Contemporary Chicana Poetry "endnotes"

Notes

I— Setting the Context: Gender, Ethnicity, and Silence in Contemporary Chicana Poetry

1. Spanish-speaking writers before this period were primarily poets who were published in Spanish-language newspapers. Their poetry has not been researched in depth, but several studies appeared in the 1970s. One example concerning New Mexico, whose inhabitants have traditionally claimed Spanish rather than Mexican origins, is Doris Meyer, "Anonymous Poetry in Spanish-Language New Mexico Newspapers (1880-1990)," Bilingual Review / La Revista Bilingüe 1 (Sept.-Dec. 1975). 259-275. Meyer gives examples of poetry written by New Mexican Hispanos. Anselmo Arrellano introduces the poetry of a literate class in New Mexico in Los pobladores nuevo mexicanos y su poesía, 1880-1950 (Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications, 1976). Tomás Rivera, foremost Chicano novelist of the 1960s, stresses the importance of Mexican-American newspapers as a vehicle for the literary contribution of writers of Mexican descent in the nineteenth century in "Into the Labyrinth: The Chicano in Literature," New Voices in American Literature: The Mexican American. A Symposium (Edinburg, Tex.: Pan American University, 1971). One difference between the poems presented by Meyer and Arrellano and those referred to by Rivera is that the former were composed to be read and the latter were composed to be heard; only later did they appear in print.

Written literary works in various areas of the Southwest before World War II require further study and research before the historical and cultural relationships between the poetry of Spanish-speaking writers, regardless of their self-declared Hispanic identity, and the "new" literature that is the subject of this book can be explored.

2. Among the most important contributions to the genre of the novel are Tomás Rivera, . . . y no se lo tragó la tierra / And the Earth Did continue

Not Swallow Him , bilingual ed. (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971); Rolando Hinojosa, Estampas del Valle y otras obras , bilingual ed. (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1973) and Klail City y sus alrededores (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1976); Rudolfo Anaya's trilogy, Bless Me, Ultima (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972), Heart of Aztlán (Berkeley: Editorial Justa Publications, 1976), and Tortuga (Berkeley: Editorial Justa Publications, 1979); and Miguel Mendez, Peregrinos de Aztlán (Tucson: Editorial Peregrinos, 1974).

The playwright who best represents the dramatic output of Chicanos in this era is Luis Valdez, who organized El Teatro Campesino in 1965. His early presentations aroused in César Chávez' farm workers an awareness of the socioeconomic conditions that affected their lives. His theatrical production of Zoot Suit (1978) at the Mark Taper Forum was the first drama about the history and culture of Mexican-Americans to be produced in Los Angeles.

Alurista, the most prolific of male Chicano poets, published three collections of poems between 1971 and 1976: Floricanto en Aztlán (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1971); Nationchild Plumaroja (San Diego: Toltecas en Aztlán Publications, 1972); and Timespace Huracán (Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications, 1976). Other important Chicano poets are José Montoya, El sol y los de abajo and Other R . C . A . F . Poems (San Francisco: Ediciones Pocho-Che, 1972); Tino Villanueva, Hay otra voz Poems (Staten Island: Editorial Mensaje, 1972); Raul Salinas, Viaje / Trip (Providence: Hellcoal Press, 1973); and Gary Soto, The Elements of San Joaquin (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976), The Tale of Sunlight (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), and Where Sparrows Work Hard (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

Elizabeth Portillo-Tramley wrote plays and short stories. Her best-known drama is "The Day of the Swallows," in El Espejo-The Mirror (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1971), pp. 150-193; Rain of Scorpions and Other Writings (Berkeley: Tonatiuh International, 1975) is a collection of short stories. For reasons noted in the text of this chapter, no novels by Chicanas appeared in the period 1965-1975. Two novels published since then are Isabella Rios, Victuum (Ventura, Calif.: Diana Etna, 1976), and Gina Valdés, There Are No Madmen Here Tonight (San Diego: Maize Press, 1981).

3. The term "Chicano" designates the totality of experience of both men and women of Mexican extraction who live in the United States. As the Spanish language allows for gender specificity, Chicano may also refer to the male of this culture. Although my usage of the term includes both meanings, I frequently use it in its more limited sense, that is, to specify the male counterpart of Chicana. A Chicana is a woman of Mexican heritage who lives in the United States. To encompass the cultural and historical continuity between Mexico and certain geographical areas of the United States, I sometimes use the term "Mexican-Chicano." break

4. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1979. Joseph Sommers is the author of a landmark article in Chicano literary criticism, "From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Application to a Chicano Literary Text," New Scholar 6 (1977), 51-80.

5. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Bernice Zamora is the only Chicana poet discussed by Bruce-Novoa.

6. Santa Barbara: Editorial La Causa, 1982.

7. Ypsilanti, Mich.: Bilingual Press, 1982.

8. Elizabeth Ordóñez, "Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 316-339; Alejandro Morales, "Terra Mater and the Emergence of Myth in Poems by Alma Villanueva," Bilingual Review 7, 2 (1980), 123-142; Marta E. Sánchez, "InterSexual and Intertextual Codes in the Poetry of Bernice Zamora," MELUS 7 (Fall 1980), 55-68.

9. Tomás Ybarra, "The Chicano Movement and the Emergence of a Chicano Poetic Consciousness," New Scholar 6 (1977), 83.

10. Sommers, "From the Critical Premise to the Product," 70.

11. El Grito 1 (Sept. 1973).

12. I am thinking here of Alurista's early poems in which he propounded the idea that northern Mexico and the American Southwest together formed a native Chicano homeland called Aztlán. He opposed Aztlán to the values of white America, presented as sterile and vacuous. Elements of the same dichotomous tendency appear in the novels of Rudolfo Anaya and Miguel Mendez.

13. Huerta, Chicano Theater , pp. 18-23, 195-199.

14. Sonia López, "The Role of the Chicana within the Student Movement," in Essays on la mujer, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martinez Cruz (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1977), pp. 16-29. See also Adelaida R. del Castillo, "Mexican Women in Organization," in Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present , ed. Magdalena Mora and Adelaida R. del Castillo (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1980), pp. 7-16.

15. For a penetrating study of the writings of black women, see Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980). Clearly black women faced the same kinds of problems as Chicana poets during the same historical period. Some outstanding black American women poets are Sherley Anne Williams, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Ai, Sonia Sanchez, and Colleen McElroy. Curiously, none of the Chicana poets I discuss are indebted to black women writers. Although Elizabeth Ordóñez claims ("Sexual Politics," p. 319) that the Chicana poet, Ana Castillo, empathizes with the processes and goals of black women's literature, there is little evidence that black women poets have influenced Chicana poets. The influence on Chicana poets, as on Alma Villanueva, for example, comes from white women writers. break

16. Conflicts stemming from social class also arose, to some extent, when Chicanas interacted with white women's groups. Some Chicanas in the movement realized that they came from communities whose per capita income and educational level were significantly lower than in white communities. In emphasizing the categories of ethnicity and gender, I am not suggesting that the dynamic of social class was of no significance. I stress those categories because Chicana intellectuals and writers were more conscious of race and gender than of class as factors shaping their lives.

