V—
The Dramatization of a Shifting Poetic Consciousness:
Bernice Zamora's Restless Serpents

You insult me
When you say I'm schizophrenic.
My divisions are
Infinite.
     —"So Not To Be Mottled" from Restless Serpents

Bernice Zamora, my fourth and final central figure in Chicana poetry, traces her cultural roots to a different area of the American Southwest. Unlike Alma Villanueva and Lorna Dee Cervantes, who as native Californians were raised in predominantly urban environments, Zamora was born in Aguilar, a small village in southern Colorado located at the foot of the East Spanish Peak, where her ancestors had lived and worked as farmers for several generations. The farmlands around Aguilar and the coal mines near Trinidad and Valdez formed Zamora's environment until she was seven, when her father moved the family to Denver. Preferring a rural over an urban life, however, he chose Pueblo, Colorado, a median point between Denver and Aguilar, as the family's permanent home.^[1] More than the geography of Denver, more than even that of Pueblo, where Zamora lived most of her life before moving to California, the brutal landscapes of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico loom largest in her poetry. Zamora remembers returning to the farms and mountains of Aguilar during her summers while in school. The volcanoes, mountains, and rivers, and the traditional ceremonies of these

areas, mapped the natural borders of Bernice Zamora's childhood. They also form one extreme of her polarized poetic landscape.

The works of poets, particularly male poets of the English and American tradition, represent the borders of Zamora's academic education. She received her formal education in Pueblo, attending mostly Catholic schools. She pursued degrees in English, obtaining a bachelor of arts degree at Southern Colorado University and a master's at Colorado State University. In 1963, at the age of twenty-five, Zamora moved to California and continued her studies, working for a doctorate in English and American literature at Stanford University. While at Stanford she began to write poetry. Becoming better acquainted with English and American poets, she interwove literary figures of this tradition into her poetry. Together these two landscapes—one natural and regional, the other academic and literary—represented Zamora's polarity between a Mexican-Chicano and an English-American literary tradition.

The natural environment of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico, and the academic milieu of Stanford University, are not as far apart as they may seem at first. Ironically, Stanford, the Ivy League institution and bastion of the intellectually elite on the West Coast, is only one hour by car from Carmel and the Monterey peninsula. The proximity is important because Carmel and Monterey are the land of Robinson Jeffers, the American poet who probably exerted the most significant literary influence on Zamora and who provides a link between the two poles of her poetic landscape. That Zamora chose Jeffers over other poets for her main literary inspiration is no accident. On the one hand, Jeffers gives Zamora an opportunity to express allegiances and loyalties to her natural and cultural roots because he writes about a land similar in its harshness to the land of her rural origins in Colorado. On the other hand, Jeffers, though a minor poet in the canons of American literary tastes, has textual roots in mainstream United States literature. Zamora's intertextuality^[2] with Jeffers represents the conflict between her positive identification with a poet whose subject is California and its land, and a critical perspective on his masculine assertions about nature and woman in his poetry.

Zamora's response to Jeffers primarily engages her identities as a woman and as a poet, with her identity of Chicana present but subordinate to the other two. The polarized settings, cultures,

and traditions that appear throughout Zamora's poetry—a natural landscape and a literary landscape—imply the identities of Chicana and poet. These two identities—the first rooted in a cultural-ethnic base, the second in an intellectual, academic base—overlap with her strong identity as a woman, which moves back and forth between the two landscapes and traditions. I assume that Zamora acquired this identity from her experiences in the larger society—the impact of the woman's movement during the 1960s and 1970s—as well as from her experiences in the Chicano movement. The strong sexual bias of the Mexican-Chicano male observed and felt by Chicanas inspired and encouraged their resistance to the cultural tradition of male superiority and authority over women.^[3]

In Restless Serpents^[4] Bernice Zamora offers a qualitatively different scenario of the relationships defining the identities of woman, Chicana, and poet from those offered by any of the other poets discussed in this volume. For this reason I have chosen to present her last. Of the four poets whose works I analyze, Zamora best exemplifies my hypothesis of a triad of conflicting identities. As opposed to the other poets, who have chosen one identity over the others, Zamora in her poetic works reveals a shifting consciousness that dramatizes a strong tension among the three identities. She is the most conscious of all three identities at once. Her poetic voice articulates conflict and tension rather than striving for synthesis and resolution.^[5] Sometimes this conflict is dramatized in a single poem. In "Gata Poem," for example, she attempts to respond to both a Mexican-Chicano sociocultural context and an English-American literary context. At other times we hear in the juxtaposition of several poems the multiple voices of the poetic consciousness, as it expresses in one poem a positive relationship to Mexican-Chicano culture and in another defines itself in critical opposition to the Chicano male. Zamora also reveals a shifting perspective toward the dominant literary tradition, now identifying with its poets as writers she admires, now criticizing them as males whose traditions exclude women.

To understand Zamora's poetry, then, we must shift our perspective so as to see the reverse side of the triad of woman, poet, and Chicana, thus bringing to the surface the implied counterparts of woman and Chicana, that is, male and Chicano. Zamora confronts in a direct and explicit way the male dimension only implied by the struggle in Villanueva's Mother , May I ? and

indirectly alluded to in Cervantes' "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway." What distinguishes Zamora's poetic universe from that of the other poets, then, is her vigorous desire to master the male.

Zamora's poetic persona encounters the male adversary in both traditions. In fact, her literary persona finds it hard to conceive of its struggle with the male as independent of either one tradition or the other. Like Villanueva's, Zamora's response to the dilemma is to reenact the history of woman's oppression without compromising her autonomy as a woman and a poet. Unlike Villanueva, who seeks an abstract community of women with no real concrete basis in either the Anglo or the Chicano society, Zamora articulates a male-female conflict in the specific contexts of the Chicano male and of the English-American poet. Whereas Villanueva's female consciousness does not—perhaps cannot—contain the social specificity of a Chicana consciousness, Zamora's female consciousness enters into sharp conflict with a desire to assert her Chicana ethnic self. Her strong feminine consciousness leads her to distrust the traditional Chicano male and inspires her to conduct a sexual battle against him. Her distrust prevents her from identifying with him in a racial struggle against the dominant society, a struggle that inevitably includes herself as a member of the same community.

Zamora's decision to restrain the expression of her Chicana self to the dominant society suggests a major difference between herself and Lorna Dee Cervantes. Cervantes refuses to compromise her ethnic identity; Zamora refuses to compromise her female identity. In "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" Cervantes envisions a future when male-female relationships will be harmonious, thus obtaining a lyrical moment. My analysis of this poem reveals a gap in the transition from the macho male of her grandmother's and mother's generations to the "gentle man" of her own generation. Zamora, unlike Cervantes, cannot envision such a transition. Instead, she insists on "fighting the fight," on filling in the gaps and mapping out the concrete details of the struggle to transform the macho into a gentle man.

Zamora's strong feminine consciousness also leads her to conduct an intertextual battle against the literary masters who are responsible—at least in part—for her identity as a poet. Of all the Chicanas discussed in this book, Zamora is the most academic, the most intellectual, the most obviously influenced by poets of the dominant tradition, most of whom are male. As

a woman and as a poet, Zamora revises her masters' stories and constructs new ones that include herself and, implicitly, other women like her. In this sense, even her intertextuality is a form of feminism, for in responding to male poets such as Jeffers and her other literary precursors she also makes a statement of what it means to be a woman. In Zamora's world women speak for themselves and revise the canon of established literary tastes. The intelligibility of Zamora's poetry, then, depends not only upon the presence of a sexual or male text but also upon the presence of a literary text. Zamora's desire to master the male and gain autonomy in her relationship with men is also implicitly connected to a desire to master the dominant culture. If the poetic consciousness can accomplish this twofold task, perhaps it can also eliminate the barriers that keep it from asserting a Chicana identity to the dominant culture.

I suggest that the primary determinant of Zamora's poems in Restless Serpents is sex, in the double English sense of gender and the erotic. The poems that follow represent attempts to redefine sexual relationships between men and women as well as relationships between a text and its literary source. At both sexual and intertextual levels, they articulate statements in male-female discourse which women have not expressed to men, or which men have not permitted women to say, or which men themselves traditionally have not said. These statements are therefore linked to problems of both sexuality and textuality. Thus Zamora's poetic voice is constantly rotating on the triad of identities, never really finding a single fixed point on which to position itself. No matter which option it momentarily chooses, the decision almost always implies an awareness of at least one other alternative for a Chicana poet.

1

I begin with "Gata Poem."^[6] It is the paradigm for the poems of Restless Serpents . In it are the two dominant poetic modes employed by Zamora to construct her poetic universe: dialogue and narrative. The poem also includes practically all the important sets of categories, or codes, that define the major poles or opposi-

tions of her poetry. As a paradigm, "Gata Poem" sets up a system of relationships among several sets of conflicting codes. Thus it is a site of tension where opposing codes coming from two distinct literary and cultural traditions—English-American and Mexican-Chicano—interlock and traverse each other.

"Gata Poem" is the expression of a poetic voice that is striving to define its place in these two main traditions. The poem dramatizes a Chicana's struggle to confront both an internal and an external dilemma. The internal dilemma concerns the fictional speaker's desire to hold fast to her identity as a woman within a Mexican-Chicano tradition that bestows privileges on the male over the female. The external dilemma concerns her desire to reject the English-American larger society and thus to assert her ethnic identity as a Chicana. The major thematic opposition, then, is a struggle between sex and race, an opposition that can be translated into the question the poem attempts to answer: Can I assert my ethnic Chicana self to the larger society and still affirm my autonomy as a woman within my minority culture? Zamora's intent to assert both these identities at once makes "Gata Poem" a unique work in Restless Serpents . In no other poem in the collection does she attempt so overtly to integrate these two identities into her poetic persona.

The poetic frame of "Gata Poem" is Mexican-Chicano culture, a frame that Zamora seldom privileges over the English-American culture that governs so much of her poetry. Zamora's decision to write "Gata Poem" in Spanish^[7] is important because only two other poems of the fifty-eight in Restless Serpents are in the same language—"El último baile" and "A tropezones en Stanford"—except for "Stanford" in the title of the latter. The major difference between "Gata Poem" and these other two pieces is that in the former Zamora responds as a Chicana whereas in the other two she emphasizes her consciousness as a woman. That "Gata Poem" displays an awareness of the English dominant tradition is evident from the bilingualism of the title and the shift from Spanish into English in stanza 1. Because most of its lines are in Spanish, "Gata Poem" seems to favor a Mexican-Chicano, rather than an Anglo, poetic register. In asserting her Chicana persona in Spanish, the language of the minority culture, Zamora is ostensibly rejecting the dominant literary tradition. She writes in Spanish as a Chicana, but nonetheless is poetic. In contrast with the other poems discussed here, such as "Sonnet, Freely

Adapted," written in imitation of Shakespeare, and the poems that directly allude to Jeffers, "Gata Poem" presupposes no previous literary text. "Gata Poem" thus demonstrates a form of negative intertextuality. The text in "Gata Poem" is Mexican-Chicano culture. The translation that follows the original is mine.

GATA POEM

Desde la cima me llamó
Un hombre perfecto, un chicano
Con cuerpo desnudo y tan moreno que
He glistened in the sun like a bronze god .

—Ven, mujer.
Ven conmigo.

Se me empezó a morir como una gata
        en la noche
Y yo misma era gata vestida de negro.

—¿Qué quieres, señor?                                                        10
¿Qué quieres conmigo?

—Quiero cantar eternamente contigo
     lejos de la tristeza.
Quiero enseñarte un sol tan brillante
     que debemos verlo con alma escudada.
Quiero vivir contigo por los nueve mundos.

—Ven, gatita.
Ven conmigo.

                              Y me fui

CAT POEM

From the summit he called me
A perfect man, a Chicano
Naked, and so brown that
He glistened in the sun like a bronze god.

—Come, woman.
Come with me.

He began to die on me like a cat
     in the night.
And I also was a cat dressed in black.

—What do you want, sir?                                                       10
What do you want with me?

—I want to sing with you eternally
     somewhere far away from sadness.
I want to show you a sun so brilliant
     that we must see it with a guarded soul.
I want to live with you in nine worlds.

—Come, kitten.
Come with me.

        And I left  or  And I went

"Gata Poem" is marked by a continual slippage of the poetic voice, as the reader finds it impossible to pinpoint the identity of the speaker's voice. In the poem's latter half (ll. 12 ff.) the voice constantly vacillates, slipping back and forth between the feminine speaker's voice and her male addressee's, between the gender identity of male and female. Thus the poem creates an ambiguous poetic space. In reality, the poet is striving to create a new identity—the dual assertion of a Chicana self and a female self. In the end she does not achieve that goal. I propose that what the poem means is what it does. Its meaning is the uncertainty as to the identity of its voice.

