Prietita and the ghost woman pdf

GLORIA ANZALDUA

GLORIA ANZALDUA (1942-2004) grew up in south- west Texas, the physical and cultural borderland between the United States and Mexico, an area she called "una herida abierta," an open wound, "where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds." Defining her- self as lesbian, feminist, Chicana -a representative of the new mestiza -she dramatically revised the usual narra- tive of American autobiography. "I am a border woman," she said. "I grew up between two cultures, the Mexican (with a heavy Indian influence) and the Anglo (as a mem-

ber of a colonized people in our own territory). I have been straddling that tejas- Mexican border, and others, all my life." Cultural, physical, spiritual, sexual, lin- guistic-the borderlands defined by Anzaldua extend beyond geography. "In fact," she said, "the Borderlands are present where two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, mid- dle, and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy." In a sense, her writing argues against the concept of an "authentic," unified, homogeneous culture, the pure" Mexican experience," a nostalgia that un- derlies much of the current interest in "ethnic" literature.

In the following selections, which represent two chapters from her book Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Anzaldua mixes genres, moving between poetry and prose, weaving stories with sections that resemble the work of a cultural or political theorist. She tells us a story about her childhood, her culture, and her people that is at once both myth and history. Her prose, too, is mixed, shifting among Anglo-American English, Castilian Spanish, Tex-Mex, Northern Mexican dialect, and Nahuatl (Aztec), speaking to us in the particular mix that represents her linguistic heritage: "Presently this infant language, this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chi- canos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture-to translate to Anglos, Mexicans, and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. Today we ask to be met halfway. This book is our invitation to you." The book is an invitation, but not always an easy one. The chapters that follow make a variety of demands on the reader. The shifting styles, genres, and languages can be confusing or disturbing, but this is part of the effect of Anzaldua's prose, part of the experience you are invited to share.

In a chapter from the book that is not included here, Anzaldua gives this account of her writing:

In looking at this book that I'm almost finislled writing, I see a mosaic pattern (Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thin here, thick there. I see a preoccupation with the deep structllre, the underlying struc- ture, with thegesso underpainting that is redearth, blackearth.... This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance. The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will.

Beyond her prose, she sees the competing values of more traditionally organized narratives, "art typical of Western European cultures, [whichl attempts to manage the energies of its own internal system .... It is dedicated to the validation of itself. Its task is to move humans by means of achieving mastery in content, technique, feeling. Western art is always whole and always 'in power.'"

Anzaldlia's prose puts you, as a reader, on the borderland; in a way, it re-creates the position of the mestiza. As you read, you will need to meet this prose halfway, generously, learning to read a text that announces its difference.

In addition to Borderlands/La frontera, Anzaldua edited Haciendo Caras: Making Face/Making Soul (1990) and coedited an anthology, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983). She published a book for children, Prietita and the Ghost Woman (1996), which retells traditional Mexican folk- tales from a feminist perspective. A collection of interviews, In- terviews/Entrevistas, was published in 2000, and a coedited anthology of multicultural feminist theory titled This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation was published in 2002.

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Borderlands La Frontera'"ti/;

Entering into the Serpent

Suefio can serpientes, can serpientes !e/ mar, Can cierto mar, ay de serpientes sueno yo. Largas, transparentes, en sus barngas /levan Lo que puedan arebatarle a/ amor. Oh, oh, oh, la mat6 y aparese IInamayo,:. Oh, can mucho mas infierno en dlgestwn.

I dream of serpents, serpents of the sea, A certain sea, oh, of serpents 1dream. Long, transparent, in their bellies they carry All that they can snatch away from love. Oh, oh, oh, I kill one and a l~rg~r o.ne~ppears. Oh, with more hellfire burmng mSld~.