17. Alfredo Mirandé and Evangelina Enríquez give detailed accounts of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexican women active in the public sphere in La Chicana (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 68-95, 233-234. I would add two names for the contemporary period: Dolores Huerta, vice-president of the United Farm Workers Union, and Irma Castro, president of the San Diego Chicano Federation.

18. Mirandé and Enriquez give a helpful summary on the issue of Chicana feminism and list some primary sources in their bibliography ( La Chicana , p. 234). Some women, such as Marta Cotera, Anna Nieto-Gómez, and Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez, gave that issue a central position in their critical essays. Enriqueta Longauex y Vasquez, "The Mexican-American Woman," is reprinted in Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement , ed. Robin Morgan (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), pp. 426-432. See also Cotera, The Chicana Feminist (Austin: International Systems Development, 1976), and Profile of the Mexican-American Woman (Austin: National Educational Laboratory Publishers, 1976).

19. Other important Chicana poets are Carmen Tafolla of Austin, Xelina, of Calexico, California, now living in Colorado Springs; Olivia Castellanos of Sacramento; Margarita Cota-Cárdenas of Tucson; and Gina Valdés of San Diego.

20. For discussion of the personal confessional mode of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, see Karl Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1973), p. 89.

21. Chicano interest in Octavio Paz resulted more from his essay on the pachuco (El laberinto de la soledad [Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959]) than from his poetry. Pachuco is the generic name for the self-styled heroes of barrio culture in the 1940s who were identified by their dress, language, and behavior. See Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude , trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), pp. 13-18.

22. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.

23. Bilingual ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

24. For further information on la llorona , see Américo Paredes, ed., Folktales of Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. xvi.

25. Walter Ong, "Literacy and Orality in Our Times," in Profession 79 (New York: Modern Language Association, 1979), p. 3. break

26. I refer to that body of literary criticism which posits the notion of the text as plural. Among the many critics who have written on the idea of intertexuality, and whose presuppositions are reflected in my analyses, are Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974); Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981); and Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

27. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980.

28. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980. Villanueva's book includes a detailed introduction to Chicano poetry and historical and literary essays on Chicanos.

29. Ed. Toni Empringham (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1982).

30. Numerous Spanish-language radio stations flourished in the late 1920s and early 1930s in cities of the Southwest.

31. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

32. Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook , p. 252.

33. Allen, New American Poetry , p. xii.

34. For two different readings of Alurista's poetics, see Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, "Alurista's Poetics: The Oral, the Bilingual, the Pre-Columbian," in Sommers, ed., Modern Chicano Writers , pp. 117-132; Bruce-Novoa, "The Teachings of Alurista: A Chicano Way of Knowledge," in Chicano Poetry , pp. 69-95.

35. Part of Bernice Zamora's ambivalence as Chicana, poet, and woman comes from her identification with an Anglo-American tradition (see chap. 5). Whereas Eliot and Pound looked to classical literary expression because they found contemporary culture insufficient, Zamora reacts and responds to the English sonnet tradition and American writers such as Robinson Jeffers because they exclude a woman's voice.

36. For sources for my comments on the implied audience, see chap. 2, n. 39.

37. Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry , esp. p. 226, n. 10.

38. Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation , p. 16.

39. I am indebted to Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981), 179-205, for the term "muted discourse." Showalter describes woman's writing as a "double-voiced discourse," or a combination of two alternative oscillating texts simultaneously at play with each other: an "orthodox" (or "dominant") and a "muted" story (see esp. p. 204).

II— The Birthing of the Poetic "I" in Alma Villanueva's Mother, May I? The Search for a Female Identity

1. Pittsburgh: Motheroot Publications, 1978. Mother , May I ? is printed in its entirety in Appendix C, below.

2. Austin: Place of Herons Press, 1977.

3. In Third Chicano Literary Prize (Irvine, Calif., 1976-77), pp. 85-133. break

4. James Cody, editor of Villanueva's Bloodroot , explains his fascination with her poems, but his reasons distort the issue of why Villanueva writes in the first place. In his introductory comments Cody says (p. i) he likes Villanueva's poetry because she writes like a man: " . . . her poems were of the universal quality, embracing all subjects and passions, that seemed . . . to come almost only from the writings of men. In addition, there was none of the self-pity that is in so much 'feminist' poetry." He continues: " . . . she does not ape men or brutalize her sexuality to escape the bonds that have existed traditionally for women. For her these bonds do not exist. Alma Villanueva is not a feminist, or a female poet, she is a poet."

5. Fernando Alegría, Walt Whitman en Hispanoamerica (Mexico City: Ediciones Studium, 1954), esp. pp. 314-331.

6. On May 24, 1983, Alma Villanueva told me she had not read Walt Whitman before writing Bloodroot . While confirming this in his introduction to Bloodroot , Cody insists that Villanueva's poems resemble Whitman's: "Though Alma had read almost no Whitman before our friendship began, I read her poems as if she were the female fulfillment of those words spoken so long ago [by Whitman in "Poets to Come"]. Cody sees "a clarity of line, a forthrightness, a subconscious and assumed rhythm . . . that seemed to proceed from Whitman" and an "insouciant joy in the crude, the ordinary, the common, while elevating it, or accepting it equally with the rest of life" (p. ii). Had Villanueva read Whitman before writing Bloodroot , I imagine that the unconventionality of Whitman, who allowed practically everything to enter into his poems, employed free verse, used no rhyme, and believed in spontaneous natural song, would have appealed to Villanueva.

7. Alegría ( Walt Whitman , pp. 320-331), in referring to Song of Myself and Neruda's "Ritual de mis piernas" ("Ritual of My Legs"), points to this difference in the way each poet speaks about his legs.

8. See "Cuerpo de mujer," the introductory poem in Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (p. 87), and Poems II, V, VI, and XIII (pp. 87-91, 95-96), in Obras Completas , 3d ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 1967), Vol. I. For an English version see Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair , trans. W. S. Merwin, bilingual ed. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969).

9. For views on Plath's and Sexton's poetry and insights into their place in contemporary American poetry, see Gary Lane, Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979); Charles Newman, The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); Mary Lynn Broe, Protean Poetic (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Karl Malkoff, Crowell's Handbook of Contemporary American Poetry (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1973).

10. Alicia Ostriker, "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking," Signs 8 (Autumn 1982), 68-90. Ostriker observes that childish language and bawdy are both variants of colloquial language. She notes that Rachel Blau DuPlessis uses "pun- soft

ning baby talk" in her poem "Medusa" to reveal "the power of sexual pain to thwart growth," whereas in Sexton it signals sexual trauma. Ostriker asserts that Erica Jong is one poet who uses bawdy to invade the linguistic preserves of male discourse (pp. 87-88).

11. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 15.

12. Bloodroot , pp. 4-5; App. A, pp. 277-279.

13. Villanueva sometimes uses only a closing parenthesis.

14. Bloodroot , p. 1. The lines cited are the entire poem.

15. Bloodroot , pp. 2-3; App. A, pp. 280-281. The poems "(wo)man," "bloodroot," and "ZINZ" offer a feminine analogue to the myth of Aztlán in Chicano poetry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to this myth, Aztlán, reputedly in today's Southwest, was the legendary birthplace of the Aztec Indians. The Aztlán myth posited the existence of a collective unconscious for modern-day Chicanos whereby they retained continuity with their Indian heritage. For some Chicanos, Aztlán made possible a reintegration with their cultural roots. The Aztlán myth represents a unilateral rejection of United States culture.

Villanueva does something similar in a feminine context. Whereas Aztlán is a mythical utopia based on race, Villanueva's mythical matriarchy is based on gender. Like the poets of Aztlán (one example is the early Alurista of the Floricanto poems, 1971), Villanueva, too, criticizes Western culture: men have split the world into mind and body. Her revision is to affirm and celebrate the beauty of the feminine body, which is negated by Western civilization and is therefore the aspect of the human person to be elevated. Alejandro Morales discusses this feminine principle in terms of Mircea Eliade's Earth Mother in "Terra Mater and the Emergence of Myth in Poems by Alma Villanueva," Bilingual Review 7, 2 (1980), 123-142.

16. Bloodroot , pp. 20-21; App. A, pp. 282-283.

17. Roy Harvey Pearce, Whitman (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1962), p. 6.

18. Villanueva does not use an apostrophe to indicate the possessive.

19. Bloodroot , p. 37. I cite the entire poem. This poem bears a thematic resemblance to Neruda's "Unidad," the fifth poem in Residencia en la tierra I (1925-1931). The concern for the poet's immediate sensory experience, the eternal repetition of natural events (the ebb and flow of the sea), and the subject's experience of time as "intuited pastness" are themes common to both poems. See Lane Kauffmann, "Neruda's Last Residence: Translations and Notes on Four Poems," New Scholar 5, 1 (1975), 122-124.

20. Bloodroot , pp. 49-51; App. A, pp. 284-286. The three poems I mention at the end of this paragraph appear on pp. 27, 29, and 47-48.

21. Bloodroot , pp. 57-59; App. A, pp. 287-289.

22. Bloodroot , pp. 52-54; App. A, pp. 290-293.

23. App. A, p. 293.

24. Indications of a witch-persona in Plath are mentioned by Lane, Sylvia continue

Plath , pp. 13, 144. Ostriker ("Thieves of Language," p. 86) observes that the framing element of Sexton's Transformations is the persona of the narrator-poet, "a middle-aged witch, me."

25. Poems , pp. 117-118; App. B, pp. 301-302.

26. "Of/To Man," Poems , p. 115; App. B, p. 300; "witches' blood," Poems , p. 105; App. B, p. 297; "Of Utterances," Poems , pp. 107-108; App. B, pp. 299-300. In Poems , "witches' blood" mistakenly appears as part of "The Hard Probing Plow." The poem begins with the words "witches' blood" (p. 105) and concludes with the same words (p. 106).

27. Robert Graves espouses this theory of poetry. In The White Goddess (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), originally published in 1948, he argues that a test of a poet's vision is the "accuracy of his portrayal of the White Goddess and of the island over which she rules," and that "a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living" (p. 12). For Graves, poetry is a magical language that honored the moon-goddess in prepatriarchal times, survived in popular religious ceremonies and mystery cults, and was still taught during the times of the early Christian emperors "in the poetic colleges of Ireland and Wales, and in the witch-covens of Western Europe." He claims that one important difference between the classical and Romantic poet was his attitude to the "White Goddess." Whereas the classical poet claimed to be the goddess's master, the Romantic poet of the nineteenth century was a "true poet only in his fatalistic regard for the Goddess as the mistress who commanded his destiny" (pp. 12-13).

In my conversation with Villanueva on March 24, 1983, she said that in this poem she quoted, not Graves, but Sexton's quotation of Graves. As with Neruda and Whitman, Villanueva seems to come across a source in an indirect way, here Graves via Sexton, since she claims she had not read Graves when she wrote this poem.

28. Bloodroot , pp. 55-56; App. A, pp. 294-296.

29. Numbers in parentheses indicate the page or pages in Appendix C where the passage appears.

30. Norman Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 38-39. Holland's explanation of the phases of child development in a psychoanalytical context is helpful for understanding the character's activities as a little girl (ibid., pp. 32-50).

31. Ibid., p. 39.

29. Numbers in parentheses indicate the page or pages in Appendix C where the passage appears.

31. Ibid., p. 39.

29. Numbers in parentheses indicate the page or pages in Appendix C where the passage appears.

31. Ibid., p. 39.

32. For comments on Plath's exaggerated hyperboles, see Richard Allen Blessing, "The Shape of the Psyche: Vision and Technique in the Late Poems of Sylvia Plath"; Marjorie Perloff, "Sylvia Plath's 'Sivvy' Poems: A Portrait of the Poet as Daughter," in Lane, Sylvia Plath , esp. pp. 66-67, 173.

33. Villanueva's male characters fall into categories of sexual deviants and innocent wimps. The rapist and the uncle who molest the child are examples of the former, and the Anglo schoolboy with whom the protagonist falls in love is an example of the latter. The only male character in the poem to whom the protagonist seems to continue

relate in a positive way is her second husband, but nothing is known about him. Men do not play a significant role in Villanueva's poetic universe because they do not participate in the creation of meaning. For example, the narrator dismisses sons with a passing reference before moving into her discussion of the mother-daughter bond.

Judith Kegan Gardiner, "On Female Identity and Writing by Women," Critical Inquiry (Winter 1981), p. 356, points out that Anglo women writers describe their male characters in terms of access to power: "they are wimps or brutes." Villanueva seems to share this tendency, for she depicts her male characters as one-dimensional. The tendency is, of course, in keeping with her primary objective of telling a woman's story. As Chicano male writers primarily portray women as either virgins or whores, Villanueva's portrayal of men is a neat reversal of the male tendency.

34. These terms are used by R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 65-77.

35. Morales, "Terra Mater," following Mircea Eliade's discussion of myth, focuses on the grandmother as the contemporary incarnation of the Earth Mother in Villanueva's prize-winning anthology, Poems . Unlike Morales, I am not interested in validating the Eliade model of myth, but I do think that Villanueva consciously knows and uses archetypal conventions. She says in the study of her life and work by Elizabeth Ordóñez ( Chicano Literature: A Reader's Encyclopedia , ed. Julio A. Martinez and Francisco A. Lomelí [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985]) that she has been influenced by Mary Esther Harding's Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1971). Harding was a disciple of Jung, who introduced her book, originally published in 1935. One of Harding's objectives in Woman's Mysteries is to expose and recover the "feminine principle" represented by Western culture via the presentation of feminine archetypes, such as the Demeter-Kore myth. The intention of making the grandmother in the grave scene a kind of Earth Mother is a buried presupposition of Mother , May I ?

36. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," trans. Alix Strachey, Sigmund Freud on Creativity and the Unconscious (New York: Harper Torch-books, 1958), p. 148, defines the repressed in this way.

37. Ostriker, "Thieves of Language," esp. pp. 72-75.

38. Walter J. Ong, "Literate Orality of Popular Culture Today," in Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979), p. 289. Also appropriate on formulary devices and their relation to oral cultures are Ong's comments in "Transformations of the Word and Alienation," in Interfaces of the Word (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 17-22.

39. I cite only a few of the many critics who share my view of the literary text as a cultural product in a given situation of discourse. Robert Scholes, Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 14-16, makes the useful distinction between a "work" and a "text": "the same set of words can be regarded as either a work or a text." A work is "a complete, self-sufficient object, continue

constructed of words on a page . . . seen as free of authorial intention, free of historical necessity, and free from the reader's projections of value and meaning." The major exponent of this method is the New Criticism school of thought. Scholes's preference is for semiotic analysis which takes the same set of words as a text: "open, incomplete, insufficient." He argues that "as a text . . . a piece of writing must be understood as the product of a person or persons, at a given point in human history, in a given form of discourse, taking its meanings from the interpretative gestures of individual readers using the grammatical, semantic, and cultural codes available to them."

Susan R. Suleiman and Inge Crosman, The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 3-4; take as their central premise the notion that "all stories [texts] are implicitly or explicitly addressed to an audience." The audience is an entity inseparable from the notion of artistic texts. The authors present six varieties of reader-oriented criticism and compile an extensive bibliography on questions related to the reception of literary texts.

Peter J. Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption: Fictional Patterns and the External World," PMLA 96 (May 1981), 408-419, says in a note (p. 418) that the "central disagreement in reader criticism is between critics who argue for the individual's freedom to 'create texts' and those who claim that the text imposes restrictions on response." My comments on Mother , May I ? relate more to the second position, or to the way readers are reflected in texts.

40. Daniel Wilson, "Readers in Texts," PMLA 96, 5 (Oct. 1981), 848-863; Rabinowitz, "Assertion and Assumption."

41. Bloodroot , pp. 62-63.

42. Emile Benveniste, "Relations of Person in the Verb," "The Nature of Pronouns," and "Subjectivity in Language," in Problems in General Linguistics , trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami Linguistics Series, no. 8 (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 195-204, 217-222, 224-230. Lucille Kerr, in notes to her article, "The Paradox of Power and Mystery: Carlos Fuentes' Terra Nostra ," PMLA 95 (Jan. 1980), 91-102, comments on Benveniste's theories on the first-, second-, third-person pronouns and the difference among them (p. 108).

43. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978).

44. Robinson Jeffers, Medea , in Medea: Myth and Dramatic Form , ed. James L. Sanderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), p. 133.

III— The Chicana as Scribe: Harmonizing Gender and Culture in Lorna Dee Cervantes' "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway"

1. This poem and all others mentioned or quoted in the text are from Emplumada (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981).

2. I say "usually" because in "Lots: I" and "Lots: II" Cervantes, speaking as a woman, assigns no identifiable racial, cultural, or class continue

markers to her fictional speaker who responds to an experience of rape.

3. "Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway" and "Freeway 280" were originally printed in Latin-American Literary Review 5 (Spring-Summer 1977), 175-179. "Refugee Ship" appeared originally in Revista Chicano-Riqueña 3 (Winter 1975). "Beneath the Shadow" and "Refugee Ship" were reprinted in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States , ed. Dexter Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980). Except for some of Cervantes' other early pieces, such as "You Cramp My Style, Baby," "Trabajadores Culturales" ( Fuego de Aztlán 1, 4 [1977], 39, 41), and "Para un revolucionario" ( Revista Chicano-Riqueña 3 [Winter 1975]), surprisingly few of the poems in Emplumada are overtly expressive of a Chicana social consciousness.

4. Cervantes' spelling of Veracruz as two words reinforces her ambiguous relationship with Mexico.

5. See the special issue of América Indigena 38, 2 (1978), devoted to "La Mujer Campesina en la Sociedad Latinoamericana."

6. Set in an urban context, probably in California, "Cannery Town in August" ( Emplumada , p. 6) focuses on a group of women going home one August evening after working all day in a cannery that processes spinach, tomatoes, and peaches. The speaker-witness describes the woman as "not speaking," "dumbed" by the cannery's "clamor." The metonymies of "bodyless / uniforms" and "spinach-specked shoes" stand for the women who "drift in monochrome" down the streets. They are like men because they "smell of whiskey" and have "peach fuzz" on their eyes and lips. Cervantes describes the hard, physical labor these women perform, "with no one / waiting in the shadows / to palm them back to living."

7. Vicente T. Mendoza, El corrido mexicano (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1954).

8. Américo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958). According to Paredes, the " corrido of Gregorio Cortez" presents Cortez as a border hero surviving in a hostile Anglo community in southern Texas at the turn of the century. Cortez is one of several heroes of border corridos whom some official American newspapers of the time presented as bandits and outlaws capable only of murder and other crimes. For Paredes' discussion of both the thematic and the formal aspects of the corrido , see especially Part II, pp. 12 ff.

9. See Walter Ong's discussion ("The Writer's Audience Is Always a Fiction," in Interfaces of the Word [Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1977], pp. 61-62) on the transition in Western culture from an oral to a literate society. Ong notes that the original transcribers of the Iliad and the Odyssey were not composing in writing but recording with minimal changes "what a singer was singing or was imagined to be singing."

10. Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979), esp. pp. 29-49. In his first chapter, "Modern and continue

Postmodern: Symbolist and Immanentist Modes of Poetic Thought," Altieri opposes an immanentist tradition to the symbolist tradition in modern poetry, tracing the former to Wordsworth and the latter to Coleridge. Symbolist poets (Eliot, Pound) affirm the creative mind as the source of all value: "What matters is not what is there in immediate experience but what the mind can make of it" (p. 36). The poet of the immanentist tradition places value in the forces at work in ordinary experience. The mind discovers and orders meaning already present in nature. Experience is immanentist, not transcendental.

Accounting for their various differences, Altieri places post-Modern poets (Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Denise Levertov) into the immanentist tradition. Given the general parameters of his model, I would place Cervantes, as well as all the other Chicana poets discussed in this book, within his immanentist poetics. In fact, the historical shift in the style of writing poetry from symbolist to immanentist after World War II is, I think, one factor encouraging Chicanas and Chicanos, and probably other cultural minorities as well, to write. An immanentist style is far better suited to their abilities and objectives than the high modernistic and more "academic" style of Eliot and Pound.