"Gata Poem" portrays sexual rivalry in terms of verbal play between a Chicana and a Chicano, the goal of which is to determine who decides the rules of the sexual contract. The epitome of male machismo is the Chicano on the summit. The pun on cima ("pinnacle") / sima ("abyss") enriches the poem. If the reader's experience with the poem is purely auditory, the Chicano's location is ambiguous: Is he above or is he below? Only by reading the poem does one know for certain that the Chicano is above.

The ambiguity as to the Chicano's location suggests a consciousness that desires to question the social rules defining boundaries between men and women in a Mexican-Chicano context. According to the social conventions of the traditional serenade in Spanish and Latino cultures, for instance, the man's place is below and the woman's is above. The poet's impulse is to invert these positions by placing the man above and the woman below. This transposition of traditional gender roles is consonant with the dominant themes of Zamora's poetry. The impression

that the Chicano is below is a possibility only on the poem's oral level; the issue is settled at the poem's written level. From the outset tension is established between two antagonistic codes pulling in opposing directions: the oral code says "Chicano may be above or below"; the written code says "Chicano is above." This interplay between oral-aural and written-visual codes recurs in several of Zamora's poems.

The first three lines of "Gata Poem" are narrative, presupposing a speaker and an implied addressee. The Chicano at this point is outside the circuit of communication between speaker and addressee, for he is the subject spoken about by the narrator. The narrative language has an ambiguous quality: it could belong either to a speaker who is telling somebody else about the Chicano's call, or to a speaker who is silently pondering the event. That the speaker is a woman is clear from the relationship implied in the phrase, Desde la cima me llamó ("From the summit he called me"), and the ensuing line of dialogue, Ven, mujer ("Come, woman"). The woman is reflecting in present time upon an occurrence in past time. The temporal sequence—the narration of the call followed by the event of the call—suggests that the narration is a silent meditation rather than a spoken description.

The purpose of these three lines is to present the myth of the Chicano as a "bronze god." The lines in Spanish produce seductive effects. The repetition of soft vowels (e 's, a 's, and o 's) and the soft labials (the c of cima pronounced like an s , the m 's and the ll of llamó ) give the lines melodic tones that the English translation does not convey. The hard sounds of p, f , and t in perfecto , the ch in Chicano , and the hard c sounds in con cuerpo , offer a contrast because they alter the rhythm and help to project these words to the foreground. In other words, it is important to note that this male is "perfect" and is a "Chicano" and that he has physical, sensual qualities. In making this distinction between the languages I am not suggesting the popular but, nonetheless, unfounded notion that Spanish has a propensity to be soft and musical and English to be hard and harsh. Rather, I am suggesting that Zamora elects to write in Spanish because Spanish, more easily than English, evokes for her an involvement with the romantic myth.

The speaker's abrupt shift into English (l. 4) interrupts the flow of her preceding phrases (up to the word que ) constructing

the romantic, sexual image of the Chicano. The shift to English at this strategic point disrupts the romantic effect achieved by the opening lines. The English sentence sounds vapid and dull. The crescendo effect of the lines in Spanish is destroyed by the English line. The relative pronoun que prepares the reader for the high point, but instead of fulfilling expectations by continuing the approach to a romantic climax, the English line is merely a slogan. The slogan, which sounds more jargonistic in English than in Spanish, provides the only clue that the Chicana is critical of the romantic rhetoric by which the Chicano can imagine himself as a "bronze god." In the opening stanza the speaker thus moves from a position of an involved narrator (the lines in Spanish) to a position of a distanced narrator (the line in English) who is critical of the situation.

Dialogue first appears in stanza 2 (ll. 5–6). The man utters an abrupt, straightforward directive to the woman, indicating his position of power over her. The lines in dialogue reveal the communication situation between the speaker and the addressee, now the Chicano and the Chicana, respectively. Even more directly, the dialogue stresses the effect the Chicano wants to make. He hopes to generate a specific action on her part, to persuade her to follow him.

Stanza 3 (ll. 7–9) suspends the dialogue and returns to the woman's meditative, romantic narrative. Although these lines, separating his command in stanza 2 from her question in stanza 4 (ll. 10–11), are part of her internal narrative, they are on a different level of signification. They suggest a surreal scene through the juxtaposition of disparate images: death, a cat, blackness, night, a woman and a man. The description produces erotic effects of a sexual fantasy. Through an elaborate metaphor, the woman transforms the Chicano into a feminine animal. The man dies as a female cat would die in the night. In a Chicano-Mexican context, associations link gata to a stray female cat wandering the streets, indiscriminately mingling and copulating with any male cat. The image transmitted is one of the Chicano expiring on the Chicana as a female cat would expire in the night. The word morir in line 7, then, means what "to die" means in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature—the sexual orgasm.

Line 9 links male and female in the common symbol of gata , for the woman speaks of herself as also being a gata , thus identifying with the Chicano. The phrase that identifies the woman as a

gata —vestida de negro —suggests a woman in mourning. Traditional norms of Mexican-Chicano communities dictate that women dress in black to mourn the death of a close family relative. These lines therefore suggest that the woman of the poem identifies with the traditional woman of her culture, someone whom she imagines obeying traditional rules. The traditional rule here is that the woman succumb to the sexual pleasures the male has to offer her.

The image of gata also brings to mind the creature evoked by the title of the collection, Restless Serpents , and by several other poems. The image of the serpent in "Gata Poem" is indirectly suggested in the image of a cat performing the rhythmic movements of a snake, gliding and circling in and out with the motion of waves. In other poems the image of the snake is presented directly (as in the title poem, "Restless Serpents," or in "Stone Serpents"), or is evoked by the poem's spatial design (as in "El último baile," where the image of the serpentine dance [baile ] suggests on a kinesthetic level the movements of a snake). The snake image operates in both its Judeo-Christian and pre-Columbian contexts: it is both a negative and a positive image. As a classic phallic symbol it has the usual Freudian negative implications of male power over women. In the pre-Columbian context it relates to Quetzalcoatl or the Plumed Serpent, a positive deity who intimates a connection with artistic achievement. The poetic persona of Restless Serpents is restless, always struggling to define its authentic place in relation to its cultural and literary traditions. At the metatextual level in "Gata Poem," the cat/snake image also relates to the poetic voice slipping in and out between two genders and among various formal codes.

Unlike the dialogue in stanzas 2 and 4, the narrative in stanza 3 is not intended to persuade. Rather, stanza 3 expresses the thoughts of a mind in silent meditation, a mind losing itself in a dream. Its effect is to invite readers to interpret it, to find the relationships and connections among its images. In stanza 4 the woman answers the man with a question. Here again, as in stanza 2, these lines of dialogue stress the oral communication between woman and man. Her question seeks to generate a specific action on his part; she wants him to tell what he desires of her. Her manner of answering him suggests that she too has some measure of power. She is not responding to his command without questioning it. Whereas stanza 3 is couched in self-conscious, reflec-

tive language, the language in stanzas 2 and 4 is persuasive and argumentative.

In stanzas 5 (ll. 12–16), 6 (ll. 17–18), and 7 (l. 19) it becomes difficult to distinguish the speaker from the addressee, male from female. Interpreting the poem loosely, one might argue that the rules of exchange in a conversation dictate that the Chicano enunciates stanzas 5 and 6. In this interpretation, the content of stanza 5, an answer to her question, and the dash preceding Quiero (l. 12), are elements suggesting the presence of a male voice. Possibly threatened by the woman's stern tone in stanza 4, possibly softened by the sexual encounter in stanza 3, he changes his formerly terse style to a softer, more endearing tone. He then repeats the command in stanza 6, only this time he uses the diminutive gatita . The parallel syntactic structure between this stanza, Ven , gatita . / Ven conmigo , and stanza 2, Ven , mujer . / Ven conmigo , is another formal feature indicating that the Chicano is the speaker. Following this line of argumentation, the gender ending of gatita would imply a male speaker.

If the Chicano actually does speak these lines, her answer, Y me fui , has two possible meanings. The juxtaposition of stanzas 5 and 6—stanza 5 a commitment in elaborate language and stanza 6 a directive in direct language (except for the metaphoric elaboration of gatita )—suggests that the Chicano, though promising poetic floweriness, still prefers giving commands. If the Chicana sees the words Y me fui as a contradiction, they most likely mean that she rejects the Chicano and goes off without him. The poem's typography reinforces the latter idea. The argument against this interpretation, however, is that the diminutive gatita softens the commanding tone and turns the command into an invitation. The inviting tone adds power to the fantasy of the male as someone capable of fulfilling the woman. Y me fui is then more likely to mean that she goes with him. It is important to realize that this phrase, as my translation indicates, can communicate either meaning: "I went" suggests that the Chicana decides to submit to the Chicano's sexual call; "I left" suggests that the Chicana asserts her separateness from him.

As Zamora thinks primarily in English, fui may also be—as sometimes happens in her poetry—a literal translation into Spanish of "come," used in popular speech to designate the sexual orgasm. This connotation of fui ("came") suggests that, in all probability, the Chicana imagines herself surrendering sexually

to the Chicano. If the Chicana does surrender, her language reveals enough consciousness to make the reader suspect that she does not surrender uncritically.

If one looks closely at the voice and gender changes in stanzas 5 through 7, however, one must conclude that the communicative circuit breaks down because it becomes impossible to distinguish between speaker and interlocutor, between man and woman. The Chicana may be the speaker in stanza 5, for, though presented as dialogue, it is couched in romantic, flowery language. No precedent exists for the Chicano's employing this kind of language, whereas she has used impassioned narrative in the first three lines of stanza 1 and in stanza 3. Stanza 5 may very well correspond to her dream of what she would like the Chicano to promise her—eternal songs and brilliant suns. It is as though her voice has absorbed his voice; he may speak, but only as an imagined voice within her. Even though the Chicana is critical of the romantic myth of the Chicano as a "bronze god," the myth is also her fantasy because it is presented in sentimental, flowery language which corresponds to her imagined voice.

The gender changes also create ambiguities in stanza 6. Since both male and female are gatas in stanza 3, either one could call the other gatita . In stanza 3, however, the Chicana performs the metaphoric reversal of gata on him, not he on her. The reversal represents her sexual transformation of him into a gata . If, then, stanza 6 is actually a spoken communication, as I assume stanzas 2 and 4 are, only she can call him gatita , as she is the only one who has employed the term by thinking it. Even if stanza 6 is spoken by the Chicano, he can call her gatita only in her imagined dialogue. If he says Ven , gatita , the male voice is therefore within herself. The Chicana has moved into the masculine position: earlier he says Ven , but now, in language exactly parallel to his, she says Ven . She has transformed the male's abrupt order by using the diminutive gatita , which softens the commanding tone and turns the order into an invitation. The woman is offering the relationship to the Chicano under new terms: an opportunity to accept his femininity. According to this reading, the woman has renegotiated the traditional contract so that she, not he, defines its terms. The final phrase, Y me fui , would then mean that she leaves without him.

The poem's consciousness communicates a desire for equality between male and female, Chicano and Chicana. The word

conmigo ("with me") is important. In Spanish it is one word, not two as in English and French. Repeated three times in the poem, twice by the first voice and once by the second voice, it suggests a desire to have male and female dissolve into one, especially in stanza 6 where the ambiguities in voice and gender are heightened. The sexual transformation of the male into a gata also suggests a desire to find an equality between the two genders so that there will no longer be a "low" and a "high."

The crucial issue is to determine what occurs in the interval between the enunciation of Ven , gatita . / Ven conmigo , and the final line, Y me fui . There are at least two possibilities. The first is that the male will accept his new identity of gatita and follow her, instead of holding onto his macho identity, more fittingly suggested by the masculine gato . Y me fui would then mean that she goes off without him, open to the possibility that he will follow. The second and, I think, the more radical possibility is that in the silence between the softened command and the final decision the woman herself realizes that the revision of the traditional contract ultimately represents a closed cycle, because Chicana and Chicano have only changed places instead of altering the substance of the relationship. No one can win. The only way she can redefine the contract is to lock herself into the macho role. Realizing the circularity of the situation, she decides to break away and go off alone without the male.

