Esperanza who still loves to run and play, recognizes the danger in a kissing game Sally plays with the local boys to get her keys back:
I don’t know why, but something inside me wanted to throw a stick. Something wanted to say no when I watched Sally going into the garden with Tito’s buddies all grinning….Only how come I felt angry inside. Like something wasn’t right. (96-97)
Yet instead of being appreciated for trying to save her friend from being sexually
manipulated, she is made to feel ridiculous both by her friend and the boys’ parents. When Esperanza runs for help to Tito’s mother and the latter hardly reacts, Esperanza realizes that the game between Sally and the boys is acceptable behavior in her community and represents the power structure between men and women in general. It is through this new insight that Esperanza loses her belief in the protective power of adults as well as her own innocence, “her safe and easy ignorance” (Anzaldua 61):
I looked at my feet in their white socks and ugly round shoes. They seemed far away. They didn’t seem to be my feet anymore. And the garden that had been such a good place to play didn’t seem mine either. (98)
Shortly after this, Esperanza undergoes another traumatizing experience. Still clinging to her friendschip with Sally, she sacrifices her own wishes by going to the fair: “I was waiting by the red clowns. I was standing by the tilt-a- whirl where you said. And anyway I don’t like carnivals. I went to be with you because you like to laugh on the tilt-a-whirl, you throw your head back and laugh” (99). While waiting for Sally who has again gone off with a boy, Esperanza is sexually violated. This first violent experience completely disillusions Esperanza as it does not in any way resemble what she had been told about sex. Esperanza
expresses her anger and disillusionment with the patriarchal myths which both Anglo and Mexican society propagate about sexuality: “I waited my whole life. You’re a liar. They all lied. All the books and magazines, everything that told it wrong” (100).
Maria Herrera-Sobek understands Esperanza’s anger to be directed at ‘“the community of women who keep the truth (about female sexuality) from the younger
generation of women in a conspiracy of silence”’ (quoted in Petty 130). It is thus striking to note that in Jacqueline Doyle’s view Esperanza experiences Sally’s betrayal “more keenly than the rape she suffers while she waits for Sally at the carnival” (Doyle 16). Unlike Sally, who passively lets boys take advantage of her and define her life, Esperanza is unwilling to accept the denigration of women and is determined to help those around her.
Leslie Petty observes that the most important dualism which Esperanza finally manages to transcend is “the division of ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ females in her culture” (130- 131), epitomized in the passive and nurturing role of wife and mother as represented by the image of the Virgin de Guadalupe on the one hand, and the sex object for the pleasure of men as represented by Malinche, the traitor and violated mother on the other hand. Esperanza is portrayed as embodying characteristics of both of these figures and she realizes that
irrespective of the role she chooses to follow, whether it is Sally’s example or that of the Virgen de Guadalupe (i.e. the rules set out by patriarchal culture), neither will protect her from being violated. It is this realization that leads her to deconstruct this binary altogether and to develop her own independent identity and it is education which helps her to accomplish this goal.
In Borderlands, Anzaldua points out that education and a career can offer a new opportunity for women to escape the traditional gender and sexual roles assigned to them (nun, mother or prostitute) by patriarchal culture. The importance of education to improve her own socio-economic position is stressed by Esperanza several times. In the chapter “Alicia
Who Sees Mice” Esperanza describes the difficult and sexist conditions under which her friend Alicia is trying to study “because she doesn’t want to spend her whole life in a factory or behind a rolling pin” (Cisneros 32). Unlike Alicia, who has taken over the role of her deceased mother and is coping with a father who does not appreciate the value of education for women, Esperanza is encouraged by both her parents to receive a good education. Her father wants her to go to a Catholic high school, even though he cannot really afford it, because, in his opinion: “nobody went to public school unless you wanted to turn out bad”
(Cisneros 51). In addition, Esperanza’s mother intimates to her daughter that she does not feel fulfilled by being a wife and mother alone and stresses that education can change a woman’s life: “I could’ve been somebody, you know?” (Cisneros 91). Her mother also understands the value of education in improving job prospects, which in turn will prevent women from being financially dependent on their husbands, like her friends.
Esperanza is thus determined to leave Mango Street without a husband, but with all her “bags of books and paper” (110). She has decided she will not let herself be overcome or defeated by the poverty, sexism and violence surrounding her on Mango Street: “One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever” (110). Although she hates the socio-economic malice dominating Mango Street, she loves the people that live there and values her past experiences with them. One of the most important faculties
Esperanza develops during her year living on Mango Street is what Anzaldua has termed a tolerance for ambiguities and contradictions, which helps Esperanza to integrate all aspects of her identity, past, present, and future.