11. In Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).

12. For examples of the decomposition of the poetic surface as it relates to the poetry of William Carlos Williams, see Marjorie Perloff, "'Lines Converging and Crossing': The 'French' Decade of William Carlos Williams," in The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 123-132. Using cubist painting as a comparative norm, Perloff argues that in Spring and All Carlos Williams presents images that are difficult, even impossible, to visualize. His poems begin with an image of a concrete object only to end with another image that contradicts it. In "The Red Paper Box," for example, the box turns out to be made, not of paper, but of cloth or leather.

13. For more on the concept of "mother's brother," see Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Doubleday, 1967), pp. 39-43. For a more recent discussion of the phenomenon, see Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, "Family and the Household: The Analysis of Domestic Groups," Annual Review of Anthropology 8 (1979), 161-205.

14. The changes were for the better, I think. Most of them eliminated unnecessary repetition and helped to make the poem tighter and more compact. A comparison of the poem as printed in Emplumada (1981) with the one in The Third Woman (1980) yields three significant changes. Cervantes probably made these alterations for Emplumada because the stanzas in which they appeared were still the same in The Third Woman as in the original printing in Latin-American Literary Review (1977). break

In The Third Woman stanza 2 of section 5 reads:

inside
a grey kitten a touchstone
purring beneath grandma's
hand-sewn quilts the singing
of mockingbirds

The version in Emplumada is enriched because the grandmother sews quilts from the suits left by her husband; it also drops the unnecessary "hand-sewn."

The second change concerns stanza 2 of section 6, where Cervantes eliminates four complete lines that state too explicitly what the poem already suggests without them:

a mother's wisdom.
The lines on her face are beginning to show.
The bitter years are all so visible now
as she spends hours
washing down the bile.

The third change eliminates the future tense in the first two lines of the final stanza. In The Third Woman these lines read:

and in time, I will plant geraniums.
I will tie up my hair into loose braids.

The altered version in Emplumada gains the immediacy of the present tense, which in turn gives the phrase "in time" an aspect of ambiguity.

15. Ong, Interfaces of the Word , p. 103.

16. The idea of calling the girl-narrator's expression immanentist was suggested by Altieri, Enlarging the Temple .

17. Stephen Ross, "'Voice' in Narrative Texts: The Example of As I Lay Dying ," PMLA 94 (March 1979), 3-10, discusses a phenomenon in narrative similar to the dichotomy in literary voice which I discuss here.

18. For examples, see Bloodroot , p. 54; Poems , pp. 94, 106; and Mother , May I ?, pp. 18-19.

IV— Prohibition and Sexuality in Lucha Corpi's Palabras De Mediodia / Noon Words

1. The biographical information on Lucha Corpi is based on Barbara Brinson-Pineda, "Poets on Poetry: Dialogue with Lucha Corpi," Prisma (Mills College, Department of Ethnic Studies, 1979), pp. 4-9; Corpi's short autobiography in Palabras de Mediodía / Noon Words ; and my interview with Lucha Corpi in June 1980. Corpi also gives autobiographical details in Fireflight: Three Latin-American Poets (Berkeley, Calif.: Oyez, 1976), pp. 43-44. Ten of Corpi's poems appear in Fireflight ; most of them are reprinted in Palabras de Mediodía .

2. Palabras de Mediodía / Noon Words , trans. Catherine Rodríguez-Nieto (Berkeley: El Fuego de Aztlán Publications, 1980), contains an continue

eight-page introduction by the Mexican author, Juan José Arreola, also translated into English. Of the forty-eight poems in this collection, only two, "Time" and "Underground Mariachi," are in English, and they are translated into Spanish (pp. 74-75, 76-77). All the poems reproduced in this chapter are from this edition.

3. For examples in Mexican songs and lyrics, see Cancionero Folklórico de México , 5 vols., compiled and edited by researchers of the Centro de Estudios Linguisticos y Literarios de El Colegio de México, under the direction of Margit Frenk (1975-1984). For examples of men eating the fruit or cutting the flower, see the Cancionero, Coplas del Amor Feliz 1 (1975), 193-195. For a brief but helpful introduction to Mexican popular poetry and lyrics, see Jacobo Chencinsky, "El Mundo Metafórico de la Lírica Popular Mexicana," Anuario de Letras 1 (Mexico City, 1961), 113-148.

4. Printed in La Cosecha , a special issue of De Colores (Albuquerque: Pajarito Publications) 3, 3 (1977), 74-89. All translations from "Tres Mujeres" are mine.

5. This expression comes from the experience of people living in Mexico and other areas of Latin America. The phrase una mujer muy sufrida means a self-sacrificing woman.

6. According to Jacques Soustelle ( Daily Life of the Aztecs [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961], p. 55), Iztaccíhuatl was a priestess in charge of the physical preparation for certain ceremonies, particularly the sweeping of holy places. The legend of Iztaccíhuatl as sleeping woman or princess is in the popular imagination of Mexican people, but it is not documented by sources on pre-Columbian civilization and culture. The name is frequently spelled with an x instead of a z . I follow the spelling given in Luis Cabrera, Diccionario de aztequismos (Mexico City: Ediciones Oasis, 1975), p. 84.

Corpi's second reference to the princess in white, a little farther on, alludes to the "snowy peaks of two giants." Corpi is referring to the chain formed by Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatépetl, or the Sierra Nevada.

7. Iris Blanco, "Participación de las Mujeres en la Sociedad Prehispánica," in Essays on la mujer, ed. Rosaura Sánchez and Rosa Martinez Cruz (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Center, University of California, 1977), pp. 48-80 (see esp. p. 56).

8. In a Mexican context, I am thinking of Octavio Paz's El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959), translated as The Labyrinth of Solitude by Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961); and novels by Carlos Fuentes, such as La Región Más Transparente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958), translated as Where the Air Is Clear by Sam Hileman (New York: Obolensky, 1960), and La Muerte de Artemio Cruz (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1961), translated as The Death of Artemio Cruz by Sam Hileman (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1965). These Mexican writers tend to represent the sociohistorical conquest as a rape by the Spaniards, thereby implying the virginity and purity of pre-Columbian civilization. break

In a Chicano context, I include Corky Gonzalez, "I Am Joaquin," one of the first poems to appear in the Chicano movement; the early poems by Alurista; and even the novels Peregrinos de Aztlán (Tucson: Editorial Peregrinos, 1974), by Miguel Mendez, and Bless Me , Ultima (Berkeley: Quinto Sol Publications, 1972), by Rudolfo Anaya. Such poems and novels tend to simplify the process of colonization by romanticizing native American cultures as more natural and human than the corrupt and materialistic cultures, whether Spanish or Anglo-American, which overcame them.

9. See the play by Carlos Fuentes, Todos los gatos son pardos (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1970), for the variations on Marina's name: "Malintzin . . . Marina . . . Malinche. . . . Tres fueron tus nombres, mujer: el que te dieron tus padres, el que te dio tu amante y el que te dio tu pueblo. . . . Malintzin, dijeron tus padres: hechicera, diosa de la mala suerte y de la reyerta de sangre. . . . Marina dijo tu hombre, recordando el océano por donde vino hasta estas tierras. . . . Malinche, dijo tu pueblo: traidora, lengua y guía del hombre blanco."

