4
Consensual Fictions

Courting the Consensual Fantasy

As suggested in the last chapter, Chicano utopian revisions have been the site of a complex battle with legal rhetoric. As early as the 1880s Mexicano authors like Mariano Vallejo were considering their disenfranchisement under the American regime in light of a projected utopian past, a time worthy of nostalgia when cherished values remained unthreatened and conflicts were avoided by recourse to an essentially benevolent patriarchal tradition. Not surprisingly, early texts like Vallejo's bolster their rhetorical authority to posit such utopian visions by turning to various legal documents and legal rhetoric, confirming both the authority of the Mexicano historian and the superiority of the lost society, of the imaginary landscape.^[1]

The tendency lives on in the earliest academically sponsored Mexicano scholarship, which strategically posits a similar utopian past; hence, in Américo Paredes's With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958), we read claims for the essentially utopian political life of Nuevo Santander—what is now the Mexico/ Texas borderlands. According to Paredes, it is exactly this utopian governance that inspires the resistant corrido tradition, and perhaps its most famous example, "El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez" (1901). As with Vallejo's celebration of life before the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the landscape portrayed by Paredes appears to remain pure by virtue of its insulated "patriarchal system," which "not only made the border community more cohesive, by emphasizing its clanlike characteristics, but also minimized outside interference, because it allowed the community to govern itself to a great extent" (12-13). As Renato Rosaldo notes in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (1989), Paredes carefully builds on the Cortez legend, and the resistant force the ballad took on, to praise an ancient

ideal of manhood associated with the lost "corrido century" (roughly 1830-1930). Summarizing this vision, Rosaldo recalls: "Descendants of the primordial patriarchs, these country men live in the old style. Unaided by microphones, their voices carry across the pasture and make their listeners feel muy gallo, literally very rooster, very male fighting cock, with rising hackles" (155).

Likewise, Cortez's "deeds as a warrior horseman confer the aura of medieval nobility," his shouts echoing with the "grandeur of the medieval epic" (155). Rosaldo acknowledges that these overtly masculine heroics have been significantly reworked by subsequent Chicano and particularly Chicana narratives; however, I will linger on Paredes's particular form of nostalgic remembrance because it is instructive in regard to Chicano representations of, and interactions with, consensual rhetoric.

For example, when Rosaldo takes up the question of resistance in Paredes's text, he emphasizes that Paredes "uses a nostalgic poetic mode to depict his Garden of Eden" in which "manhood" could be "endowed with the mythic capacity to combat Anglo-Texan anti-Mexican prejudice" (151). Here the utopian is implicitly posited as a reaction distinct from Anglo-Texan attitudes and, by implication, from Anglo-Texan legal rhetoric. It is precisely the potential complicities defined in this account—complicities between Mexicano resistance and Anglo-Texan racist ideology—that require further consideration. What subtly distinguishes Paredes's rendition of the pre-treaty era from Vallejo's is a fundamental emphasis on the con-sensual purity and egalitarian nature of Nuevo Santander. Thus, from the opening pages of With His Pistol in His Hand , readers are asked to measure the value of the earlier society on the basis of the minimal military presence, as if this absence of overt displays of force guaranteed a more democratic society (albeit one still nominally patriarchal).

This refinement or streamlining of the legal-rhetorical agenda—from Vallejo's citing of legal documents and language as a means of legitimating the previous society, to Paredes's positing of a consensual fantasy on a par with mainstream legal apologists—marks a crucial shift in what are distinct masculine-oriented notions of resistance. What readers find is a tendency to adopt increasingly specific Anglo legal assumptions while constructing "forms of resistance"; hence, we discover in Paredes's version of the pre-treaty era an amal-

gam of historical perspectives that nonetheless symptomatically emphasizes the ideals of the U.S. legal tradition. Taking this tendency into account and returning to Bruce-Novoa's claim about the entrenched "incestuous focus" of Chicano literary studies, we may now consider problematic nationalist notions of community in the light of this history of positing utopian forms of resistance that weld "benevolent" masculine rule to U.S. legal thought.

