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Heterotopias and Shared Methods of Resistance:
Navigating Social Space and Spaces of Identity
Jennifer A. González and Michelle Habell-Pallan
We make our own history and geography, but not just as we please; we do not make them under circumstances chosen by ourselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the historical geographies produced in past. (Soja 129)
Prologue
As two Latina/Chicana cultural theorists of mixed heritage, we realize that cultural and national identities are never given. These identities are always in the process of being constructed or maintained by both dominant and disempowered communities across contested boundaries. Our own identities are created through a continuing process of questioning and re-evaluation that takes place in relation to specific social spaces and histories. When we met, only a few months earlier than the writing of this paper, the similarity of our experiences growing up in Southern California struck us. Both children of mixed Mexican American/European American marriages, we have faced similar problems that arise when identity comes into question. With which parent’s cultural history do we identify? With which parent’s cultural history are we expected to identify? Is it necessary to choose?
Because of the general disrespect for Mexican culture we encountered in the mass media and in predominantly Euro-American environments; because our public education did not include the history of Chicano and Chicana struggles and accomplishments; and because of our “Mexican” physical appearance, olive skin, dark hair and brown eyes, we were often placed into situations where we felt compelled to defend, or even privilege, our “whiteness.” As teenagers looking for a way to express a nonessentialized “individual” identity, we each joined the alternative music and fashion communities of punk and ska in Southern California during the early 1980s. As was the case with many teenagers, this affiliation appealed to us because it allowed us a certain distance from what we saw at that time as the conservative establishment, or the more limited ethnic communities of our parents. These youth subcultures were some of the few spaces, during the height of the Reagan-Bush era, which exposed young people to viewpoints, political and otherwise, which were alternatives to the status quo.
Later in the context of the university setting, our “mixed” identity continued to be a difficult issue. We were not only negatively judged by others for being Mexican or Chicana, but we were also negatively judged for not being Chicana enough. We both remember being asked by Anglo and non-Anglo peers: “As a Chicana, how do you feel about this issue?” We both remember looking around for “the Chicana” who was being addressed. It was in this context that we both began to realize that any attempt on our part to create an identity outside of ethnic stereotypes would be difficult in a society which inscribes identities based on phenotype. It was thus necessary for us to continue the process of transformation (a process that included learning about Chicano and Chicana history) that would allow for a more complex and multiple understanding of identity; one that made room for the contradiction, overlap, and inclusion of difference within one and the same body.
Along with other critical discourses, Chicano discourse has been empowering to us because it interrogates the racist ideologies which made us want to privilege the construction of our white identity. Yet, just as we object to those dominant discourses which attempt to belittle our Mexican/Chicana identity, we are wary of a particular strain of Chicano discourse which is equally essentializing and restrictive. As a result, our work here is partially focused upon the ways in which identity is a complex formation that cannot be easily summed up in a single designation. Echoing the comments made by Soja above, we also recognize that identity is not simply a matter of choice or free will, but is rather a negotiation between what one has to work with, and where one takes it from there. Above all, we have learned from moving between very different educational and cultural spaces–such as the domestic and the public, the suburban and the urban–that it is often in relation to place that identity must be negotiated and transformed.
Navigating Social Spaces and Spaces of Identity
Edward Soja argues in his book Postmodern Geographies that spatiality is simultaneously a social product and a shaping force in social life. He cautions cultural historians and critics against assuming that space is a given or a natural phenomenon. Just as the idea of “nature” is socially constructed, so too, claims Soja, is the concept of space. It can and must be understood as a social process, production, or transformation; for in the context of these spatial “circumstances directly encountered,” there must be a possibility of intervention and change. Any notion of space as static must be problematized and interrogated in order to make visible the possibilities for alternative constructions of social space. As we hope to show in this paper, these alternative constructions or trajectories through space reveal evidence of multiple and hybrid social identities that move between and across the lines purposefully and artificially drawn between racial and economic communities.
Amalia Mesa-Bains and Marisela Norte, two Chicana cultural producers, use their own critical strategies to disrupt traditional and patriarchal representations and structures of space: domestic space (the home), public space (the street), and institutional space (from museums to performance spaces). The imagined spaces of visual and spoken word that these two women produce represent a negotiation of identity constructions. In their attempt to figure alternative representations of Chicana identity to those present in mainstream U.S. culture, both of these women create what might be called “heterotopic” space: a space of contestation, a space of resistance, a space of myth and imagination. [1] They share practices of representation which help to maintain, problematize, refigure, and relocate Latina/Chicana identity in a broader social, historical context. For this reason we have chosen to focus on the respective installation and spoken word works of MesaBains and Norte in relation to the questions of space and spatiality that appear in their works as themes and methodologies. We see each artist operating in collaboration with her community in order to construct or record new or unrecognized areas of spatial identification and mobility.
