No country to call home: a study of Castillo's 'Mixquiahuala Letters.' - Ana Castillo

Style, Fall, 1996 by Tanya Long Bennett

I cannot say I am a citizen of the world as Virginia Woolf, speaking as an Anglo woman born to economic means, declared herself; nor can I make the same claim to U.S. citizenship as Adrienne Rich does despite her universal feeling for humanity. As a mestiza born to the lower strata, I am treated at best, as a second class citizen, at worst, as a non-entity. I am commonly perceived as a foreigner everywhere I go, including in the United States and in Mexico.

Ana Castillo, Massacre of the Dreamers

In Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, the narrator struggles with the problem that Castillo describes as being without a home, the problem of having no clearly defined identity to call one's own. As a result, the narrator not only reflects upon her self in the novel, but also, ultimately, recognizes the constructedness of her self. The Mixquiahuala Letters is made up of letters written by a young mestiza woman, Teresa, to her friend Alicia, concerning Teresa's and Alicia's friendship and the forces that work upon both women during their travels in Mexico and the United States. Some features of Castillo's novel are notably postmodern, for example, its particular form of epistolary narrative, the structure of which may only be determined by the reader, and the narrator's reference to herself as "i." The letters that make up the novel are numbered, but Castillo suggests that their arrangement is arbitrary and that the reader's own preference for the novel's outcome should determine their order. In giving such a flexible structure to the novel, Castillo creates a text that cannot be defined by any unified ideology. Similarly, her choice of "i" as pronoun for her self undermines the notion of the authorial "I" in that it refuses to indicate the authority representing dominant discourses. Yet in saying "i," Teresa, through her letters, can voice a self, a fragmented self that resists ideological definition.

Teresa is, from the outset, aware of the conflicting identities encompassed by her self. As a mestiza, she is U.S. American (from Chicago), Mexican, and Native-American, or "Indian."(1) Further, she is Catholic, a religion that includes not only Christian superstition but also that of her Native-American heritage, much of which has been absorbed by the Catholic tradition in the mestiza culture; and she is intellectual, a quality that requires her to disregard her superstitions. In addition, to complicate the relationships among these identities, she is a woman. Teresa writes her letters roughly between the ages of twenty and thirty, as a way to "make sense" of both her own and Alicia's experiences. By writing the letters, she is able to gain some distance from both her experiences and her feelings, as she expresses here:

i doubt if what i'm going to recall for both our sakes in the following pages will coincide one hundred percent with your recollections, but as you make use of my determination to attempt a record of some sort, to stir your memory, try not to look for flaws or inaccuracies.

Rather, keep the detachment you've strived for since knowing, if you kept it close, it would go on hurting. This isn't a tale of our experiences, but of two women. (53)

The act of writing these letters is often disturbing for Teresa, and once having written them, she is not necessarily any more at peace than she was before. As she notes in letter 16, "when one is confronted by the mirror, the spirit trembles" (55). Yet, there is a need to write. Although what Teresa learns by looking in the mirror/writing her letters is not comforting, it allows her a new sense of agency. This agency comes primarily from her observation that reality is constructed, that is, the act of writing gives her a medium, first for deconstructing oppressive ideologies, and then for constructing her own reality, including her self. The constructedness of things is emphasized by the structural play Castillo sets up in the text itself, demanding the reader's recognition of its nature as a construct and participation in the construction of her/his own reality.

As for Alicia's role as recipient of the letters, Teresa is clearly aware of the pitfalls of such a position, thus her acknowledgement that Alicia will undoubtedly have her own version of the narrated events. Anne Lieberman Bower suggests that "Tere's [Teresa's] persistent effort to rewrite the past for herself and for Alicia could be termed, to borrow a phrase from Nancy K. Miller, an effort 'to unwrite the text which keeps her prisoner'" (105). Yet simply to rewrite the past for Alicia would be to reenact conventions that would imprison her in yet another narrative that is not her own. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry explores The Mixquiahuala Letters in light of a conventional effect of epistolary fiction: the establishment of the subject-object or master-slave hierarchy. This hierarchy results from the control that the writer usually exercises over the narrative, authorizing experience and sending it to the receiver/object of correspondence. Yet, as Gonzales-Berry states, while on a certain level Teresa writes to convey information and feelings to Alicia, Castillo also complicates the conventional paradigm to subvert "traditional trappings" (231). First, she reverses the qualities of the friends so that Teresa, who as writer would traditionally be superior, exhibits traditionally inferior qualities - she is "morena" (brown) with "round fleshy contours" and "Indian Ancestry" (231) - while Alicia's qualities would traditionally be considered superior: she is "fair skinned" with "thin muscular contours" and "Anglo-Spanish Ancestry" (231). Second, Teresa writes, at least to a certain extent, to herself. As Gonzales-Berry states, "The very conventions of the genre which traditionally have marked the boundaries between self and other [dates, clear pronouns, greetings, farewells, and signatures] begin to disappear and ambiguity shows her tantalizing face" (233). While Lieberman Bower's point that Teresa desires a renewal of the bond between herself and Alicia is well-taken, Gonzales-Berry suggests that the very notion of subject/object is broken down in the novel and that the two women begin to merge through "difference - plural, fluid, fragmentary" (234). In spite of this merging, however, Teresa does not intend to absorb Alicia's own narrative, as is evident in her suggestion that their "recollections" will differ. In Teresa's words, Alicia will "make use of [Teresa's] determination to attempt a record of some sort, to stir [Alicia's] memory" rather than simply adopting Teresa's narrative as her own (53; emphasis added). Thus, while Teresa does rewrite her experience, she suggests in her letters to Alicia that her version of those experiences is only that, one version among many others.