Building on this context, we may reread Chicana narratives and their strategies—which struggle against oppression both inside and outside Chicano culture—in terms of the growing tendency evidenced by Chicano authors to adopt the legal ideology of consent. In this manner, we may begin rethinking one important type of collaboration between the aims of the dominant society and the "Mexican-American generation" of political activists and their successors as well as the critique this collaboration has received from Chicana artists.^[2]

The Politics of Consent

Attempting to conceive of a more perfect union, one which would circumvent the spheres of power left behind in Europe, the "framers" of the Constitution initiated what they felt to be a more participatory government in which the various forms of force experienced previously would be realigned in a new style of consensual interaction between free individuals. Numerous historians, including Sacvan Bercovitch and Michael Kammen, have noted the manner in which our earliest calls to consensus played out specific political ends, ends especially important at a time when an emphasis on liberty threatened to destroy burgeoning national unity.^[3] Consensus as such has always had an important rhetorical function, a fact not lost on the British, who, during revolutionary times, were quick to point out the irony behind the colony's claims to a slavelike existence (as opposed to true citizenship) under British rule: slavery was obviously alive and well in America.

In the present context, a similar notion of consenting citizenry resurfaces in Archibald Cox's best-selling study The Court and the Constitution (1987). There is a certain irony in this, inasmuch as Cox is thought of by some as a constitutional Dirty Harry. Of course, it was Cox who, as appointed investigator, doggedly pursued the

Watergate tapes and finally helped force Richard Nixon to resign. As Cox himself notes, his zealous pursuit and ultimate success significantly challenged the power of the presidential office—both nationally and internationally. Committed to the notion of an objective legal system, if only as an ideal, Cox went ahead with his investigation of Nixon despite his awareness that such open confrontation between the judicial and legislative branches could potentially weaken the consensual foundations at all levels of U.S. society (15-16). As Cox presents himself, he was thus another rule breaker with the right intentions, a challenger of Winston Churchill's dictum: democracy must never show its weaknesses.

As Cox himself seems to fear, his investigative work contributed to a trend also exacerbated by protesters making their voices heard on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court building; both he and the protesters appear to share, however tenuously, a legal-activist agenda in which they seek to influence decisions through public opinion. The dangerous result, in Cox's estimation: the public at large has come to see the Supreme Court justices more and more as a legislative body. He supports the claim by noting that recent polls have found that the majority of citizens favor choosing justices through an electoral process that would place justices on the bench for limited terms. As one might suspect, such polling results were met with horror by prominent legal leaders, including Cox, leaders who continue to believe that the judicial tenure system, and the principle of judicial restraint, are the fundamental reasons why people continue to respect and consent to the law. In one sense, then, we can read The Court and the Constitution as an attempt to rectify the damage done by the author's own role in the Nixon scandal. While I will not devote the time to a full analysis of the book, let me summarize by noting that it represents yet another attempt to put the genie back into the bottle, to "depoliticize" the law and thereby reinforce the Court's legitimacy as an objective body worthy of consensual support. From the beginning, the only other option offered by Cox is a government chained to its own use of force, a dilemma that derives from his liberal-legal outlook.

I would like to consider how this liberal-legal dynamic shapes the contradictions we find in Cox's work. Like all other institutions, the legal system in this country has as its primary goal self-replication. We may thus assume that various rhetorical mecha-

nisms we identify with the law promote its own institutional survival. Inasmuch as U.S. law is founded on liberal-legal principles and the revolutionary context which reanimated those principles, its life—as Cox well recognizes—depends on the viability of the dichotomy of consent versus force; it is through this dichotomy that the law legitimizes its role in U.S. society by structuring a more perfect union. The law demands that we accept this dichotomy, but the mere fact of that demand by no means verifies that the dichotomy is actually determinant in events as we live them.

Approaching the law's masking effect from another perspective, we would do well to recall that rules often act as rhetorical devices put into play while people argue about and construct accounts of behavior; however, having lists of such rules does not necessarily throw much light, if any, on what people do. However, while the relation between rules and behavior may be complex, the rhetorical mechanisms of the law may enact politically efficacious modes of denial by giving the illusion of nonculpability. In other words, legal rules may throw up blinders that are reinforced by the weight of legal precedence and therefore appear to absolve individuals—and especially groups—of direct responsibility for political consequences that are attained by means that are often far more complex than the force/consent logic will allow. This tendency toward interpretive redirection is especially apparent in terms of what will and will not be allowed admissible for judgment—including evidence, but also directing principles—in particular situations. For now, I will note that only on rare occasions does mainstream legal thought inadvertently reveal the deeper rhetorical function of the consent/ force dichotomy.