Amalia Mesa-Bains, a San Francisco-based Chicana arts advocate, educator, and cultural worker, has focused on the questions of spatiality and identity in much of her recent installation work. Building upon her own life and the real and imagined experiences of other women, personal friends, religious figures, and cultural icons, Mesa-Bains works with the artifacts and icons of daily life to evoke the subtly remembered experiences of childhood, the spiritual spaces of memory and the historical sites of identity. In 1991 Jennifer González interviewed Amalia Mesa-Bains. The following text is excerpted from that interview, and concerns the questions of space and conceptual process in her altar installation work.
MESA-BAINS: I began strictly doing altars from about 1974. Although, since 1989, in what I call the “Emblem” series, some of the installations are bigger and include fragments of altars in rooms; until then all of them were specifically altars.
GONZÁLEZ: And in each case were the pieces installations?
MESA-BAINS: Yes. That was a big movement. Once they left the community gallery setting, which was similar to a home, and went to major museums and non-Latino galleries, a new protocol had to be established. That was when I stopped calling them “alters” and started calling them “altar installations.” I felt that they were functioning in a different way, and it was important to make that distinction; because what I am doing is not what women do at home or in South Texas. The altars spring from a shared space, but they take different forms and are responding to other needs. I wanted to make sure that people understood that distinction.
At the beginning I always thought of myself as an altarista. From the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties, all the works were very consistently traditional altar structures: two to three tiers, with a nicho retablo box in the center at the top. They always had some form of framing like a drapery or paper-cuts, and they always have had some religious iconography somewhere in them, even if it was not foregrounded.
Although I started out with a relatively focused kind of Catholic vocabulary, I have moved into a hybrid of vocabularies because I am very interested in cross-cultural materials. So “Gypsy Mysteries” and two works on the Black virgins started crossing over into different areas. And even some Caribbean influences have seeped in. But it really started to change in the move from Catholic to pre-Catholic or pre-Hispanic iconography. I haven’t gone outdoors yet with the [instillation] pieces, but I think in the next couple of years I will. [For now] I have brought the outdoors indoors so that natural phenomenon becomes a metaphor for the mother and the earth. In the largest sense, the development of my work started from very specific altars [and moved] to works that make use of fragments of the altars but always still mark space. My work continually is for the purpose of marking space.
GONZÁLEZ: What do you mean by “marking space”?
MESA-BAINS: Giving an identity to a space in order to understand how it functions. I used to call it making “sacred space,” although I am not sure now that is accurate. It is a way of circumscribing space for the individual or the public. One of the things that I am doing in “marking space” is allowing the boundaries of the space to remain indistinct. The viewers don’t always know whether they are in or out of the piece. I want them to have some experience of the space as I sense the space to be. Actually, it is of no importance to me if they read my language. But I do want them to reflect, because the way we mark space is a very spiritual process.
For instance, when you enter a church something happens in the way you respond. If you enter museums, they function like churches now, [and] people respond differently. If you enter a bedroom you respond differently from entering a front room. Every space has its meaning. I think you can use the marking of space to help people reach a reflective state, and that is my ultimate goal. When they wander into the piece and don’t know whether they can touch it or not, step on the dried flowers or stay on the other side of the dried flowers. I like that because it forces them into making choices about entering into the space and then using it in a way that is more reflective than something one can walk past. They don’t quite know where the boundary lies.
Right now I am working on a show in which there will be a reading room which will have tables to sit at and read. The back wall will be a [photographic] blow-up of a mausoleum where you see the names of the people who are in the little drawers. At the same time [the viewers] occupy the space to read and reflect, they are reminded of a kind of final resting space. It will trigger in them a different approach to the material. It is part of a piece called “Numbers” which is like a laboratory setting in which there is obviously an examination or investigation taking place. It is all about numbers such as magical dates and historic dates, city populations, age rates, numbers of teen pregnancies, crime rates, and others.
I moved from very direct and didactic altars in which people read the space of a particular nature, religious or spiritual, to a space now that causes the same thing to happen indirectly. I have come to see the space of reflection in a much more complicated way. I have [personally] changed by seeing how blind faith encounters a very complex intellectual reality. Working one’s way through both is not always easy. The present works reflect the struggles I have gone through to maintain both a state of reflection or sincere belief and the capacity to understand the circumstances within which I am working. The spaces have changed as I have changed.
GONZÁl;LEZ: What is the relation between your community and the public “altar installations”?
MESA-BAINS: I am an advocate always. On the one hand I don’t necessarily want people to believe what I believe, but on the other hand, I don’t want them to avoid the information that I think is significant. My work, with rare exception, is always rooted in my culture. The issues I discuss as a writer, or arts administrator, or as a lecturer are all very tied together and appear in the art work. “Borders” and “Numbers” are both pieces about the conditions under which Latinos live in this country.
GONZÁLEZ: Can you say more about your use of the term “culture”?
