Who would have thought it would end with a body to remember with

As a Language major, the number of English literature classes I can take is limited and I already took them all last year! I am glad that this course did not fall under the same category. I enjoyed being in this class!

Who Would Have Thought It? almost scared me away but I ended up writing about it for Wikipedia and reading a lot of the critiques gave me a sense of appreciation of Ruiz de Burton’s work. Sometimes, when I edit the article on Wikipedia, I feel somewhat of an anonymity that I think Ruiz de Burton initially wanted. Maria Ruiz de Burton would use Mrs. Henry S. Burton in the publication of her books and we use different names to sign into Wikipedia.

As I was writing on the book’s portrayal of religion and how it was used to distinguish Lola from the Irish Catholics, I realized that Alvarez too finds the need to distinguish the girls from the Irish population. Although this course is about Chicana identity, reading the novels gave me a sense of an overall immigrant experience.

There seems to be a lot of motivation for immigration as well such as the constant renegotiation of the demarcation of borders in Who Would Have Thought It? the harvest in … y no se lo trago la tierra, political motivations in El Puente de Brooklyn, marriage in Woman Hollering Creek and Pinochet’s dictatorship in and a Body to Remember With

I think it was such a treat to have Carmen Rodriguez come and talk about and a Body to remember with and share her insights on why a writer chooses to write a work of fiction instead of an autobiography.

and a body to remember with

I think that each author has an interesting description for their ambiguous hybrid position. Alvarez embeds the motion of a yoyo in one of Yolanda’s names and Rodriguez describes the “moving back and forth” as “teeter-totter” in her foreword. As I read Black Hole, I noticed that the conversations were one sided. Estela’s letter to her mother has no response and only one voice can be heard in the phone conversations. The voice of the other person is embedded with what the other one decides to repeat.
My eyes widened when she used the identifiably Canadian pragmatic marker “eh”, spelled “color” with a “u” and mentions Vancouver landmarks such as Stanley Park, City Hall, the seawall at Burrard, etc. I was enjoying reading about the landscape I live in. And I found myself relating to Estela’s dreams. She dreamt of Vancouver landmarks within the Chilean geography. I would often dream of being inside our Manila house here in Vancouver. It was almost as if there was no clear dividing line between the two countries and I would wake up confused, wondering where I was for the first few minutes. I guess my position too is ambiguous even though I am not an immigrant, being sent to Vancouver to study.
The way Rodriguez wrote is more direct and less descriptive than Alvarez’s style. I find it to be effective in the first person narrative. I am finding it difficult to put the book down!

How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

I have noticed that novels we read in this class are increasingly resembles something poignant to the one we read previously. The fragmented structure of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents is similar to Woman Hollering Creek and other stories but the vignettes of this novel explicitly state the perspective from which the story is told in the beginning of the chapter. Sometimes, all four of the girls are the protagonists of a story, offering multiple perspectives on life in the United States and Dominican Republic. Similar to Woman Hollering Creek and other stories whose characters straddle the line between the United States and Mexico, having one foot on each side, Alvarez’s novel (unlike Rivera) also names the characters of the story. Each of the sisters have a name and a pet name and the people around them are distinguished with unique names such as Illuminada and Altagracia. The names seemingly function as an indicator of class and the pet names of the girls, such as Yo for Yolanda explicitly refer to the first person.

Although each of the girls each have names, their mother confuses them and attempts to resolve the situation by assigning a particular color to them almost as like how the colors of a flag are representative of a nation. The attention to color seems to be an important aspect of this novel. It begins with visual descriptions of Yolanda’s coming home party.

That story also hints at a matriarchy, indicating that the widowed Tia Carmen was the head of the clan. I am interested to see if this turns out to be a feminist novel. One of its similarities to Cisneros’ novel is a daughter’s defiance to a father’s wishes. Sofia packs her things and flies to Germany after her father confronts her about the letters from her German boyfriend. One of the women in Cisneros’ novel also defied her father to be with her husband. Alvarez’s character more explicitly feels exiled. He only goes to her house to visit his grandchildren and although Sofia threw his seventieth birthday, he mentions all her sister’s names but fail to mention her’s during the games.

