Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature: Memoir, Folklore, and Ficiton of the Border, 1900-1950 (Latino Communities: Emerging Voices - Political, Social, Cultura)

Latino Communities Emerging Voices Political, Social, Cultural and Legal Issues

Edited by

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez University of New Mexico

A Routledge Series

Latino Communities: Emerging Voices Political, Social, Cultural, and Legal Issues

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez, General Editor Colegio Cesar Chavez, 1973–1983 A Chicano Struggle for Educational Self-Determination Carlos S. Maldonado Latinos in Ethnic Enclaves Immigrant Workers and the Competition for Jobs Stephanie Bohon Telling Our Stories The Lives of Midwestern Latinas Theresa Barron McKeagney Dominicans in New York City Power From the Margins Milagros Ricourt Latino National Politial Coalitions Struggles and Challenges David Rodriguez Creating Tropical Yankees Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898–1908 José-Manuel Navarro Brown Eyes on the Web Unique Perspectives of an Alternative U.S. Latino Online Newspaper Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez Pregones Theatre A Theatre for Social Change in the South Bronx Eva C. Vásquez The Quest for Tejano Identity in San Antonio, Texas, 1913–2000 Richard A. Buitron, Jr.

Caribbean Spanish in the Metropolis Spanish Language among Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans in the New York City Area Edwin M. Lamboy Skin Color and Identity Formation Perceptions of Opportunity and Academic Orientation among Mexican and Puerto Rican Youth Edward Fergus Inviting Latino Voters Party Messages and Latino Party Identification Stacey L. Connaughton Leaving Latinos Out of History Teaching U.S. History in Texas Julio Noboa Gay Hegemony/ Latino Homosexualities Manolo Guzmán Latino-Anglo Bargaining Culture, Structure, and Choice in Court Mediation Christine Rack The Promised Land? The Lives and Voices of Hispanic Immigrants in the New South Patricia L. Goerman Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature Memoir, Folklore, and Fiction of the Border, 1900–1950 Sam López

Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature Memoir, Folklore, and Fiction of the Border, 1900–1950

Sam López

Routledge New York & London

From Mexican Village by Josefina Niggli. Copyright © 1945 by the University of North Carolina Press, renewed 1972 by Josefina Niggli. Used by permission of the publisher. From Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance by Leticia M. Garza-Falcón, Copyright © 1998. Used by permission of The University of Texas Press.

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business International Standard Book Number‑10: 0‑415‑95553‑X (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑0‑415‑95553‑9 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data López, Sam, 1970‑ Post‑revolutionary Chicana literature : memoir, folklore, and fiction of the border, 1900‑1950 / Sam López. p. cm. ‑‑ (Latino communities : emerging voices‑‑political, social, cultural, and legal issues) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN‑13: 978‑0‑415‑95553‑9 (alk. paper) 1. American literature‑‑Mexican American authors‑‑History and criticism. 2. American literature‑‑Women authors‑‑History and criticism. 3. American literature‑‑Mexican‑American Border Region‑‑History and criticism. 4. Mexican American women in literature. 5. Mexican Americans‑‑Social conditions. 6. Mexican‑American Border Region‑‑In literature. 7. Laredo (Tex.)‑‑In literature. 8. Villegas de Magnón, Leonor‑‑Criticism and interpretation. 9. Mireles, Jovita González, 1904‑1983‑‑Criticism and interpretation. 10. Niggli, Josephina, 1910‑1983‑‑Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS153.M4L67 2006 810.9’86872‑‑dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com ISBN 0-203-94384-8 Master e-book ISBN

2006024830

For Chris, con todo amor, mi oso

Contents

List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

Chapter One Politics of Place: Laredo as Case Study

21

Chapter Two “Do they not remember the brave women?”: Rethinking/Rewriting Border Women in Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel

39

Chapter Three The Moon and the Unfortunate Lover: Folklore and Feminism in Jovita González’ Dew on the Thorn

61

Chapter Four The People Beyond the Mountains: Crossing Boundaries with Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village

87

Conclusion A Tolerance for Ambiguity

109

Appendix La Crónica

115

vii

viii

Contents

Notes

119

Bibliography

131

Index

139

List of Figures

Figure 1.

Laredo Border Area

25

Figure 2.

La Crónica masthead, 1910

32

Figure 3.

