Toward Chicana critical theories: Seeking equilibrium in the analysis of infinite complexities

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Richards, Judith

Richards is assistant professor of Spanish and Latino Studies at Rockhurst College in Kansas City. She is currently at work on a book manuscript titled Revolting Developments:

Mexican Women Write Revolution

Eysturoy, Annie 0. 1996. Daughters of self-creation. The contemporary Chicana novel. University of New Mexico Press. $27.50 hc. $15.95 sc. 172 pp. Herrera-Sobek, Maria, and Helena Mar'a Viramontes, eds. 1996. Chicana creativity and criticism. New frontiers in American literature. 2nd ed. University of New Mexico Press. 17.95 sc. 304 pp. Quintana, Alvina E. 1996. Home girls. Chicana literary voices. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. $44.95 hc. $16.95 sc. 165 pp.

[W]e have grown up and survived along the edges, along the borders of so many languages, worlds, cultures and social systems that we constantly fix and focus on the spaces in between. Categories that try to define and limit this incredibly complex process at once become diminished for their inability to capture and contain. Those of us who try to categorize these complexities inevitably fail.

Tey Diana Rebolledo

The history of literary production and theory in the past three decades suggests that overlapping and contradictory dynamics constitute the rule rather than the exception. Assuming the concept of "center" to be epistemologically and metaphysically immovable, structuralist critics in the 1960s and '70s were dispensing with the author in favor of the autonomous text, while women and ethnic-minority writers on the margins of that center were reasserting the importance of the relationship between author and situating context. Likewise, in the 1970s and '80s, feminist theorists documented the emergence of women writers and the inscription of their different realities and male ethnic-minority writers established a presence in the academic canon, while women of color still continued to struggle for recognition both as social subjects and as authors, despite the goals and rhetoric of the political movements claiming to include them. And yet, in the face of this double tendency to ignore the writing of women of color, we may argue that, from the vantage point of the second half of the 1990's, it is clear that the current boom in contemporary U.S. Latino literature represents a strong and diverse current of women's writing dating from those same years. Since the 1973 publication of Estella Portillo Trambley's anthology, Chicanas en la literatura y el arte: El Grito, one of the first collections of Chicana texts, U.S. Latina writers have contributed in growing numbers to the increasingly heterogeneous conversations taking place in American literary and cultural studies. They have done so with works whose notable artistic merit parallels their compelling value as socio-political testimony.

Daughters of Self-Creation, Chicana Creativity and Criticism and Home Girls are texts that examine the development of Chicana creative and theoretical writing since the middle of 1970's.l In light of Chicana writers' struggle for recognition, Eysturoy, Herrera-Sobek and Viramontes, and Quintana reveal a self-conscious effort to document and evaluate the present boom in the production and publishing of Chicana writing, to discuss the breadth and complexity of its texts, and to develop organic critical approaches for its interpretation. Central to the Chicana literary history traced in these books is the consideration of its diverse contexts, and of the complex socio-cultural, class, race, and gender dynamics constituting Chicana subjectivities and shaping the authentification of the theoretical analyses that describe them. Concerned both with individual texts and the production and reception of Latino art in general, all three volumes question the position of the Chicana critic inside the Eurocentric academy. Wary of epistemological assumptions that have ignored or misread Latina writing, these critics use specific analyses as a basis for theoretical positions, creating diverse interpretive reading spaces through which readings evolve from the texts themselves. Vigilance against the repetition of strategies that repress voice and eclipse the Other's subjectivity in the interpretation of her text, and thus against the recolonization of Chicana identities, is a central component of the critics' stance in all three volumes.

Although their approaches and analyses overlap in many ways, these books are pleasingly different in focus. Set in conversation with each other, they offer the reader the broad spectrum of issues and challenges confronting theorists who attempt to evaluate the contemporary Chicana literary movement. Because Chicana Creativity comprises both an anthology of creative and analytical texts and an historical overview of Chicana literary production, its mid90s perspective on the evolution of Chicana writing and publishing since the 70s offers a comfortable starting point for a critical exchange of ideas among the three books. In the volume's introduction, Herrera-Sobek identifies two prevailing approaches to current Chicana literary criticism. The first, and dominant, current is the appropriation and adaptation of European, American, and feminist critical discourses for the analysis of Chicana writing. The second, an argument for the emancipation of Chicana critical theories from Anglo academic thinking, holds that through the hegemonic optic the Chicana text is either lost (literally) or misread (37). The appropriation vs. emancipation argument, succinctly described by Audre Lorde as the contradiction inherent in the project of dismantling the master's house with the master's tools, is itself a reflection of broader socio-political arguments, such as separatism vs. assimilation, or feminism intersecting with identity politics. In order to present the many nuances in current theoretical arguments, Herrera-Sobek and Viramontes have structured the anthology to provide readers with both primary and analytical materials to explore the relationship between the work and its reception. The multi-genre nature of the volume, moreover, calls attention to the variety of voices and strategies comprising Chicana writing. First published in 1988, now with a revised introduction, Chicana Creativity includes poetry by Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucha Corpi, Evangelina Vigil-Pinon, Denise Chavez and Naomi Quinonez; prose by Alma E. Cervantes, Helena Maria Viramontes, Roberta Fernindez, and Sheila Ortiz Taylor; criticism by Tey Diana Rebolledo, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Norma Alarc6n, and Maria Herrera-Sobek; and art by Carmen Lomas Garza, Yreina Cervantez, and Laura Aguilar.