My reading of "Gata Poem" suggests three options: (1) the woman goes with the traditional male; (2) she accepts the male under a redefined contract; (3) she rejects the entire process of renegotiating the contract and goes off alone. The first, for me, is the least credible because the poem conveys too much consciousness for her to accept the traditional male on his terms. Its intent is to change and transform the male. But even if we choose either the second or the third option, we cannot decode the poem with complete satisfaction, because no matter which of the two we argue for, there are always indications of the credibility of the other one. The undecidability of the consciousness is the poem's meaning. When both identities of Chicana (race) and woman (gender) come together, the consciousness finds it impossible to integrate the two into one harmonious unit. The consciousness strives to speak from the point where these two identities of Chicana and woman meet. In the end it does not achieve what it sets out to do.

"Gata Poem" is also paradigmatic of Zamora's other poems at the intertextual level. The literary and social values, norms, and conventions that the poem, or any literary work, presupposes imply a particular kind of literary and cultural reader. If the readers of "Gata Poem" are seen as a continuum, at its two extremes are monolingual English and monolingual Spanish readers. In between is the bilingual reader, who is the ideal reader of Zamora's poetry. Only the bilingual reader is able to bring together the two different traditions from which Zamora's poems emerge and to which they respond.

As all but one of the lines in "Gata Poem" are in Spanish, it would seem that the Chicano reader is privileged over the Anglo reader. That the poem nonetheless presupposes two kinds of cultural readers is manifest on the surface, at least, in the bilingualism of the title and in the shift from Spanish into English in stanza 1. Yet even within the Spanish lines there is conflict between the dominant literary tradition and an oral, popular poetic language. The interpretation of stanza 3 depends upon the decoding of two words—morir and gata —and that in turn depends upon the presuppositions of cultural and literary conventions. The modern reader must shift from the current usage of morir ("die") to an archaic, literate usage (sexual orgasm). Through her study of English literature Zamora is fully aware of the latter usage. Her poem, "Sonnet, Freely Adapted," presupposes an acquaintance with Shakespearean conventions. Neither reader at the two extremes of the continuum can make the shift into English, though the Spanish monolingual reader has the advantage of being able to associate morir with the sexual orgasm. Such an association exists in the Spanish repertoire of associations with morir in a literary context.^[8] The English reader, however, cannot make the association because the initial word is morir . Paradoxically, however, the poem makes an indirect appeal more to the English than to the Spanish reader. The assumption, then, is that the reader will shift first from Spanish into English and then link "die" with the sexual orgasm. The only reader who can easily effect this switch is the bilingual reader.

The second important presupposition necessary to understand stanza 3 is that the reader will know the meaning of gata , which comes not from a literate English-speaking tradition but from an oral, popular Spanish-speaking Mexican-Chicano tradition. Gata colloquially designates either "prostitute" (puta ) or

"servant," both of which connote a subservient position for women. To interpret stanza 3 the reader must know these meanings of morir and gata . The connotations of these two words are far apart: the first from the dominant tradition is literary and archaic; the second from the minority tradition is oral and popular. Here again, only the bilingual reader has the potential to join the two together.

A secondary conflict in the Spanish lines is a tension between narrative and dialogue. Through stanza 4 the two alternate: narrative, dialogue, narrative, dialogue. The narrative discourse is presented as romantic and meditative (except for l. 4) or as unspoken narrative reflecting the Chicana's internal state of mind. The dialogue is presented as spoken discourse. Like the two genders, these discourses are difficult to separate in stanzas 5 and 6. The language of stanza 5 is romantic hyperbole, but its form of presentation insinuates spoken discourse. Stanza 6 seems to be spoken but the insertion of gatita links it to the romantic narrative of stanza 3. Until this point the narrative has been presented as unspoken. The last line, Y me fui , retains the direct quality of the lines in dialogue, yet it is not dialogue. It also retains the nonspoken, meditative quality of the lines in narrative, yet it is not romantic. The line's position on the page suggests the poet's desire to separate it from the conflict of the prior language. The fact that the line is narrative without being romantic narrative also suggests a desire to reject the poetic floweriness of the prior language. The conflict between narrative and dialogue modes, however, is present to the end, for the line retains and rejects features of both.

The subject matter of "Gata Poem" is its own poetic consciousness. It contains within itself its own contradiction that does not allow it to come together and close. For Zamora, "Gata Poem" is the suggestion of autonomy as a woman and assertion of a Chicana ethnic self. To reach this goal the poetic persona attempts to transform the Chicano, for as long as he remains in his traditional form there can be no hope for harmony between them. The consciousness remains in a liminal state in the end, for we do not know if she decides to accept the male she has transformed, thus proving her mastery, or to reject him in the knowledge that her desire to master the male remains circular and ultimately goes nowhere.

Zamora's ambivalent relationship to the Chicano is the

dynamic force behind the poem. "Gata Poem" bumps up against its own contradiction. The desire to master the male becomes at once the recognition that without him there can be no writing. The integration of the two identities of woman and Chicana into one poetic voice makes this contradiction all the more intense. Implied is the recognition that the Chicano male, unlike the male of mainstream society, is a brother in a racial struggle against the dominant society and also a sexual oppressor in her culture. For this reason "Gata Poem" is unable to achieve closure. Hence, the poetic consciousness of Restless Serpents asserts itself in one context or the other, as a woman or as a Chicana.

2

The fixed point of Zamora's poetic voice in the poems discussed in this section is its identity as female. Her poetic voice slips in and out of two different cultural contexts, responding as a woman either to a Mexican-Chicano tradition or to the dominant English-American tradition. In my analysis of "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" and "When We Are Able" I argue that when Zamora responds to a Mexican-Chicano tradition, her woman identity is never one with her Chicana identity, as she desires in "Gata Poem." My analysis of "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" shows that when she responds to an English-American tradition she does so in a literary and academic context. These poems are developed around the single continuum of dialogue, one of the dominant modes of "Gata Poem." The two extreme points of this continuum are oral and literary. Whether Zamora grounds the poems in the socially based context of "Notes" and "When We Are Able," or in the literary, learned context of "Sonnet, Freely Adapted," her language always creates ironic effects.

The female speakers of these poems respond directly to prior utterances or actions by males. Since the intent of the speakers is to convince their male addressees to alter their behavior and discourse, their rhetorical strategies are argumentative and persuasive rather than descriptive or meditative, as are the rhetorical strategies of the poems structured around the continuum of narrative, discussed in the next section. In each of these poems

Zamora employs different kinds of diction and syntax—from direct and explicit to flowery and elaborate—to persuade the male to change. The directly implied addressees of "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" and "When We Are Able" are Chicano males; the male addressee of "Sonnet" is racially unspecified.

"Notes from a Chicana 'COED'"^[9] is a powerhouse poem revealing Zamora's perspectives on the Chicano male and on poetry which are found in many of her other poems. Unlike the more tightly organized, more lyrical poems in Restless Serpents , "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" expresses its message directly and explicitly, though not without producing ironic effects. Its lack of control allows some of Zamora's main concerns to surface. Although the poem does not appear in Restless Serpents , I include it here because it clarifies Zamora's relationship to the male in Chicano culture.

NOTES FROM A CHICANA "COED"

To cry that the  gabacho
is our oppressor is to shout
in abstraction, carnal .
He no more oppresses us
than you do now as you tell me
"It's the gringo who oppresses you, Babe."
You cry "The gringo is our oppressor!"
to the tune of $20,000 to $30,000
a year, brother, and I wake up
alone each morning and ask,                                                     10
"Can I feed my children today?"

To make the day easier
I write poems about
pájaros, mariposas ,
and the fragrance
of perfume I
smell on your collar;
you're quick to point out
that I must write
about social reality,                                                               20
about "the gringo who
oppresses you, Babe."
And so I write about
how I worked in beet fields
as a child, about how I
worked as a waitress
eight hours at night to

get through high school,
about working as a
seamstress, typist, and field clerk                                             30
to get through college, and
about how, in graduate school
I held two jobs, seven days
a week, still alone, still asking,
"Can I feed my children today?"

To give meaning to my life
you make love to me in alleys,
in back seats of borrowed Vegas,
in six-dollar motel rooms
after which you talk about                                                      40
your five children and your wife
who writes poems at home
about pájaros , mariposas ,
and the fragrance of perfume
she  smells on your collar.
Then you tell me how you
bear the brunt of the
gringo's oppression for me,
and how you would go
to prison for me, because                                                      50
"The gringo is oppressing you, Babe!"

And when I mention
your G.I. Bill, your
Ford Fellowship, your
working wife, your
three gabacha guisas
then you ask me to
write your thesis,
you're quick to shout,
"Don't give that                                                                          60
Women's Lib trip, mujer,
that only divides us,
and we have to work
together for the movimiento
the gabacho  is oppressing us!"

Oye carnal , you may as well
tell me that moon water
cures constipation, that
penguin soup prevents crudas ,
or that the Arctic Ocean is  menudo ,                                        70
because we both learned in the  barrios ,
man, that pigeon shit slides easier.

Still, because of the gabacho ,
I must write poems about
pájaros , mariposas , and the fragrance
of oppressing perfume I smell somewhere.

The speaker and her addressee, a mistress and her lover, are academic Chicanos: she is a coed and he is a recipient of a Ford Fellowship who is supposed to write a thesis. The male text is the political slogan the Chicano lover continually repeats to his Chicana mistress: "It's the gringo who oppresses you, Babe." In attempting to answer, the woman has to decide whether to engage in a struggle against the gringo, her racial oppressor, or against the Chicano, her sexual oppressor. As he puts it, her choice is between "women's lib" and the movimiento (ll. 60–65). If she chooses the former, she asserts her womanhood but presumably betrays the movement in the eyes of her Chicano addressee. If she chooses the movement, she embraces the Chicano's racial struggle, but she incurs the liability of sexual inequalities imposed on Chicanas by Chicano men. Zamora's speaker exposes the contradictions of the Chicano's simplistic slogan. The real struggle is too complex, she argues, to be reduced to an opposition between herself and the gringo.

The Chicano's slogan impresses the speaker as a vague abstraction (ll. 1–3). In contrast, the hardships she endures, especially when compared with the privileges he enjoys, constitute the reality of her everyday existence. To escape this reality she writes romantic poetry: birds, butterflies, and the fragrance of perfume on the Chicano's collar. The Chicano disapproves of her poetry and urges her to write about social reality, or the white man's oppression of Chicanos, male and female (ll. 18–22). The effect of the so in her response—"And so I write about / how I worked  . . . "—gives the reader or listener the impression that the Chicana agrees to write what he wants her to write. The lines that follow (23–25), however, are not those of a Chicana raging against her gringo oppressor. Rather, they provide concrete testimony of her own social reality: a woman who must work as a waitress and a seamstress ("two jobs, seven days / a week") in order to change the condition of her children starving to a condition of her children eating. The Chicano, in contrast, enjoys the comforts and security of his GI bill and his Ford Fellowship.

Since the Chicano's wife also writes romantic poems about

birds and butterflies and smells the "fragrance of perfume" on his collar, wife and mistress are bound together. Rather than attribute to the speaker the emotions of jealousy and hatred for the wife, responses that might be expected of her, Zamora links wife and mistress in a common identity. Whereas he talks about his wife and children to his mistress, Zamora transforms his response into the mistress's sympathy for the other woman. Both are poets; both are frustrated. We recall that in "Gata Poem" Zamora uses this technique of establishing an identity between the traditional woman and the woman who is aware of contradictions. In Zamora's poetic world, the second kind of woman seems to presuppose the first kind.

Stanza 3, "To give meaning to my life  . . . ," is a parody whose effects depend on the technique of attributing to the Chicano actions that undermine the seriousness of his slogan. He makes love to the Chicana in alleys (this image conjures up the gatas in "Gata Poem"); he talks about his wife and children; and then he boasts of his sacrifices for the Chicana. The presentation of these actions one right after the other produces a satiric effect because it highlights the contradictions in the Chicano's behavior which seem to escape him so conveniently. A similar parodic effect is produced in stanza 4, where the Chicana amasses evidence to show him his contradictions: his privileges, his "working wife," and his gabacha guisas , or Anglo "chicks." His sexual activity with Anglo women is behavior that is hardly suitable to a Chicano who makes so much of the racial issue. Instead of confronting the inconsistencies in his behavior, he adds injury to insult: "then you ask me to / write your thesis," and so forth and so forth. The joke is on the Chicano, for the poem's audience can hardly ignore these contradictions. The effect of the Oye carnal ("Listen brother") (ll. 66 ff.) causes the audience that can capture the elocutionary force of these and following words (crudas ["hangovers"]; menudo ["tripe"]) to ready itself for the punch line. The series of hyperboles accompanied by the climactic line about "pigeon shit sliding easier" is the final criticism of the Chicano's hypocritical behavior and discourse. In essence, she puts him in his place, telling him to restrain his useless, absurd rhetoric because they both know the hard, crude life of the barrio.