MESA-BAINS: Well, it can be described as a pattern of behaviors and values, ways of living, ways of believing, language, and art that is common to a people. But I have really two cultures. One stems from the original Mexican traditions with which my parents raised me; they were undocumented and never returned to Mexico, but have always lived here as though they were going to go back. They have only recently acknowledged that they are probably not going back. So they are very American in a peculiar way, but also very Mexican in a sort of state of suspended animation. But for me, my culture is really Chicano culture, which is based on certain sorts of political advocacy and action. It is also based on our literature, our music, even our hybrid foods. I think of myself, when I speak of culture, related to that reinvention of self which is so Chicano, because then everything is possible; I am not locked into something that I can’t change. So, for example, it is okay if I want to put a hat on the Virgen de Guadalupe.
GONZÁLEZ: Tell me about the relation between your personal altar and your public altar installations.
MESA-BAINS: Although I do maintain a very close style between my personal and public altars, I don’t like simulations, so I don’t want to do generic altars. My work is a process by which I disguise for other people what some of my life experiences have been. [Although] these are private and personal to me, they are also part of a kind of world view, one that I’ve been illuminating in some way in the women’s stories that I have been doing in a series of altars.
When I did the “Dolores [Del Rio]” piece, it was the first time I stepped into someone else’s memory. I thought, “How am I going to make her real when I don’t have her lipstick and I don’t have her jewelry?” I decided to ask women, whom I considered very glamorous and very special, to give me their hair brushes and hair pins and a powder puff. It became a collective statement on beauty and age; I did it when I was turning forty. Each piece had to do with some stage of life that I was passing through. Anyway, I learned I didn’t have to reach into the past for objects to have this certain potency, but that they had to come to me in a certain way. I could not go out and buy the objects in the altar installations. They had to have some connection or some life experience.
The “life-experience” of these objects becomes an important component in Mesa-Bains’ materially eclectic altar installations. Taking the life of the Mexican Hollywood film star Dolores del Rio as her model, Mesa-Bains produces a visual and tactile argument for the glorification of this secular icon of feminine glamour. Photographs appear surrounded by glitter and flowers, lace fans, lipstick, the Mexican flag, and la Virgen de Guadalupe, each object serves as “evidence” in a material memorial which also functions as a revision of history.
In writing about her own work and that of her colleagues, Mesa-Bains uses the term domesticana to describe a Chicana rasquache. The term rasquache has been described by Tomás Ybarra-Frausto as “neither an idea nor a style, but more of a pervasive attitude or taste. Very generally rasquachismo is an underdog perspective, a view from los de abajo. It is a stance rooted in resourcefulness and adaptability, yet ever mindful of aesthetics” (133). A practice based on a female form of “making do,” domesticana is the affirmation of cultural values in combination with an emancipation from traditional feminine roles. Using “techniques of subversion through play with traditional imagery and cultural material,” domesticana takes the “space of the feminine” and transforms its isolation into a powerful representation of lived experience.(Mesa-Bains 5).
The space of the altar installation thus also functions as a microcosmic expression of a personal memory and history for Mesa-Bains. Identification takes place in relation to a mixing of sign systems, such as the mixing of Catholic and Caribbean visual vocabularies in the piece entitled “Gypsy Mysteries.” The space is one in which an individual identity is revealed to be the complex linking of several cultures, an overlay of time past and present, a process of communal collaboration, and a re-mapping of the artifacts of daily life. It is this re-mapping that makes the installation spaces of Mesa-Bains function as alternatives to other social spaces in which women find themselves defined and confined spatially, such as the home and the church. [2]
While carefully made distinguishable from the intimate and sacred home altar, the altar-installations of Mesa-Bains are nonetheless rooted in this practice. As the artist points out, the two spring from a “shared space” but take different forms. Not necessarily physical or concrete, this “shared space” might be more a sphere of identifications with secular and sacred icons that appear in the symbolic shape of collected objects. Each object represents part of a complex identity; an identity that is located spatially in relation to others. The collected and organized objects produce a representation that cannot be reduced to a linear narrative. Rather, a simultaneity of time and place is stacked and layered in the altar-installation in an effort to re-map the possible spaces of identification, especially for the viewer, who is forced to negotiate the unmarked boundaries of the altar-installation.
In the “Numbers” installation, the viewer/participant is invited into the “final resting place” (depicted by the photographic image of a mausoleum) and simultaneously confronted with a statistical topography of death. For Mesa-Bains this space does not represent a socially marginalized and forgotten site, but is rather a symbolic ground for the expression of the lived experiences of the Chicano/Latino community as expressed in crime rates, teen pregnancies, city populations, etc. Mesa-Bains’ work might be described as a re-thinking of space that includes a wider and more complex mapping of daily lived identities. The altar installations could thus be considered a critical “spatial practice.” [3] Marking the tensions that exist between domestic and public spaces, this spatial practice reveals the ambivalent relations to a material and psychic inferiority that works with and against the world outside.