Similarly to Anzaldua, Esperanza’s writing helps her negotiate the discrepancy between her current reality and her dreams for a better future for herself and her neighbours.
By dedicating her writing to the women living on Mango Street Esperanza transcends her earlier and apparent denial of her traditional and poverty stricken background: “They will not
know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (110). Esperanza manages to obtain what Anzaldua has called a mestiza consciousness; a peace of mind with which she can face a world full of contradictions. It is with this state of mind that Esperanza can leave Mango Street, knowing that in this way she will eventually be able to help most those who she is leaving behind. In contrast to Richard Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory, which will be discussed in the following chapter, Esperanza vows to remain connected to her cultural background, even though her education and writing career might intellectually separate her from most of the people in her community.
Richard Rodriguez: A Split Identity
Richard Rodriguez’s book Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (1982) contains six critical autobiographical essays in which he chronicles his experience of assimilating into an Anglo middle class community as the son of working class Mexican immigrants. Initially, Rodriguez is firmly rooted in his Mexican-American environment. As he grows up in a Spanish speaking household, he comes to associate Spanish with family and intimacy, and English with public society. It is his parents’ and his own inability to speak English fluently that intensifies his feeling of identification with his family and his concomitant exclusion from the predominantly Anglo community around him: “I was reminded by Spanish of my separateness from los otros, los gringos in power” (14).
Rodriguez not only distinguishes between public and private life on a cultural and linguistic level, but is also painfully aware of class differences between himself and his classmates at a young age. “From those early days began my association with rich people, my fascination with their secret….When I went to the big houses, I remembered that I was, at best, a visitor to the world I saw there” (132).
In Hunger of Memory Rodriguez argues against bi-lingual education as well as
affirmative action, the latter of which he himself was a beneficiary. He bases his arguments on his own personal experience of the American educational system, which, he emphasizes, greatly improved his standard of living: “It is education that has altered my life. Carried me far” (4). Rodriguez has been highly criticized by many Chicano activists for undermining the political cause of Chicano self-empowerment, but Rivera points out that “Rodriguez [and his views merely are] a reflection of North American education” (Rivera 10). Henry Staten, however, observes that Rodriguez’s critics overlook his arguably valid arguments against affirmative action as they are all magnetized by his dichotomous way of thinking, juxtaposing
ethnicity to social mobility, and his consequent rejection of bi-lingual education. In this chapter I will demonstrate that Rodriguez is unable to develop a mestiza consciousness because unlike Anzaldua, his main desire as a working-class scholarship boy, is to move up the social ladder by receiving an Anglo-American education, and to reach this goal he is willing to sacrifice the Mexican part of his identity. In this way, he does not deconstruct the Anglo-Mexican dualism but evades its tensions by assimilating into Anglo-culture.
Rodriguez starts to develop a dichotomous view of his identity during his early childhood, in which Spanish represents his private life and English public gringo society.
Both Anzaldua in Borderlands and Rodriguez in Hunger of Memory recognize that ethnic and linguistic identity are inseparable, but for Rodriguez this is a reason to argue against bi-lingual education. Unlike Anzaldua, who grew up in a tightly- knit Mexican peasant community, Rodriguez has grown up “many blocks from the Mexican south side of town” (10). He is confronted with and aware of being a minority at a much younger age than Anzaldua: “Our house stood apart. A gaudy yellow in a row of white bungalows. We were the people with the noisy dog. The people who raised pigeons and chickens. We were the foreigners on the block”
(11). Like most small children, Rodriguez experiences public society as threatening, but especially so as he is unable to speak English. “Nervously, I’d arrive at the grocery store to hear there the sounds of the gringo—foreign to me—reminding me that in this world so big, I was a foreigner” (15). In addition to this, Rodriguez is aware of his parents’ social isolation from public society and its Us- versus- Them mentality. Rodriguez’s parents instil in him a sense of the Other and their mistrust of white Americans: “They regarded the people at work, the faces in crowds, as very distant from us. They were the others, los gringos. That term was interchangeable in their speech with another, even more telling, los americanos” (11).