The effect of Still (meaning "in spite of everything I've said") in the final stanza suggests that the Chicana now apparently retreats from her criticism and succumbs to an acceptance of the

Chicano's philosophy. These last lines, however, express the poem's neat rhetorical reversal. They contain a double irony: (1) it is not "because of the gabacho " that she writes, as she claims, but because of the Chicano; and (2) she does not write poems about what she claims she must write about—birds, butterflies, and perfume—but about concrete social existence. The fragrance recedes into an ambiguous location of "somewhere " instead of the specific location of "your collar," for the first time becoming "oppressing." The woman's resolution is to phrase her words so that she may criticize the Chicano. The kind of poem she says she writes is not the kind of poem she has written. She projects an image of a passive, submissive woman whom the Chicano thinks he deludes, and of a poet who says she must write about pájaros and mariposas . The reality is that she is not a naive woman but a strong Chicana capable of exposing the contradictions of her compañero . Also, she is not a poet who espouses the lyricism of perfume and butterflies but a poet who uses these romantic images to speak about the lives of people in a specific context.

In "When We Are Able" Zamora uses a more subtle form of irony, saying less and implying more. The speaker's use of querido as her form of address implies that her interlocutor is a Chicano. Depending on the context, querido may designate, as it does in this poem, the male in the amorous relationship.

WHEN WE ARE ABLE

When we move from this colony
of charred huts that surround
our grey, wooden, one-room house,
we will marry, querido ,
we will marry.

When the stranger ceases to
come in the night to sleep in
our bed and ravish what is yours,
we will marry, querido ,
we will marry.                                                                          10

When you are able to walk
without trembling, smile
without crying, and eat without fear,
we will marry, querido ,
we will marry.

In responding to the implied question asked by the querido , "When will we marry?" the querida , or the mistress, lays down a series of conditions that must be fulfilled before the marriage can take place. Each stanza states one condition and each condition is followed by the refrain, "we will marry, querido , / we will marry." Each condition incriminates the Chicano more and more deeply. The argument moves from an implication of mutual responsibility between querida and querido in the first stanza to an attribution of blame to the querido in the third.

The second stanza raises the poem's central question: Is the querido powerless to prevent the stranger's intrusion into their "one-room house," or does he simply look the other way? The poem's ironic tone suggests that the answer is the second alternative. The ironic effect is created by two unexpected deviations. The first shift occurs when the focus changes from "our bed" to "ravish what is yours" (l. 8). The reader or listener expects something different, for example, "ravish what is ours." The shift to "yours" marks a logical paradox because "yours" contradicts what "our bed" affirms.^[10] "Yours" implies that what the stranger "ravishes" is "not mine." The shift into second person contradicts what "our bed" and the four preceding uses of "we," including the one in the title, suggest. This shift indicates a divided consciousness. On the one hand, the consciousness accepts the terms of the traditional contract with the male, making her his possession and, on the other hand, it also sees itself as outside this situation, questioning and resisting the terms of the contract. Here again, we see a linkage in identity between the traditional woman who simply accepts and a modern woman who questions.

In the second rhetorical deviation, the speaker changes from the "we" of stanzas 1 and 2 to the emphatic "you" in line 11. This shift reinforces the suspicion that the speaker sees herself as outside the boundaries implied by the traditional contract; its effect is to transfer the weight of the burden from "we" to "you," the querido . The irony is intensified when we read the poem's refrain for the third time in the context of these two shifts. The conflict between the two parties is heightened. We are reasonably certain that the woman is critical of the Chicano's position and that she hardly means, "we will marry, querido / we will marry." The speaker seemingly assures the querido that there is hope for future harmony between them, as long as certain conditions are

fulfilled. She says "we will marry" six times, as though marriage could represent the fairy-tale ending to their present situation of misery. In reality, however, she is implying that she and the querido will never marry. Even if the poem continued for several more stanzas, each repeating the refrain, the less we would believe her.

The Chicano betrays his sexual contract with the woman by allowing an alien force to use her as his sexual possession. Hence the woman is doubly oppressed in a sexual way. The woman's point is that the Chicano only pretends to include the Chicana in his endeavors, a pretension implied by his desire to marry her, while he himself cooperates with dominant society, further intensifying her oppression.

Although the relationship among the three parties—woman, Chicano, and stranger—is conveyed in a sexual metaphor, the poem's implied message also has a racial context, for two reasons. First, the word "colony" in the first line denotes economic subordination of one group by another. The details of "charred huts" and "grey, wooden, one-room house" suggest economic impoverishment. Second, the threefold design of a Chicano, a Chicana, and "the stranger," especially when considered in relation to the implications of "colony," intimates that the stranger is probably a white male. The woman may say "stranger" to indicate his relationship to the ethnic community: "he is not one of us," in other words. The first two stanzas, in fact, echo the behavior of the white masters in the early American South when they not only exploited black men and women socially and economically, but further abused their power by sexually exploiting black women.^[11] In Zamora's poem, even if the Chicano willingly allows the stranger to enter, his behavior implies that the stranger is his superior or his master and that the Chicano is the inferior or the subject.

The classic double standard permitting the man to engage in sexual relations without incurring negative social consequences is an active principle in Zamora's poetry, but in a sexual context it is not the emotional focus of either this poem or of "Notes." The separate characters of wife and mistress in "Notes" are conflated into the single character of the speaker in "When We Are Able." This fusion is once again a variation of Zamora's technique of establishing a connection with the traditional woman. The emotional focus of the poem is the speaker's awareness of the

Chicano's double standard in a racial context. Pretending to be her friend, her brother, he really exploits her. The contradiction is conveyed by the speaker's identification with the traditional woman whose first concern might be loyalty to la raza , regardless of the Chicano's behavior, and her own awareness of the Chicano's duplicitous conduct. This second feature of the poetic consciousness leads Zamora to assume the pose of the traditional querida , an object of male desire, in order to criticize and ironically to deflate the Chicano's claim to male superiority. In refusing to confront the stranger, the sign of the dominant society, the querido refuses to be strong.

Although both these poems are addressed to Chicano males, they are open to anyone who reads English, Chicanos as well as Anglos, because they are written almost entirely in English. Zamora's female identity is connected to the English-speaking dominant tradition. Her poetic voice occupies a liminal space in Mexican-Chicano culture, positioning itself both outside and inside this culture: outside because she writes in English; inside because she writes to the Chicano male. Her use of the word querido grounds the poem in a Chicano social context. "Notes from a Chicana 'COED'" presupposes a consciousness that is inside Chicano culture because it contains specialized words whose meanings and implications are understandable only to those familiar with Chicano culture and language. Words such as gabacho , guisas , carnal , menudo exclude both an English and a Spanish monolingual audience unfamiliar with the caló dialect of Chicano culture. While these audiences may overhear the conversation, they remain outside the communication situation. Words like pájaros and mariposas , however, include the general Spanish audience, and words like "gringo" and "barrio" are familiar to an Anglo audience. "When We Are Able" uses only one Spanish word, but it is an important one. The endearing tone of querido in Spanish serves to heighten and intensify the speaker's ironic tone. The themes and the rhetorical strategies of these poems, then, show that Zamora's poetic consciousness as a woman is both inside and outside, alienated from, as well as part of, a Mexican-Chicano tradition.

Zamora uses a similar reversal strategy to gain ironic effects in "Sonnet, Freely Adapted." The sexual relationship in "Sonnet" is male heterosexuality versus male homosexuality. The first two lines suggest a heterosexual male who inquires of the woman

speaker why she persists in keeping company with gay men. The male may even have made a pass at her and been rebuffed. Irked, he then inquires why she prefers gays to real machos, like himself. The poem is a direct reply to the man's inquiry.

SONNET, FREELY ADAPTED
FOR J. R. S.

Do not ask, sir, why this weary woman
Wears well the compass of gay boys and men.
Masculinity is not manhood's realm
Which falters when ground passions overwhelm.
O, no! It is a gentle, dovelet's wing
That rides the storm and is never broken.
It is whispered, secret words that bring
To breath more hallowed sounds left unspoken.
Men, sir, are not bell hammers between rounds
Within the rings of bloody gloves and games.                            10
Men, sir, aught not rend the mind round square's round,
Spent, rebuked, and trembling in fitted frames.
    So, I return, sir, worn, rebuked, and spent
    To gentle femininity content.

The woman speaker is "weary," either tired of defending herself against the advances of heterosexual men or tired of being asked by heterosexual men to justify her preference for gay men. In turn, she replies that she is more comfortable in the presence of gays: ("Wears well the compass" (ll. 1–2). She argues for an unconventional masculinity which encompasses the opposing qualities of gentleness and strength: "dovelet's wing / That rides the storm" (ll. 5–6). This masculinity, she continues, brings "to breath" or gives voice to sounds "more hallowed" than those actually spoken by traditional men. The homosexual male is closer to her ideal than the heterosexual male, who aims to fit himself into typically masculine roles: "bell hammers between rounds" (l. 9). The woman is implying that men like her addressee think they are masculine only if they are violent, combative machos. But because the "sir" does not share her view of life, she withdraws to "gentle femininity content." Her resolution of the sexual conflict is to retreat into relationships with male homosexuals or with women. She accepts her femininity, supposedly, "content" with its gentleness.

Zamora gains critical ironic effects by attributing archaic language and syntax to her speaker ("Do not ask, sir"; "manhood's

realm"; "gentle, dovelet's wing"). Throughout the first eight lines Zamora knowingly fails to fulfill the "maxim of manner"^[12] which governs how a modern woman in a similar situation, and, with motives similar to those of Zamora's speaker, responds to a male making such an inquiry or wishing to flirt. Zamora intentionally flouts the maxim of manner by having her speaker assume an elevated vocabulary and tone, a strategy that creates ambiguity and achieves distancing effects between her speaker and the addressee.

The polite and emotionally subdued tone of the archaic language allows the speaker to say what she wants to say without saying it too directly. Too blunt an answer would only anger the male and prevent him from listening to her argument. Instead, she assumes a tone of mock submissiveness and polite deference. Although the speaker's archaic diction and syntax probably sound prissy and effeminate to her male addressee, a modern audience will catch the latent humor and sarcasm. The repeated use of "sir" is ironic for it does not mean to the female speaker what we assume it means to the male addressee—rank, respect, and manhood. The speaker adopts the pose of a woman who suffers a rebuke whereas she really intends her words to serve as a rebuke to him.

In lines 9–10—"Men, sir, are not bell hammers between rounds / Within the rings of bloody gloves and games"—the woman shifts from her archaic, formal language to a modern, colloquial, oral word usage. At a first-level meaning, these lines say that men are not agents of physical conquest. The second-level meaning is subliminal because "hammer," in colloquial speech, is a synecdoche for men, as it designates the male organ. These lines also say, then, that men are not agents of sexual conquest making the "rounds" among women. The woman shifts into an oral language that her modern macho addressee understands and uses. By employing his language ("hammer," "rounds") the speaker ironically establishes her own identification with male discourse, showing her addressee that she can use his language to undermine his masculine image. These lines are ironical because they capture an implicit contradiction between what the images connote—blood, violence, brutality—and the apparently innocent tone employed to express them. The audience observes the marked contrast between the male's image of himself and what the woman is demonstrating about him. These

oral, popular references presuppose a modern audience that catches the wit of the puns, their humor and irony.

At the intertexual level "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is Zamora's quarrel with the conventions of the traditional Elizabethan sonnet. As other women have done before her,^[13] Zamora invades the sanctuary of the sonnet as a literary form used by males in the dominant tradition. The fact that she makes her interlocutor feminine and her addressee masculine in a poetic form traditionally employed to express a man's love for a woman is in itself a deviation from the reader's expectations. By so doing she challenges the basic feature of Renaissance love poetry: a man speaking to gain a woman's love. The reversal produces irony, for here a woman is addressing a man, not to idealize him, but to chide him. Tension and contradiction also emerge when Zamora puts unconventional content into a conventional frame. She argues against the rigidity of conventional roles for men and women, yet she casts her ideas within the tight and closed form of the sonnet ("fitted frames").

The syntax of Zamora's sonnet links it with Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 on love as a direct literary inspiration.^[14]

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments; Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;                                 10
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Lines 3–6 of Zamora's poem are strikingly similar to lines 2–5 of Shakespeare's. Shakespeare's sonnet states what love is not (ll. 2–4), and then follows with an exclamation and an emphatic statement about what love is (ll. 5–6). Zamora's rhetorical argument on masculinity follows the same pattern, except that she introduces her negation at the beginning of line 3 and ends it in

line 4. She then gives the exclamation and follows it with a definition of what masculinity is.