- SlLVIO RODRIGUES,. t ,,]"Suel'io can serplen es

haze the sleepy crowing of roosters atop the In the predawn or:r-ge I ' Don't go to the outhouse at night, Pri-

trees. No vayas al escu:~ :aen ~::~~:o~aya a meter alga pour alld. A snake will eta, my mother wou 2 y'k pregnant They seek warmth in the cold. crawl into your nalgas, ma e you 3' . f ou D' ue las culebras like to suck chiches, can draw mIlk out 0 Y . b

tcen q I d' the half-light spiders hang like gliders. Under my are En e escusa a m the dee awning tugs at me. 1can see my

buttocks and the rough pla~~ falls tKr~ugh the round hole into the sheen legs fly u~ to my face asbm

l y ~oiding the snakes under the porch 1walk

of swafffilng maggots e ow. 1 fl. b' black one slithering across t 1e oar.back into the kitchen, step on a Ig

Ella tiene su tono4

Once we were chopping cotton in d th oods QueliteS towered

the fields of Jesus Maria Ranch. All aroun us e:, . , above me, choking the stubby cotton that had outhlv~ddtho'ne6dheaerr;t;tq~elite

I swung e aza . d f When 1heard the rat-

barely shook, showered nettles on my arms an ace.

tle the world froze. 1 f It't f ngs Boot got allI bare y e 1 sa. . the veneno? My mother came shrieking, swinging her hoe high, cuttmg the

earth, the writhing body. d '11 th un beat down.1 stoo stl, e s d b . b k f neck under arms, be-Afterwards I smelled where fear ha een. ac 0 , h k 't

tween my legs, 1 felt its heat slide down my body. I swallowed t e roc 1

had hardened into. MId one down theWhen ama 1a g k 'f 1 de an X over eachrow and was out of sight, I took out my pocket 111e. ma

How to Tame a Wild Tongue

How to Tame a Wild Tongue f the sins I'd recite to the priest in the confession box the few times I wentone 0 " I H .nfession: talking back to my mother, hablar pa tras, repe ar. OClOcona,re- to co .. . 1 11 .pelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questlOmng, carrymg ta es are a ~lgnS of being mal criada. In my culture they are all ,:ords that are derogatory If ap- plied to women - I've never heard them applied to men.

The first time I heard two women, a Puerto Rican and a Cuban, say the word "nosotras," I was shocked. I had not known the word existed. Chicanas use nosotros whether we're male or female. We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural. Language is a male discourse.

"We're going to have to control your tongue," the dentist says, pulling out all the metal from my mouth. Silver bits plop and tinkle into the basin. My mouth is a motherlode.

The dentist is cleaning out my roots. I get a whiff of the stench when I gasp. "I can't cap that tooth yet, you're still draining," he says.

"We're going to have to do something about your tongue," I hear the anger rising in his voice. My tongue keeps pushing out the wads of cotton, pushing back the drills, the long thin needles. "I've never seen anything as strong or as stubborn," he says. And I think, how do you tame a wild tongue, train it to be quiet, how do you bridle and saddle it? How do you make it lie down?

And our tongues have become dry the wilderness has dried out our tongues and we have forgotten speech.

-IRENA KLEPFISZ 2

Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?

- RAY GWYN SMITH 1

Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of reglas de academia.

I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess-that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for "talking back" to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. "If you want to be American, speak 'American.' If you don't like it, go back to Mexico where you belong."

"I want you to speak English. Pa' hallar buen trabajo tienes que saber hablar el ingles bien. Que vale toda tu educaci6n si todavfa hablas ingles con un 'accent,''' my mother would say, mortified that I spoke English like a Mexican. At Pan American University, I and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to get rid of our accents.

Attacks on one's form of expression with the intent to censor are a vio- lation of the First Amendment. EI Anglo con cara de inocente nos arranc6 la lengua. Wild tongues can't be tamed, they can only be cut out.

Oye como ladra: ellenguaje de la frontera

Quien tiene bocase equivoca. - Mexican saying

"Pocho, cultural traitor, you're speaking the oppressor's language by speaking English, you're ruining the Spanish language," I have been ac- cused by various Latinos and Latinas. Chicano Spanish is considered by the purist and by most Latinos deficient, a mutilation of Spanish.