J. González and students, San Antonio, Texas, April 1934

64

Figure A-1

September 1910 cover page of La Crónica, announcing “segunda epoca” of the paper

116

ix

Acknowledgments

As with all great and small endeavors, this work cannot exist without the help of many individuals over a long period of time. For their assistance, encouragement, and patience, I thank Claire Fox, Cheryl Herr, Brooks Landon, Rob Latham, Tom Lewis, and Tom Lutz. My thanks extend as well to the faculty and staff of the English Department of the University of Iowa, in particular Vicky Dingman, without whom nothing happens. In addition, the wonderful women of Iowa’s Women’s Resource and Action Center (WRAC) managed to live with me through some of the harder times: Monique DiCarlo, Laurie Haag, Linda Kroon, Molly Greiner, Shane Orr, Jillian Duquaine, and Stephanie Soilieu. My academic work has been focused on teaching, and I thank my students from the University of Iowa (particularly my American Lives: Manifest Destiny and the American West class), the College of DuPage, and Arizona Western College for both patience and encouragement. Perhaps more so than other fields, academia can be lonely without the presence of good friends and family, with which I have been incredibly blessed. My family in Texas has been patient, loving, and kind during this whole process, and my thanks go out to my mother Theresa B. López, for more than I can ever say. My adopted family, my friends, is responsible for the majority of my accomplishments. The happiness and comfort they brought to my life cannot be quantified: Greg Bales, The Barrows, Dr. Bidisha Banerjee, Norma Borjas, Tim Bryant, Patty Brogan, my “brother” Jeff Charis-Carlson, Dr. Chris Charis-Donelson, Dr. Jay D’Arcy and Dora D’Arcy, Dr. Megan Early, Joyce Fletcher, Lisa Hartin, Dr. Eleanor Hersey, Kathy Lyons, Ed Mallot, Dr. Nathania Montes, Judson Nichols, Maria Oropeza, Alexis Paluch, Dr. Mary Beth Pope, Jack Pripusich, Dr. Jennifer Ryan, Sean Scanlon, Mike Schraut, Dr. Jessica Walsh, and Julia Willis. My sanity and life would not xi

xii

Acknowledgments

be intact without the presence of Dr. Robin Barrow (catsitter, co-worker, and friend), who saw me through all phases of this project with grace and kindness. Finally, this work is dedicated to the ones who were there for me every moment—my boys, Tommy Lee and Joshua Casy—who make each day alive and bright, and who have touched every page of this work, literally; and to my heart and soul, Christopher Peal. Te amo mucho.

Introduction

It is not yet my time this is not yet my home. —Angela de Hoyos, from “Hermano”

This project, a late part of the greater project of “recovering the U.S.- Hispanic literary heritage” is perhaps both in and out of time; while recovery work proceeds on Chicano literature, so much of the work of early Chicanas remains lost, unnoticed, or ignored. Chicana writing has not yet found a “home” in the canon, regardless of the presence of Sandra Cisneros and Ana Castillo. My thesis—that the roots and fundamental ideas of Chicanisma, and the anticipatory impetus for Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Angela de Hoyos, and others are found (at least in part) in the early 20th century writings of women from the Texas-Mexico border—may seem obvious to some critics unfamiliar with Chicana academic endeavor. The literary truth remains, however—Chicana literature’s “home” seems to be in flux, and its foundations are still being built while the stories rise above. The more immediate and perhaps disturbing reason for the tardiness of this work in the historical timeline is simply that women’s writing from the first half of the 20th century US-Mexico border became more widely available—through accidental discovery, determined archival research, and reanalysis of forgotten texts—only recently, with a great deal of work being done in the 1990s. However, the time is now, if a “home” has yet to be found for Chicana Studies. Indeed, the sense of immediacy versus status quo in the work from the Border(ed) writers I examine in this dissertation reflects present Chicana scholars’ status—working inside the academy/institution without, in most cases, a space to call “home.” Women writing from the Border area during the first half of the twentieth century, including Leonor 1

2

Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature

Villegas de Magnón, Jovita González, and Josephina Niggli, negotiated the challenges, trials, and triumphs their literary daughters would face half a century or more later. I concentrate my efforts here on the Laredo, Texas border area and the Texas-Mexico experience because it was particularly complex politically, culturally, and socially.1 These women and others formed a strong community of female public intellectuals/activists actively engaged in debate in the journals of the time as well as in local politics. Through analysis of memoir, folklore, and fiction I will demonstrate that these women were not merely prefiguring the women writers of the 1970s but enacting the same identity later known as Chicana, challenging the same issues of concern in the same manner and with the same resolve—the full social enfranchisement of the woman of Mexican and American descent. This work arises in response to male critics’ reductive defining and structuring of the concept of “Chicana” in American literature, including writers such as Stan Steiner and Luis Valdez in their historic 1972 anthology Aztlán and Raymund Paredes in Houston Baker’s Three American Literatures.2 Moreover, the dismissal until the early 1990s of the decidedly quotidian considerations woven in early texts from the border area as simplistic, shallow, or passively uncritical of society by many male critics necessitates a careful critique of the texts’ potential revolutionary capabilities.3 While more recent critics have begun to recognize the early Chicana texts as bearing witness to the complexities of women’s marginalization, including Francisco Lomeli and Genaro Padilla, the pervasive popular sentiment and memory of the Chicano Movimiento persists: the mantle of politicized consciousness seems only to have been granted by the Movement in the 1960s to men (by men) in active struggle. After the Chicano, they claimed, came the Chicana. My claim that a Chicana identity existed before the term arose does not depend on the definition of “Chicana” presently used.4 As Chicana critics have noted, the search for a “Chicana identity” is not only problematic but constant in the face of male-defined structures, “well-intentioned” or otherwise: [In the movements of the 1960s] Chicano cultural productions moved closer to legitimacy by developing ideological systems which represented predominantly masculine interpretations of history and culture. Paradoxically, Chicanas were subordinated and repressed the ideologies of resistance. On the one side . . . marginalized by the . . . masculine interpretation of their respective culture and on the other by the . . . dreams and aspirations of a feminist utopian vision which allowed no space for cultural, racial, or class distinctions among women.