For the English translation, see Rachel Phillips, "Marina / Malinche: Masks and Shadows," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), p. 112: "Malintzin . . . Marina . . . Malinche. . . . You had three names, woman: the one your parents gave you, the one your lover gave you, and the one your people gave you. . . . Malintzin, said your parents: enchantress, goddess of ill fortune and blood feud. . . . Marina, said your man, remembering the ocean he crossed to come to this land. . . . Malinche, said your people: traitress, white man's mouthpiece and guide."

10. Soustelle, Daily Life of the Aztecs , p. 2.

11. I am thinking here of the well-known comment made by José Martí during his stay in the United States: "He vivido en el monstruo y conozco sus entrañas, y mi honda es la honda de David" ("I have lived in the monster and know its very innards, and my sling is the sling of David"). José Martí was a poet, an intellectual, and a fighter for Cuban independence.

12. For examples, see "Quedarse Quieto" ("Keeping Still"), pp. 4-8; "Girasol" ("Sunflower"), pp. 72-73; "Time" ("Tiempo"), pp. 74-75; "La Casa de los Espejos" ("House of Mirrors"), pp. 102-107; and "Lento Liturgico," pp. 108-109. No title is given to the English translation of this poem.

13. See Brinson-Pineda, "Poets on Poetry," pp. 5-6.

14. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 96.

15. Gilbert and Gubar (ibid., pp. 4-11) discuss the implications for women writers of the notion of "author" as male and the pen as a metaphorical penis.

14. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 96.

15. Gilbert and Gubar (ibid., pp. 4-11) discuss the implications for women writers of the notion of "author" as male and the pen as a metaphorical penis.

16. Corpi defines teponaztle as a flute used by Indians to announce the celebration of festivities in honor of the gods ( Palabras de Mediodía , p. xxvii), but I follow the definition given by Cabrera ( Diccionario , p. 134): a percussion instrument sometimes used as a drum. Corpi continue

also identifies Francisco Gabilondo Soler, whom I mention at the end of the paragraph.

17. Atole is a Mexican drink made of cooked corn that is ground, dissolved, filtered, and boiled.

18. Corpi uses the words, "cultivadoras de indecibles" ("cultivators of the unsayable") to describe herself and her literary precursor in "Emily Dickinson," pp. 134-135.

19. Chencinsky, "El Mundo Metafórico," p. 145.

20. A more openly political poem is "Underground Mariachi" (see n. 2, above).

21. Oddly enough, terms that designate male genitalia are frequently feminine in Spanish, for example, la verga ("penis"), and terms that designate female genitalia are masculine, for example, el coño ("vagina").

22. Here I think Rodríguez-Nieto's English translations, though in general sensitive and accurate, impoverish the Spanish text. A few other examples occur in "Romance Negro"; for example, arrancar in line 18 is translated as "cut," a rendition that does not express the violence suggested by the Spanish word. For other examples, see nn. 35, 38, below.

23. Blanco, "Participación de las Mujeres," pp. 75-76.

24. Paz, Labyrinth , pp. 65-88; Fuentes, Todos los gatos son pardos , pp. 173-175. For a translation of the Fuentes passage on Marina as Chingada in Todos los gatos , see Literatura Chicana: Texto y Contexto , ed. Antonia Castañeda, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, and Joseph Sommers (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972), pp. 305-306.

25. Labyrinth , p. 86.

26. Ibid., p. 80.

25. Labyrinth , p. 86.

26. Ibid., p. 80.

27. Two other Chicana poets have also reassessed Marina's image: Carmen Tafolla, "La Malinche," in Encuentro Artístico Femenil (Austin: Casa/Tejidos Publication, 1978), pp. 41-42, and Angela de Hoyos, "La Malinche a Cortez y viceversa," La Palabra 2 (Spring 1980), 69-70. Elizabeth Ordóñez, "Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry," in Women in Hispanic Literature , ed. Miller, gives examples, with commentary, of Chicanas who have attempted to reassess Marina in poetry (see esp. pp. 324-328). Also contributing to a reevaluation of Doña Marina's role as woman and cultural symbol in the conquest of Mexico are Adelaida R. del Castillo, "Malintzin Tenépal: A Preliminary Look into a New Perspective," in Essays on la mujer , ed. Sánchez and Martinez Cruz, pp. 124-149; Cordelia Candelaria, "La Malinche: Feminist Prototype," Frontiers 5 (Summer 1980), 1-6; and Phillips, "Marina / Malinche."

28. Both Phillips, "Marina / Malinche" (p. 114), and Candelaria, "La Malinche" (p. 3), speak of Marina's role as la lengua de los dioses ("the tongue of the gods," meaning the Spaniards).

29. Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain , trans. J. M. Cohen (London: Penguin Books, 1963), p. 86.

30. Adelaida R. del Castillo, "Malintzin Tenépal," p. 143; Phillips, "Marina / Malinche," p. 111. break

31. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Conquest , pp. 85-87.

32. Paz, Labyrinth , p. 86.

33. Brinson-Pineda, "Poets on Poetry," p. 6. The next two quotations are also taken from this interview.

34. "Romance Liso" and "Romance de la Niña" appear on pp. 114-117.

35. Here again I disagree with the Rodríguez-Nieto English translation. The Spanish fuego blanco is "white fire" at its most basic level. I therefore use "rose of white fire" instead of "rose of pale fire," which more accurately refers to rosa de fuego pálido .

36. I borrow the terms "abstract" and "coda" from William Labov and David Fanshel, Therapeutic Discourse (New York: Academic Press, 1977), p. 109.

37. The metaphor connecting the color black with tragedy is part of a long tradition, and has, I think, racist implications.

38. By rendering y al verla as "at the sight," the translator suggests that the metaphor of the sexual experience is intended as a rape. The phrase y al verla , however, does not mean "at the sight"; more simply, it means "and upon seeing her."

39. The English translation mistakenly interchanges the first and third stanzas of the coda.

40. Brinson-Pineda, "Poets on Poetry," p. 7. I cite Corpi's anecdote: "Once while translating a poem she [Rodríguez-Nieto] said that it wasn't right. I had written a mixture of colors that I intended to pass for brown. She told me "That's dirty water." Then she thought the poem should end before it actually did. I told her, "No, I want my poem as it is." She said, "Then I won't translate it." 'So don't translate it,' I answered. That poem has never been completed."

41. Examples are "De mi casa" ("My House"), pp. 36-39; "Protocolo de Verduras" ("The Protocol of Vegetables"), pp. 48-49; "Carta a Arturo" ("Letter to Arturo"), pp. 60-61; and "Romance Liso" ("Smooth Romance"), pp. 114-115.