But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evoluci6n, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invenci6n 0 adopci6n have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.

For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable of communicating the realities and values true to themselves-a language with terms that are neither espafiol ni ingles, but both. We speak a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.

Chicano Spanish sprang out of the Chicanos' need to identify ourselves as a distinct people. We needed a language with which we could commu- nicate with ourselves, a secret language. For some of us, language is a

Ahogadas, escupimos el oscuro. Peleando con nuestra propia sombra el silencio nos seputta.

En boca cerradano entran moscas. "Flies don't enter a closed mouth" is a say- ing I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don't answer back. Es una fatta de respeto to talk back to one's mother or father. I remember 42

HoW to Tame a Wild Tongue :.------

homeland closer than the Southwest-for many Chicanos today live in th Midwest and the East. And because we are a complex, heterogeneous peo~ pIe, we speak many languages. Some of the languages we speak are

1. Standard English 2. Working-class and slang English 3. Standard Spanish 4. Standard Mexican Spanish 5. North Mexican Spanish dialect 6. Chicano Spanish (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California have

regional variations) 7. Tex-Mex 8. Pachuco (called calo)

My "home" tongues are the languages I speak with my sister and brothers, with my friends. They are the last five listed, with 6 and 7 being closest to my heart. From school, the media, and job situations, I've picked up standard and working-class English. From Mamagrande Locha and from. reading Spanish and Mexican literature, I've picked up Standard ~pan.lsh and Standard Mexican Spanish. From los recien llegados, Mexican Immigrants, and braceros, I learned the North Mexican dialect. With Mex- icans I'll try to speak either Standard Mexican Spanish or the North Mexic~n dialect. From m? parents and Chicanos living in the Valley, I picked up Chicano Texas Spamsh, and I speak it with my mom, younger brother (who married a Mexican and who rarely mixes Spanish with English), aunts, and older relatives. . W.ith Chicanas from Nuevo Mexico or Arizona I will speak Chicano Span- Ish a lIttle, but often they don't understand what I'm saying. With most Cali- fornia Chicanas I speak entirely in English (unless I forget). When I first moved to San Francisco, I'd rattle off something in Spanish, unintentionally embarrassing them. Often it is only with another Chicana tejano that I can talk freely.

dude, chale means no, simon means yes, churro is sure, talk is gu~ o~r pigionear means petting, que gacho means how nerdy, ponte aguila ~~w, .

watch out death is called la pelona. Through lack of practice and notmeans '. others who can speak it, I've lost most of the Pachuco tongue. havIng

Words distorted by English are known as anglicisms or pochismos. The pocho. is an. anglicized Mexican or American of Mexican origin who speaks Spamsh with an accent characteristic of North Americans and who distorts and reconstructs the language according to the influence of English.3 Tex- Mex, or Spanglish, comes most naturally to me. I may switch back and forth f~om English to Spanish in the same sentence or in the same word. With my sister and my brother Nune and with Chicano tejano contemporaries I speak in Tex-Mex.

From kids and people my own age I picked up Pachuco. Pachuco (the language of the zoot suiters) is a language of rebellion, both against Stan- dard Spanish and Standard English. It is a secret language. Adults of the culture and outsiders cannot understand it. It is made up of slang words from both English and Spanish. Ruca means girl or woman, vato means

Chicano Spanish

Chicanos, after 250 years of Spanish/Anglo colonization, have devel- oped significant differences in the Spanish w~ speak: We collaps.e two adjacent vowels into a single syllable and somehmes Shift the stress In cer- tain words such as maiz/maiz, cohete/cuete. We leave out certain consonants when they appear between vowels: lado/lao, mojado/mojao. Chicanos from South Texas pronounce f as j as in jue (fue). Chicanos use "archaisms," words that are no longer in the Spanish language, words that have been evolved out. We say semos, truje, haiga, ansina, and naiden. We retain the "ar- chaic" j, as in jalar, that derives from an earlier h (the French halar or the Germanic halon which was lost to standard Spanish in the sixteenth cen- tury), but which is still found in several regional dialects such as the one spoken in South Texas. (Due to geography, Chicanos from the Valley of South Texas were cut off linguistically from other Spanish speakers. We tend to use words that the Spaniards brought over from Medieval Spain. The majority of the Spanish colonizers in Mexico and the Southwest came from Extremadura-Hernan Cortes was one of them-and Andalucia. An- dalucians pronounce lllike a y, and their d's tend to be absorbed by adja- cent vowels: tirado becomes tirao. They brought ellenguaje popular, dialectos, y regionalismos.)4