One such occasion takes place as Cox describes his understanding of the judge's role as passed down to him by the famous Judge Learned Hand. According to Cox (recalling Judge Hand), "A judge must preserve his authority by cloaking himself in the majesty of an overshadowing past, but he must discover some composition with the dominant needs of his time" (26). The figure here, authority cloaking itself in precedence, invites the male readers of this book—Cox seems to be focused solely upon male readers—to take up an apparently enlightening opportunity, to probe with Learned Hand beneath the robes. I offer my apologies to whoever might be offended by such puns, but they are apt. To risk offense even further,

I would suggest that the scene described here is, indeed, libidinally charged, for throughout the text Cox unselfconsciously describes the law as a male field, an approach that invites readings of homosocial desire.^[4] For instance, Cox relies on crucial anecdotes that are made more personal by revealing the combination of dressing, undressing, and legal argument before the male gaze. Cox's masculinist notion of the law is made more explicit in his treatment of women and women's issues: he rarely mentions women as active participants in the law, and the only contemporary case that he openly criticizes is Roe v. Wade . While we will later pursue, as Eve Sedgwick has suggested, the homosocial desires embedded within the patriarchal exchange of women among men in the law, for now I will limit my point to the following: guarded revelations about the transgressability of authority, like the one offered by Cox through Judge Hand, both reveal naked power and disguise it in a sleight of hand that serves an ultimately symbolic function. Where Cox would play on consent and force as distinct sociosymbolic categories, the transgression that occurs when the boundary slides (as in the Learned Hand anecdote) carries an even greater charge, one which seems to destabilize the apparently settled contours of the categories throughout the rest of his text; ultimately these categories may exist in a dialectical relation that makes such tension, revealed in guarded moments, essential to the self-perpetuation of legal rhetoric.

While the claim might seem highly speculative, I would assert that a subtle erotics is at work within the descriptions of such transgressions between consent and force, an erotics which is intimately intertwined with all dominance/submission scenarios in a patriarchal and homosocially organized society. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White suggest such a possibility in their book The Politics and Poetics of Transgression , in which they propose that a psychological investment or dependence can develop when social phenomena are artificially dichotomized so that one part of the dichotomy may be symbolically excluded and subsequently eroticized (25). Despite the efforts of legal apologists like Cox, we move through society experiencing decisions made on a complex continuum between force and consent. We come to recognize a middle ground where the two categories may in fact break down, or at least become exceedingly complex; the notion of hegemonic power is informed by just such a recognition. The state, of course, has a considerable investment in the

psychological manipulation of behavior. Its legal institutions have participated in such conditioning by reinforcing the force/consent dichotomy and by giving apparent priority to the latter term in order to build the liberal ideal of voluntary participation in "acceptable" behavior. Force thus becomes the excluded term. However, as Stallybrass and White suggest, such excluded spheres usually become "a primary eroticized constituent of [a culture's] fantasy life." It is in this sense that what is supposedly socially peripheral—here, the use of force—becomes symbolically central. Such arguments help us to understand why, in a society that prides itself on the democratic rule of law, the public spends much of its leisure time observing representations of murder, sexual assault, and cops crossing that fine line in order to do the right thing—in short, participating in a psychic economy which lives out in fantasy the violence that the illusion of consent masks in everyday life.

Granting Stallybrass and White's contention that there is an erotic content to such transgressions as those noted above, we find that the cases which reveal the most about this content include those delineating legal responses to issues involving sexuality. In this vein, Susan Brownmiller, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine MacKinnon have all argued that the explicit dynamics of rape best explain the functioning of contemporary patriarchal society, including its legal structure. When we also consider Annette Kolodny's argument in The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Literature (1975)—that the Western frontier has been almost universally figured in terms of masculine aggressive expansion seeking control of a resistant feminized object or property—we begin building a context for reading rape as it is represented in borderlands texts, a context that highlights the transgressive artistic shiftings that may take place between force and consent. However, no interpretation of such transgressive shifting could address the subtlety of the Chicana critiques without first considering the specific Mexicano iconography of rape and the politics of shame it mobilizes.

Critiquing Consensual Paradigms

As Norma Alarcón has noted, the terms traitor and translator collapse in Chicano cultural iconography inasmuch as La Malinche (Cortez's native interpreter) has traditionally been made the para-

digmatic figure of feminine betrayal. While there is a great deal of supposition about La Malinche's history—ranging from claims that she was actively assisting a Christianization she herself believed in to claims that her sudden disappearance evidences a violent sexual violation—there is little doubt that she has acted as a principal reference point for the masculinist cultural production of Chicana shame. In turn, such shame has been used to reinforce Chicana gender roles, including passivity, by associating Chicana violation with an act of consent. In the Malinche context, the principal dynamic of rape in Chicano communities—which occurs predominantly between familiars within the same social group—is refracted through a cross-cultural lens, making the event but one moment in a larger history of betrayal. As Alarcón notes, the association between La Malinche and rape remains a Chicano and Mexican national male obsession, an obsession that in turn becomes one important context within which Chicana writers intervene (82-83).