Rodriguez’s parents’ ineptitude to converse satisfactorily in English, “their whining vowels and guttural consonants; their sentences that got stuck with ‘eh’ and ‘ah’ sounds; confused
syntax” makes him feel ashamed of them in public and weakens his belief in their power to protect him (13).
Once Rodriguez reaches school age, however, he is no longer able to keep his private and public life separate. His schoolteachers invade his private life when they visit his parents to stress the necessity of speaking English with their children. At first the family experiences learning English together as a game, but as it becomes more forced, it soon leads to a
traumatic experience for Rodriguez:
One Saturday morning I entered the kitchen where my parents were talking in Spanish. I did not realize that they were talking in Spanish however until, at the moment they saw me, I heard their voices change to speak English. Those gringo sounds they uttered startled me. Pushed me away. In that moment of trivial understanding and profound insight, I felt my throat twisted by unsounded grief. I turned quickly and left the room. But I had no place to escape to with Spanish. (The spell was broken.). (21)
It is his parents’ insistence on speaking English with their children which angers Rodriguez and eventually makes him determined to learn classroom English. However, once he is able to speak English and feels confident in public society, he senses there is less intimate
communication in his family. Tormented by guilt and a feeling of betraying his family by speaking English, Rodriguez loses his ability to speak Spanish:
For my part, I felt that I had somehow committed a sin of betrayal by learning English. But betrayal against whom? Not against visitors to the house exactly.
No, I felt I had betrayed my immediate family. (30)
Despite this guilt and in order to overcome it, Rodriguez consciously chooses English over Spanish and decides to excel in it. For Rodriguez there is no way to reconcile the two
languages and to remain a fluent speaker of both. The positive side for Rodriguez, however, is
“that while [he] suffers from a diminished sense of private individuality by becoming assimilated into public society, such assimilation makes possible the achievement of public individuality” (26). It is this dichotomy between private and public life that prevents
Rodriguez from developing a mestiza consciousness. Henry Staten points out that Rodriguez makes an “astonishing logical leap” in which Mexican ethnic/linguistic identity is equated with private individuality and needs to be sacrificed in order to achieve public Anglo individuality (Staten 109).
Ultimately, however, it is Rodriguez’s strong awareness of class differences, which triggers his decision to assimilate and excel in English, the language of his middle- class peers, abandoning Spanish, which he associates with his working class background. Ramsdell observes that for Rodriguez “allegiance to Spanish means to seal one’s future as a member of the working class whereas mastery in English is the entry ticket into the gringo world of economic success” (Ramsdell 169). In the prologue “Middle-Class Pastoral” Rodriguez immediately foregrounds class division as an important factor defining his identity. Henry Staten observes that while Rodriguez’s parents were initially perceived as working class people in an American context, they would never identify as the laboring underclass in Mexico, and later in the US they also identify as middle-class. Unlike Anzaldua’s family who had already lived in America for generations, Rodriguez’s parents were Mexican immigrants but did not experience their ethnicity as a barrier to fulfilling their American dream: “They were nobody’s victims. Optimism and ambition led them to a house (our home) many blocks from the Mexican south side of town....It never occurred to my parents that they couldn’t live wherever they chose. Nor was the Sacramento of the fifties bent on teaching them a contrary lesson” (10). It was thus both his parents and his school environment that encourage him to identify and aspire to the same socio-economic status as the American middle-class.
Rodriguez claims that while visiting his friends he was aware of “things most middle- class children wouldn’t trouble to notice,” yet it must be noted that his racial identity highly increases his class sensitivity: “I’d notice that my friend’s mother rang a small silver bell to tell the black woman when to bring in the food” (132, italics mine). For Rodriguez’s mother dark skin is a symbol of a life of poverty and oppression and she instills this idea in her son when constantly warning him to get out of the sun because of his already dark skin: “‘You won’t be satisfied till you end up looking like los pobres who work in the fields, los
braceros’” (121). In contrast to his mother, Rodriguez’s father never comments on the skin color of his son, but teases him with the softness of his hands as it implies he has never known
“real work” (Rodriguez 137).