Chicanos and other Spanish speakers also shift II to y and z to S.5 We leave out initial syllables, saying tar for estar, toy for estoy, hora for ahora (cubanos and puertorriquenos also leave out initial letters of some words). We also leave out the final syllable such as pa for para. The intervocalic y, the II as in tortilla, ella, botella, gets replaced by tortia or toriya, ea, botea. We add an additional syllable at the beginning of certain words: atocar for tocar, agastar for gastar. Sometimes we'll say lavaste las vacijas, other times lavates (substituting the ates verb endings for the aste).

We use anglicisms, words borrowed from English: bola from ball, car- peta from carpet, machina de lavar (instead of lavadora) from washing ma- chine. Tex-Mex argot, created by adding a Spanish sound at the beginning or end of an English word such as cookiar for cook, watchar for watch, parkiar for park, and rapiar for rape, is the result of the pressures on Spanish speakers to adapt to English.

We don't use the word vosotros/as or its accompanying verb form. We don't say claro (to mean yes), imaginate, or me emociona, unless we picked up Spanish from Latinas, out of a book, or in a classroom. Other Spanish- speaking groups are going through the same, or similar, development in their Spanish.

Linguistic Terrorism

Deslenguadas. Somos los del espmiol deficiente. We are your linguis- tic nightmare, your linguistic aberration, your linguistic mesti- saje, the subject of your burla. Because we speak with tongues of fire we are culturally crucified. Racially, culturally, and linguisti- cally somos hlllirfanos-we speak an orphan tongue.

Chicanas who grew up speaking Chicano Spanish have internalized the belief that we speak poor Spanish. It is illegitimate, a bastard language. And because we internalize how our language has been used against us by the dominant culture, we use our language differences against each other.

Chicana feminists often skirt around each other with suspicion and hesitation. For the longest time I couldn't figure it out. Then it dawned on me. To be close to another Chicana is like looking into the mirror. We are afraid of what we'll see there. Pena. Shame. Low estimation of self. In child- hood we are told that our language is wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. The attacks continue throughout our lives.

Chicanas feel uncomfortable talking in Spanish to Latinas, afraid of their censure. Their language was not outlawed in their countries. They had a whole lifetime of being immersed in their native tongue; generations, centuries in which Spanish was a first language, taught in school, heard on radio and TV, and read in the newspaper.

If a person, Chicana or Latina, has a low estimation of my native tongue, she also has a low estimation of me. Often with mexicanas y latinas we'll speak English as a neutral language. Even among Chicanas we tend to speak English at parties or conferences. Yet, at the same time, we're afraid the other will think we're agringadas because we don't speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be the "real" Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano lan- guage just as there is no one Chicano experience. A monolingual Chicana whose first language is English or Spanish is just as much a Chicana as one who speaks several variants of Spanish. A Chicana from Michigan or Chicago or Detroit is just as much a Chicana as one from the Southwest. Chicano Spanish is as diverse linguistically as it is regionally.

By the end of this [the twentieth] century, Spanish speakers will com- prise the biggest minority group in the United States, a country where stu- dents in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more "cultured." But for a language to re- main alive it must be used.6 By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos.