In general, Chicana representations of rape have only recently gained recognition because editors and teachers alike—at times in the name of nationalist pride—have wished to avoid conveying the wrong image of "the" community. Chicanos and Chicanas are left to ask, however, how they might understand the use of gendered stereotypes without associating them with one of their most blatant expressions: rape. Certainly La Malinche becomes eroticized and calls forth a violent response because, within the economy of the masculinist myth, her "choices" demand it. The artists explored here repeatedly ask to what extent Mexicanas and Chicanas have "free" choices in either the colonial or contemporary contexts. Their approaches suggest that consent, as figured in the great wealth of legal-cultural material surrounding us, remains an essentially symbolic power denied in practice.

For instance, in Ana Castillo's poem "An Idyll" (Women Are Not Roses [1984]) consent is asserted as a meaningful option for women, but only within a darkly ironic context that explodes the pastoral mind-set that readers might expect from a poem with such a title. In "An Idyll" a woman protagonist rejects a physically godlike lover, who in turn becomes violent. Consent is not only reappropriated here but is also reinforced by police officers who, with the protagonist, kill the pathetically ineffectual yet pastoral god-man. On one level, this poem is about reclaiming the right to sexual access. How-

ever, sexual access, treated as a resource as it is here, leads us to fundamental questions about gender itself and the way it appears to be socially constructed through the actual or impending transgression of women's "supposed" consent. Inasmuch as this consent is supposed, I would read "An Idyll," like Castillo's poem "In My Country" (My Father Was a Toltec [1988]), as a utopian projection aimed at empowering women on an imaginative level, a fact reinforced by the highly improbable participation of the police, who have historically most often turned their backs on "domestic" assaults.^[5] Such police inaction bears out what becomes painfully clear in studies of rape prosecutions, including Gary LaFree's Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Context of Sexual Assault (1989): most courts cannot conceive of force being used against a woman by her male partner. This elision is potentially reinforced by those liberals who would promote the supposedly clear distinction between rape as violence and sex as sex. In fact, the relations between sex, gender, and rape inform one of the most radical Chicana feminist critiques, developed by Cherríe Moraga in Giving Up the Ghost (1986).

Maria Herrera-Sobek points out in her article "The Politics of Rape: Sexual Transgression in Chicana Fiction" (Chicana Creativity and Criticism [1988]) that Moraga presents rape to demonstrate "its function as a political signifier of women's inferior status with regards to men" (172). Herrera-Sobek in turn focuses on the way rape as a process engenders women as a group. Examining the metaphoric structuring of the rape scene, this reading notes how women are both made an absence—are literally "made a hole"—and transformed into silent, invisible objects. Emphasizing the collapse of father and rapist, of father's tool and rapist's screwdriver, Herrera-Sobek, following Moraga, initiates a radical rethinking of the dictum that rape is violence, not sex.

Moraga is very explicit on the conflation of gender construction and rape. Corky, Marisa's younger self, recollects slowly: "Got raped once. When I was a kid. Taken me a long time to say that was exactly what happened, but that was exactly what happened. Makes you more aware than ever that you are one hundred percent female, just in case you had any doubts, one hundred percent female whether you act like it or not" (36). The irony of the last line is perhaps one of the most resolute lessons for rape victims at trial. As Kristin Bu-miller points out, legal rhetoric is such that most victims learn early

on in their court cases that there is no room for their perspective in the court (101-2). To support an accusation in a rape trial, only one mode of self-presentation is acceptable—that of a stereotypical, traditional woman. Ultimately, a woman's capacity to be raped is never far from sight. The court's question almost always becomes: did she do enough to circumvent a man's response to her capacity to be raped? Corky understands this rhetorical situation well and describes her own attempts to think herself out of it: "I guess I never wanted to believe I was raped. If it could happen to me, I'd rather think it was something else like 'unprovoked' sex or something hell I dunno. But if someone took me that bad, I wouldn't want to think I was took . . . you follow me? But the truth is . . . I was took" (36). Corky's desire, considered in light of the legal institution's reaction to rape, suggests one context for reading the play's epigraph: "If I had wings like an angel / over these prison walls / I would fly." The law, in conjunction with the masculine mobilization of Malinche iconography, makes this "prison" inasmuch as it conditions Chicanas toward condemning themselves for having their ultimately illusory consent transgressed.