Introduction

3

The literature and art of the 1960s thus reflected a partial reality, as it mimicked Western structures. . . . It is ironic that . . . the latent thrust of the [resistant] writings served to effectively “other” Chicanas through omission or stereotypical allusions.5

In the early 1980s, in response to issues raised before and during what was then the National Association for Chicano Studies (NACS) conference in 1982, Mujeres en Marcha elucidated clearly the stereotypes enforced by white and brown society in their pamphlet Chicanas in the 80s: Unsettled Issues: We are here because Mexican women are neither inherently passive, deceptive nor insignificant. Indeed, our choices have been limited. Chicanas across the United States are challenging the limitations set. . . . Because our challenge runs counter to the very veins of tradition, it is difficult and painful. . . . We are told we are divisive . . . that we are aggressive and castrating. . . . But all that serves to diffuse the understanding of the imbalance of power that is a function of male dominance—or patriarchy.6

If identity is in a constant state of flux at the psychological or theoretical level, then the identity construction for a group of people who are socially, culturally, and in some cases psychologically multifaceted must be not only constantly fluctuating but constantly evolving in significant ways. Therefore, while my project is not necessarily to “redefine” Chicana, of necessity I must present different conceptualizations of the term as they have arisen since the 1960s in order to demonstrate their limitations and restricted useful life span. The rise of the term Chicano in the 1960s coincided with the rise in Mexican-American consciousness during the Civil Rights movements of the period. Unlike other ethnic identifiers, the term appears to have been one which a person took on, rather than an identity one was born with—in short, one became Chicano.7 While ostensibly a radical act—for renaming oneself is a reclamatory act of resistance—the term naturally led to infighting and moreover, to the subtle sidelining of women. For while Spanish allows a feminine version of Chicano, the movement focused on a single monolithic male conceptualization. The role of women was primarily in the 1960s a supporting one, though feminists such as Marta Cotera, Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, and Maxine Baca Zinn were actively advocating the inclusion of women’s issues in a Chicano rights platform.8 These women strove to make Chicana not

4

Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature

simply the female form of Chicano. Their work led to the reconsideration of the first (and perhaps the most abused) definition of Chicana that went beyond genderized language: a Chicana was a female Mexican-American who was “strong, long-suffering . . . who had endured and kept Chicano culture and the family intact.”9 As Alma García and others pointed out, this reductive definition was both sadly inadequate and stubbornly persistent, particularly as this notion of Chicana meant that a sense of cultural preservation remained, since women would be the bearers of cultural information. If anything, the Movimiento for its very survival needed culturebearers, storytellers, to spread the rediscovered (and occasionally redefined) Aztec/Indian prehistory, and women filled that role. To resist this role was to be labeled a vendida, a sellout, a Malinche whose concern for women’s issues and gender inequity was a result of becoming agringada (having spent too much time around white feminists). The famous 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back presents essays from women of color both lesbian-identified and straight, which detail the inevitable accusations from men (and a few women) of lesbianism in the case of women who challenged the Movimiento status quo. It is not certain whether the men of the Chicano Movimiento accused every white feminist of lesbianism; it was more challenging to the men that their brown “sisters” were questioning the men’s desire to ignore gender inequity and roles. There was a split in the Movimiento early over gender issues, with a small but fairly vocal group insisting that the inequities be addressed. This split led to a second definition of Chicana, indeed a two-pronged one: a Chicana was a faithful Mexican-American woman warrior in the Movimiento (as opposed to simply being stoic); or a Chicana was a “protofeminist,” often college-educated, who questioned the dismissal of gender inequity. Both “types” were warrior women—one was, however, becoming more than a little aware of the inability or lack of desire on the part of Movimiento leaders to address specifically the concerns of one-half of that movement. Their fight became the seeds of the present Chicana feminist movement.10 The point at which Chicana feminists find themselves now is not radically different from the 1960s and 70s; however, the explosion of creative and critical works by Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Maria Herrera-Sobek, and others has meant that ignoring the concerns of Chicanas is no longer possible.11 Interestingly, Chicanas presently find themselves divided by many into two basic categories which arose in the distant past: either they are vendidas or they are suffering mothers. What has happened that problematizes this (even beyond the obvious) is the mass of writing by Chicanas which complicates any such simple reductionism; specifically, this

Introduction

5

has often been accomplished by utilizing the everyday lived life as the site of complexity in writing, the matrix from which arises a prismatically fractured yet coherent set of shifting identities for the mujeres de la frontera—these women in/of/on the border(s). It is not accidental that one of the strongest resemblances between the writing from the turn of the 20th century border and the present is its concern with the minutiae (often considered as important as the spectacular) in the everyday lives of Chicanas. Even when presenting significant historical events, these authors—Villegas de Magnón, González, and Niggli and their “daughters”—write of them through the lives of women who are not iconic ciphers or stoic sufferers but women of the moment caught in a strong current of events which is, nevertheless, their everyday. The resulting literature is both remarkably powerful and personal, moving from the “everyday” to the “historic” and back, and subject as a result to fractious and contentious critique about the significance of this writing that seemed to cover everything under the sun. As Rebolledo and others have pointed out, many of these women (some perhaps with less overt politics) allowed their concern, discontent, and fears to come through in their “sentimental” writings. Raymund Paredes criticizes several female writers of the period as “sappy and genteel,” prone to ignoring “social concerns” with stories of a romanticized past and particulars of a woman’s day. However, Paredes points out in this same essay that [Something] is profoundly disturbing about this body of work. It seems a literature created out of fear and intimidation, a defensive response to racial prejudice. . . . 12

The disturbance Paredes sensed owes much of its power to a subtle and complexly ciphered method of expressing dissatisfaction, dissent, and resistance to encroaching Anglo culture. Despite the fact some women were able to access male-dominated public expression and publish writing, cultural and societal standards dictated that they were not to overtly critique issues considered the province of men: politics, religion, and social structures. This dictated the form their writing would take—those with a radical voice often subsumed it under a guise of “just talking about women’s lives” or utilizing cuentos (stories) to address their discontent with the status quo. Given the structure of society in the 19th and 20th centuries, this is not a surprising approach; nor is it surprising that their potential importance was fully understood only after a number of Chicanas took advantage of academia and began redefining Chicana history in the 1970s, work scholars such Norma E. Cantu, Maria Herrera-Sobek, and Marta Cotera continue today.