So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity-I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept

HoW to Tame a Wild Tongue-- .' t Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages I

as leg1tima e . f . b'l' I t accept the legitimacy of myself. Until I am ree to wnte 1 m-

speak canno I hil I '11, d t switch codes without having always to trans ate, w e sti gually an 0 l' h d

k English or Spanish when I would rather speak Spang IS ,anhave to spea . as I have to accommodate the English speaker rather than havmg

as long '11b '11 't' tommodate me, my tongue WI e 1 egi Ima e. them acc f ., I '11hI will no longer be made to feel ashamed 0 eXIstmg. WI ave m,y

. . I dian Spanish, white. I will have my serpent's tongue-my woman s VOICe. n , h d' . f. Y sexual voice my poet's voice. I will overcome tetra Itlon 0 VOIce,m ' silence.

My fingers move sly against your palm Like women everywhere, we speak in code ....

- MELANIE KA YE I KANTROWITZ7

"Vistas," corridos, y comida: My Native Tongue

In the 1960s, I read my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John Rechy, a gay Texan, son of a Scottish father and a Me~ican mother. For days I walked around in stunned amazement that a ChIcano could wnte and could get published. When I read I Am Joaqu£n8 I was surpri.sed to see a bilingual book by a Chicano in print. When I saw poetry wntten J~ Tex- Mex for the first time, a feeling of pure joy flashed through me. I felt like we really existed as a people. In 1971, when I started teaching High School English to Chicano students, I tried to supplement the required texts with works by Chicanos, only to be reprimanded and forbidden to do so by the principal. He claimed that I was supposed to teach" American" and Eng- lish literature. At the risk of being fired, I swore my students to secrecy and slipped in Chicano short stories, poems, a play. In graduate school, while working toward a Ph.D., I had to "argue" with one adviser after the other, semester after semester, before I was allowed to make Chicano literature an area of focus.

Even before I read books by Chicanos or Mexicans, it was the Mexican movies I saw at the drive-in - the Thursday night special of $1.00 a carload- that gave me a sense of belonging. "Vamonos a las vistas," my mother would call out and we'd all-grandmother, brothers, sister, and cousins-squeeze into the car. We'd wolf down cheese and bologna white bread sandwiches while watching Pedro Infante in melodramatic tearjerkers like Nosotros los pobres, the first "real" Mexican movie (that was not an imitation of European movies). I remember seeing Cuanda las hijas se van and surmising that all Mexican movies played up the love a mother has for her children and what ungrateful sons and daughters suffer when they are not devoted to their mothers. I remember the singing-type "westerns" of Jorge Negrete and Miguel Aceves Mejia. When watching Mexican movies, I felt a sense of

How to Tame a Wild Tongue- h~mec~mi~g as well a~ alienati~n. People who were to amount to some- thmg dIdn t go to MexIcan movIes, or bailes, or tune their radios to bolero rancherita, and corrido music. '

Si Ie preguntas a mi mama, /ll, Que eres?/I

Identity is the essential core of who we are as individuals, the conscious experience of the self inside.

-GERSIIEN KAUFMAN 9The whole time I was growing up, there was norteno music sometimes

called ~orth Mexic~n border music, or Tex-Mex music, or Chicano music, or cantzna (bar) mUSIC.I grew up listening to conjuntos, three- or four-piece bands made up of folk musicians playing guitar, bajo sexto, drums, and but- ton accordion, which Chicanos had borrowed from the German immi- grants who had come to Central Texas and Mexico to farm and build brew- eries. In the Rio Grande Valley, Steven Jordan and Little Joe Hernandez were popular: and Flaco Jimenez was the accordion king. The rhythms of !ex-Mex mUSICare those of the polka, also adapted from the Germans, who m turn had borrowed the polka from the Czechs and Bohemians.

I remember the hot, sultry evenings when corridos-songs of love and d~a.th on the Texas-Mexican borderlands-reverberated out of cheap am- phfIers from ~helocal cantznas and wafted in through my bedroom window.

