[Un]framing the "Bad Woman": Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and Other Rebels with a Cause

392 Pages·2014·9.839 MB·English

by  Alicia Gaspar de Alba

[Un]Framing the “Bad Woman”
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at the mouth of the serpent, helen escobedo’s Coatl, 1980. metal sculpture, 20 x 20 x 49 ft.
Unam Sculpture garden, Ciudad Universitaria, mexico City. Photo by alma López.
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Copyright © 2014 by Alicia Gaspar de Alba
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2014
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
University of Texas Press
P.O. Box 7819
Austin, TX 78713-7819
http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form
∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso
z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper).
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Gaspar de Alba, Alicia, 1958–
[Un]framing the “bad woman” : Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui, and other
rebels with a cause / by Alicia Gaspar de Alba. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-292-75761-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-292-75850-6
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Hispanic American women—History. 2. Mexicans—History. 3. Women—
Identity. 4. Women—Conduct of life. I. Title.
hq1166.g37 2014
305.4—dc23

2013038465
doi:10.7560/757615
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For my darling wife, Alma,
whose rebellious heart beats with my own
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ContentS
Preface: Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa, in Gratitude for Your
Tongues of Fire ix
Acknowledgments xxiii
Introduction: Activist Scholarship and the Historical Vortex
of the “Bad Woman” 1
1. The Politics of Location of La Décima Musa:
Prelude to an Interview 41
Interview with Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 54
2. Malinche’s Revenge 65
3. There’s No Place Like Aztlán: Homeland Myths and Embodied
Aesthetics 81
4. Coyolxauhqui and Las “Maqui-Locas”: Re-Membering
the Sacrificed Daughters of Ciudad Juárez 131
5. Mapping the Labyrinth: The Anti–Detective Novel
and the Mysterious Missing Brother 175
6. Devil in a Rose Bikini: The Inquisition Continues 203
7. The Sor Juana Chronicles 247
Epilogue: To Your Shadow-Beast: In Memoriam 291
Notes 293
Bibliography 327
Reprint Permissions 347
Index 349
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Figure f.1. alma gómez-Frith, Santa Gloria de la Frontera, © 2009. oil on panel, 8 x 10 in.
Used by permission of the artist.
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PreFaCe
Letter to Gloria Anzaldúa, in Gratitude for Your Tongues of Fire1
Dear Gloria,
When I left El Paso in 1985 to embark on my adventure in doctoral
studies at the University of Iowa, I wasn’t motivated by the idea of getting
a PhD and becoming an academic. I was just pulling a geographic, trying
to put many miles between my ex-girlfriend and me. I had chosen a
field called “American Studies,” which I had never heard of, but which
intrigued me with its focus on “the study of American life and thought.”
I had been sneaking in assignments on folklore and family rituals in
my Freshman Composition classes at the University of Texas in El Paso
(UTEP), where I had worked as a part-time lecturer since receiving my
MA degree (1983), and I surmised that “the study of American life and
thought” would probably be a good fit for someone interested in studying
cultural traditions and legends.
Within a few weeks of starting the program at Iowa, and reading
endless articles about “how to do American Studies,” I quickly realized
that no one seemed to know what that methodology actually entailed.
Even worse, I saw that “American life and thought” did not include mi
América, the bilingual/bicultural America that you and I were born into
on the Texas-Mexico border.
Dazed with culture shock, I kept asking myself, what is a Chicana
from the El Paso–Ciudad Juárez border doing in the Midwest? Little did
I know how many other Chicana/os inhabited that cold landscape. It
wasn’t the long winter that scared me, or the way the sixty-degree-below-
zero wind chill bit into my earlobes and turned my feet blue on the walk
home. What really terrified me was sitting in those classrooms listening
to white men lecture about what it meant to “do” American Studies,
and whether the frontier or the garden were better ways to conceptualize
“the West” from the point of view of the pioneers. From what I could
gather, “doing” American Studies meant reading white male historians
and white male literary critics and white male literature, trying to find
the immanent “American” mind and character. There was some wiggle
room in the curriculum to take Black Studies or Women’s Studies classes,
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x [Un]Framing the “Bad Woman”
but mainly we were supposed to study “American life and thought,” and
“American” clearly meant white, male, and middle class. At least, that’s
how it was being done at Iowa and other places, despite the challenges
of the Radical Caucus and Betty Chmaj’s 1979 critique of the “Golden
Years” of consensus scholarship and the monolithic myth-symbol-image
approach to the discipline.2
I can’t tell you the intellectual malaise I wallowed in that first se-
mester, feeling for the first time in my life like a cultural alien in a white
wilderness. Little did I know I was in the throes of what you called the
nepantla state, “that uncertain terrain one crosses when moving from
one place to another . . . To be disoriented in space is to experience
bouts of disassociation of identity, identity breakdowns and buildups.”3
I had definitely disassociated from my identity, at least the identity I had
brought with me after twenty-seven years of living on the El Paso–Juárez
border. By the end of the fall semester, I convinced myself that if I could
just make it to the end of the academic year, I would leave Iowa City,
leave academia altogether, and buy a one-way ticket to some warm beach
in Mexico.
Then, you came to town, Gloria. I couldn’t believe it, a tejana fronte-
riza dyke like me who could speak the same three tongues as me. Lenguas
de fuego, you named them, tongues of fire—the lesbian tongue, the
poetic tongue, and the forked tongue of the Texas-Mexico border. You
were working on the essays that would become Borderlands/La Frontera:
The New Mestiza and were trying out some of your theories—la facul-
tad, the Shadow-Beast, the Coatlicue State, mestiza consciousness—on
a college audience of white dykes, queer Cubans, Puerto Ricans, South
Americans, Chicanas/os, as well as African American and Anglo profes-
sors in Iowa City.
Even among all those maricones and tortilleras (who knew I would find
such queer Latinidad in Iowa?), your lecture settled over us like cosmic
dust from another planet. The whites in the room, even the liberal ones
wearing Guatemalan shirts under their parkas, shifted uncomfortably in
their seats whenever you called out white privilege or said something in
Spanish and chose not to translate it; the more honest ones stared at you
as though you’d just dropped a crop circle in their cornfield.
I saw how the queers, the rape survivors, and the people of color
responded with recognition to your idea about a certain faculty of mind
that people who live in the margins develop early in life, a “survival tac-
tic,” you called it, that teaches us to become aware of the racist, the rap-
ist, or the homophobe in the room before that person even approaches.4
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