Heterotopias and Shared Methods of Resistance
Edward Soja has written that “spatiality exits ontologically as a product of a transformation process, but always remains open to further transformation in the contexts of material life. It is never primordially given or permanently fixed” (122). Spatiality is thus defined as a context of change. Although it cannot necessarily be escaped, it can be reformed, redefined and ultimately challenged. If one thinks of the spaces of the street, spaces of consumption, and spaces of movement it is possible to imagine moving through these spaces in a variety of patterns. However, there are other spaces through which one moves less often, spaces that Michel Foucault has called “heterotopic.”
[These spaces] are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. (24)
Foucault goes on to suggest that one think of the heterotopia as mutable (the meaning of this “counter-site” changes along with historical and societal change); as multiple (it can juxtapose in a single real space several spaces that are incompatible); as a-temporal (linked to different slices of time); and as having an ambiguous threshold (both open and restricted). Although this definition falls short of adequately accounting for the kinds of powerful social commentary produced by artists and cultural workers like Amalia Mesa-Bains and Marisela Norte, it does begin to offer a conceptual vocabulary for describing the space of the altar installation. If spatiality is always open to further transformation, then it is necessary to see the ways in which this transformation can take place.
Given this definition of a “heterotopia,” what does it mean to create a heterotopic space of remembering, a heterotopic space that redefines history and identity? Foucault suggests the cemetery, the museum, and the library as paradigmatic heterotopias of memory in the nineteenth- century West. The altar installations of Mesa-Bains can be seen as heterotopias of the late twentieth century that challenge and respond to the spaces of these earlier institutions. Her work reflects a set of community values that are gathered into objects collected and arranged to produce both a “ceremony of memory” and a site of historical revisions. In the case of the “Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio,” the public space of the museum is invaded by the private artifacts of a reconstructed icon. Not simply a random placement of objects, these artifacts reproduce a topography of history and an intimate presence in themselves.
Soja has suggested that the problems of traditional Western philosophical concepts of space are usually rooted in the desire to either understand space “only as a collection of things” or as a physical/mental dualism of objective and subjective space (120-122). Instead, space and spatiality must be thought of as created and lived, and not merely as an anonymous void into which objects are placed. Space is grounded, as Soja points out, in the material conditions of human life. The altar installation, as a kind of heterotopia, reflects these conditions while subverting any easy assimilation of the parts into a seamless whole, the parts of the piece, just as the parts of a cultural identity, exist in juxtaposition.
One can understand this contingent conception of space at both macro- and microscopic levels. Soja looks at the city-scape as that scene of spatiality that surrounds and supports the movements of populations, finance, and social and economic oppression. Mesa-Bains focuses on the more intimate landscape of personal memory, history, and spiritual identifications that take place in domestic spaces and local communities. The space of her installations is not, however, merely a “collection of things” but is rather a symbolic representation of family and social relations, relations that constitute an identity founded upon the experience of existing across the thresholds of defined spaces. The threshold of the altar installation is the ground upon which other thresholds are marked: the threshold of Mexican and U.S. identifications; the threshold between art and social politics; the threshold between past and present that is crossed by material artifacts of the dead; and the threshold that is breached between a public and private display of identity in the space of the museum. Existing neither on one side nor the other, this threshold maintains the surface tension of spaces in conflict. The installation thus finally serves as an alternative space, a “counter-site,” for the spaces of representation to which Chicana cultural identity is usually confined in the United States.
The juxtaposition of diverse elements that characterizes this “counter-site” can also be found in the work of Marisela Norte, a Chicana spoken word artist based in Los Angeles. [4] If one could hear the altar installations of Mesa-Bains, they might sound like Norte’s complex narratives. Each artist constructs multi-layered representations of the way cultural identity can change as it moves across different social spaces. Norte juxtaposes images found in popular culture to construct non-linear narratives. She contextualizes words in order to connote several meanings at once, and allows sound-images to build new meanings through repetition. She represents the unexpected and seemingly unconnected elements of a Chicana border identity in order to show, for example, how the life of a domestic worker is circumscribed by the objects she collects and keeps, “souvenirs turistas left behind.”
A cultural worker based in East Los Angeles, Norte represents a border identity and the heterotopic spaces it defines in her “spoken word” performances and CD/audio cassette releases. Like Mesa-Bains, Norte constructs an imaginary space where she can represent “real sites” from a Chicana vantage point. Norte invokes and re-contextualizes songs, prayers, one-liners, cliches, icons, and geographical locations, such as U.S./Mexico border and the city of Los Angeles, ingrained in the local popular imagination. Provoking the audience’s memory, Norte’s narratives invite the audience into her cultural space and she moves into theirs, albeit temporarily Norte demonstrates that she shares an experience of popular culture founded on cultural hybridity which informs an emergent identity for herself and her audience.