Although not developed at length, the link between the function of the law and the function of rape provides a central tenet for Herrera-Sobek's essay on the play. Her epigraph begins:

Men rape because they own the law
They rape because they are the law
They rape because they make the law
They rape because they are the
guardians of the peace, of law and order . . .
Bodily rape is merely the acting out
of a daily ideological reality.
        (Herrera-Sobek, "Politics of Rape" 117)

"The law" here is understood broadly to encompass myriad social institutions. In fact, the culture industry constantly bombards us with a great spectrum of specifically legal rhetoric—rhetoric that in its various forms says a great deal about how we perceive ourselves as social and sexual actors. As I have tried to suggest throughout this study, this rhetoric emphasizes social interaction as a play of individual intentions limited in time and complexity. Inevitably, understandings of deeper group conflicts, along the lines of gender, race, and class, appear as insurmountable individual tragedies that

in turn legitimate the status quo. Again, Ramona is the epitome, a fact confirmed by its reception.

These legal-cultural representations—which continue to eroticize "illicit" sexual assault and which continue to suggest to Chicanas, by denying their perspective, that they should remain passive with regard to rape—reinforce the larger engendering process that links aggression and passivity to gender, dominance and submission to heterosexual desire. Hence, rape is constructed by means of stereotypes emphasizing that violation happens to women who transgress culturally defined gender roles. Such representations argue that women bring rape on themselves by being outside of the home, by wearing provocative clothing, or by acting in "nontraditional" ways.

Throughout the various legal-cultural representations, but especially in those which critically acknowledge the prevalence of non-stereotypical experiences, a language is operating—a language essentially not far removed from the language of torture described by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985). Torture, Scarry explains, often occurs in a confining cell complete with familiar, household objects, objects which are turned into instruments that become semiotic symbols of the torturer's power. Consent or confession in such scenarios plays only a masking role: what is crucial is that the perpetrator appear to confer power on himself by destroying the victim's world through pain. Inasmuch as familiar objects can evidence sustaining links for the victim to a world outside of the torturer's control, he must literally unmake these objects by forever giving them the taint of his uses. Is it coincidence that the domestic scene so often becomes the site of confinement and abuse when such torture is really an extension of the practice of rape?

This commonality between the languages of torture and rape and their representation becomes literal in Corky's recollection of the assault she suffered during her Catholic schooling. While this recollection is particularly loaded—including as it does strong suggestions that Corky is a survivor of incest—I wish to focus on the manner in which her assailant's props become a central concern.^[6] When a stranger enters Corky's schoolroom after hours, she is initially reassured by the familiar tools he carries.

He had work clothes on 'n' all I remember but they
wernt dirty

or wrinkled or nutin like they shoulda been
if he'd been working all day
but he has this screwdriver in his hand
so I figure he must be legit .
                (38)

Enlisting Corky's aid in "repairing" a broken drawer, the assailant soon has the young girl in an extremely vulnerable position in which he is literally working between her legs. Conscious of the threat he poses, but equally terrified, Corky grasps for ways to make sense of (or to escape) what is happening.

"Don't move," he tells me. In English. His accent is gone. 'n' I don '.
From then on all I see in my mind's eye . . .
were my eyes shut?
is the screwdriver he's got in his sweaty palm
yellow glass handle
shiny metal
the kind my father useta use to fix things around the house
remembered how I'd help him
how he'd take me on his jobs with him
                        (40-41)

A highly overdetermined scene, one suggestive of traumas preceding or speaking through this recollection proper, the episode reveals a use of household objects by the assailant that—as Scarry argues—literally unmakes Corky's world. In turn, Corky interprets the violence directed toward her with an unquestioned assumption of the masculinist consensual paradigm: "I knew I musta done something real wrong to get myself in this mess " (41). Hence, even in Corky's world unmade, a logic yet remains, one delineated as a series of paternal figures (she also imagines her assailant as her older cousin, Enrique) evoke for her a sense that she is being punished for some transgression she has committed. The consequent "indoctrination" into gender ideology portrayed by Moraga, and identified explicitly as such, thus assumes that learning fear and vulnerability is part of a process that also includes the internalization of the consensual dynamic.

Perhaps the foremost requirement for the perpetrator of either rape or torture is that he not empathize with his victim; to do so would collapse the scenario of dominance and submission that supposedly grants him his power. Each time a Chicana describes her understanding of rape, translating her experience into words, pic-

tures, or music, the act challenges the power as well as the process of gender construction and its goal of perpetuating silent acceptance. Returning to the works of Ana Castillo, we find an excellent example of just such a challenge in The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986). An epistolary novel that acts out many roles (including travelogue, love poem, and political critique), the work traces the frustrated desire for dialogue experienced by women—in this case Theresa the writer and Alicia the recipient—who try to keep an intimate relationship alive at a distance. Besides the limitations of their medium, however, Castillo defines a larger barrier for this relationship early on:

When i say ours was a love affair, it is an expression of nostalgia and melancholy for the depth of our empathy.