Another deviation is the rhyme scheme. Although it has seven rhymes, the traditional number for a Shakespearean sonnet (aa, bb; cdcd; efef; gg), Zamora's poem begins with two pairs of rhyming couplets instead of a quatrain. The next eight lines adhere to the Shakespearean rhyme scheme (cdcd; efef) but deviate in stanzaic form since they are a series of four unrhymed distichs rather than two symmetrical quatrains. Zamora ends her sonnet with a rhymed couplet that summarizes her resolution.

Zamora's couplet does not have the tight relation to the thematic content of its preceding twelve lines which Shakespeare's couplet does to his. Certain elements, such as the "So," the repetition of "spent" and "rebuked," and the epigrammatic force resulting from the couplet's rhyme, convey a sense of closure, but the thought remains loosely connected to the logical argument presented in the preceding lines. The reader is left to supply the missing information: it is precisely because the speaker knows that her addressee will probably continue his macho behavior that she retreats—though not really "content"—to "gentle femininity." Because of these formal similarities between Zamora's and Shakespeare's sonnets, the "sir" may implicitly allude to Shakespeare. Zamora is really saying: "Women, sir, not only men, can use this form, and for the purpose not of praising men, but of rebuking them."

Zamora's sonnet thus contains enough similarity to and enough deviation from the Shakespearean model to suggest that she is freely adapting the form, as her title states. My earlier comment about the intrusion of the oral and popular language is also pertinent here. This intrusion, as I have suggested, may indicate the desire of Zamora's speaker to show her addressee that she can master his language. Similarly, I now propose that it may also indicate Zamora's desire to assert her power with respect to the literary tradition of the sonnet. Zamora is playing with the form, conforming to it but also deviating from it as she pleases. This shifting indicates a desire to gain power and a refusal to be dominated by the form.

Ironically, however, Zamora's shifting into the modern, oral language undermines her attempt to subvert the tradition. The discontinuity in language choice ruptures the dialectical tension in her intertextual argument with the sonnet form that she has

thus far sustained. The technique that is her claim to power and autonomy is the very technique testifying to its loss. She gains her freedom at the expense of losing control of the form. One possible reason for this breakdown may be the sexual ambiguity surrounding the figure of Shakespeare, who is well known for taking the position of the opposite sex to create ironic tension in his address. A second reason may be that Shakespeare, the universal and sensual poet, is ultimately regional to Zamora. Whatever the reason, something in the tradition resists her attempts to subvert it. In section 4 of this chapter I show that Zamora has a richer response to her other main precursor poet, Robinson Jeffers.

In contrast with "Notes" and "When We Are Able," which are linked to an oral tradition, "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is written in the dominant poetic language. Hence it presupposes a different audience from those of "Notes" and "When We Are Able." Whereas "Notes" and "When We Are Able" presuppose racially mixed audiences, the archaic, lexical language and the poetic mode of "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" suggest a literary and academic audience; its thematic content suggests a gay audience. "Notes" and "When We Are Able" contain elements that imply an oral tradition. The repetition of the slogan, the specific parallelisms—"in alleys, / in back seats . . .  / in six-dollar motel rooms" (ll. 37–39); "that moon water / . . . that / penguin soup . . .  / or that the Arctic Ocean" (ll. 67–70)—and the loose stanzaic structure of "Notes," for example, are all features suggesting an oral tradition. "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" implies a Chicano readership only insofar as Chicanos are represented as members of literary and gay groups and not as members of a specific racial community.

"Sonnet" and "When We Are Able" are both founded on logical arguments. "When We Are Able" is presented in the form of three three-line propositions, each stating a condition and each beginning with "When." Each proposition is followed by a two-line statement beginning with "we" and expressing the result when the preceding condition is satisfied. The syntactic sequence, "When . . . we," is comparable to "If . . . then," a form that implies a logical relationship between the two parts. The first part leads us to expect the second part.

Zamora's sonnet follows the conventional Elizabethan form: the first twelve lines state the argument and the last two lines present the conclusion. Whereas "Sonnet" is cast in a highly conventionalized form, "When We Are Able" is not. The length

of "Sonnet" is predetermined, as the sonnet form cannot exceed fourteen lines. No prescribed rules limit the structure of "When We Are Able" to a set number of stanzas. As the refrain is a device common to ballads, folk songs, and nursery rhymes,^[15] its repetition in "When We Are Able" is a stylistic feature connecting the poem to oral rather than to written literature. "When We Are Able" and "Notes from a Chicana 'COED,'" then, presuppose a relationship to oral sources, whereas "Sonnet" is definitely connected to literary and academic discourse.

Regardless of the tradition chosen, two distinct codes intersect in the poetry: an oral, popular code and a written, literate code. The rhetorical and linguistic resources Zamora relies upon to develop and expand her poetic universe come either from the dominant English-speaking cultural heritage or from the language of a social group that derives its poetic vitality from oral and popular culture.

3

The poems discussed in this section are based on the continuum of narrative, the other dominant poetic mode of "Gata Poem." In these poems Zamora is attempting, not to persuade a male addressee, but rather to express her relationship to her two main cultural and literary traditions. Like her poetic voice in the dialogue mode, her poetic voice in the narrative mode slips in and out of these two contexts. These poems represent different gradations of a poetic voice moving along a continuum of narrative which consists of different levels of concrete description and their intended effects on the reader or listener. These levels and their effects are all contained in the paradigm work, "Gata Poem."

One level of description informs through direct, objective statement. Its model is found in the first lines of "Gata Poem," which inform us of an event: "Desde la cima me llamó / . . . un chicano." A second level of description is intended to produce nostalgic or meditative effects and may arouse, though not necessarily, erotic sensations. A third level of description is explicitly sexual and is intended to arouse sensual, erotic effects. The third stanza of "Gata Poem," with its surreal, dreamy images, its

meditative tone, and its erotic presentation of a male cat expiring on a female cat, is a good example of the second and third levels of description. A fourth kind of descriptive language, which parodies or denies sexual eroticism, is intended to produce effects of distance from and resistance to the sexual myth. The single line in English in "Gata Poem," interrupting the image of the naked and bronzelike Chicano, produces these effects. In summary, the two extremes of the continuum of narrative are concrete-objective statement and concrete-satiric statement. In between these two extremes are levels of narrative language which produce effects ranging from nostalgic-meditative to sensual-erotic. The various gradations of both continuums—of dialogue and narrative—may be regarded as the different pitches of the notes of a musical scale.

"Penitents" and "Andando" reveal speakers who desire to integrate themselves into a Mexican-Chicano culture which they perceive as masculine. Although the speaker of "Penitents" may be a woman,^[16] a female identity is submerged in the image pattern of its final stanza and thus is only indirectly inferred. In the poems of the preceding section the feminine consciousness is directly and explicitly presented. Nothing, either directly or indirectly, indicates a feminine speaker in "Andando." Here the speaker responds in terms of a cultural identity. These poems suggest that Zamora, when she is not responding to a Chicano male figure, feels freer to express a desire to identify with her traditional culture. When she does so, she tends to subordinate her modern identity as a woman.

"Penitents" and "Andando" contain all the levels of description and their intended effects noted above, except that the critical, satiric effect is absent. Because it is, these poems have an overall nostalgic-meditative tone. "Notes" and "When We Are Able" express the ironic, satiric side of Zamora's feminine persona in a Chicano context; this element is present in a Mexican-Chicano context only when a male figure is directly implied as an addressee. In contrast, "Penitents" and "Andando," expressive of Zamora's poetic persona searching for its cultural roots, reveal a poet's fascination with traditional ritual and form.

The speakers of "El último baile," "Having Drowned," and "Bearded Lady" are explicitly defined as women. Although "El último baile" is written in Spanish, its speaker reveals no explicit consciousness of a Chicana identity. "Bearded Lady" and "Having

Drowned," like "Sonnet, Freely Adapted," are set in an English-American context. What distinguishes them from "Sonnet," however, is that they ostensibly respond to no specific anterior text. "El último baile" and "Bearded Lady" are spoken by women who are searching for their sexual roots. The persona's inability to resolve the problem of male and female sexuality leads her to a moment of fantasy in "Bearded Lady" in which she imagines a hermaphrodite figure who embodies both male and female characteristics. "Having Drowned" is probably Zamora's most enigmatic poem in an English-American context. I include it here because it shows the shifting position of the poetic consciousness. No sooner does the poem tease us into interpreting it along sexual lines than it leads us to negate that interpretation. The tone of "El último baile" and "Bearded Lady" is passionate and sensual; that of "Having Drowned" is mainly ironic, grotesque, and comic. These three poems contain all the different levels of narrative language and their intended effects. Together these five poems, written in the narrative mode, show that Zamora's feminine persona has ironic as well as mythical aspects, but that when searching for its cultural roots it is primarily romantic and nostalgic.

"Penitents," the first poem in Restless Serpents , is named after the Penitentes of New Mexico, a religious sect whose members have the same customs, languages, and faith. Historically closed to females, the group is noted for its severe penitential observances.^[17] Its main ritual is reenactment of the Crucifixion, a drama that includes self-flagellation, the dragging of chains, and the carrying of crosses. The ceremony seems medieval in the modern urban world. In some ways it is testimony to a region's isolation, where customs, habits, and language of previous eras are continued into a modern world with relatively little or no change. The word "edmanos " in line 3, for example, is an ancient spelling for hermanos ("brothers") and may correspond to the pronunciation of that word in certain parts of New Mexico. The use of quotation marks calls attention to the fact that edmanos is not standard Spanish.

PENITENTS

Once each year  penitentes  in mailshirts
journey through arroyos Seco, Huerfano,
to join "edmanos " at the  morada .

Brothers Carrasco, Ortiz, Abeyta
prepare the Cristo for an unnamed task.
Nails, planks and type O blood are set
upon wooden tables facing, it is decreed,
the sacred mountain range to the Southwest.

Within the dark  morada  average
chains rattle and clacking prayer wheels jolt                            10
the hissing spine to uncoil wailing tongues
of Nahuatl converts who slowly wreath
rosary whips to flog one another.

From the mountains  alabados  are heard:
En una columna atado se
hallo el Rey de los Cielos ,
herido y ensangrentado ,
y arrastrado por los suelos .

The irresistible ceremony
beckoned me many times like crater lakes                               20
and desecrated groves.
I wished to swim
arroyos and know their estuaries
where, for one week, all is sacred in the valley.

Personal, temporal, and spatial signs orient the reader to the situation of the ceremony. Specific names of brothers (Carrasco, Ortiz, Abeyta), identification of places ("arroyos Seco ["dry"], Huerfano ["orphan"]"; "sacred mountain range to the Southwest"), and mention of times ("Once each year" [1. 1]; "one week" [1. 24]) help to set the scene for the drama enacted by the Penitentes. Readers familiar with the history and sacred ceremonies of this group will know that the "sacred mountain range" is the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in northern New Mexico and that the time is Holy Week. More important than the landscape where the ceremony takes place, however, is the speaker's relationship to it.

The temporal and spatial sequence in the presentation of events is linear. The first two stanzas which set the outdoor scene, describe a series of actions in the order of occurrence. The Penitentes "journey through" streams, meet other brothers at their morada (an adobe or stone dwelling place), prepare the chosen brother for his role as Christ in the "unnamed task," and ready the accoutrements ("Nails, planks, and type O blood" [1. 6]) for the ceremony. This sequence conveys a sense of tradi-

tional order and routine. The juxtaposition of the mysterious catalog of "Nails, planks, and type O blood" and the abstract "unnamed task" is intended to arouse curiosity about the events to follow. The task, of course, is the simulated crucifixion of the brother chosen to represent Christ. The phrase "it is decreed" shows that every detail of the ceremony is readied in accordance with ancient practice. There is no room here for change or innovation.