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Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature

It was not without a struggle that early Movimientistas allowed women’s concerns and voices to be muted; however, the general attitude as remembered by veteranas, including Adaljiza Sosa Riddell, is one of women’s roles as being “particularly unfortunate.” Sosa Riddell pointed out early in 1974 that Chicanos and Chicanas and the Movimiento must now address themselves to these [internal and external oppressions of women]. If Chicanos act in such a way as to ignore the condition of double-oppression under which Chicanas suffer we must face the fact that they are not only perpetuating the stereotypes and conditions which those stereotypes support, but they are also guilty of intensifying those conditions and their negative results.13

While in my research I have uncovered a wealth of information about Chicana struggle and the attempt to reconstruct a sense of identities from the detritus of multiple cultural encounters in literature and life, there has been little consideration until very recently of the implications of this early “theorizing” for Chicana literature and cultural production. Critics such as Norma Alarcón, Tey Diana Rebolledo, and Gloria Anzaldúa have established definitively the existence of a Chicana literary canon,14 and Alarcón and Rebolledo have been instrumental in the development of language to discuss in theoretical terms this complex literature, yet precious few texts have been analyzed with the thoroughness of even one Chicano text such as “Yo Soy Joaquín.”15 Much Chicano literary analysis has a strong identification with reconstructing cultural history to acknowledge the connections between the indigenous Mexican past and the Americanized present, as does much Chicano writing (particularly the earliest 1960s tracts as enshrined in Aztlan: An Anthology of Mexican American Literature, edited by Luis Valdez and Stan Steiner). Interestingly, Chicano literary theory has forgotten or ignored the women in the past and their cultural expression in the wave of Raza politics—”We must unite as one race in face of white oppression” meant women’s concern about internal chauvinism went ignored or condemned until the explosion of women of color theorization in Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back in 1981. Chicano scholar Jose E. Limón noted in a 1974 historical reconstructive essay in the journal Aztlan the presence and activity of these “lost” women at the Laredo, Texas El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (First Mexican Congress) in 1911.16 Discussing the intellectual and political agitation in Texas during the Mexican Revolution, Professor Limón writes of a significant group of women who helped organize the political conference for

Introduction

7

Texas-Mexicans and Mexican nationals, a group which included activist/ journalist Jovita Idar as first president of La Liga Femenil Mexicanista (The Mexican Feminist League), indicating that they represent “strong historical precedent for [activist Chicana] work in [their] activity.”17 Limón further notes the resemblance between the intention and ideology of the Congreso and the late 1960s Movimiento, asserting that the non-assimilationist ideology of the 1911 Congreso is much more akin to the radicalized Chicano Movimiento than the assimilationist strategies of most organizations for Mexican-Americans founded after 1911.18 What is interesting, though perhaps not surprising, is that Professor Limón fails to appreciate the striking incongruity of women’s participation in the 1911 Congreso (including Idar’s importance as a journalist) and the lack of women’s active and desired participation in the Movimiento of the sixties. His account of the Congreso is significant in its completeness yet lacks a critical appreciation of the marginalization of later Chicanas and the dreadful lack of expression from women in so-called “Chicano” manifestos, anthologies, and political writings. I am certain presently that the disparity is clear. The historical significance of these women from the border area is clear to scholars of Chicana literature with an eye to historical reconstruction of the genre; how important are they to the writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? There are several collections demonstrating this significance, including Chicana Voices, edited by the (then) National Association for Chicano Studies; Latina: Women’s Voices from the Borderlands, edited by Lillian Castillo-Speed; and Cuentos: Stories by Latinas, edited by Moraga, Alma Gomez, and Mariana Romo-Carmona. In an astonishing collection edited by Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, Infinite Divisions, the importance becomes even more obvious: aside from specifically writing to and about women such as Idar and even earlier writers such as Maria Ruiz de Burton and Sor Juana, the Chicanas in this anthology address the quotidian life and the methodologies women have had to use to negotiate life in a world less than encouraging of free expression. The significance of the everyday and the past is demonstrated in subsections reclaiming Malinche, La Llorona, and Adelita figures, painting in many cases these maligned icons as modern women facing the struggle of surviving each day. Writers such as Ana Castillo, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Cherrie Moraga comment on and develop more complex renderings of these metaphorical women, with poet Bernice Zamora perhaps coming closest to a succinct understanding of Chicana identity and self-knowledge for these women when she asserts at the end of her poem “So Not to Be Mottled,” “My divisions are infinite.”

