| Vol. 2, No. 3 | Fall 2003 |
a review
by
George Colman
“I am ruined already.”
“You are not ruined. True, you’ve had your share of troubles, but going north would only give you more.”
The girl’s name is Marta. Lighted candles are on the table, incense burns, a spiral of smoke rises. The healer is old, her face is like the bark of an ancient tree, a long braid runs down her back.
Marta and the healer meet in the story, “From a Place Where the Sea Remembers” by Sandra Benitez, one of thirty-one “well known and emerging Latina writers” whose work is included in the book Latina:Women’s Voices from the Borderlands, edited by Lillian Castillo-Speed.
Yearning, crossing over, looking back, insisting on continuity with their past while shaping new selves and solidarities, redefining borders---these are the themes in this rich and frequently powerful collection of stories and essays.
Families are remembered, a mother’s early life recalled. “In the Mexico City of the 1930s, Mami was a street urchin, not an orphan—not yet—with one ragged dress. Because of an unnamed skin disease that covered her whole tiny body with scabs, her head was shaved. At seven years old or maybe eight. . . she bustled on her own mission toward the corner where her stepfather sold used paperbacks on the curb. At midday he ordered his main meal from a nearby restaurant . . . . The little girl would take the leftovers and dash them off to her mother, who was lying on a petate in the one room the whole family shared in a vecindad overflowing with families like their own with all manner of maladies that accompany destitution.” When 17, “Mami” left Mexico, moved north and “was either raped or, at least, clearly taken advantage of by the owner of a restaurant on the US side of the border where she found work as a waitress.” (Ana Castillo, “My Mother’s Mexico”)
Other women crossed over easily and wrote home to anxious parents that all was going well. “Hello Papa, Mama, brothers and sisters, I hope this finds you very well in spite of everything. By now you will have found out I’m in the United States and you will be asking yourselves what I’m doing here. Before anything I want to ask you to have a lot of trust in me. I came with the desire to work here a few months in order to gather a little money. I have great faith that it’s going to go very well for me, and this is important. Here everything is different from Mexico, but I assure you I’m never going to forget anything I learned from you!! I remember you a lot and this is going to be decisive in my behavior. I am not going to fail you! Of that I assure you!!”
This new arrival found shelter, food and work in California by reaching out to Mexican relatives, acquaintances, or friends of friends whose addresses she’d carried carefully on her journey north. “They have two daughters, little ones,” she wrote. “They work mornings, someone takes care of the girls. . . . .I’ve gone with them downtown and to look for work, these are the possibilities I have:1.Office of the University of California for Chicano Studies. I would work typing things in Spanish. It doesn’t matter if I don’t speak English for the time being. . . . They pay $4.50 an hour and you work 8 hours a day. This is the job that interests me the most. 2.Transistor radio factory, they pay the same for an hour of work. The first job is through a girlfriend of this couple, who is the person in charge of this job. Her name is Yolanda Castillo.. . .” (Patricia Zarate, “Two Letters Home”)
In much the same way, Rosario Magdaleno’s first experience of Arizona was with members of her extended family. “I stayed with my cousins on Maricopa Street and shared a bed with my cousin Kika. The son, Chepe, had TB and I took one look at him and knew he was going to die. And you know they were terrible cooks. All they ever ate was beans and tortillas for breakfast and avena and coffee. And then the same thing for lunch. Then for supper maybe a little meat or sopa. So one day I said, “Why don’t we make a salad . . . (and) after that I started making things. I made salads and pot roasts and mole and enchiladas. And then I would make pies. My mother and father used to make pies out of dried fruit because at that time it was cheaper than fresh. . . So I made so many pies—apricot and apple and others. And I made fudge and jamoncillo. . . . I always did love to bake since I was a little girl.”
Predictably, Rosario’s life was not all apple pie and enchiladas. Welfare workers “wouldn’t give anything to people from Mexico and if you said anything they would tell you, ‘Go back to Mexico, we’ll give you $250 to go back.’ Finally, one of the better-educated mexicanos, Mr.Baroldy, spoke to the higher-ups in Phoenix, and they said they could not deny aid to mexicanos since their children were born here. So they gave us half-rations. And later on after more interventions, they gave us full rations.” (Patricia Blanco,“Rosario Magdaleno”)
Many went north to make money, mail some back to family, eventually go back themselves. Others, happy to shed the past and pleased to get away, enjoyed what they considered to be a larger world. “On her way home, Lourdes passes a row of Arab shops, recent additions to the neighborhood. Baskets of figs and pistachios and coarse yellow grains are displayed under their awnings. Lourdes buys a round box of sticky dates and considers the centuries of fratricide converging on this street corner in Brooklyn. She ponders the transmigrations from the southern latitudes, the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts.”