In stanza 3 the scene shifts from outside to inside the morada . Although the poetic consciousness continues to narrate in the impersonal third person, something quite other than detachment is suggested by the figurative language. Except for the first line ("Within the dark morada average"), the language describing the events in the interior is replete with images of objects whose shapes and sounds produce sadomasochistic effects. The instruments for self-scourging—chains, whips, and rosaries—make noises (rattling, hissing, wreathing, uncoiling) that conjure up the image of the serpent, a traditional phallic symbol. Beatings and floggings are the main activities suggested. The movement of chains and whips ("the hissing spine") is circular and winding, coiling and uncoiling. The prayer wheels go round and round, clacking and striking against the whip whose sting lets loose the wail of "converts" initiated into the brotherhood. The first two stanzas and the third, then, are marked not only by a different spatial order but also by the degree of intensity in the sensations evoked by the images.^[18]

The mention of "Nahuatl converts" (1. 12), together with the hard, austere images and sounds, evokes the aggression of the Spanish conquest of the Amerindian peoples of Mexico. Nahuatl was the language spoken by the Aztecs in central Mexico. The nationalist bent of the movement in the 1960s identified the Aztecs as the mythical precursors of Chicanos. The mention of "Nahuatl converts" in a poem about the Penitentes of New Mexico, a cultural-religious phenomenon of Spanish origin,^[19] reflects one of the central discontinuities in the Chicano consciousness of the 1960s. This consciousness nostalgically went back to a pre-Columbian era to revitalize a cultural identity with its supposed ancestors.

The first line of stanza 4 returns to the language of neutral description. Except for this first line, the stanza is an alabado , an ancient hymn originating in oral communities and dating back

to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.^[20] By quoting the alabado Zamora creates tension. The words are italicized because they are transposed from an oral context to a written one. They are not spoken, as they would be in their original context. So, to create authenticity, Zamora uses italics for words that in the context of the poem become all the more distanced. As four lines of stanza 4, then, already exist in the reservoir of a culture, the effect is to distance the speaker from the subject matter.

The hymn concludes the description of the ceremony, presenting a wounded, bloodied Christ who is dragged across the ground. The superimposition of the alabado on the poem's temporal sequence makes the reader see that what has been pronounced in the past is now occurring in the ceremony, creating the illusion of an eternal present. The alabado contains the poem's only rhymed lines. The rhyme of Cielos ["Heavens"] and suelos ["ground"] stresses the tension between high and low.

The final stanza of "Penitents" effects two shifts or "turns," each of which contributes to the poem's meditative, nostalgic tone. First, the narration shifts from third to first person, from a description of external events to a personal utterance. Second, it shifts from present to past tense. Both changes create the effect of a speaker reflecting on her personal life. The present tense in the preceding four stanzas gives the impression that the speaker is present and is observing every detail of the ceremony. In the final stanza, however, the reader realizes that the poet is reminiscing after the event to a receptive listening self.^[21]

The second shift, from present to past tense, reverses the relationship between the narrating consciousness and the person addressed as the narrator becomes the addressee. The subject of the narration—the Penitente ceremony—becomes the agent of address. The cultural landscape silently gestures toward the speaker ("beckoned me"). The comparison in lines 20–21, "like crater lakes / and desecrated groves," implies a relationship of similarity between the two images. Crater lakes are formed on mountain peaks when a volcano erupts or on the earth's surface when a meteorite explodes. The volcanic explosion might be considered a desecration of a mountain and the meteorite explosion a desecration of the earth. In mythology groves are small, sacred woods where gods, goddesses, or other creatures, such as nymphs, live. Desecration of a grove would be an outrage that is forbidden by the deities. It shares with a volcanic eruption the

quality of a desecration. Both produce awe and horror, ecstasy and fear, in the speaker. Crater lakes, though transparent and clear, are bottomless and limitless cavities. Their shape and depth (round and profound) and their connection with water suggest the female body, or a maternal womb. Groves also suggest a maternal womb because they are dark, protective, and nurturing. A sense of transgression and evil pervades the formation of a crater and the desecration of a grove. Hence the speaker sees crater lakes and desecrated groves as dangerous, threatening, and engulfing, yet their beauty seduces and attracts her. These phenomena enrapture her the way the ceremony does. Both are irresistible. The speaker feels a desire to merge with the larger matrix of her culture, represented here in the rituals of the Penitentes. As male rituals, they are dangerous and threatening, but their passion and sexuality seduce her. As she reflects on the ceremony, she reiterates in the present her wish of the past to "swim" the waters of the arroyos. Her desire to "swim arroyos" is a wish and not a statement that reports an actual event.

The landscape images that relate to the Penitentes are hard and austere. The Penitentes journey through dry and "orphaned" arroyos; in contrast, the narrator will swim arroyos. Since images of water, like those of earth and flowers, are traditional images of the female body,^[22] the wish to swim arroyos suggests a female persona desiring to find a feminine route to her culture. The ceremony lures her just as crater lakes and desecrated groves do. The comparison implies a desire to desecrate the sacred norms of her culture, because she will invade its sanctuaries of male privilege. It is important to note that when the narrator does insert herself into the discourse, she does so primarily as a woman and not as a Chicana. Her female persona is implied indirectly by images and not directly through statement, as it is in the poems discussed in Section II. Zamora submerges the side of her poetic persona which overtly insists on its female identity in order to express the wish to relate to a male culture.^[23]

The second poem, "Andando" ("Walking"), consists of the first two kinds of narrative language: description whose purpose is to set the scene, and description whose purpose is to evoke a contemplative, romantic mood. Its narrative lines set up an alternating sequence of two kinds of landscape: one external and physical, the other internal and psychological. Presented in the first person and bilingually, the poem gives us a stronger sense

of a Chicano narrator than "Penitents." I assume that the persona is female, though the poem gives no clues, explicit or implicit, as to the correctness of my assumption.

ANDANDO

From tomb to tomb  voy andando ,
buscando un punto final
to an age ya mero olvidado .

Cuando en las ruinas del Xlak-pak
hallando un tesoro de oro
explorers are less puzzled

Than I am now on this mountain.
Con el alma del presente
yo sucumbo al pasado

And to the secrets rolling through tall weeds                              10
of my abuelos ' mountain. I listen to their
laughter among the field mice.

From tomb to tomb  voy andando ,
buscando un punto final
to an age ya mero olvidado .

This poem's orientation as to time and place is more ambiguous than in "Penitents" because the pilgrimage is primarily an internal one. The first-person pronoun, nonetheless, provides focus and direction for the series of images. As the speaking persona moves in and out between an external and an internal landscape, there are some hints about physical location. In the opening stanza the speaker is walking in a cemetery, from "tomb to tomb." This direct statement situates us in a place, though we do not know where the cemetery is. The next two lines are more metaphysical and abstract. Their function is to relate us to the emotional mood of the speaker, who is searching for the final point (un punto final ) of an age almost forgotten (ya mero olvidado ). In stanza 2 the speaker moves on to a different physical location, the ruins of Xlak-pak , and makes a comparison between ancient explorers and herself in order to define her feelings. Confronted with the treasures of her own culture, she is more puzzled in the high altitudes of "this mountain" (l. 7) than were explorers who found treasures of gold in the subterranean ruins of ancient cities. Whereas they are archaeologists of the earth, she is an

archaeologist of the soul, a soul searching to define itself. Here again we find a tension between low and high, between the subterranean and the celestial. The effect of the deictic this in line 7 is to create the illusion of a specific, concrete territory.

In lines 8 and 9 the speaker again slips into the spiritual realm, as her modern self yields to the spirit of a past culture. In contrast with "Penitents," wherein the speaker expresses a desire to succumb to the call of the Penitente ceremony, the speaker in this poem sees herself actually yielding. In stanza 4 her focus shifts outward to the specific location of her grandfathers' (abuelos ') mountain. As she could have used the feminine form, abuelas ', her choice of the masculine form indicates that she sees the culture as masculine. Finally, the unmodified repetition of stanza 1 in stanza 5 creates a temporal sequence that is circular. The circular pattern imitates the structure of the poet's meditation: from beginning to end and back once again to the beginning. The repetition of the stanza, the internal rhyme (andando , hallando ), and the repetition of -ado in lines 3 and 9 (olvidado , pasado ) give the poem a meditative-lyrical quality.

By returning to the situation at the beginning, the last stanza serves to announce the poem's conclusion because it lessens the reader's expectations of continuation. It also reasserts the speaker's commitment to her search for cultural roots. Because the poem ends by returning to its point of origin, it suggests an eternal repetition of the journey. One implication of this circular pattern is that the speaker will have to succumb again and again with no deviations. The pattern also emphasizes the idea that there is no place else to go except to the beginning. As in "Penitents," the only way that Zamora's female speakers can succumb to a traditional culture they perceive as male is to hold in check their modern consciousness as women.

Like "Gata Poem," both "Penitents" and "Andando" presuppose bilingual readers, but they do so in different ways. "Penitents" is obviously addressed to an English monolingual reader, who would, however, encounter frustration in several places. The words morada, alabados , and "edmanos ," for example, are not translated, though penitentes is. Stanza 4, almost entirely in Spanish, represents the culmination of the three preceding English stanzas. Thus the English reader would be stopped by stanza 4. On the other hand, Spanish monolingual readers would be able to understand the core or central drama of the ceremony,

but the poem's context would remain unclear to them. They would not be frustrated, however, as they would be unlikely to read the poem in the first place because it contains too much English. Only the bilingual reader would understand both core and context.

"Andando" contains enough Spanish and English to keep monolingual readers of both languages from understanding it. The bilingual, bicultural reader not only grasps the meaning of the poem but can also manage the internal, mental transformation required by the final line of stanzas 1 and 5: "to an age ya mero olvidado ." The Spanish phrase, ya mero olvidado , must qualify the substantive that immediately precedes it—the genderless "age"—instead of the masculine un punto final in the preceding line. The final o of olvidado requires that "age" be masculine. Either an English or a Spanish monolingual reader would find this combination comfortable. If the English reader knows that the o in Spanish is, in most cases, a masculine ending, he or she would relate olvidado to the genderless "age" in English. The Spanish monolingual reader probably assumes that "age" is masculine. Only the bilingual reader feels the clash in genders embedded in the line, for this reader, I assume, translates "age" into the feminine epoca . Tension results from the mental juxtaposition of epoca and olvidado . The bilingual person, in reading the poem, can merge feminine and masculine.

That "El último baile" is the only poem in Restless Serpents written entirely in Spanish makes it particularly important. Only "Gata Poem" and one other piece, "A tropezones en Stanford,"^[24] each containing very few English words, rival it in this respect. As contrasted with these poems, then, no English words interrupt the flow of Spanish in "El último baile." Its language is passionate and lyrical, aiming to produce erotic effects and evoke a romantic mood.

EL ÚLTIMO BAILE

Ensangrentada me quedo
a medianoche bailando
en mis pensamientos
en la medianoche
muriendo fisicamente
sobre ondas de
aguas coloridas,
esperando la última luna

            roja       mojada
me quedo sola bailando
bailando en mi medianoche                                                      10
bailando en la medianoche
bailando rumbo a la mar
        de la tranquilidad.

THE FINAL DANCE

Anguished I remain
dancing at midnight
in my thoughts
at midnight
dying physically
over waves of
colored waters
waiting for the final moon
     red     wet
I am alone, dancing                                                              10
dancing in my midnight
dancing at midnight
dancing toward the sea
        of tranquility.

Because "El último baile" is written in Spanish, we know that its lyric speaker is a woman. As she first describes a feeling, the adjective used is feminine: Ensangrentada (she is "anguished" but we do not know why). The poem's context is even more ambiguous and allusive than that of "Andando." Although it seems to refer to a specific circumstance or occasion, the details are beyond precise identification. The poem invites the Spanish reader to construct a circumstantial context that is appropriate to the speaker's reflections.

"El último baile" uses temporal and spatial indicators to create an imprecise landscape: it is midnight (a medianoche ) and the speaker seems to be near water (sobre ondas ["over waves"]) looking at the moon (la última luna ["the final moon"]). The language evokes a primitive context with its setting of the natural elements: the moon, water, and blood. The central action of the poem is the dance, a form of ritual in traditional communities. Because it recreates a sinking into fantasy, sleep, or even death, the poem reflects not so much a specific situation as the inner life of the speaker.

The speaker's mind wanders from an outer to an inner landscape, from an impersonal to a personal plane. Dancing in her

thoughts (bailando / en mis pensamientos ), she sees herself in an objective midnight (la medianoche ). The spiritual landscape suggested by the image of the speaker "dancing / in my thoughts" is transformed into a physical landscape by the image of muriendo fisicamente ("dying physically"), so that spiritual anguish becomes inseparable from physical death. The extreme poles of high and low—luna ("moon") and aguas ("waters")—are also merged in the images. The word Ensangrentada , containing sangre , the word for "blood," suggests "passion," "fire," "death." The waters are transformed into color (aguas coloridas ) by the red moon (luna / roja ), and the moon's image, reflected in water, becomes a "wet" moon (luna / . . . mojada ). The speaker is alone and withdrawn as she dances in her personal midnight (en mi medianoche ) (l. 11). In line 12 her consciousness moves to the objective, impersonal midnight (en la medianoche ). The mind's movement in and out, reinforced by the image of the dance, suggests the collection's title and its central image, the restless serpent.