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The “infinite divisions” of the title clearly delineate the many boundaries, borders, and lines of transgression and intersection Chicanas feel their lives exist in and through. This collection and others demonstrate as well that women in these spaces and intersections are more than able to deal with the incredible complexity of lives as mothers, lovers, wives, sisters, abuelas, comadres, and more—most often through what may sometimes seem to be the simple motions of the everyday. In the artful crafting of these stories and essays, Chicanas demonstrate not only the importance of the quotidian life, but the connections to the past that are made through books, newspapers, oral history, and in the learned domestic and personal skills of negotiation their foremothers learned from their own mothers. That infinite regression is possible for Chicana literature is for another paper and argument; here I demonstrate that the quotidian is real, tangible, and necessary for survival. What will be explored in this work is not only the people but the very real complexity of space which made the development of Limón’s “strong historical precedent” inevitable.

CHAPTER ONE: POLITICS OF PLACE: LAREDO AS CASE STUDY In the case of Laredo resident Leonor Villegas de Magnón and her friend and fellow writer Jovita Idar, the personal and political life in the abstract became action in the concrete, with both women closely involved in the Mexican Revolution as it affected the citizens of Laredo, Texas. In terms of simple geography alone, Laredo life was closely entwined with cross-border conflict during, before, and after the Revolution. When one examines the implications of living in a border area with so much crossing, physically and culturally, Laredo becomes a prime area for the study of border writing. The first chapter will explore the pre-Revolution history of Laredo, Texas and the site-specific complexities which gave rise to a wave of early Chicana expression and political activism during the Mexican Revolution itself. The fact that Laredo not only sits on the Texas (US)-Mexico border but is a border town on a river which delineates a national boundary gives rise to both practical and metaphorical possibilities for exploration. This chapter will explore the use of the river in the works I have chosen for this text (as both metaphor and plot device) as well as the real political and geographical complications of life in Revolution Laredo. Located on the Rio Grande in Texas, and the site in the early 20th century of a great number of mercantile ventures, Laredo was and is a classic border town. The streams of visitors and the porous nature of the international boundary represented by the river made for a town of impressive

Introduction

9

intricacy and striations. This porous (and economically important) border allowed over time for a complexly layered, international, and culturally varied site, producing a streak of independent thinking manifested in journals, art, and books of the time. Whether the multiple streams of different types or the economic independence of one of the only truly financially successful border towns of the early twentieth century made for the independence cannot be ascertained. However it occurred, the development of an independent strain in Laredo and the surrounding border area was not accidental. Laredo was, like many towns in Texas, a small settlement which was claimed for the site of a US Army fort that naturally led to an increase in the town’s size. In this chapter, the development of relations between American and “Mexican” leaders will be explored in order to understand how Laredo, for all its complex nature, managed to prevent major race rioting occurring in the 1890–1910 period. Indeed, the familiarity and facility of Laredo Mexican-American leaders male and female to negotiate politics and business with the Anglo settlers and military officers is in my analysis one of the reasons for the flourishing of Chicana expression and political activity in Laredo. Adding to the more tranquil nature of Laredo as compared to border area towns such as Rio Grande City and Brownsville was the importance of mercantilism. In the years surrounding the Mexican Revolution, unlike present calls for border “security,” residents were not as concerned with the cross-border traffic on the river or the International Bridges as they were about the US Army destroying business opportunities or buildings in minor skirmishes with Revolution forces. The community was very carefully constructed on a social and political scale, and unlike other areas perhaps less valuable to Texas/Mexico business, Laredo managed to negotiate well with American politicians and merchants to secure a relatively prosperous status as an international port of business. The establishment of the Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo after the imposition of the Rio Grande as the definitive border (instead of the larger community that was originally founded as Laredo by Spanish settlers) also speaks to the international and fundamental nature of border relations. These twin towns of the border offer a metaphorical and practical representation of a multifaceted borderized consciousness and reality in their history/ies, and in the cultural and social blending of people, thought, and lives. My contention in this chapter and this project is that Laredo/Nuevo Laredo (and borderland areas of similar complexity) is a site-specific place producing the possible for radical redefinition of “accepted” social, cultural, and gender roles—a space of potentialities.

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Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature

CHAPTER TWO: “DO THEY NOT REMEMBER THE BRAVE WOMEN?” Part of the expanding Recovering the US-Hispanic Literary Heritage series, the 1994 publication of Laredo activist Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel (La rebelde) marks the first time this narrative has been seen in its near completeness since first penned by Villegas in the period immediately following the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920. Edited by scholar Clara Lomas, this book is an outstanding and rare account of female active participation in the Revolution, as well as being an excellent example of Revolution biographical writing. A version of the text was first published in the Laredo (Texas) Times in March-June 1961 as a serial, and was lost until the early 1990s. The Rebel is significant for this work and for the expanding comprehension of early Chicana writing due not just to its rarity, but to the complexity of issues and expression Villegas provides in the narrative. Ostensibly autobiographical, The Rebel explores the physical and psychic dimension of border living, crossing, and the state of a border area in flux as a result of the Mexican Revolution. Weaving a semi-mythic biography of herself (“The Rebel” of the piece), Villegas structures the work in the manner of Mexican Revolutionary biographies of the time, simultaneously true and colored by a tendency of the genre to grand sentiment. When she begins the narrative with an account of her birth during a storm, as her house is invaded by soldiers looking for rebels, the impulse may be to dismiss the work as creative fiction (it is from this event that her father gives her the nickname “La Rebelde”), yet within the limits of the genre it is expected and accepted.19 Indeed, the work is a product of its time in terms of structure and style; where it transgresses boundaries of all types is in its subject material and presentation of women. The Rebel is not an obviously feminist text; indeed, except for its genre it is not an obvious text of any kind. However, the active participants in the book are almost all women, with the primary exception of Venustiano Carranza (eventual president of Mexico), and the action in the book is driven by women. Villegas herself seems to base her inevitability as an active Revolution participant and a “rebel” not solely on her father’s “renaming” of her at her birth, but also on the moment early in the narrative when her mother folds two flags, one American and one Mexican (Villegas was born in Mexico, her brother in Texas) and places them in a small box to preserve them both and to metaphorically link Leonor to both sides of the border. The