We weren't free of society's tenets to be convinced we could exist indefinitely without the demands and complications one aggregated with the supreme commitment to a man. (Letter eleven, 39)

The approval conferred by men drives Theresa and Alicia to sexual encounters, but these encounters are far from the fulfillment of the heterosexual romantic myth. In their least physically brutal form, such episodes become occasions for wry humor. As letter eleven itself continues, Theresa recalls observing Alicia's seduction by an unidentified suitor. While the language of this recollection is packed with erotic overtones, both in its poetic images and its play of sounds, the scene is crucially deflated as Theresa interrupts the action to continue with her nap, entirely undercutting the eroticism of the passage, an eroticism contrived by allusions to conventional heterosexual pornography and to voyeurism. Equating consent with somnambulism, the recollection both simulates one type of erotic contract and dismisses its tenet (the unquestionable power of heterosexual seduction to move women).

As Castillo has said of the novel, its goal is "to present the reality, the complexities of sexuality, and how that interplays in society and how at a given moment two people can come together and miss" (qtd. in Trujillo 121). Clearly the most important erotic register for this latter failure is not a heterosexual one but rather a lesbian one. To read the novel with this in mind, however, leads one to find that heterosexual imperatives constantly impose themselves, frustrating a fully erotic relation between the women. In the end the messages recalled in the letters, even the letters themselves, exist in a world

that subverts them, makes them, as Theresa writes, "only the words of another woman" (letter fourteen, 46). Theresa is particularly clear on the captivity of her interlocutor:

Alicia,

of prophetic dreams, not a Pisces, sign of mysticism and premonitions, not one to assume power except that acquired by your curiosity of the laws that guide men.
        (letter twelve, 40)

Understood in this light, the transgression that the two women enact by traveling alone is undercut by their persistent desire to connect with the men whom they meet (at the expense of their relationship).

In this regard, Theresa is absolutely on track when she compares Alicia to the girl in the fairy tale "The Red Shoes." Alicia's desire to dance freely with men results in a physical sanction akin to that visited on her fairy tale twin, whose feet are ultimately amputated when her desires and agency become too great. Theresa's letters tell us that twice in one night Alicia is sexually assaulted: once at gunpoint, once in a university hall as the target of a gang attack. Alicia survives such experiences, but it is Theresa who understands the systematic purpose the attacks encode. Alicia in fact resents Theresa's "edge on society's contradictions," an edge Theresa gains "by admitting their enforced power" over the pair and over women in general (letter twenty-five, 86). What is gained is not simply an acknowledgment of victimization but rather a new understanding of the subtle, economic manipulations engaged through these "contradictions."

Ultimately, it is Theresa who appears to grapple most openly with the breakdown between coercion and consent, the same categories which sustain the very definition of liberalism which she tries to defend to a would-be Mexicano seducer who reads "liberal" as sexually accessible. Theresa replies: "What you perceive as 'liberal' is my independence to choose what i do, with who, and when. Moreover, it also means that i may choose not to do it, with anyone, ever" (letter twenty-two, 73). The assertion of choice is qualified in each of the Cortazar-like reading options offered at the novel's beginning (patterns of letters set out by the author), inasmuch as each of these readings contains a pairing of letters twenty-two and

twenty-three. The latter, a response to the former, describes the attempted rapes and rethinks the viability of the choice defended in letter twenty-two. Anticipating the gang attack, Theresa reflects on Alicia's participation—her role as a "slave"—in a game located "in the lion's den [where] one doesn't play by one's own rules" (78). Theresa recalls,

an invitation to dance
in the auditorium
with bored men fed up with poker
who should have had to coerce you
twist your arm threaten your life
lead you bodily in had only to  ask  you to dance . . .
Again, the self-appointed
guardian, i follow
knowing there is little in the end i can do. i
have a vagina too.
        (letter twenty-three, 78)

Theresa's subsequent words—"Leave her be! Son of a Bitch!"—do break "the spell," halting the rape. However, to the extent that the "lion" is only kept at bay, that the process of gender construction continues after an only momentary challenge—to that extent Theresa's ultimate sense of failure appears justified. At stake is the women's investment in categories of force and consent because the collapse that Theresa recognizes significantly challenges their "liberal" self-definition. As happens elsewhere in the novel, resentment follows injury when Theresa fails to extend her understanding to Alicia, a refusal perhaps tied to her fear that her "edge" on society's "contradictions" would only exacerbate Alicia's sense of betrayal. While the novel itself may move beyond such self-imposed silences experienced during the "events" it looks back on, its monological epistolary form demonstrates Castillo's commitment to recognizing the pervasiveness of the barriers women like Theresa and Alicia face when they try to connect. (The letters all move in one direction, from Theresa to Alicia, confirming this limitation.)

