The Chicana Subject in Ana Castillo's Fiction and the Discursive Zone of Chicana/o Theory

Abstract

world of Chicana fiction, Ana Castillo has achieved kind of status Maxine Hong Kingston has attained within Asian American discourse. (1) Castillo's work popular not only general reading public but in many academic circles as well. As Sara L. Spurgeon writes, In 1994, [So Far From God] would help garner Castillo Mountains and Plains Bookseller's Award and place her, along Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez, and Denise Chavez, in September issue of Vanity Fair, cementing her place, or without unanimous agreement of academia, at forefront of Chicana literature, and establishing her as an important voice in canon of western writing (15). But what sets Castillo apart from so many other Chicana fiction writers that she also a theorist, and her Massacre of Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994) has achieved widespread acclaim. As case in African American, (2) Native American, (3) and Asian American (4) discourse, primary concern of Chicana fiction and theory integrity and authenticity of ethnic subject. Following pioneering work of Gloria Anzaldua, Chicana authors like Castillo have embraced notion of mestiza, who is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions (Anzaldua, Borderlands 103; emphasis original). As Anzaldua writes, at confluence of two or more genetic streams, chromosomes constantly crossing over, this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable, more malleable species a rich gene pool. From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological cross-pollination, an 'alien' consciousness presently in making--a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer. It a consciousness of Borderlands. (99) Within discourse of Chicana literature and theory, mestiza has a privileged position, functioning as she does as a reminder of hybridity that has resulted from more than five hundred years of colonization and cultural miscegenation. The mestiza further reminds Chicana/os of the contentious history of Chicana/o population in [the] U.S. (Delgadillo 893). (5) Because of this history, Delgadillo writes, It not unusual for literature of this heterogeneous community to grapple conflicting claims and demands, for its characters engage a discourse of identity in which issues of power and opposition to dominant society are central. Consequently, Chicana/o literature has demonstrated a preoccupation multiplicity of subject that colonized and oppressed people must of necessity occupy in their experiences. (893) The fictional works by Ana Castillo, as Delgadillo suggests, are indeed preoccupied with multiplicity of subject positions her characters inhabit (893). They represent a virtual catalog of subjectivities, often in opposition to one another, in Chicana communities (893). And yet in Massacre of Dreamers, a collection of critical essays on experience of those whom Castillo calls Amerindians, Castillo suggests rather explicitly that, while Chicana identity fragmented due to vicissitudes of history, there an essential identity that can be asserted (Castillo, Massacre 12). order to illuminate ways in which Castillo theorizes and constructs Chicana identity, in what follows I will look at relationship between Castillo's own theoretical work, Massacre of Dreamers, and her fiction, (6) including The Mixquiahuala Letters and So Far From God. There is, I argue, a curious incongruity between how Castillo theorizes Chicana subject and how her characters perform subjectivity in her fiction. While Castillo's fiction not only exemplifies and performs the arcane mysteries of absence, trace, and slippery possibilities of presence that are hallmark of postmodernism, in Massacre of Dreamers Castillo nostalgically searches for an originating moment that will ground her Mexic Amerindian identity (Smith 6). …

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