Woman Hollering Creek

The run-on sentences and fragments mirror the non-linear structure of the book, resembling an oral history of a Chicana community. Although the structure is relatively unconventional it is effective in portraying an oral tradition or perhaps a manifestation of memory. The voices of the characters almost seem to come alive in "Little Miracles, Kept Promises". The word orders of the little prayers mimicked Spanish grammatical rules and Cisneros seemed to create somewhat of a hybrid of both languages and perhaps create something that is neither Anglo-American or Mexican but instead, something that is identifiably Chicana.

The novel also demythisizes the typical Chicana image by portraying them as "the passive virgin, sinful seductress, and traitorous mother." (Wikipedia) Most of the anecdotal stories are told from the perspective of women and portray the men as misogynists. One of the few that are not told by women is "Los Boxers". A widowed husband has been seemingly domesticated after his wife's death. He discusses ice cubes as a miracle solution to all stains. It is interesting to read how he remembers his wife through seemingly mundane chores and how the wheels have turned and he has taken a more feminine role.

Los Boxers, along with most of the stories, seem to be a critique of marriage. The husbands all seem to have mistresses and at times have kids outside their marriage. With the protagonist of "Los Boxers", there seems to be a bit of ambiguity. He is telling the story instead of the wife.

Woman Hollering Creek

The book has a rather unusual structure. The stories seem to be chronologically compiled from childhood to adolescence and adulthood; however, each story has no explicit beginning or end. The stories open by identifying the main characters by their names and the protagonist seems to shift with every story. If the stories are told by the same narrator, she introduces herself indirectly through her tocaya. She seems to demarcate the borders by offering a birds-eye-perspective on her identity, negotiating her location between borders.
Cisneros seems to represent her position between Anglo and Mexican culture, “el otro lado- on the other side” by juxtaposing the Spanish words with the English words. Although she uses Spanish words once in awhile, I think this is the first time she placed them side by side.

I think it is interesting to see a book structurally similar to … y no se lo trago la tierra and find a poignant difference- the importance of naming stressed and how names function book. It reminds me of Who Would Have Thought It and how nearly all characters have names. Julie, the only surviving canary, symbolically trades places with Lavinia who ends up caged by the corruption of the ideological American dream.

I think Woman Hollering Creek and other stories ties all our reading together with its similarities with the other books.

Borders

I was in a film studies course prior to this class and I remembered one of the required reading was Michael Cieutat’s account on Mexican iconography. “On the one hand, there was a Mexican Catholic, subject to a harsh social hierarchy (from hidalgo to peon, crushed by tradition… on the other, the American Protestant on racial purity, rejecting miscegenation, unlike the Mexican who accepts the mestizo.”

Religion seems to be poignant issue regardless of the period in which the novel is set. Ruiz de Burton uses Catholicism to distinguish Spanish Catholics and Irish Catholics through Lola’s refusal to sleep beside Mrs. Norval’s Irish maid. The boy in Rivera’s novel seems to have a problematic relationship towards religion. Rivera juxtaposes images and ideas.

The novels also better informed me of Chicano history. The theory of Manifest destiny was reflected in Who Would Have Thought It? and migration seemed to be the pressing concern in ...y no se lo trago la tierra before it was published in the 1970s.

I have enjoyed the books we read so far. They constantly questioned the concept of borders and its fluidity. In my introduction, I had restricted myself in defining North American literature and in a way confined myself within a personal border. By reading Ruiz de Burton, Marti and Rivera, I now have a better understanding of North America in its entirety.

… y no se lo tragó la tierra

I was looking at the cover for quite awhile, trying to find the words to describe the book entirely. I started thinking that what appeared to be a dragon might actually be “el Diablo”. But I thought the devil did not come despite the boy calling him.

The book uses dialogue to portray events in the boy’s life. Dialogue with the unseen such as the devil, the ramble in the boy’s head and the conversations in the truck all seem to have a communicative effect that reaches beyond the conventional narrative. While I was reading “Cuando lleguemos”, I felt like I could almost hear the voices of the people in the truck. They resemble streams of consciousness. Their inner thoughts are so diverse yet limited to that of the adults only. The readers do not know what the children are thinking. The book has been told from the perspective of a young boy trying to understand the adult world. Like most things in this book, the dialogue seems to be confined within the minds of the adults. And through Rivera’s writing, their voice is heard.