Though the imagined spaces Norte constructs in her narratives may not be concrete manipulations of physical space, they do function like Mesa-Bains’s altar installations. As “counter-sites,” her narratives are spaces where an alternative to the representation of Chicana/Latina identity maintained by US mainstream culture can be imagined and articulated. While Foucault’s notion of heterotopias as counter-sites is useful for describing the space Norte’s spoken word constructs, her work problematizes Foucault’s theory that heterotopias “are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (24). Norte’s work illustrates that there are no spaces that are completely removed from their location in reality. Instead even marginalized places are specifically located and immersed in the contradictions of social life.
It is in tying together spatiality with the history of social life that Soja’s writings are useful for understanding how the work of MesaBains and Norte represent cultural identity. That is, one in which individuals understand their social experience in relation to others in order to “search for a practical understanding of the world as a means of emancipation versus maintenance of the status quo.” Soja writes, “To be sure, these ‘life-stories’ have a geography too; they have milieux, immediate locales, provocative emplacements which effect thought and action” (14).
The text’s narrator or, as Norte calls her, narratrix acts as a social critic who recognizes the importance of place and space in the construction of social being or identity. [5] She is always mindful of how social space or geography determines, in part but not completely, the lives of women in their communities. Norte’s production of spoken word helps to construct a critical social space, or a counter-site, in which to critique the confinements of social space and patriarchal practices. The conditions under which she produces partially determine the formal structure and the content of her narratives. Since Norte does not own a car she must ride the bus to her office job in downtown Los Angeles from East Los Angeles. It is in this public space, that of the most inefficient bus system in the nation, that Norte writes. This explains why, for the most part, her narratives are as long “as it takes to get from one bus stop to another.” [6]
Just about everything I write, I write on the bus, the No. 18 bus especially. That’s the bus that’s taken me from East Los Angeles over the bridge into downtown L.A. for most of my life. That’s where so many of the images, the ideas for the work have been born. If I’m lucky, I manage a choice seat by a window where I can write comfortably until someone looks over my shoulder and starts reading whatever it is that I’m writing. That’s when I will switch languages depending on who’s sitting next to me. It changes everything. I would rather not have anyone know what it is that I do even though I do it in public. [7]
Reworking Foucault’s comments in his essay “Of Other Places” about the ship functioning throughout historical memory as a “floating piece of space” (27), the bus is figured as a rolling piece of space; a place with many places. As it travels across the city from destination to destination, the population inside this space constantly fluctuates. This moving, shared, public space in which Norte writes contradicts Virginia Wolf’s ideal place for writing: a room of one’s own. Though the bus may be an unconventional place to write, Norte makes do and “makes room” for her own writing there, on the way to a “job of her own.”
It is what Norte sees from the bus happening on the streets of East and Downtown Los Angeles, scenes perhaps not visible from a room of one’s own on the wealthy West side, that makes her work compelling. Moving through economically marginalized sections of the city, the narrator in “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” critiques the social practices which force working-class single women to live at the edge of society; for example, on the street and/or without a job. The character who narrates “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” is no longer the object of another’s representation; she claims her own subject position. [8] She is at once both the Chicana “l” and the “eye” who experiences, witnesses, interprets, constructs, and transcodes into images events as they occur in her everyday life. In the process of writing about everyday life, Norte documents an unofficial record of Chicana experience in Los Angeles. This following section of “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” thematizes the diversity found within Latina experiences,
I am a peeping tom, tom girl and from my seat on the downtown bus I have been driven through, been witness to, invaded by las vidas de ellas. [9]
As a spectator “peeping” from the window of the “downtown” bus, the narrator’s eye is drawn to las vidas de ellas (the women’s lives). Riding the bus through different L.A. neighborhoods, the narrator witnesses the economic stratification of Latinas. She also shows that there is more to Chicana experiences than the “Miss Señorita Black Velvet Latina” image would want us to see. [10] For instance, she passes “The widow with the gladiolus who never misses a day of forgiveness” and “the countess” who “sleeps in doorways, hefty bag wardrobe, broken tiara, and too much rouge.” This countess “counts todos los dias en ingles y español” (she counts every day in English and Spanish); she is “nuestra señora de la reina perdida que cayó en Los Angeles. “
Using this phrase to describe both the homeless woman and the city’s East side, the narrator ironically twists the meaning of the original name of Los Angeles. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula (The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of Porciúncula) becomes “nuestra señora de la reina perdida que cayó en Los Angeles ” (Our Lady of The Lost Queen Who Fell in Los Angeles) in order to comment critically on the living conditions of women surviving in the city. This pun on the Spanish name of Los Angeles is characteristic of the linguistic strategies Norte uses to articulate social criticism. The Spanish Pastoral myth of Los Angeles’ limitless abundance is contrasted with the dwindling chances of survival of many Latinas in the city.