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

1. Since leaving Pueblo, Bernice Zamora has lived in Palo Alto, California, Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Houston, Texas. She presently lives in the San Francisco Bay area. Although she reads and writes Spanish, her primary language is English. She has taught English expository writing at the University of California, Berkeley, and creative writing in poetry for Chicanos at Stanford University. She is now in the final stages of a Ph.D. at Stanford in English and American literature. Her second collection of poems, After the Salmon Leave , will soon be ready for publication. For more biographical details and cultural information about Zamora, including statements about her poetry, see Juan Bruce-Novoa, Inquiry by Interview (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), pp. 203-218. break

2. Joseph Sommers was the first to mention intertextuality in a Chicano literary context ("From the Critical Premise to the Product: Critical Modes and Their Application to a Chicano Literary Text," New Scholar 6 [1977], 59). For the most part, I follow the notion of intertextuality as argued by Jonathan Culler ("Presupposition and Intertextuality," Modern Language Notes 91 [Dec. 1976], 1380-1396). Although Culler does not define intertextuality as the investigation of sources and influences, I include this dimension of intertextuality, but I do not limit it to sources and influences. A revised version of Culler's article appears in his book, The Pursuit of Signs (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp. 100-118.

3. For examples of poems by Chicanas which protest the internal contradictions of the Chicano's sexual and political behavior in the movement, see Emy López, "Apartment 107" and "La Gringa," El Fuego de Aztlán 4 (Summer 1977), 32-33, 35; Lorna Dee Cervantes, "You Cramp My Style, Baby," ibid., p. 39; Lorna Dee Cervantes, "Para un revolucionario," Revista Chicano-Requeña 3 (Winter 1975), 21-22; Marcela Christine Lucero, " Machismo Is Part of Our Culture," in The Third Woman: Minority Women Writers of the United States , ed. Dexter Fisher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), pp. 401-402; and Anna Montes, "Bus Stop Macho," Comadre 1 (Summer 1970), 24-25. For brief commentaries on some of these poems, see Elizabeth Ordóñez, "Sexual Politics and the Theme of Sexuality in Chicana Poetry," in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols , ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 316-339. Tey Diana Rebolledo includes "You Cramp My Style, Baby," in her article of the use of humor by Chicanas, "Walking the Thin Line: Humor in Chicana Literature" in Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature , ed. María Herrera-Sobek (Binghamton, N.Y.: Bilingual Press, 1985).

4. Menlo Park, Calif.: Diseños Literarios, 1976. All the poems discussed, except for "Notes from a Chicana 'COED,'" are from this collection. "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" was first published in Poetry , a special edition of La Onda (Stanford University), 1 (April 1975).

5. The idea of tension and conflict rather than of synthesis and resolution is important for my reading of Zamora's poetry. This perspective distinguishes my interpretation from that of Juan Bruce-Novoa, "Rituals of Devastation and Resurrection," in Chicano Poetry: A Response to Chaos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 160-184. Bruce-Novoa argues that Zamora's poetry moves toward resolution.

6. My decision to begin with "Gata Poem" rather than with "Penitents," the first poem in Restless Serpents , is another difference between my analysis and that of Bruce-Novoa. My order of presentation differs from his for three reasons. First, I want to discuss "Notes from a Chicana 'COED,'" an important poem for understanding Zamora's perspective which is excluded from Restless Serpents . Second, Bruce-Novoa's decision to begin with "Penitents" attributes an continue

importance to this poem which in my opinion it does not have. "Gata Poem" has a higher value for me because it reveals the contradictory relationship of the poetic consciousness as a woman and as a Chicana in both traditions. Third, as Zamora herself told me in a conversation on February 16, 1983, she did not intend the poems to be read as a narrative sequence. While I do not take an author's statements about his or her intentions in a work of art as dogma, I think it important to recognize them.

7. As the linguistic particularities of the poems I analyze relate to the definition of the poetic voice, I insist on noting whether the poems are written in Spanish or in English or in a mixture of the two. I also insist on discussing the implications of choosing one language over another. My attention to this aspect is another feature that distinguishes my discussion of Zamora from Bruce-Novoa's. Because he does not consider the language of a particular poem, he says that "Sonnet, Freely Adapted" is aimed at "Chicano machos" since "boxing is one of the macho rituals most admired among Chicanos" ( Chicano Poetry , pp. 454-455). In addition to the fact that this assertion is unsustainable because the sport of boxing is also supported by Anglo and other ethnic groups, the possibility of a Chicano audience is practically eliminated by the poem's syntax and diction and by the literary conventions it presupposes, as I point out below.

8. Keith Whinnom explores the use of death as a euphemism for the sexual act in the context of sixteenth-century Spanish poetry ("Hacia una Interpretación y Apreciación de las Canciones del Cancionero General de 1511," Filología 13 (1968-69), 361-381, esp. 372-381.

9. This poem appeared in Caracol 3 (May 1977), 19. Caracol , published in San Antonio, Texas, for a few years, folded during the financial setback suffered by small presses in the late 1970s. To my knowledge, "Notes" has never been reprinted.

10. In "Pueblo, 1950" Zamora's ambiguous use of the pronoun "you" creates irony and humor because it refers to Fred Montoya in the first and second lines:

PUEBLO, 1950
I remember you, Fred Montoya.
You were the first vato to ever kiss me.
I was twelve years old.
My mother said shame on you,
my teacher said shame on you, and
I said shame on me, and nobody
said a word to you

The irony depends upon the reader's also linking the "you" in lines 4 and 5 with Fred Montoya. When the final "you" makes clear that the referent of "you" is really the girl, the reader is confronted with the irony of the situation: the girl, not the boy, is made the object of shame. The confusion experienced in reading the poem humorously makes Zamora's point about the privileges that society gives the male. Vato is colloquial Spanish for "dude."

In another poem too long to quote here, entitled "Mirando continue

Aquellos desde los Campos" ("Looking at Them from the Fields"), Zamora also shifts perspectives, only this time the shift involves the two languages. The first half of the poem is in English, the second half, in Spanish. In the English part Zamora uses the Spanish third-person pronoun, ésos ("those"), as an adjective (" esos propagators") to speak about aquellos ("Anglos"). In the Spanish part she inserts a two-line phrase in English, using the second-person pronoun, your , to speak directly to Chicano males. Ironically, to establish a critical position of Anglo culture, Zamora must use Spanish, the language of the culture that gives dominance to the Chicano male. Also ironic is that she must shift into English, the language of the dominant culture, to establish a critical perspective of the Chicano male.

11. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass , An American Slave , Written by Himself (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845). Douglass tells the story of his Aunt Hester who was whipped by her owner because he had found her with a black man. Douglass's narrative makes clear there were many other cases similar to his aunt's (see pp. 3-8).

12. Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977). The "maxim of manner" is one of four sets of rules governing conversational behavior proposed by the British language philosopher, H. P. Grice, and discussed by Mary Pratt in her study on speech act theory. The maxim of manner states: "Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity." The language of Zamora's speaker violates this maxim. For Pratt's discussion on "flouting" see pp. 159-175.