“Lourdes considers herself lucky. Immigration has redefined her, and she is grateful. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention. Lourdes relishes winter most of all—the cold scraping sounds on sidewalks and windshields, the ritual of scarves and gloves, hats and zip-in coat linings. Its layers protect her. She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all.” (Cristina Garcia, “Lourdes Puentes”)
Ana Castillo is less celebratory than Lourdes but still quietly grateful that her mother moved out of Mexico because “by migrating, Mami saved me from the life of a live-in domestic and perhaps from inescapable poverty in Mexico City.” She remembers, however, the grim side of Chicago and her mother’s work in factories, “where she got some benefits and bonuses on assembly lines and varicose veins and a paralyzed thumb one day when a punch press went through it. . . . Mami stayed in factories until the last one closed up and went off to Southeast Asia, leaving its union workers without work, without pay, and some without a pension.” (Ana Castillo, “My Mother’s Mexico”)
The loss of a large family-centered community in the new land is noted by many. “To all of us in nuclear families today, the notion of an extended family under one roof seems archaic, complicated. We treasure our private space. I will always marvel at the generosity of my parents, who opened their door to both my grandmother and (my Aunt). No doubt I am drawn to the elderly because I grew up with two entirely different white-haired women who worried about me, tucked me in at night, made me tomato soup or hot hierbabuena when I was ill.” (Pat Mora, “Remembering Lobo”)
Marta del Angel, separated from her family and deserted by her American husband, experienced years of gray loneliness and wondering in “el norte”. “The second summer of the marriage, my husband said he had a constuction job in Arizona and he never came back. I kept his dinner in the freezer and on lonely nights I would go to the boats and stare out across the ocean where on a clear day I could see the outlines of the Channel Islands. I like to think they were the shores of Mexico and the foghorns were her tired sounds, like an old aunt I listened to. My American girlfriend told me he was probably just working hard. He’ll come home, she said. I wanted to say to her,’You gringas, you are too stupid about men.’”
“I sat up nights and embroidered anything I could get my hands on. I didn’t embroider the pretty roses and curling leaves my mother taught me to embroider; I now had skeletons and dark-winged birds on my dish towels and bed sheets. I stitched and thought about why I had come here. . .” (Linda Macias Feyder, “Marta del Angel”)
A different tone is sounded by the children of immigrants, the full of fizz young, eager to get off with the old and on with the new. “It’s 1967, summer, and I’m as restless as all of America. The Beatles are inundating the airwaves in our apartment building, drowning out our parents’ salsas. My mother has left me alone to keep an eye on the red kidney beans boiling for dinner, while she goes to the bodega for oregano or some other ingredient she needs. She had tried in vain to make me understand what it is, but I have resisted her Spanish. As soon as she has gone down one flight of stairs, I run up two, to 5-B, where the music has been playing loud enough for me to hear from my room. The door is unlocked and I burst in on Manny dancing with his sister, Amelia, who is fifteen and wants to be called Amy. . . Manny and Amy are dancing too close for brother and sister. They are grinding their bodies together, chest to chest, hip to hip.” (Judith Ortiz Cofer “Twist and Shout”)
And there’s Arlene, “Miss Clairol”, a lively young woman answering old questions about identity and purpose with a new coating of hair dye, Maybelline makeup, false eyelashes, and Love Cries perfume.
“Arlene and Champ are in the Kmart looking through the cosmetics section. Arlene says, ‘Maybe I need a change, tu sabes. What do you think? She holds up a few blond strands with black roots. Arlene has burned the softness of her hair with peroxide; her hair is stiff, breaks at the ends, and she needs plenty of Aqua Net hairspray to tease and tame her ratted hair, then folds it back into a high lump behind her head. For the last few months she has been a platinum “Light Ash” blonde, before that a Miss Clairol “Flame” redhead. . . Champ follows her to the rows of nail polish, next to the Maybelline rack of make-up, across from the false eyelashes that look like insects on display in clear, plastic boxes... She finally settles for a purple-blackish color, Ripe Plum, that Champ thinks looks like the color of Frankenstein’s nails. She looks at her own stubby nails, chewed and gnawed.”
Back home and dressing for her date, “Arlene powder-puffs under her arms, between her breasts, tilts a bottle of Love Cries perfume and dabs between her ears, neck and breasts for those tight caressing songs which permit them to grind their bodies together until she can feel a budge in his pants and she knows she’s in for the night.” (Helena Maria Viramontes, “Miss Clairol”)
Gloria Anzuldúa watches these brown girls with black hair going for blonde and confronts the anglo-culture’s demand that newcomers change their ways, blend in, look and sound the same. “Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other. Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesitation, For the longest time I couldn’t figure it out.Then it dawned on me. To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we’ll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives. . . Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am free to write bilingually and to switch codes without having always to translate, while I still have to speak English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spanglish, and as long as I have to accommodate the English speakers rather than having them accommodate me, my tongue will be illegitimate. I will no longer be made to feel ashamed of existing. I will have my voice. Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue---my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence. (Gloria Anzaldúa, “Linguistic Terrorism”)
In similar vein, Aurora Levins Morales comes on strong with this fierce, moving protest and affirmation, “It was Puerto Rico waking up inside her, uncurling and shoving open the door she had kept nearly shut for years and years. Maybe since the first time she was an immigrant, when she refused to speak Spanish in nursery school. . . . The door was opening. She could no longer keep her accent under lock and key. . . . Yesterday she answered her husband’s request that she listen to the whole of his thoughts before commenting by screaming, ‘This is how we talk. I will not wait sedately for you to finish. Interrupt me back’ She drank pineapple juice three or four times a day. Not Lotus, not Co-op brand, but it was piña, and it was sweet and yellow. And she was letting the clock slip away from her into a world of morning and afternoon and night, instead of ‘five-forty-one-and-twenty-seconds-beep’.”