On the same bus ride, the narrator shares a different view of the city with her friend “Silent,”
Who taught a friend of mine how to flick her cigarette out of a car window and be so bad in the process. Silent who spends a lot of time in the welfare office now filling out those pink and blue forms. Can’t find a baby-sitter, a good man, a job. [11]
The unifying component of the narrative is its theme: single women facing economic hardship in Los Angeles. The sympathetic representation of the women and their living conditions in “Peeping Tom Tom Girl,” the widow, the homeless “countess” and the ‘Silent” single mother, generally falls to the margins of mainstream cultural expression. The women’s representational marginalization is homologous to their economic marginalization within U.S. culture. Furthermore, the traditional model of the Latino patriarchal family delineates strict gender roles in which the ideal Chicana/Mexicana woman is constructed to fit two “legitimate” identities: the chaste daughter and the devoted wife.
In traditional Chicano/Mexicano cultures, La Virgen represents the ideal woman, who is contrasted with the figure of the MalincheProstitute. Thus, the cultural paradigm of the Virgin Mother/MalincheProstitute dichotomy informs the boundaries of possible feminine roles. [12] The women in “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” fall somewhere between the spaces of these predetermined traditional gender roles. They move in public spaces such as the street and institutional offices, rather than the idealized domestic space associated with traditional middle-class life. Only “the widow” has a legitimate place within the traditional family structure. Even so, she like the other women represented in the image live “unprotected within a cultural order that has required the masculine protection of women to ensure their ‘decency,’ indeed to ensure that they are ‘civilized’ in sexual and racial terms” (Alarcón). As women they are also disadvantaged in an economic system which discriminates on the basis of gender. The single women represented here have little or no access to basic necessities, from shelter to child care.
In addition to showing that different women share common ground in their struggle to survive in the face of economic hardship, Norte’s work illustrates that location and spatiality also shape Chicana experiences. The urban spaces the narrator in “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” travels through are contrasted with the U.S./Mexico border crossing experience in “Act of the Faithless.” The narrative articulates one way in which lines “purposefully and artificially” drawn between national and economic communities are negotiated by women who live and work across national borders. Norte writes,
It was a Holiday Inn downtown El Paso
where she crossed the line daily
paso por paso mal paso que das
al cruzar la Frontera
step by step mis-stepping
as you cross the border
There was the work permit
sealed in plastic like the smile
she flashed every morning
to the same uniformed eyes
She cleaned up decorated her home
with objects of rejection
souvenirs turistas left behind
salt and pepper shakers
shaped like ten gallon hats
Lone Star state of the art back scratchers
all the way from Taiwan
She cleaned up after everyone else
leaving her mess at home
in neat piles
like his laundry waiting to be washed
cleansed delivered from evil. [13]
Considering that Norte herself travels across unfriendly urban terrains to reach her job, it is not surprising that many of Norte’s narratives recognize and pay tribute to the lives of the women who must constantly travel across unfriendly terrains such as those of the U.S./Mexico border to reach their places of employment. Though similar in this respect, Norte’s urban experience is significantly different than the woman’s border experience; Norte does not have to flash documentation “sealed in plastic” to travel to and from work.
Employed as a domestic worker who crosses the U.S./Mexico border the woman in the text, whom we later find to be the narrator’s aunt, crosses the borderlands everyday to get to her place of employment. For those people, such as the narrator’s aunt who must travel across national borders every day, this borderland space among other things is a threatening social space. The aunt can cross the U.S./Mexico border because she possesses the required documents, “the work permit/sealed in plastic … .she flashed to the same uniformed eyes,” in order to make a living on the U.S. side of the border. But for those left without documentation, the national borders are a site of exclusion, and many times of death.
Soja’s theory of spatiality can help to illustrate both how border space is represented in Norte’s text and how it works to determine identity. While González has demonstrated how Mesa-Bains’s work “focuses on the more intimate landscape of personal memory, history and spiritual identifications that take place in domestic spaces and local communities,” Norte’s work focuses on how this intimate landscape is affected by the city-scape. For example, “Act of the Faithless” represents the ways private spaces are affected by public spaces. Narrated in the past tense, the niece describes what her aunt did on the U.S. side of the border, “She cleaned up,” literally and figuratively. That is, she “she cleaned up” literally by performing her job at the Holiday Inn, and continues cleaning up after her husband in their home in Ciudad Juarez. The narrator uses the figurative expression “she cleaned up” to make an ironic comment about the goods she collected. With the discarded objects the tourists have left behind at the Holiday Inn, the narrator’s aunt practices what Mesa-Bains might call a Chicana rasquache. Norte’s description of the aunt’s home illustrates Mesa-Bains’s description of the practice of domesticana.