Manipulations of gender construction, like those created by Castillo, use passivity in a critical way to demonstrate the larger forces acting on social interactions. In the past, as Maxine Baca Zinn points out in "Chicanas: Power and Control in the Domestic Sphere," Chicanas may have too easily accepted academic descriptions of their

own passivity. The predominance of such stereotypical representations of Chicanas in texts by Chicano males only furthers such acculturation. By contrast, a great many Chicana texts are being created or retrieved, texts that not only demonstrate Chicana and Mexicana efforts as agents of change in the domestic sphere but also suggest a long-standing participation in institutions, including the legal.^[7]

Yet even where Chicanas have avoided such participation, it may be a mistake to assume complete patriarchal control has succeeded. As Baca Zinn notes, "Deference to males, the 'giving in' whereby women temporarily relinquish their control of domestic sphere matters, when males exercise their generalized authority, has not been submissiveness, but a mechanism for safeguarding the internal solidarity of the family" (29). Although such an analysis may seem somewhat dated in terms of more recent radical critiques of Chicano familial patriarchy, the problem of translating between academic spheres and different, more traditional segments of Chicano society suggests that at the very least, such claims to agency deserve attention. It is this sort of problem that Alarcón appears to have in mind when she notes that the Chicana feminist turn to La Malinche as a critical model opens problems which go beyond the specific appropriation or reappropriation. At stake is a "Chicana's own cultural self-exploration, self-definition and self-invention through and beyond the community's socio-symbolic system and contract" (72). The possibility of "anglicizing" the culture also accompanies such attempts to exceed this "contract" a term that reinforces just how extensively legal culture has permeated the language of social interaction.

If traditional roles have appeared silent, but may not necessarily be so, writers may ask how critical work is to understand its own participation in the problems identified by Alarcón. Assuming as I do that Chicanas and Chicanos operate within spheres of cultural conflict that may be described as borderlands, then an appropriate model of interpretation might well build on the theory and practice of translation—with all the productive betrayal implied by La Malinche as a Chicana feminist cultural force. Such an interpretive mode of translation, enacting a switching of codes and worldviews, is very much in evidence in some of the most innovative Chicana feminist work to date, including Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La

Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). Drawing on such "innovations" is particularly appealing for many critics who feel that the legitimation of certain Chicano male "safe" texts has harmed Chicano studies. Yet for all the subtlety and complexity that might be offered by such new efforts at translation, there are clearly whole new horizons for co-optation, both intra- and intercultural. After a history of active underdevelopment of Mexicana and Chicana voices, what role if any exists for non-Chicanas to participate in current discussions? Is it in fact too soon even to ask questions about participation? Have the various ways Chicanas are forced into silence been addressed—opening anything like a mutually consenting partnership—or is consent in this scenario like much of the consent I have alluded to: a manipulative elision perpetuated in part through legal rhetoric in the hands of publishers, university bureaucrats, and many others irrespective of their position vis-à-vis Chicana history and the displacements it experiences? In my own thinking about these questions I have found a particular story by María Helena Viramontes, entitled "Cariboo Cafe" (included in The Moths and Other Stories [1985]), to be very helpful. Because this story offers a subtle rethinking of positioning—of what it means as a writer to treat historically silenced others—I believe it has much to say to readers and writers who find themselves in analogous situations.

"Cariboo Cafe" focuses on displaced persons, their voices ostensibly silenced by their marginality within society. The story is told primarily from the perspectives of three characters: the lost child Sonya; a cook in the run-down cafe; and a refugee from Central America, burdened with grief for her "disappeared" son. Each of these characters must confront representatives of legal authority in the course of the story. The nearly omniscient narrative voice which opens the story shadows Sonya's own, reciting a list of rules that include the necessity of avoiding the police, who are also "La Migra in disguise." Sonya's narrative, which immediately follows, seems to bear out this particular rule, as Sonya and her brother Mackey stumble on a neighbor being taken away by the police, presumably for deportation. Escaping the scene, the two soon find themselves in unfamiliar territory. When the two lost children seek refuge at the Cariboo Care, they are "appropriated" before they can enter by a nameless Central American woman who has likewise come to a stark understanding of "society's contradictions." Her narrative

presents the painful recounting of a mother in search of her abducted son. Her previous interview with the legal representative of her government, the young señor, stands out as a mockery of dialogue; the señor's deferrals and accusations are practiced, even clichéd, and after he has rationalized virtually everyone's guilt, he proceeds to displace the child's name, sending a clear message to his mother: your language, even the simple name of your child, will not penetrate this rhetorical machine. This same mother subsequently finds herself a refugee in the United States, a refugee so overcome by grief that she would "illicitly" substitute the lost children she finds outside the cafe for her own disappeared.