13. For a discussion of Renaissance women who wrote sonnets in the Neoplatonic and Petrarchan traditions, revising and questioning the roles assigned to women in sonnets written by men, see Ann Rosalind Jones, "Assimilation with a Difference: Renaissance Women Poets and Literary Influence," Yale French Studies , no. 62 (1981), 135-153.

14. Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry , pp. 172-173, discusses this Shakespearean sonnet as a direct literary source for Zamora's. I agree with his point that Zamora criticizes Shakespeare's magisterial position. Whereas Shakespeare can speak universally about love, the social conventions defining Zamora's milieu make it impossible for her to do so.

15. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. 30.

16. Zamora says that "the poem's persona is meant to be the spirit of females—mothers, wives, sisters, daughters of penitentes " (Bruce-Novoa, Inquiry by Interview , p. 206). Although I acknowledge her intention, I also think it important to stress that this poem implicitly defines the persona as female, in contrast with poems that explicitly do so.

17. Marta Weigle, The Penitentes of the Southwest (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1970). Weigle's pamphlet and William Farrington's Los continue

penitentes: A Brief History (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1975) both provide useful historical information.

18. Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure , p. 7.

19. For theories of origin, see Weigle, Penitentes , p. 5.

20. Alabado comes from the Spanish word, alabar ("to praise"). See ibid., pp. 18, 28.

19. For theories of origin, see Weigle, Penitentes , p. 5.

20. Alabado comes from the Spanish word, alabar ("to praise"). See ibid., pp. 18, 28.

21. Reuben Arthur Brower, The Fields of Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951), p. 21.

22. Alicia Ostriker, "The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking," Signs 8 (Autumn 1982), 71. Ostriker makes insightful comments on the uses of myth in contemporary poetry by Anglo-American women. She defines the bent of their poetry as "revisionist mythmaking." That is, poets like H. D., Susan Griffin, and Anne Sexton, authors of book-length mythological poems, appropriate figures or tales from myth and use them for altered ends—"the old vessel filled with new wine." The poets "correct" the old stories so that they "can no longer stand as foundations of collective male fantasy." Their stories are "retrieved images of what women have collectively and historically suffered; in some cases they are instructions for survival" (pp. 72-73). My poets share common themes, interests, and approaches with those discussed by Ostriker, and they are also "revisionist" in bent, but as Chicanas they tread cultural terrain unavailable to Anglo-American women poets.

23. For another interpretation of this poem which sees the ritual in more positive terms than I do, see Bruce-Novoa, Chicano Poetry , pp. 162-166.

24. The title literally means "stumbling around at Stanford." One may either walk or talk a tropezones : jerkily, with fits and starts. The expression is mainly used in popular, familiar conversation. Its juxtaposition with "Stanford," a "gentlemen's" institution and a symbol of refinement and high culture, produces a comic effect because the phrase is contrary to one's expectations about Stanford: one should not "stumble" in style or speech at so high-toned a university as Stanford.

"A tropezones en Stanford" is aimed at the Spanish speaker, though the effect of the word "Stanford" is to tease the English reader. The Spanish reader will transform "Stanford" into estanford , the typical linguistic adaptation made by Spanish speakers when pronouncing English words that begin with s . The title would then read "A tropezones en nestanford" instead of "A tropezones en Stanford." The Spanish pronunciation deflates the aura around Stanford because it undermines the correct English pronunciation. This effect is appreciated, however, only if the poem is read aloud.

25. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1964), III, 7. In a non-Western mythological context, Campbell implies a connection between warrior tribesmen's mastery of the camel and the horse and the fall of the cosmologies of the goddesses. break

26. I would place "Bearded Lady" in a tradition of writing by contemporary women poets who attempt, in the words of Alicia Ostriker ("Thieves of Language," p. 75) "to retrieve, from the myth of the abstract father god who creates the universe ab nihilo , the figure on which he was originally based, the female creatrix." Ostriker refers to Sharon Barba's "A Cycle of Women," Rachel DuPlessis's "Eurdydice," and Adrienne Rich's "The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One."

27. I am thinking of poems like "From the Vestibule" and "As Viewed from the Terrace" ( Restless Serpents , pp. 44, 48). "Gata Poem" also contains the opposition between the sacred and the profane. Its first line echoes the Virgin Mary's canticle, De Profundis: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord." In Zamora's version the male or Chicano god on the mountaintop calls out to the Chicana. The juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane in effect mocks the notion that a woman calls out to her lord. Zamora has the "lord" call out to the Chicana and then diminishes his aura of godliness by shifting into English in line 4.

28. Zamora begins "Mirando Aquellos desde los Campos" ( Restless Serpents , p. 27) with a quotation from the prologue to Dahlberg's The Sorrows of Priapus , which she identifies in the text. Three other poets directly identified by Zamora as influences on her text are Herman Hesse (see "Without Bark," Restless Serpents , p. 34), Theodore Roethke (see "And All Flows Past," ibid., p. 68), and Guillevec (see "On Living in Aztlán," ibid., p. 17). A literary influence that Zamora does not identify in the text but one that she herself pointed out to me is Virginia Woolf (see "A Litany for Mad Masters," ibid., p. 73).

29. In "Living in Aztlán" Zamora does not criticize the nineteenth-century French writer Guillevec from the perspective of a woman. Instead she identifies with him as a poet. What they share in common is that both are minority poets who write outside the dominant culture.

30. Bruce-Novoa has identified this Jeffers source ( Chicano Poetry , p. 176). For Jeffers's "Cassandra" see The Double Axe and Other Poems (New York: Random House, 1948), p. 117.

31. For "Carmel Point" see Hungerfield (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 97.

32. I was the first to explore the relationships between Jeffers's Roan Stallion and Zamora's "California" ("Inter-Sexual and Intertextual Codes in the Poetry of Bernice Zamora," MELUS 7 [Fall 1980], 55-68).

33. Bruce-Novoa ( Chicano Poetry , p. 175), mentions important differences between Jeffers and Zamora. The critical element missing in Bruce-Novoa's perspective is the strong female dimension of Zamora's poetic persona when responding to Jeffers. He stresses "transhuman" (Jeffers) versus "human" (Zamora); I stress "man" versus "woman." break

34. James D. Houston, editor of West Coast Fiction: Modern Writing from California , Oregon and Washington (New York: Bantam Books, 1979), claims that the discovery of California was foreshadowed in a sixteenth-century Spanish novel, The Adventures of Esplandian , by García Ordóñez de Montalvo. The novel, published thirty-two years before the Cabrillo expedition first sighted the West Coast and twenty-five years before Hernan Cortés named what is now the lower tip of California, influenced the expectations of the earliest Spanish adventurers. See Houston, "The Literary West: From Mark Twain to Joan Didion," Los Angeles Times , Jan. 6, 1980, p. 3. break