“There were things she noticed about herself, the Puertoricanness of which she had kept hidden all these years, but which had persisted as habits, as idiosyncrasies of her nature. The way she left a pot of food on the stove all day, eating out of it whenever hunger struck her. . .The way she was embarrassed and irritated by Ana’s unannounced visits, just dropping by, keeping the country habits after a generation of city life. So unlike the cluttered date books of all her friends, making appointments to speak to each other on the phone days in advance. Now she yearned for that clocklessness, for the perpetual food pots of her childhod. Even in the poorest houses a plate of white rice and brown beans with calabaza or green bananas and oil. . . . “
“She would not fight the waking early anymore, or the eating all day, or the desire to let time slip between her fingers and allow her work to shape it. Work, eating, sleep, lovemaking, play---to let them shape the day instead of letting the day shape them. Since she could not right now, in the endless bartering of a woman with two countries, bring herself to trade in one-half of her heart for the other, exchange this loneliness for another perhaps harsher one, she would live as a Puerto Rican lives en la isla, right here in north Oakland, plant the bananales and cafetales of her heart around her bedroom door, sleep under the shadow of their bloom and the carving hoarseness of the roosters, wake to blue-rimmed white enamel cups of jugo de piña and plates of guineo verde, and heat pots of rice wih bits in them on the stove all day.” (Aurora Levins Morales, “:Puertoricanness”)
Gloria Anzaldúa watches men and women coming together in work, struggle and solidarity and notes the way new identities get shaped when the question “Who am I?” becomes the more inclusive “Who are we?” “Chicanos” she writes, “did not know we were a people until 1965 when Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers united and ‘I Am Joaquin’ was published and La Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a distinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul---we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together---who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become.”
And then Anzaldúa offers this fierce prophecy, ”Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us. We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue, we’ve kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture but more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the eons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they’ve created, lie bleached.”
“Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk by the crumbing ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet possessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain.” (Gloria Anzaldúa, “Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza”)
Let the last of these brief selections from “Latina writers” be from Cherríe Moraga, who also looks down the long years ahead, describes what she sees coming and argues for a radical redrawing of the borders in our lives.
“I hold a vision requiring a radical transformation of consciousness in this country, that as the people-of-color population increases, we will not be just another brown faceless mass hungrily awaiting integration into white Amerika, but that we will emerge as a mass movement of people to redefine what an ‘American’ is. . . . We must learn to see ourselves less as U.S.citizens and more as members of a larger world community composed of many nations of people.”
“all together now” by m.gibbs
by
Michele Gibbs
i would like to be wrong, but
this year
the sirens sound louder/
outblast the saxophones/
signal closed borders/
split ears with their screeching
keeping people
on their last nerve already
cowering
lest their next step
take them right over the edge
which splinters as we speak
in a city of unnatural disasters
and crumpled futures
wherre birds drop dead out the sky
from unknown causes
in other latitudes
flags of hunger
ride on shoulders of barefoot
and sandalled multitudes
bearing simple hopes, old dreams
held aloft from the dust.
in some towns
there are no men left
and the silence is deafening.
in some countries
there are no towns left
charred skeletons of firebombed buildings
marking the path of the conqueror,
going back to sand, to bush.
in some places, which have become camps,
there are no children left:
no healthy births
and even trees cease to seed.
an endangered species
allowing its tongue to be cut/hacked off/ mutilated
by roughshod rulers
pushing their penile rockets
into the center of the village circle
while we strangle
trying to make them welcome
may not survive
this most recent diseased penetration.
i would like to be wrong.
i really would like to be wrong, but
the facts i need
don’t seem to be recorded
or, at least, are in dispute.
like,
what is the average attention span of North Americans?
their children?
how do they swallow so many contradictions?
gluttony fattening on what future slaughters?
how much arsenic
kills more than bacteria in the water?
or this:
“at least 1,000 babies are born
in captivity every year in the USA
to mothers shackled to delivery tables
lest they escape,
joining over 200,000 other children
whose mothers are also behind bars.”
joining them where, how, when?
where does the State abduct them?
to date, i don’t know
who will care how they grow
or trace their fate.
how many million dead and raped does it take
to make a Holocaust?
or do they just call it “collateral damage”
and chalk it up to “accaptable losses”?
what facts count
when assessing a concept like ‘progress’?
for a nation in denial
who’d rather not remember or know,
much less be accountable,
the options are minimal.
*