In this narrative, the objects the aunt gathers and arranges are not, as González explains, merely a “collection of things,” but are rather a symbolic representation of a life lived across the U.S./Mexico border. The aunt situates the discarded objects in a new context, her home, in which they signify differently. No longer “objects of rejection,” the souvenirs become concrete representations of her life, her relation to other people and other places. The objects the aunt collects, like the “Lone Star state of the an back scratchers all the way from Taiwan,” are themselves culturally hybrid; they are manufactured in Taiwan and sold to tourists as authentic Texan artifacts. These souvenirs, like the people who are paid to make them, play their part in a late twentiethcentury international tourist economy. These objects, like the aunt, cross national borders according to the demands of the tourist market. The identity the aunt constructs with these objects is determined in part by the market which brings those “Lone Star back scratchers from Taiwan” to the El Paso/Ciudad Juarez border.
By chronicling the experiences of her aunt and of the many women who must cross the border daily to earn wages, Norte’s text critiques the constructions of space which privilege patriarchal practices. Though “uninformed eyes” fail to see the complexity of the aunt’s identity, she is more than a “smile” with a work permit. On the Mexican side of the border, she constructs different identities for herself, one of which is that of wife. Juxtaposing the image of the aunt who works as a maid on the U.S. side with the image of her as devoted Mexican wife, Norte demonstrates how this woman must negotiate different systems of patriarchal practice. If on the U.S. side she is seen only as labor for the turistas, she also must serve her husband at home who leaves “his laundry waiting to be washed, cleansed, delivered from evil.” Though she may not be “othered” by her citizen status in Mexico, she is discriminated against because of her gender.
Besides articulating a narrative about a woman’s experience on the U.S./Mexico border, “Act of the Faithless” also critiques the double standard that women are subjected to in traditional Latino culture. The title itself “Act of the Faithless” makes a pun on the institution of marriage which ideally functions as an “Act of the Faithful.” As a child, the narrator had romanticized both the marriage of her aunt and uncle and marriage in general. The young narrator dreams of home life “in Ciudad Juarez, on the corner of Revolucion and Eternidad” where she “wanted to be the child bride, mixing up Martini’s in [her] ten gallon hat.” But the narrative goes on to explain how her aunt and uncle’s marriage was anything but ideal. Years later after his death, the narrator realizes the uncle was a womanizer and she reflects on his life,
I thought of my Uncle
wondering how many times
he had snuck up the back way
for a dip in this luxury sized pool of regret
knowing that after his swim
there would be food and clean clothes
waiting at home
clothes that would surely take him
into the night and possibly
the next couple of days.
After the narrator realizes the marital situation her aunt had to negotiate, knowing that her aunt was required to prepare the “food and clean clothes” for her unfaithful husband, she takes on a different view of marriage. She recognizes how relations between men and women in traditional patriarchal cultures favor the subordination of women and how patriarchal ideology supports and reproduces that inequality. Despite the fact that her marriage did not correspond to romanticized images of matrimony found in women’s magazines and romance novels, the aunt endures. While watching her aunt clean at the Holiday Inn, the niece listens to the advise she offers. Handing the niece a pair of women’s sunglasses she found in her husband’s jacket, the aunt tells her cuidate los ojos, to take care of her eyes because there is “too much you should see.” The aunt’s advice is double edged; she seems to be both warning her young niece to be aware of possibly harmful situations, and giving her hope that there is something worth looking forward to. Leaving unspoken exactly what she herself sees and what the niece “should see,” their exchange is interrupted by a lounging Holiday Inn tourist. Displaying a complete lack of cultural sensitivity, the tourist yells, American accent and all, “Excuse me…um…Señorita, can you come over here por favor?” The narrative articulates for the aunt and niece what they cannot say to him directly,
Señorita
and the name stings like the sun
and my Aunt
she cusses him out real good in Spanish
under her breath
The man in the chair
is till trying to get her attention
“María . . . Marrría! ”
only I can’t hear it anymore
only his lips are moving
I tug on her arm
I point at the man
now gone silent
there is too much to see
she said
too much to remember.
This concluding segment of “Act of the Faithless” critiques the narrow vision of the way dominant culture envisions Latinas. The aunt knows that the tourist with “uninformed eyes” mistakes her for a servant. Though María isn’t her name, he sees her as he probably sees most Latina women, as a homogeneous group and as indistinguishable. And though the aunt’s defiant gesture (she cannot “cuss him out” aloud because if she does, she will jeopardize her job) may not be considered radical, it does demonstrate her self-pride and self-knowledge and her dissatisfaction with the status quo.
However, the narrative ends more realistically than idealistically, the tourist remains ignorant of his offensive racist and class-biased actions, demonstrating that there may be too much “to see.” Also, the aunt, who is restricted by her own cultural system, fails to tell the niece not to idealize the institution of marriage. It is rather through her acute observations that the narrator arrives at this conclusion. In this way, Norte’s narrative does not characterize women as victims, but instead critiques the cultural restrictions they constantly negotiate, and at times resist.