Introduction

11

meaning for Villegas seems to be that a border life, a life dependent and structured on both Mexican and American cultures is inevitable. For the majority of her life after marrying, Villegas did indeed move back and forth across the Laredo border to work in a number of capacities, most significantly as founder of the pro-Revolution nursing corps La Cruz Blanca (The White Cross). This chapter not only discusses Villegas’ work in its unique expression of life in Revolution Laredo, and its presentation of women as active participants in the conflict, but also the careful structuring of meaning and metaphor in the text that for the careful reader mitigates the hyperbole of the genre. While Villegas was not a professional writer, she was a highly educated, upper-class woman who nevertheless sided with and empathized with the “lower-class” Revolutionaries and peons, and her use of language and image in the text surpasses any sense of noblesse oblige; Villegas cared for and was concerned with the campesinos’ struggle for land and freedom, as well as very conscious of the white American impulse to see the Revolution (and Mexicans) as savage, backward, and dangerous. Her desire to provide an accurate description of the border situation to the American half of her audience resulted in several impressive and complex metaphorical cross-border tableaux. Directly addressed in this chapter is the well-written and careful description of Villegas in the middle of the International Bridge over the Rio Grande, a bridge dedicated upon its opening by her older brother. She meditates in the center of the bridge on her desire to bring cross-cultural understanding to Laredo between Americans and Mexicans, and of course for the resident Mexican-Americans. “Peace, peace, and only peace” Villegas thinks to herself as she crosses the International Bridge into Mexico, her thoughts provoked by the small marker on the bridge with the same sentiment. On the Mexican side she negotiates in Spanish that general’s consent to retreat, and on the return journey across the same bridge meets and speaks with the American commander of forces in Laredo in English.20 In a single scene Villegas has traversed border geography, border politics, and border society, all on the one trip back and forth across a single bridge over the river. Through an analysis of the river as metaphor (synecdoche is Claire Fox’ term in The Fence and the River) for international relations, women’s space and roles in the Revolution and turn of the century society, as well as the fluid concepts of identity in a border area, this chapter will delve deeply into Villegas’ own feelings of cross-border identity, as well as highlight the aspects of The Rebel which demonstrate an early Chicana consciencia in Laredo. This chapter will also explore the deconstruction

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of stereotypical female roles in the text, couched in the rhetoric of the period yet managing to depict the complexity of female identity and life in the area. In this respect, the text serves as an apt and rich introduction to the other women discussed in the dissertation, providing a historical and sociological cornerstone for the dissertation as a whole and Laredo Chicanisma in particular.

CHAPTER THREE: THE MOON AND THE UNFORTUNATE LOVER Known primarily as an Tejana educator and activist, Jovita González’ bestknown work of fiction is the semi-epic Caballero21. However, my work will center on the lesser-known Dew on the Thorn, particularly as it offers a clearer and more powerful example of Chicana aesthetics in its emphasis on the everyday as well as its presentation of several strong female presences in the text. Published in 1997 as part of the “Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Literary Heritage Project” and edited by José E. Limón, this near-pastoral novel recounts the hacienda life of the Olivares family, their friends, and the peones in the area. Set in the Texas-Mexico borderlands between present-day Laredo and Rio Grande City, Dew on the Thorn covers the years 1904 to approximately 1907, when rapid changes in culture, society, and politics brought by Anglo settlers were beginning to affect even the far western Texas boundary with Mexico. This text, partly influenced by González’ own family and childhood in Texas, shows a deep affinity for the author’s own academic specialty— Mexican folklore. Born in Texas in 1904, Jovita González’ ancestors had come to Nuevo Santander (the Spanish province from which came most of present day Webb County, Texas) with Jose de Escandón in the 1700s.22 Acquiring a teaching certificate in 1920, González first entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1921, returning to study folklore with esteemed Professor of English J. Frank Dobie (after receiving a BA in History at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio) in 1924. She received a Master’s Degree in History from Austin in 1930, writing her thesis Social Life in Webb, Starr, and Zapata Counties under the direction of Dr. Eugene C. Barker, and in that same year the Texas Folklore Society elected González president, a position she held for two years.23 Over her prolific writing career, Jovita González wrote dozens of articles, short tales, essays, two books, numerous presentation papers, and co-wrote an eight-volume Spanish textbook series for elementary