In Borderlands Anzaldua criticizes the discrimination of the Indian in Mexican and American culture, which she has personally experienced. Rodriguez, however, internalizes the American discrimination against the Indian and thus develops an inferiority complex due to his skin color. In public society, Rodriguez does not experience intense racism, but the few incidents that occur, nonetheless, leave him “paralyzed with embarrassment” (125). His shame of his dark skin in a white world is intensified by his family’s predominantly white appearance, he and his older sister being the exception. Deeply impressed by the solutions proposed to lighten dark skin, “a mixture of egg white and lemon juice” and the degrading remarks “mi feito” made by the women in his community, Rodriguez is so repelled by his own body that he tries to escape all physical activity: “The sensations that first had excited in me a sense of my maleness, I denied. I was too ashamed of my body. I wanted to forget that I had a body because I had a brown body” (135). Rodriguez is so desperate to be accepted by “white America” that at the age of eleven or twelve he tries to shave off his brown skin color, but is confronted with the fact that the “dark would not come out. It remained. Trapped. Deep in the cells of my skin” (134). Unlike Anzaldua, who has lived on the margins her whole life,
Rodriguez is unable to deconstruct the dark-light binary as he fully identifies with, and always feels the necessity to be accepted by the white majority in society.
Education has different meanings for both of Rodriguez’s parents: “whereas my mother saw in education the opportunity for job advancement, my father recognized that education provided an even more startling possibility: It could enable a person to escape from a life of mere labor” (58). According to Rodriguez, he is more aware of the fact that education is changing him and his family’s life than his brothers and sisters. While first correcting and commenting on his parents’ English, he soon is careful “ to separate the two very different worlds of my day (47). For Rodriguez, it is social mobility which inevitably causes a cultural gap between himself and his parents, who never had the same educational opportunities as he did: “This is what matters to me: the story of the scholarship boy who returns home one summer from college to discover bewildering silence, facing his parents” (4). Unlike Anzaldua, who also enjoyed the privilige of receiving a university education, Rodriguez no longer identifies himself as working class or Mexican once he is at university and feels alienated from both his parents and his Mexican background. For Rodriguez cultural identity and class are inseparable, and he mocks the members of America’s ethnic left who suggest and emphasize that it is possible to remain “unchanged by social mobility” (3). For Rodriguez the Chicano students that dress in traditional Mexican clothing and insist on speaking Spanish are annoying and make a “clownish display” of themselves. As Rodriguez has sacrificed his Mexican identity in order to become educated, he cannot and will not comprehend the possibility of a multi-cultural and multi-lingual identity: “I needed to tell myself that the new minority students were foolish to think themselves unchanged by their schooling. (I needed to justify my own change.)” (171). Henry Staten points out that Rodriguez is wrong to assume that he or any other person from a working class background “has no grounds for
identification with the culture of origin” once they have gone to university (Staten 113), but
for Rodriguez, this transcendence of binary thinking seems impossible. He is caught in an Either-Or trap.
Overall, despite his education and his assertion that he is now a middle class man, Rodriguez is unable to develop a mestiza consciousness in Hunger of Memory. In the first part of his autobiography, Rodriguez is still so insecure about and preoccupied with defending his place in white middle class society that he prefers assimilation into the cultural mainstream over and above all alternatives.He is yet unable to contemplate questioning or deconstructing the multiple binaries he has encountered in his life, however as we shall see in the following chapter, he eventually manages to accomplish this twenty years later, in the third part of his autobiography.
Richard Rodriguez: The Man in The Middle
With his third book Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002) Richard Rodriguez completes his loosely connected autobiographical trilogy, which was published in 10-year installments starting with the publication of Hunger of Memory in 1982 and followed by Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father in 1992. In Brown, Rodriguez is finally able to accept and even to celebrate the ambiguity of his mixed heritage. He uses his brown color as a metaphor for the confusion of racial, sexual, and religious identities he embodies, which do not fit into clearly defined categories. He scrutinizes the puritanical strain in
American society and takes great delight in exposing the existence of the impure in American history:
I want to speak of such unpursued scenes and lives as constituting brown history. Brown, not in the sense of pigment, necessarily, but brown because mixed, confused, lumped, impure, unpasteurized, as motives are mixed, and the fluids of generation are mixed and emotions are unclear, and the tally of human progress and failure in every generation is mixed, and unaccounted for, missing in plain sight. (Rodriguez 197)
With his concept of brown as impurity Rodriguez transcends and challenges the dichotomous modes of racial thinking prevalent in America and so dominant in his first book: “I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America” (Rodriguez 11). In the following chapter I shall demonstrate that in Brown, Rodriguez develops a mestiza consciousness similar to that of Anzaldua, while at the same time his political views
concerning bi-lingual education and affirmative action remain conservative. He retains an extreme awareness of class differences and insists that (linguistic) assimilation is necessary to overcome poverty, but at the same time acknowledges the potential of the concept of
hybridity as a means to improve the future of humanity. What initiates this change in thinking
is Rodriguez’s increasing acceptance of his own complex identity. Once Rodriguez feels secure and established as a middle class man, he has the freedom to own up to his
homosexuality, which in turn opens up the way for him to develop a mestiza consciousness.