By bringing the work of Amalia Mesa-Bains and Marisela Norte into a comparative analysis we have tried to expose a developing field of cultural criticism. These two cultural producers must be read, not as “individuals” situated outside of history, but instead as artists who articulate their experiences from a particular, but heterogeneous ethnic community. And though the two have never met, their projects can be seen to overlap in their concern to produce an alternative and more intricate representation of contemporary Chicana/Latina identity.
None transforms the social space in which she moves by producing spoken-word narratives, which are performed and heard in coffee shops, high schools, community centers, performance spaces, universities, as well as in the homes of her listeners who utilize their CD and cassette forms. In these texts she provides complex images of women occupying spaces and identities outside of the restricted La Virgen/La Malinche paradigm. Mesa-Bains is equally intent on revealing a multiple and innovative formation of identity that is reflected in the restructuring of domestic and public space. She shows how the transfiguration of space in the traditional practice of constructing home altars, a practice of self-representation and often a resistance to the patriarchal spaces of official religion, can provide a similar intervention in public galleries and museums in the form of site-specific installations.
In our brief analysis of these works by Mesa-Bains and Norte, we have begun to account for the specific ways cultural production and identity formation lead to a material transformation of social space. The move to reformulate the uses of space is equally a move to redefine the possible identifications that can take place in these spaces. Both cultural workers offer not only a new vision of cultural identities, mapped across local and global economies and cultural practices, but also the power and imagination to redefine these “geographies.” They change space by making new spaces, in the world and in the imagination, where ignorant or oppressive social practices can be exposed and criticized.
1. Michel Foucault introduces this notion of “heterotopia” in his essay “Of Other Places,” Diacritics (Spring 1986). Back to main text
2. Kay Turner, in her dissertation, “Mexican-American Women’s Home Altars: The Art of Relationship,” University of Texas, Austin, 1990, suggests that the home altar is often used as a feminine equivalent or replacement for the more patriarchal space of the Catholic church. Back to main text
3. Henri Lefebvre suggests that “spatial practice…simultaneously defines: places–the relationship of local to global; the representation of that relationship; actions and signs; the trivialized spaces of everyday life; and, in opposition to these last, spaces made special by symbolic means as desirable or undesirable, benevolent or malevolent, sanctioned or forbidden to particular groups.” The Production of Space, trans. Donald NicholsonSmith (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991). Back to main text
4. Spoken word genre is characterized by its crossing of prose with poetry and song with rap, and is circulated by live performance and by cassette and compact disk form. New Alliance Record produced Norte’s first collection of spoken word as an audio recording. Back to main text
5. Norte collapses the term narrator with dominatrix to create a new term that suggests that the characters who voice her narratives are in a position of power. Narratrix implies an engagement in the struggle for the domination over words. These narratreces, who have thus far been misrepresented through language are fighting to represent themselves in the realm of language. I am tempted to replace the term “character” with that of narratrix because of the term’s implications. Back to main text
6. Live performance at Centro Cultural de la Raza, May 15, 1992, San Diego, CA. Back to main text
7. Liner notes in Norte/Word, Los Angeles: New Alliance Record Company, 1991. Back to main text
8. See A.C. Pettit’s Image of Mexican-Americans in Fiction and Film (College Station:Texas A&M University Press, 1980) for examples of the way the dominant culture has represented Chicanos. Back to main text
9. Marisela Norte. “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” in Norte/Word, Los Angeles: New Alliance Record Company, 1991. I do not cite page numbers since I transcribed the poem from the Norte/Word recording. Back to main text
10. Ibid. “Se habla ingles.” Back to main text
11. Norte. “Peeping Tom Tom Girl” in Norte/Word. Back to main text
12. See Rosaura Sanchez’s essay “The History of Chicanas: Proposal for a Materialist Perspective,” Between Borders, ed. Adelaide R. Del Castillo (Encino: Floricanto Press, 1990). Sanchez explains that Chicana history “need not postulate direct links between us and La Malinche.” By discussing this cultural paradigm, my intent is not to reproduce the notion that a “direct link” exists, but instead to begin to show that the paradigm is both constructed and contested. In her excellent article, “The Female Subject in Chicano Theater: Sexuality, ‘Race,’ and Class,” Theater Journal 38.4 (1986), Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano demonstrates how the images of La Virgen/La Malinche have been both constructed and challenged in Chicano cultural production. Back to main text
13. Norte. “Act of the Faithless” in Norte/Word. Back to main text
Works Cited
Alarcón, Norma. “In the Tracks of the Native Woman.” Cultural Studies 4:6 (1990).
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Places,” Diacritics (Spring 1986).
Mesa-Bains, Amalia. “Domesticana: The Sensibility of a Chicana Rasquache.” Unpublished manuscript, 1992.
Soja, Edward. Postmodern Geographies. New York: Verso, 1989.
Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. “Chicano Movement/Chicano Art.” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Ed. Karp and Levine. Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.