Introduction

13

students. She was most famous during her lifetime for her educational efforts in Corpus Christi, Texas with her husband Edmundo Mireles, but present recovery work by Chicana and Chicano scholars have revealed an astoundingly fertile body of work by González which attests to her longstanding interest in and championing of the border inhabitants, including Dew on the Thorn. Ostensibly a tale of the rico Olivares family, early settlers of the Laredo area who were given a royal land grant in 1764, Dew on the Thorn focuses most closely on the traditions and folklore of Texas Mexicans at the turn of the 20th century, as Anglo settlers were encroaching. More specifically, the work weaves folklore and folkways into the text to teach, scold, advise, and critique both the lower and upper classes of the border society (most often the upper class). In this way the narrative challenges strongly the overbearing, often cruel nature of the hacendados who refused to realize the border area was changing with the arrival of the Anglos. In addition, the folklore provides a method of castigating the upper-class’ treatment of the servant class, women, and Anglos. This blend of folklore, song, fiction, and commentary on actual social situations provides the critic with a wealth of material for analysis. The distinct blending allows present scholars to observe closely the methodology of the quotidian, writing and lives that are inherently bound up in the everyday, and therefore utilize it as the site of analysis. Working with Americo Paredes’ discussion of Mexican folkloric traditions, in this chapter I analyze the cultural commentary in the text in light of Paredes’ understanding of the importance of everyday life and the group dynamics which structure not only the narrative but the societal organization González is presenting as multifaceted and complex. Through her use of folktales, González replicates in the novel the teaching and advisory strategies inherent in Tejano folklore, an important aspect of Paredes’ work on this topic thus far in both With his Pistol in His Hand and Folklore of the Texas-Mexico Border. Ultimately, unlike The Rebel, Dew on the Thorn asks readers to accept and understand stories, songs, and folklore as not only valid methods of personal expression, but as themselves the source of critical analysis of social conditions. González, ever the folklorist, depends on the stories to tell the realities. Perhaps most important to an understanding of the complexity of a border reality, her rendering of the lives of the servant class through knowing (and sometimes biting) cultural critique indicates the importance of the everyday to a perceptive scholar as far back as the 1920s, when this text was first being written by a young Jovita González. That her life exhibits the kind of activist social and cultural tangent of other, more

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“public” Texas-Mexican women critical of repression and inequity, even as she left the study of folklore later, indicates Jovita González brought her early border concern and consciousness into the late half of the twentieth century, crossing timelines with the next subject of my project, the educator and writer Josephina Niggli. Both women shared not only an understanding of border complexities, but strove to present them to the public through the more easily understood means of tales, songs, and fictionalization of historical events. That both were teachers/educators to me seems to be an extension of their activism—a way of making practical their understanding of border consciousness.

CHAPTER IV: THE PEOPLE BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS: CROSSING BOUNDARIES WITH JOSEPHINA NIGGLI’S MEXICAN VILLAGE Known for her for her work as a dramatist and educator, Josephina Niggli has emerged as a significant early Chicana writer through her play Soldadera (1936) as well as her collection of short plays, Mexican Folk Plays (1976). Recognized in her lifetime for contributions to theater and colleges in North Carolina, Josephina Niggli’s position as one of the earliest Tejanas to have her work published by US presses and a forerunner of radical Chicanisma has led to critical appreciation of her art and to a reevaluation of her longer work Mexican Village (1945/1994). This work, a series of connected sections, is held together loosely through the story of young Anglo-Mexican Texan Bob Webster’s attempt to come to terms with his Mexican roots in the little border town of Hidalgo, Mexico. The tales weave in and out of Hidalgo, a fictional town the map of which is drawn for the readers in the book, moving among the residents with an intriguing flow that narratively presents the areas drawn on the map of the town; sections include “The River Road,” “The Street of the Three Crosses,” and “The Street of the Forgotten Angel.” Along with the spatial complexity of Niggli’s work, there arises a significant challenge for the Chicana critic of this text; as Maria HerreraSobek points out in her introduction to the 1994 edition, Both Niggli and her main protagonist Webster seek to cross cultural boundaries. We can see this in the author’s attempt to make accessible to American readers . . . a different culture—Mexico. In this sense we can explain her use of Mexican and gender stereotypes. [ . . . ] As an author she had to grapple with this conundrum: how to please her intended audience but not fall into ‘tourist picturesque’

Introduction

15

representations that Anglo American audiences expected of Mexican characters.24

Clearly, Niggli’s work involves the untangling and retangling of historical, cultural, and social strands, on a level of complexity only recently appreciated as Chicana critics have begun to lay out the latticework of intersecting Chicana concerns in literature: culture, gender, and society. This complexity—the negotiation of potentially reductive caricatures and deeply layered, even fractured more developed figures in her text makes Niggli’s work structurally at one with negotiations of Chicana border complexity in the latter half of the twentieth century. Additionally, her work prefigures in its clear intent to utilize stereotypes to rehabilitate the residents of the village as a whole and explain their lives to readers the later redefining and reevaluation of formerly reductive images for Chicanas: Mary, mother of Jesus, the reformed prostitute Mary Magdalene, and the virginal maid figure who becomes a married woman and long suffering-mother, among others. Born in 1910 in Mexico to a European immigrant from Texas and a Mexican resident of Irish, French, and German heritage, Josephina Niggli arrived in San Antonio, Texas at age three, her family fleeing from the violence of the Mexican Revolution. The family spent many years rootless, traveling about Texas and the southwest until their return to Mexico in 1920, only to leave again as more civil unrest broke out in 1925, at which time Niggli enrolled in the College of the Incarnate Word (now Incarnate Word University) in San Antonio.25 Niggli published her first work early, at 18, when her father subsidized her book of poetry titled Mexican Silhouettes (1931). While at Incarnate Word, Niggli refined her writing and was successful enough to have her desire to become a writer supported by her English department. After her graduation she attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a school and state she would become associated with for the rest of her life, studying playwriting and producing many short plays for the theatre group Carolina Playmakers. After her graduation, and after several national awards for poetry and playwriting, Niggli stayed on as a faculty member until moving to Western Carolina University, where she taught for 20 years. Her influence on early radio drama and the short play genre was considerable, and her work is still produced by theaters in the US. Her early travels and fragmented childhood experiences appeared to have made Niggli sympathetic to and understanding of the particularly fraught Mexican Revolution border area and its residents. Though her works do not all evidence a modern sensibility in terms of complexity and stereotypes, her ability to manifest complex characterization in spite of the