Comdos fIrst became widely used along the South Texas/Mexican bor- der during the early conflict between Chicanos and Anglos. The corridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the Anglo op- pressors. Pancho Villa's song, "La cucaracha," is the most famous one. Corri- dos of Jo~n F. Kennedy and his death are still very popular in the Valley. C?lder ChIcanos remember Lydia Mendoza, one of the great border corrido smgers who was c~lled la Gloria de Tejas. Her "EI tango negro," sung during the Great DepressIon, made her a singer of the people. The ever-present comdos narrated one hundred years of border history, bringing news of ev~nts as well as entertaining. These folk musicians and folk songs are our chIef cultural mythmakers, and they made our hard lives seem bearable.

I grew up feeling ambivalent about our music. Country-western and rock-and-rollhad mor~ status. In the fifties and sixties, for the slightly edu- c.ated.and agnngado C.hIcanos, there existed a sense of shame at being caught hste~mg to our musIC. Yet I couldn't stop my feet from thumping to the m~sIc, could not stop humming the words, nor hide from myself the exhila- ratIon I felt when I heard it.

Nosotros los Chicanos straddle the borderlands. On one side of us, we are constantly exposed to the Spanish of the Mexicans, on the other side we hear the Anglos' incessant clamoring so that we forget our language. Among our- selves we don't say nosotros los americanos, 0 nosotros los espanoles, 0 nosotros los hispanos. We say nosotros los mexicanos (by mexicanos we do not mean citizens of Mexico; we do not mean a national identity, but a racial one). We distin- guish between mexicanos del otro lado and mexicanos de este lado. Deep in our hearts we believe that being Mexican has nothing to do with which country one lives in. Being Mexican is a state of soul- not one of mind, not one of cit- izenship. Neither eagle nor serpent, but both. And like the ocean, neither an- imal respects borders.

Dime con quien andas y te dire quien eres. (Tell me who your friends are and I'll tell you who you are.)

- Mexican saying

Si Ie preguntas a mi mama, "~Que eres?" te dirci, "Soy mexicana." My broth- ers and sister say the same. I sometimes will answer "soy mexicana" and at others will say "soy Chicana" a "soy tejana." But I identified as "Raza" before I ever identified as "mexicana" or "Chicana."

As a culture, we call ourselves Spanish when referring to ourselves as a linguistic group and when copping out. It is then that we forget our pre- dominant Indian genes. We are 70-80 percent Indian.lO We call ourselves Hispanicll or Spanish-American or Latin American or Latin when linking ourselves to other Spanish-speaking peoples of the Western hemisphere and when copping out. We call ourselves Mexican-American12 to signify we are neither Mexican nor American, but more the noun "American" than the adjective "Mexican" (and when copping out).

Chicanos and other people of color suffer economically for not accultur- ating. This voluntary (yet forced) alienation makes for psychological con- flict, a kind of dual identity-we don't identify with the Anglo-American cultural values and we don't totally identify with the Mexican cultural val- ues. We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one. A veces no soy nada ni nadie. Pero hasta cuando no 10 soy, 10 soy.

When not copping out, when we know we are more than nothing, we call ourselves Mexican, referring to race and ancestry; mestizo when affirm- ing both our Indian and Spanish (but we hardly ever own our Black) ances- try; Chicano when referring to a politically aware people born and/or raised in the United States; Raza when referring to Chicanos; tejanos when Weare Chicanos from Texas.

. There are m~re subtle ways that we internalize identification, especially m the forms of Images and emotions. For me food and certain smells are tied to my identity, to my homeland. Woodsmoke curling up to an im- mense blue sky; woodsmoke perfuming my grandmother's clothes her skin. The stench of cow manure and the yellow patches on the ground; the ~rack of a .22 :ifle. an.d the reek of cordite. Homemade white cheese sizzling m a pan, meltmg mSIde a folded tortilla. My sister Hilda's hot, spicy menu do, chile colorado making it deep red, pieces of panza and hominy floating on top. My brother Carito barbequing fajitas in the backyard. Even now and 3,00.0 mile~ awa~, I can see my mother spicing the ground beef, pork, and vemson WIth chile. My mouth salivates at the thought of the hot steaming tamales I would be eating if I were home.