The principles on which this poem is based are not logical (as is the particular syntactic form in "When We Are Able") but associative and iterative. The repetition of assonance (a 's, e 's, o 's) and the gerunds (bailando and esperando ) establish the dominant verbal pattern. The different gerund, muriendo (l. 5) keeps the pattern alive while providing variety, until the initial bailando is repeated three times toward the end of the poem. The word ondas ("waves") in line 6 is a variation on the dominant pattern of -ando because it reverses the position of the two vowels. The word for wave, ola , is buried in sola , so that when the poem is read aloud the sound of the first overlaps the sound of the second and lingers in the background. The ul in última turns up in reverse order in luna , a technique that gives line 8 a particular melodic quality. The tr beginning the final word, tranquilidad , requires a different formation of the lips from that required by the preceding labials b and m . The double dental in dad forces the reader to act out in a muscular way the stopping suggested by the line in its reference to death. The poem closes with tranquilidad , which means the opposite of Ensangrentada ("anguished," i.e., "restless"), its initial word.

Although written in Spanish, "El último baile" establishes connections with a bicultural rather than a Spanish monolingual reader in two places. In line 5, for example, the phrase muriendo fisicamente ["dying physically"] is too abstract, too flat in the

context of a poem that presupposes a process of reading based on the intuitively apprehended image. Rather than rely on the effects of a logically structured discourse, the poem invites its readers to supply associations and connections to images of the sea, the moon, the dance, waves, and water. But the indefinite muriendo fisicamente interrupts the flow of image association and puts the reader into an abstract realm. The phrase is a literal translation from the English. As such, it indirectly presupposes a Chicana poet whose usage of Spanish is influenced and affected by her knowledge of English. A fluent Spanish speaker might say muriendo fisicamente in some contexts, but not in the context of a lyrical, musical poem.

The second place where a bilingual audience is presupposed is in the title. The Spanish word último means "final" in the sense of "the last dance." To a reader who speaks both English and Spanish, último may suggest the English word "ultimate," or the acme of perfection. Here again there is tension between low and high, between sexual death as the termination point (último ) and sexual death as the culmination of a process ("ultimate"). These contradictory associations enrich the poem by creating an ambiguous attitude toward the romance of dying by water. The poem attempts to represent a woman's surrender to the romance of a physical sexuality that offers her completion. Yet the reader who entertains both these associations at once must wonder whether the dying means ultimate fulfillment or ultimate loss.

The three words concluding the penultimate line—a la mar —pose another kind of intertextual conflict. This time the conflict concerns word usage in a literary and a popular context. In the Spanish language, the standard form for the sea is masculine—el mar —but the feminine form, la mar , is used as a literary convention in poetry for its alliterative qualities. It is also used in ordinary speech to refer to the sea by seafaring people or by people who live near bodies of water. In this poem Zamora must employ a la mar instead of the standard masculine form el mar both to maintain the octosyllabic line as well as to avoid the prosaic quality of the latter. In "El último baile," however, the phrase a la mar implies a connection with a literary, academic audience rather than with a popular audience because it is not part of the vocabulary Chicano communities use to refer to the sea. Histor-

ically, Chicano communities in the Southwest have been rurally based. Since World War II they have become increasingly urban.

The expression, a la mar / de la tranquilidad , in the English sense of "the sea of tranquility" includes the place on the moon where the first American astronauts landed in 1969. The echo of this landing on a sea of tranquility also increases the tensions for the bilingual reader between the realms of fantasy and reality in this poem.

"El último baile" attributes qualities of ritualistic dance and sensual ecstasy to the experience of drowning. The poetic consciousness in the following poem, "Having Drowned," explores the theme of drowning, but here the metaphor of drowning is ambiguous and enigmatic. At best, drowning seems to be a metaphor for dying. Everyday life is like death except there is no finality to it. The poetic voice seems to argue that resurrecting the dead does not help matters. Life is a confused state where no one is allowed to die.

HAVING DROWNED

It is indecent by any standard
to drown and drown again
until the spirit drips assuredly,
absurdly dangling like a hag's rag
to be sopped and wrung and sopped again.

Having drowned, I cannot face the water
to lie flat among lily pads lodged in
frog ponds, nor to lie back awaiting
a caretaker's hook to divide
the drowning from the drowned.

Division is accursed provision.
Resurrecting the drowned is an ogre's task
diminishing to me and other seasoned dead
who reap no glee from the shrinking of the caretaker
in this momentary suspension.

"Having Drowned" is full of logical paradoxes. No one can drown more than once, yet the voice claims that drownings occur again and again. They are so frequent, in fact, that the speaker and others have become "seasoned dead" (l. 13), a comic, ironic image as one cannot improve upon the condition of the dead. The voice seems to want to make a distinction between two groups:

the "drowning" who are in the process of dying and the "drowned" who are already dead. Yet in the final stanza the speaker asserts that the resurrection of the drowned is possible.

When the speaker uses the word "indecent" (l. 1) we expect her to apply it to a form of human behavior that relates to proper social manners. In lines 2 and 3, however, the voice mocks the substance of the first line, for the act of drowning has nothing to do with indecency. The serious tone of line 1 collapses into the comic tone of line 2. Line 2 frustrates a literal reading of "drowning," yet line 6 seems to ask for just that. The images of a spirit that "drips" and is "dangling" like a "hag's rag" tease us into thinking that the poem has a sexual code serving to mock the phallus, as if to say that the sexual act is neither romantic nor mythic. The word "spirit" is also difficult to place because we do not know if it is the woman's or the man's. It could refer to the male's since it drips and dangles, yet drowning might be a more fitting metaphor for women who "drown" in passion. The sexual code surfaces once again in line 9 with the mention of a "caretaker's hook," a synechdoche for the phallus, only to shift once again into the paradoxically absurd separation of "the drowning from the drowned." Then it appears once more in line 14, where "shrinking" suggests the physical contraction of the male genitals. That the speaker is a woman is clear, as to "face the water" means "awaiting / a caretaker's hook."

The images in "Having Drowned" do not follow a consistent code. On a general level the poem might be regarded as a commentary on the difficulty of the state of consciousness for Zamora. The consciousness wants to stay dead, so to speak, to find a comfortable perspective on its situation as a woman, but it cannot do so. It is always in a state of "momentary suspension." But this phrase undermines even this reading, because it probably refers to "caretaker," its closest referent. "Having Drowned" is an inexplicable poem.

"Bearded Lady," one of Zamora's most erotic poems, is a feminization of a religious ritual. Here soft images, such as "hair like linen," and the gentle action of stroking replace the harshness of "Penitentes" walking in "mailshirts" and flogging one another with whips. The search for sexual harmony is physically embodied in a lady with a beard, a creature who represents a mixture of the sexes and whose physical externals defy attempts to at-

tribute to her a specific gender identity. The image of the beard functions on both a literal and a figurative level.

Figuratively, the poem is an allegory asserting the identity between female sexuality and female creativity. Each of its principal images, beard and treasure, functions as a metaphor for the female genitals. As such, they bring together two intimately connected experiences: eroticism and conception. The speaker wants to know about "love"; that is, she asks about creation, in both a physiological and an artistic context. The first stanza, consisting mainly of direct and abstract statement, culminates in the sensuous image of the "bearded lady," who, like a sphinx, imparts secret wisdom to the narrator.

BEARDED LADY

I wanted to know about love
and was told to see the bearded lady.

As she stroked her treasure, she
told me of the melding wells of Julia,

Of the kissing stones shaped
like camels,

Of the hair like linen
found among the cloistered,

And she stroked, and stroked, and stroked

The bearded lady is a generator of images. The image sequence that expresses her answer to the riddle is linked syntactically by the word of , a device suggesting that the three images are different ways of saying the same thing. The linguistic blend of "melt" and "weld" in the first image, "melding wells of Julia," suggests the drift of the poem's theme: to dissolve the division between male and female, between the hard and the soft, and to make them one. The female genitals are suggested by "wells" (roundness, depth, water, and darkness). These shape or meld the hard, or the male genitals, unto themselves. The "kissing stones" refer to the male genitals. The use of "camels" is not irrelevant, for they may suggest a male principle in a mythological context in which man's mastery of the camel brought with it the subordination of female goddesses.^[25] In "Bearded Lady" the "kissing

stones" are shaped like "camels," which, if indeed they refer to a male principle, refer to one presided over by a female power, or Julia. Implied is a desire to melt traditional male invulnerability and bring it under the control of a female force.^[26]

The third image, "Of the hair like linen / found among the cloistered," titillates the imagination to discover its concrete equivalent. The image evokes the softness and refinement of hair, the purity of white linen, and the celibacy of cloistered nuns. The juxtaposition of the erotic ("hair") and the religious ("linen" and "cloistered") hints at a harmonious coexistence of the profane and the sacred, a recurrent motif in Zamora's poetry.^[27]

The poem closes with the erotic gesture of stroking, a highly charged image in Zamora's poetic art. Within the context of the poem, stroking is the gentle, caressing motion of the lady's hand on her beard, in both a literal and a figurative sense. The triple repetition of the word "stroked" focuses the reader's attention on the gesture, which represents the ultimate pleasure in self-masturbation. Its intended effect is to mesmerize, to seduce the speaker—and, by extension, the female reader—into releasing the suppressed dimensions of her own female sexuality. The bearded lady's message to the speaker and her female audience concerns embracing their own sexuality. They must overcome the social taboos against touching and enjoying their bodies. These bearded ladies are similar to the freak in a circus sideshow because their desire to enjoy erotic pleasure without the male is an aberration of the normal social order.

The gesture of stroking in a sexual context is analogous to the creative strokes of the pen in writing poetry. Strokes, in Zamora's poetic universe, suggest the serpent's strike, and the serpent is the poet herself, striking and stroking with the craft of her art. The speaker in "When We Are Able," for example, pronounces words whose effect is to condemn the querido . With words, the speaker strokes the querido , pretending to offer him soothing comments but all the while condemning him with each new condition and each repetition of her refrain. "Bearded Lady" offers another variant of stroking. Her objective is to obtain sexual gratification by stroking, without the querido . In recreating her speaker's journey to rediscover the origins of her female sexuality, the poet is making a metacommunicative statement about her creativity, or her poetic craft. Dissatisfied with traditional forms of male-female sexuality, and unable to locate within an actual

historical moment a harmony between man and woman to her satisfaction, the poetic consciousness of "Bearded Lady" resorts to a moment in fantasy when she can imagine the perfect androgynous figure. Zamora makes the cause of her alienation—the traditional male figure—the subject of her poetry. By writing poems, the poet, the "restless serpent," obtains vengeance, revenge even, on the male by expressing all that she, and other women like her, have never articulated to him. In the title poem ending the collection, the restless serpents are angry at their "master" for neglecting them. They bite the master in revenge, each time draining something from his blood. These serpents are the sign of the repressed that can explode at any moment, whether the repressed is a woman's sexual drive, a Chicana's longing to tell the history of her people, or the poet's impulse to express herself. Only the act of writing soothes the poetic consciousness. Through this act she confronts the anguish that causes her restlessness, a confrontation that soothes but does not resolve. The gesture of stroking connotes movement and the desire for mastery. It is lyrics, and "lyrics alone [which] soothe / restless serpents, strokes / more devastating / than devastation arrived."

4

In Restless Serpents Zamora repeatedly uses the work of other authors, usually male poets in the English-American literary tradition, to generate her own poetic texts. One influence, as noted earlier, is Shakespeare. Others are Edward Dahlberg, Herman Hesse, Virginia Woolf, Theodore Roethke, Guillevec, and Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962).^[28] Of these, the most important by far is Jeffers. Whenever Zamora responds to Jeffers, her poetic strategy is to include the female voice which he excluded.^[29] In her own poems she assumes the masks of Jeffers's female characters to express sentiments he never permitted them to express. In "Pico Blanco" she speaks as Jeffers's Cassandra in the poem with the same title.^[30] By so doing, Zamora transforms his silent Cassandra who never speaks but is spoken to only by Jeffers. In "The Extraordinary Patience of Things" Zamora's speaker meditates on Jeffers's "Carmel Point," clearly identified by Zamora in her

poem.^[31] The most dramatic of the three poems influenced by Jeffers, in both content and form, is "California," which offers the clearest challenge to Jeffers as a male poet and blends Zamora's two main poetic modes, narrative and dialogue.