In the period between the publication of Hunger of Memory and Brown, Rodriguez had firmly established himself as a public intellectual in American society. In Brown Rodriguez has developed the self-confidence that accompanies a successful career. For Rodriguez, as has been discussed in the previous chapter, success has initially meant complete assimilation into Anglo American society:
I grew up wanting to be white. That is, to the extent of wanting to be colorless and to feel complete freedom of movement. But that was what I wanted, you see, growing up in America—the freedom of being nothing, the confidence of it, the arrogance. And I achieved it. (Rodriguez 140&141)
Having reached this goal, however, he discovers that what he thought was a place to quench his ambition does not bring the fulfillment he expected: “Was I too eager to join the conversation? It is only now I realize there is no conversation” (Rodriguez 34). This
realization and the freedom that comes along with it, empowers Rodriguez to criticize both Anglo and Mexican American culture and to create meaning out of his own ambiguity.
Rodriguez now insists that he is no longer the same person who wrote Hunger of Memory: “I will defend Richard Rodriguez’s decisions about that book. But I am not the author of that book….Because he wrote that book, I am not that person, because he released me from being that. I was no longer angry after that book” (Torres and Rodriguez 191). Although Rodriguez, while writing Hunger of Memory, was already consciously living as a homosexual, it is not until he comes out on the pages of Days of Obligation and Brown that he is able to celebrate this as part of a new value system (based on ambiguity) to understand the world. The
importance of coming out on paper for Rodriguez becomes clear when he says that during his
adolescence: “Musical comedy songs were more real than my life because they were articulate and because they had ligaments of narrative attached to them” (65). To make of himself a whole and real person, it is necessary for Rodriguez to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality and to place it into a larger context. This illustrates that, similar to Anzaldua, writing functions as a healing process for him and transforms his consciousness, yet for Rodriguez, it takes three books to accomplish this goal.
In Hunger of Memory Rodriguez represses the subject of homosexuality, but provides a detailed account of his fear of not complying with the Mexican ideal of machismo and his subsequent gender confusion. He describes his extreme gender insecurity and awareness of his body during physical education class in which he denies himself all forms of physical sensation, including playing basketball or baseball:
It would have been important for me to have joined them. Or for me to have taken off my shirt, to have let the sun burn dark on my skin, and to have run barefoot on the warm wet grass. It would have been very important. Too important. It would have been too telling a gesture—to admit the desire for sensation, the body, my body. (Rodriguez, Hunger 136)
To avoid being confronted with his sexuality, he avoids social events where he is expected to court women and instead escapes to an imaginary world through reading. He maintains that reading provided him with a vivid sexual imagination, but at the same time fears that this may make him effeminate: “It seemed to me that there was something unmanly about my attachment to literature”; “it would occur to me that my attachment to word made me like her [his mother]. Her son. Not formal like my father” (Rodriguez, Hunger 139).
In addition to lacking his father’s formality, Rodriguez yearns for the physical strength his father has developed through years of menial labor. This manifests itself in his admiration for the physical strength of the construction workers he sees working besides the road during
his summer job as a construction worker and he longs to be like them: “I was unwilling to admit the attraction of their lives. I tried to deny it by looking away. But what was denied became strongly desired” (135). Although, Rodriguez describes his admiration for the bodies of the construction workers in great detail, he never explicitly addresses his sexual attraction, but represses it under the guise of wanting to be strong like the ideal Mexican man. As a result of this job, Rodriguez says that: “The curse of physical shame was broken by the sun; I was no longer ashamed of my body. No longer would I deny myself the pleasing sensations of my maleness” (146). Rodriguez, however, does not further chronicle the development of his recognition of his maleness in Hunger of Memory, but continues this topic in his second book.