. o!!.·'!!.t~o!:th~e:-.':S~e~rr:::e:.:.:n:.!.t/~H::o~w:....:t~o--=T:-a:-m_e_a_W_il_d_T_o-n",-g_ue5_1Entenn[tn-- Chicanos did not know we were a people until 1965when Cesar Chavez

and the farmworkers united and I Am Joaquin was published and la Raza Unida party was formed in Texas. With that recognition, we became a dis- tinct people. Something momentous happened to the Chicano soul-we became aware of our reality and acquired a name and a language (Chicano Spanish) that reflected that reality. Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together-who we were, what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventu- ally become.

Yet the struggle of identities continues, the struggle of borders is our re- ality still. One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration take place. In the meantime, tenemos que hacer la lucha. ~QUiel1 esta protegiendo los ranchos de mi gente? ~Quien esta tratando de cerrar la fisura entre la india y el blanco en nuestra sangre? EI Chicano, si, el Chicano que anda como un ladr6n en su propia casa.

. . ". derl'ved from Hispanis (Espaiia, a name given to the Iberian Peninsula 11 "Hlspamc IS . d b h. h't was a part of the Roman Empire) and is a term deSignate y t e

. ancient tImes w en I In ent to make it easier to handle us 011 paper. U.s. governm f G adalupe Hidalgo created the Mexican-American in 1848.

"The Treaty 0 u . . d h. d to alleviate their guilt for dispossessmg the ChIcano, stresse t e13Anglos m or er d, f d perpetrated the myth of the Spanish Southwest. We have accepte . h part 0 us an ISpaillS H'spanic that is Spanish in order to accommodate ourselves to t 1e

the fiction that we are I, .', . . t ulture and its abhorrence of IndIans. Chavez, 88-91.

domman c

Los Chicanos, how patient we seem, how very patient. There is the quiet of the Indian about us.13 We know how to survive. When other races have given up their tongue we've kept ours. We know what it is to live under the hammer blow of the dominant norteamericano culture. But more than we count the blows, we count the days the weeks the years the centuries the aeons until the white laws and commerce and customs will rot in the deserts they've created, lie bleached. Humildes yet proud, quietos yet wild, nosotros los mexicanos-Chicanos will walk by the crumbling ashes as we go about our business. Stubborn, persevering, impenetrable as stone, yet pos- sessing a malleability that renders us unbreakable, we, the mestizas and mestizos, will remain.

The most immediate challenge to many readers of these chapters will be 1. the sections that are written in Spanish. Part of the point of.a text that mIxes

languages is to give non-Span ish-speaking readers the feehng of bemg lost, eluded left out. What is a reader to do wIth thIs prose? One could learn

ex , . k I' dSpanish and come back to reread, but this is not a qUlC so utlon an ,ac- cording to Anzaldua, not even a completely satisfactory one, since some?f her Spanish is drawn from communities of speakers not represented m textbooks and classes.

So how do you read this text if you don't read Spanish? Do you.ignore the words? sound them out? improvise? Anzaldua gives translations of some words or phrases, but not all. Which ones does she translate? Why? Reread these chapters with the goal of explaining how you handled An- zaldua's polyglot style.

2. These chapters are made up of shorter sections written in a .variety of styl.es (some as prose poems, some with endnotes, s~me as stones). ~nd, whIle the sections are obviously ordered, the order IS not a conventIOnal argu- mentative one. The text is, as Anzaldua says elsewhere in her book, "an as- semblage, a montage, a beaded work, ... a crazy dance":

In looking at this book that I'm almost finished writing, I see a mos~ic pattern (Aztec-like) emerging, a weaving pattern, thm here, tluck there .... This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a mon- tage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance. The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my will. It is a re- bellious, willful entity, a precocious girl-child forced to grow up too quickly, rough, unyielding, with pieces of feather sticking out here and there, fur, twigs, clay. My child, but not for much longer. This female being is angry, sad, joyful, is Coatlicue, dove, horse, serpent, cactus. Though it is a flawed thing-clumsy, complex, groping, blind thing, for me it is alive, infused with spirit. I talk to it; it talks to me.