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

College Literature, Spring 1998 by Richards, Judith

Quintana's imposition of separatist ideologies on writers, texts, and readers limits the creative potential of her own work. Her model's reduction of narrativity and text reception to sociological analysis produces a tautological reading wherein the authentically-situated critic validates the text's success or failure in producing the appropriate political message. Denying the individual agency of Chicana protagonists, the critic's approach underreads the interaction of cultural processes between dominant and subordinate groups and fails to let the texts illuminate their own registers and patterns of experience. Describing the narrative tone of Mango Street as "free of anger or accusation, on the surface innocent and dispassionate," she categorizes it as an example of "polite indignation" rather than of confrontation and dismisses it as "a primer for raising consciousness about gender oppression" (64) in a manner that "allows Anglo American male and female readers to approach the text with relative ease" (73). Reading the text as treatise, this analysis oversimplifies interpretation by narrowing the optic solely to gender and race, while neglecting the interaction of class dynamics in the production of discrimination (see the stories "Cathy Queen of Cats" and "Those Who Don't"). Assigning a dispassionate tone to the narrative, moreover, Quintana ignores the texts' many instances of outrage that may seem muted by the fact that the narrator is a child. Unnoticed in her analysis is the transformative dynamic in the artistic interaction between Esperanza, the child, and Cisneros's adult poetic persona. This dynamic modulates the expression of topics beyond the full understanding of the child that for the adult are intolerable. Esperanza's discovery of the betrayal of women by other women through their romanticization of sexual assault is an authorial challenge to readers that her experience be interpreted as women's betrayal of women. Mistaking the deceptively clear-cut observations of a child narrator for "polite" discourse, Quintana's approach neglects the potential of the text's poetic strategies to represent outrage and the nuances of women's complicity in their own oppression. Other critics have found the results of this poetic interaction in Cisneros's novel to be indeed confrontational and transformative, because the relationship between the child's and the adult's perceptions spins discoveries and change beyond both the artistic and ideological boundaries of the text itself.

Quintana's analyses demonstrate the limits of approaches that, in an effort to distance critical discourse from hegemonic traditions, devalue the literary qualities of the text in favor of moving directly to socio-political critique. Not only does this approach diminish the inclusive potential of both creative and resistance literature, it also belittles the Chicana writer whose talent for weaving story-lines and conjuring metaphors is demonstrably noteworthy, in addition to the potentially interventionist nature of her poetics.