His second book Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father foregrounds the persecuted side of his split identity. In this book he addresses his Mexican origins and his homosexuality, i.e. those parts of his identity which he was not yet able to confront in Hunger of Memory. Rodriguez, always identifying with Anglo-American culture, had internalized its fear of Mexico: “For a long time I had my own fear of Mexico, an
American fear, Mexico’s history was death. Her stature was tragedy. A race of people that looked like me had disappeared” (Rodriguez, Days 21). Finally visiting Mexico after several failed attempts, and confronting his fear even makes him physically ill. Moreover, shocked by the number of AIDS victims, several of which are his friends, Rodriguez now feels compelled to publicly acknowledge his own homosexuality in his writing. At the deathbed of his friend Cesar, he realizes his duty to honestly confront and accept his own weakness, i.e. his inability to accept and embrace his own homosexuality: “It was then I saw that the greater sin against heaven was my unwillingness to embrace life” (Rodriguez, Days 43). This realization represents what Anzaldua calls the Coatlicue state, a vital stage in the development of a mestiza consciousness, in which an event radically changes the way a person views the world.
In Brown he is finally able to celebrate his sexuality and boldly proclaims himself “a queer Catholic Indian Spaniard” (35). He justifies his fears and the necessity of suppressing his homosexuality during his youth as a temporary way of surviving in a culture in which deviation is condemned:
I lived my life in fragments. For I knew nothing was so dangerous in the world as love, my kind of love. By love, I mean my attempt to join the world. My cubist life: My advantage (my sympathy toward brown and the bifocal plane) was due to the fact that from an early age I needed to learn caution, to avert my eyes, to guard my speech, to separate myself from myself…My eyes looking one way, my soul another. My motive could not be integrated with my body, with act or response or, indeed, approval. (Rodriguez 206)
He reveals the loneliness he felt growing up as a homosexual by chronicling his desperate search in history books and literature for a precedent to understand himself:
I was looking for the world entire. I suspected dimensions I could not find—by find I mean read about, I suppose. I never expected to form a “we” beyond my family. When would the impulse come, as it came to the birds, as it came to the bride? That was why the presence of the blond woman disturbed me so. She was proof of some power in the world I could not admit I felt. (203)
His inability to find answers concerning his sexuality in literature and history books during his youth finally also leads him to consider other unrecorded or scarcely discussed subjects, such as interracial relationships.
By writing about his experiences of multiple forms of oppression in Brown, Rodriguez is now finally able to stand up for himself and other oppressed people. He criticizes the dualistic and biased manner in which history is written and understands it to be a synonym for hate: “Say what you will about hate, hate is not ambiguous. Historians with bow ties who win
bronze medallions for their labor have long told the story of America as stories of hate” (195).
It is his love for men which leads him to focus on love instead of hate in American history and to discover a new perspective on race relations. In the US’s black-white dualism, he identifies himself as the mediator, “the man in the middle, the third man; neither” (125). Instead of focusing on conflict Rodriguez remembers “the influence of eroticism on history” by
emphasizing the existence of bi-racial children. Like his homosexuality, interracial love was for a long time suppressed by the racially dualistic American culture, but Rodriguez points out that the hybrid evidence of interracial love cannot be ignored and hence undermines the
“puritanical” i.e. purifying strain in American society:
This undermining brown motif, this erotic tunnel, was the private history and making of America. Brown was the light of day. Brown, the plain evidence.
Fugue and funk. Brown, the color of consort; brown, the color of illicit passion.
(133)
In addition, he highlights the importance of clearly distinguishing between the history and experience of African Americans and Hispanics in America. For Rodriguez the merging of these two subgroups by both federal demographers and activists, trying to obtain government funding, is a disgrace: “The Census Bureau manages both to trivialize the significance of Hispanics to our national life, and to insult African Americans by describing Hispanics as supplanters” (127). According to Rodriguez, Hispanics have the role to blur the boundaries between and confuse the categories of identity defined by the Census Bureau.
On another level, Days highlights the extent to which Rodriguez is finally able to develop what Anzaldua has identified as one of the core principles of a mestiza
consciousness: a tolerance for ambiguities and irreconcilable tensions. This manifests itself in particular in his discussion of Catholicism. He questions the condemnation of homosexuality by religious authorities, especially the Roman Catholic Church. He criticizes the church for
supporting a dualistic theology based on hate, in contrast to Christ’s teachings, but at the same time he remains a practising Catholic, as the church ironically also provides him with a motive and a relief for his homosexuality: “One of the things I love about the church is that motive is assumed: Because I am human. What alone interests the confessor is the form of humanity I wish to confess. Confession is constructed as we are constructed” (Rodriguez, Brown 205). His Catholic upbringing and education have shaped his identity to such an extent that he is unable to resolve the tension he feels in being both Catholic and gay, but at this point in his life he no longer strives for a clear-cut either-or solution and thrives on the tensions instead:
The tension I have come to depend upon. That is what I mean by brown. The answer is that I cannot reconcile. I was born a Catholic. Is homosexuality, then, a conversion experience? No. I was born gay. Is Catholicism ever a choice?