Like the narrative poems discussed in Section III of this chapter, "California" presupposes a woman speaker who makes a personal statement to no one in particular about some event whose primary significance is its relation to her own life. In this respect "California" is narrative-lyric: narrative because it reports events; lyric because it is a personal utterance. As it responds to neither a question nor a statement by any particular individual, it implies no direct auditor, as do the dialogue poems presented in Section II. If, however, we examine "California" against its precursor text, "The Roan Stallion" (1926) by Robinson Jeffers, Zamora's poem takes on the nature of an intertextual dialogue.^[32] "California" is Zamora's attempt to rework and change the parent poem; in this respect it resembles "Sonnet, Freely Adapted." These two poems represent two divergent literary strands in the English-speaking cultural heritage: "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is Zamora's attempt to transform a universal, sensual poet; "California" is her attempt to transform a minor, regional author. In this section I argue that Zamora transforms Jeffers more successfully than she does Shakespeare.

CALIFORNIA

"The night-wind veering, the smell of the spilt wine
drifted down hill from the house."
Two gods lay at my feet; I have
     shot one, and that one killed the other.
Each in his turn, each in his fashion of late
     laid over me splitting hairs, splitting atoms.
The dog, dead too, leaped to his death.

Beasts they were, both of them beasts—one                              8
     of the wind and rein, one of the night and wine
     and all of us pools in the moonlight.
My child stands witness to one aimed shot, three
     flamed and freeing ones, and one that plunged
     my wailing will to the center of this bloody corral.

The poem is named for the heroine of "The Roan Stallion." California, the daughter of a Scottish father and a Spanish-Indian mother, is married to Johnny, an Anglo gambler and drunkard

who uses her to satisfy his lust. Johnny brings home a roan stallion, an animal representing sexual potency. California has a mystical encounter with the stallion, which she perceives as a transhuman power. One night she becomes the center of physical warfare between Johnny and the horse. Johnny, lusting to do with California what he has seen the stallion do with a buckskin mare, wants to abuse California sexually, but as she has translated her experience with the stallion into a mystically liberating one, she repulses him and escapes to the corral. Johnny and his dog Bruno pursue her. The dog leaps at the horse and Johnny dashes toward California but falls under the stallion's forehooves. California, armed with a rifle provided by her daughter, aims at and kills Bruno. The stallion tramples Johnny. The poem ends as California fires three bullets into the horse.

Read as an autonomous unit without reference to "The Roan Stallion," "California" is written in a language of evocation and suggestion rather than persuasion and precision. Although the poem is indefinite as to place and time, it is imbued with a mood. The nexus of wind, wine, blood, and night images, the splitting of hairs and of atoms, and the spilling of wine mingle with images of gods and beasts ("dog" in 1. 7 and "corral" in 1. 13, for instance) to suggest physical and sexual energy, violence and conflict. The first lines summon up a concrete image of a landscape (sound, smell, color, movement), probably in California.

Without knowing the specific context of Jeffers's poem, we assume that the "I" speaking is a woman and that the gods she refers to are masculine. The central event is the killing of the gods. "California," then, is an utterance by a woman with a child who explains why she has shot two males. The relationship between the woman and the two gods is not explicitly defined, but expressions such as "laid over me" and "splitting hairs, splitting atoms" suggest conflict involving the release of sexual impulses and energy. The poem's sequence—the subject of its first stanza is two "gods"; that of the second, two "beasts"—invites us to relate the two contrasting entities, for obviously some relationship between them is intended. The woman's utterance seems to mock male powers, for gods are not supposed to die. She satirizes the gods by reducing them to the level of beasts: "Beasts they were, both of them beasts" (1. 8). The rhetorical emphasis on "beasts" and "both" leaves no doubt that the woman regards these male powers as beasts and not as gods. Although they share

the nature of beasts, they are, nevertheless, distinct from each other: "one / of the wind and rein, one of the night and wine." The pun on rein-rain is a clue that one of the gods-beasts is of the outdoors.

A second way to read the poem without reference to Jeffers is to put the associations it suggests into a historical frame. As the title is the name of the state of California, the poem has allegorical resonances. In the historical framework, the state is personified in the speaker, reflecting and presenting her view of the events. The two gods would refer to the conquerors of the land, Spanish and Anglo-American. The images evoke the blood struggle of the human and animal impulses that created the state, perhaps the havoc, frenzy, and lust of the gold rush. The merging of human and animal impulses is suggested in line 10: "and all of us pools in the moonlight." The child is a reference to future generations. The phrase "splitting atoms" refers to the liberation of energy in the conquest and the defense of the territory. More specifically, it suggests Berkeley and Livermore. In its colloquial and popular usage, "splitting hairs" conjures up an image of the state's condemnation of its conquerors for ignoring the important considerations of population and natural resources. Although the allegorical overtones are loose and sketchy, the historical struggle is probably the first interpretation the average reader would bring to the poem.

Even without regard to Jeffers, then, "California" has autonomy. The poet presumes a reader who will respond associatively to the images in the poem and will draw inferences from such associations, rather than a reader who will insist on clear statement and logical relationships. Some details, however, will remain unclear without the help of the parent poem. Why, for example, are the first two lines a quotation? Why did the woman kill only one god? How was the other god killed? And what is the meaning of ones , and one in lines 11 and 12?

Reading "California" with Jeffer's poem in mind slightly alters our perspective: instead of seeing the poem as narrative-lyric, we see it as a form of dialogue. By assuming the fictional mask of California, Zamora makes a direct response to Jeffers, who is clearly the implied addressee of "California." Considered with Jeffers's poem, Zamora's presupposes a reader who will see logical relationships between the two poems, searching in "The Roan Stallion" for the antecedents of the personal pronouns, the com-

mon nouns, and the events in "California." The two quoted lines that open Zamora's poem are the last two lines of "The Roan Stallion." This technique suggests that Zamora is criticizing Jeffers for ending the poem where he does. Attempting to complete the original narrative, Zamora retains its plot and characters, and even its terms, but gives them different meanings, as though Jeffers had not gone far enough. Zamora writes her own sequel to Jeffers in order to give woman the final word.

In "California" Zamora introduces four transformations of Jeffers's text. First, her attribution of a consciousness to the character of California is absent in Jeffers, whose California is a told consciousness. Jeffers never allows his protagonist to be critical of Johnny or, much less, of the stallion. Zamora's character, in contrast, is critical, even condemnatory, of her oppressors. She says what Jeffers's heroine might have said had she been given a voice in the matter. Thus Zamora's California enlarges and extends the original.

Second, Zamora lowers both man and animal to the level of beasts. As Jeffers presents Johnny metaphorically as a beast, Zamora's designation is nothing new. Her reference to him as a god is, however, a new dimension. It is a satiric reference, mocking Johnny for thinking himself a god and behaving as though he were one, whereas in actuality he is crude and vulgar. When Zamora's California insists that both gods are beasts (1. 8), she demolishes the aura of godliness surrounding the stallion in Jeffers. By demystifying her counterpart's perception of the stallion as a god, she reduces the stallion to Johnny's level. If the concepts of god and beast are in conflict in Jeffers with respect to the stallion, Zamora's are not: her transformation is to equate man and animal at the level of beast. God and beast are locked together from the speaker's female perspective. Zamora thus provides a critical female dimension absent in the original poem.^[33]

The third transformation hinges on the interpretation of one in "one that plunged / my wailing will" (11. 12–13). The identities of the referents of one in line 11 and of ones in line 12 are made clear in Jeffers. The "one aimed shot" is the bullet California uses to shoot Bruno; the "three / flamed and freeing ones" are the bullets that kill the horse, which in turn kills Johnny. The one in line 12 has no clear referent in Jeffers. Rather than referring to an actual bullet in Zamora's poem, it reflects the existence of a consciousness that knows that something—some unidentified

presence or power—beyond the desire to escape the husband's lechery has driven her ("plunged / my wailing will") to the "center of this bloody corral."

Finally, Zamora removes all traces of ambiguity in the original California's motive for killing the stallion. In "Roan Stallion" Jeffers leads the reader to believe that California's motive for shooting the stallion is some obscure human fidelity to civilization. Caught between culture (Johnny) and nature (the stallion), California must opt for culture. Jeffers's reader, however, is left to wonder whether an instinct that the stallion, too, is her oppressor does not also prompt California's action. No such ambiguity exists in "California." We are certain that Zamora's protagonist shoots both man and beast because each has been her oppressor. Johnny's abuse of her was both physical and spiritual. The stallion represents a sexual energy that also prevents California from asserting her true nature.

This conflictual relationship between Zamora and her intertextual choice is, at deeper levels, a conflict between written, literary discourse and oral, popular discourse. If we are unaware that Jeffers is the literary source for this poem when first reading it, we are uncertain as to whether the quotation marks refer to written or spoken discourse. Only upon learning that they are the final lines of "Roan Stallion" are we certain that they are written discourse. The lines that follow are Zamora's rendition of California's own spoken words, left unspoken by Jeffers. California's fictional speech in Zamora's poem revises and corrects the written text of the dominant tradition.

The transformations made by Zamora's poem suggest a dialectical response to Jeffers. They imply a close identification between Zamora, the poet, and California, the fictional character. By assuming the persona of Jeffers's own creation, Zamora criticizes him, but her criticism also implies that his poem has had a significant impact on her. Zamora's involvement with Jeffers is more intense than her relationship with Shakespeare. She more successfully maintains a dialectical tension between herself and Jeffers, identifying but also criticizing. She challenges his story and constructs a new one that includes herself. The dynamic force behind the poem comes from a poetic voice that responds to Jeffers first as a woman and second as a Chicana. The dramatic artifice of the implied sexual allegory, the state presented as a woman raped by male powers, presupposes primarily

a female audience. This frame of reference, however, does not exclude a Chicano audience. For one thing, it is possible to interpret the poem as a historical allegory; and second, Zamora has chosen to speak from the consciousness of a character who has a Latina name.^[34]

Zamora goes as far as she does with Jeffers because Jeffers, a modern American poet who writes about northern California, offers Zamora a congenial poetic mode. The northern California landscape, the dramatic persona of the native woman, and the theme of sexual domination of women by men are subjects that interest and provoke Zamora. Whereas Shakespeare may be remote from Zamora, Jeffers, the minor, local poet, is of major concern to her.

Ultimately, Zamora's poetic voice in "California" occupies a liminal space between her own voice and Jeffers's. Read as a narrative lyric, the poem has some autonomy but remains incomplete without reference to "The Roan Stallion." Read as an intertextual dialogue responding to Jeffers the poem makes its impact and can be fully explained, but it raises the question of independence of and autonomy from its literary source. The two poetic modes remain discontinuous with each other, suggesting a poetic consciousness that slips in and out between the two modes.

The poems of Restless Serpents present a dramatization of a shifting poetic consciousness. In the work of no other Chicana poet discussed in this book do we hear the same multiplicity of voices as we do in Restless Serpents . The many voices making up Zamora's two main poetic modes range from meditative, erotic, mythic, lyrical, and impassioned to discursive, ironic, comic, satiric, and analytical. In one sense, Zamora's poetry represents a hymn of all these literary voices, for no single voice predominates.

These voices evoke a multiplicity of divided selves: woman versus Chicana, woman versus man, female poet versus male poet, Chicana versus Chicano, and Chicana versus Anglo. The tensions between and among the different identities juggled by the poetic consciousness reveal pulls from different traditions and contexts: from poetic to nonpoetic, from English-American to Mexican-Chicano; from Aztec-mythological to Judeo-Christian. Zamora's poetic consciousness is a voice absorbing and re-

sisting its literary and cultural influences, attempting to define itself in relation to intertextual choices from two distinct traditions.

If there is a fundamental loyalty marking Zamora's poetic consciousness, it is to her female voice, to her identity as a woman. Almost always tied to her female identity is her identity as a poet. Running third among her identities is her Chicana identity, because the poetic consciousness insists on proving its autonomy as a woman to the Chicano male as well as to the dominant culture. The only way it can prove its autonomy to the Chicano male is to engage in the struggle to transform him. Inherent in this belief is the assumption that one must master the male in order to criticize him. For this reason Zamora's poetry is silent with respect to the expression of her Chicana identity to the dominant culture.

Similarly, Zamora's obsession with correcting, modifying, supplementing, revising, and humanizing Anglo culture and its male poets also reveals a silence. Inherent in this objective is the belief that one must master the dominant culture in order to criticize it. Zamora's poetry thus helps to expose the circularity of one kind of cultural response available to ethnic groups in our society. By excluding Chicanos and Chicanas from participation in its mainstream, our society makes them desire it. The struggle of the consciousness is, therefore, always dependent upon the very object it desires to master.