The third perspective developed in the story, that of the diner's cook and owner, again tells us a great deal about the interaction between these displaced citizens of the barrio and their legal overseers. His story, like the refugee mother's, is replete with displacements, in his case of his estranged wife and his son lost in Vietnam. Driven to action by a frustration similar to the Central American mother's, the cook finally turns the "kidnapper" in to the police, in some sense reuniting his own family by reuniting another's. Yet the cook's actions earlier in his story, when he turns in three illegal aliens who had been regulars at the cafe, also indicate a submissiveness to the police which betrays other seemingly autonomous resolutions not to consent. Hence, his recourses to the police are undercut by a general lack of commitment and a recognition of the law's hegemonic control over his decisions. But in fact his cafe is the place of displacement, of marginality: in the cafe's sign, only the "oo" of the name remains, a symbol of the evacuated semantic field that the cafe's population must contend with, a symbol of "an empty space, the unrecuperable locus of the discourse on silence, and on the silenced" (Debra Castillo, "Double Zero Place" 13).

Given such a situation, the critic's role within a legitimate societal institution may well be complicit with the police's role. Taking this complicity further, Debra Castillo has argued that the critic symbolically participates in "a police action: separating out the voices, bringing law and order, soliciting confessions" ("Double Zero Place" 4). Castillo in turn notes that, along with questioning the semantic space woven by the author for the displaced, we must ask, as does Michel de Certeau, from where do we speak? "This makes the problem directly political, because it makes an issue of the

social—in other words, primarily repressive—function of learned culture" (4).

Both the question and the response posed by this story may significantly engage the problem posed by positioning, and specifically the problem of how a non-Chicana might speak about issues such as rape. By providing a series of testimonies, the story invites different interpretive constructions for the final event of the story: the killing of the Central American mother-kidnapper by a police officer who refuses to engage in a process of translation. Resisting the monological authority of the law, the story presents multiple distinct voices, which are significantly not resolved into a judgmental closure by either an omniscient narrator or a reflective character. The problem of reading the events recounted and the desires expressed is thus placed in a frame which recognizes differing criteria calling out for translation, a frame whose thematic lack of a "key" is supported by a structure which is oriented toward process, not product.

This dialogic quality stands in stark contrast to "Cariboo Cafe's" legal discourse, particularly as it is enunciated by the señor, with his clichéd manipulations of patriarchal rhetoric. While the story is essentially built on a series of monologues, the critical irony of the work is that these monologues are far more dialogic than the one ostensible representation of dialogue, the interview with the señor. Castillo suggests a similar point when she notes that Viramontes's style "obeys an unrecorded wish: the parallel monologues are projected into a single space, creating the effect of dialogue, a dialogue between the characters, a dialogue between the characters and the readers, and between the characters and the writer" ("Double Zero Place" 11-12). Another qualitative difference which distinguishes the story's form from that of the law rests in the story's willingness to improvise in the face of authoritarian repetition.^[8] Built to convey a committed political stance, "Cariboo Cafe" strategically positions its interlocutors in a manner which allows the separate stories to convey a sense of the semantic invisibility of peoples historically omitted from society and its realms of cultural regulation, including the literary. Hence, the story highlights translation not simply in principle but also in a historically and politically rigorous manner.

Emphasizing the function of the desired—if not fully realized—dialogue in this story, I would suggest that non-Chicana scholars may approach Chicana representations of figurative and literal rape

only in this bracketed manner. Like the separate voices within "Cariboo Cafe" the gendered voices "outside" these brackets may register their desire for a dialogue yet to be realized while at the same time recognizing that scenarios of consent understood in conventional ways remain, at least in part, coercive and illusory, particularly because they obscure a whole realm of homosocial manipulation—a realm to be explored at length in the next chapter. For now, let me note that the illusory quality of such consensual participation may be especially pertinent in the context of embedded legal issues where Chicano (male) readings have often implicitly associated the acquisition of culturally resistant power with the stereotyping of Chicanas. It is with this particular problem in mind that we now turn to Chicano nationalist discourse and its attempts to deal with lost voices, and loss generally.