Yes. No. Not at first. I embraced Catholicism without question. (Rodriguez 224)
In addition to his homosexuality, he experiences his Catholicism as providing him with “a private perspective, a quartered plane” from which to view the world, even though both perspectives are equally crucial and vital, even though they cannot be easily reconciled. He has finally learned, like Anzaldua, to stand on both sides of the Rio Grande at once. This positive and productive stance involves a constant and painful struggle, yet Rodriguez
recognizes the preferability of his mixed identity to a singular identity defined by assimilation to mainstream cultural, religious, and gender norms.
In Brown Rodriguez is thus finally able to develop a mestiza consciousness in a similar way to that of Anzaldua. His trilogy can be said to reflect the several stages in this process that she identifies in Borderlands: repression and denial in Hunger of Memory, the Coatlique state in Days of Obligation, and finally acceptance, recognition and synthesis in
Brown, where he celebrates hybridity as the paradigm of the future: “Mixed soul, I suspect, may become, in this twenty-first century, what ‘mixed blood’ was for the 18th century. A scandal against straight lines and deciduous family trees” (203). For Rodriguez, it is the contradiction between his religion and his sexuality which splits his soul and triggers the development of his mestiza consciousness. He points out that many people with a mixed identity are still unable to embrace this ambiguity and might try to “be singular rather than several” as he did in Hunger (226). He now warns them, however, that with their wish to eliminate a certain part of their identity, they will also try to annihilate other people who represent this part of their identity. In Brown Rodriguez deconstructs and questions almost all the binaries he encounters in his life, but the one binary he remains unable to transcend is the language barrier between Spanish and English. For him, the English language has the power to unite all peoples in America and is thus a prerequisite for surviving and succeeding in American society.
After years of education and a successful career, Rodriguez feels finally confident enough to own up to his homosexuality in his writing and to place it in a larger context. His success as an academic provides him with the time, space and freedom to criticize aspects of both Anglo and Mexican culture, and to embrace mestizaje as a paradigm of the future.
Through his work he gains support from other hybrids and is able to escape the confining dualistic values in American society without completely dismissing it. This stands in marked contrast to Cherrie Moraga, who in The Last Generation is able to transcend all but one of the binaries she encounters in her life, the exception being the Anglo-Latino binary.
The Last Frontier for Cherrie Moraga
Cherrie Moraga’s radical autobiographical collection of poetry and essays The Last Generation, published in 1993, chronicles her experience living in the United States as a lesbian Chicana with a mixed Anglo-Mexican background. It addresses her fear of the complete disappearance of Chicano culture through assimilation into mainstream American culture. Moraga, a daughter of a Mexican-American mother and Anglo father, was immersed in Mexican culture by her mother’s family at a young age, but growing up in Anglo Los Angeles she experiences a constant clash of cultures in her psyche. Later, deeply ashamed of the role of the Anglo in the suppression of the Mexican people, she identifies mostly with her mother’s culture. In acknowledging her own lesbianism she revolts against the patriarchal values dominating Mexican, Chicano, Indigenous and Anglo culture and becomes politically active. Her lesbianism and her subsequent childlessness sensitize her to the assimilation and disintegration of her Mexican family: “I am the only one who doesn’t ignore this because I am the only one not contributing to the population. My line of family stops with me. There will be no one calling me, Mami, Mamá, Abuelita” (9). In addition, for Moraga,
acknowledging her lesbianism enables her to stand up for herself and for other oppressed peoples. Although she criticizes the sexist and homophobic elements in the Chicano
movement, she values “its commitment to preserving the integrity of the Chicano people” and fights for both its revival and reform (148). In contrast, she underlines the destructive effects of American capitalism, especially the NAFTA, on the lives of many Mexicans, and the refusal of the United States to commit to improving the environment. Having no hope for the future of the United States as a nation state, she radically recommends its dissolution: “If the Soviet Union could dissolve, why can’t the United States?” (169). For Moraga, a viable alternative for Anglo American culture is a new Chicano nationalism inspired by the old Indian tribal form of living, which she believes “can accommodate socialism, feminism, and