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general impulse in other American literatures to view Mexicans as backward presents Chicana critics with a book in Mexican Village that represents the unwieldy, deep, and thorny subjectivity of the borderlands. Were the experience of life in the borderlands at the turn of the twentieth century simple to explain, dozens of Chicanas would not have become invested in representing these lives, and certainly the works would have less of a feeling of complication and persistence in the face of daunting multiplicities. Along with her quite masterful structure and characterization, Niggli’s use of folklore, song, and varied voices of the village residents, as well as historical events, makes the text both wildly entertaining and very thoughtful. The people in the town range from quite wise to simple, yet because she has mastery over these various stylistic elements, her work is able to rise above those characters which appear more stereotypical than others. Many of the characters, including the outsider Bob Webster, use folklore and superstition to cope with the increasing complexities of border life. Niggli had no interest in sainting border residents—indeed, she saw much of her work, perhaps befitting a dramatist, as being about the presentations of real people to a real audience. Knowing that her audience would initially be Anglo Americans, some with experience with the border and some not, she strove to use all her skill as a dramatist to explain the greater idea of the real lives of the people. The quotidian in her text can appear simplistic, shallow, or perhaps reductive, yet the approach does not do a disservice to her intent of making the people of the border alive, real, and present. This is not to say contradictions do not appear to the modern critic; even in 1945, Niggli’s work could have been seen as quaint. However, and as a scholar and writer she was aware of this, and strove to make the work as complex as she could; the mapping of the text, the maintaining of Spanish language structural style, the presence of the biracial and bicultural Bob Webster, the use of cultural expression such as song, tale, and folkways, her references to historical events and political themes, and her exploration of border subjectivity all provide a careful reader with sufficient information to provoke thought and interest. In this way, she replicates the methods of the women Raymund Paredes found both “genteel” and “disturbing”; she presents the everyday to us in such a way that we begin to comprehend the very detailed and complex machinations we go through in our daily lives. Adding the complexities of the turn of the twentieth century border to the mix brings Josephina Niggli’s work into the category of sociocultural critique of the border area and creates a Chicana consciousness in the text, significant as well in that this is not represented overtly by a female character. Bob Webster does not

Introduction

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struggle inherently with gender—he does struggle as biracial, bicultural, and bilingual. Webster disappears often in the text, however, often to clear the stage for a complex female character, including the fascinating María de las Garzas. The enormity of the work and her layering of it as she attempts to explain the implications of living in a highly stratified area (politically, socially, and culturally) introduce concepts later Chicanas would use to try to present the area in which they lived as a space giving rise to fractured but potentially rehabilitative identities. Niggli’s work brings us full circle, from the 1911 La Liga Femenil Mexicanista and Villegas de Magnon’s struggle to present the complex lives of women of Laredo, through the use of folklore to present the changes of the border with the coming of the Anglo settlers, and into the children of the border experience and the country from which Texas was formed. Her text, set across the river in Mexico, allows us to perceive the mobility of a border consciousness, providing a way to comprehend the commonalities of Chicana writing from around the US—an interest in exploring subjectivity, a desire to redefine the everyday and too-often dismissed as a significant site of critique, and the interest in place as a catalyst for both identity and the comprehension of a fractured identity as a woman with a heritage of conquest, division, and redivision in many ways. In this way do Jovita González, Leonor Villegas de Magnon, and college professor, dramatist, and EuropeanMexican Josephina Niggli connect to the later efforts of Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Alma Robles, Sandra Cisneros, and Lorna Dee Cervantes.

CONCLUSION: CROSSING BACK In terms of the implications for Chicana literary analysis, it seems the farther we go back into the foundational thought of Chicanisma, into the period of history when a fractured subjectivity on the Texas-Mexico border might have arisen, as opposed to the wishful thinking of a practical and connected Chicana consciousness in Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz26, the more resemblance writing by women in the past bears to writing in the present. Bringing the work of early Chicana writers full circle and connecting them to the present Chicana literary criticism and projects is not as difficult as understanding the tattered subjectivity sometimes present in this writing. Discouraging and daunting as the handling of multiple subjectivities and marginalizations may appear, Chicanas continue to explore the history of bordered subjectivities and the manifestations of that history in culture and society, and they continue in areas as diverse as Chicago, Austin, New Mexico, and Colorado.

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Where the proliferation of subjectivities end for the Chicana writer I cannot attempt to answer—ultimately women of “infinite divisions” may provide an answer. Whether the women are from the Ireland/Northern Ireland border, India, Pakistan, a Native American reservation in the US, or Texas may then slightly less important as they are able to connect their postcolonial, diasporic or not, experiences. This section of my project will look forward to the potential of border residents and consciousness, through my own understanding of how one first “becomes” Chicana and develops Chicana consciousness. I explore the ramifications of uprooting a life to move into a space bearing little resemblance to “home”—in this case, my move from Texas to Iowa for graduate school. My own journey to Chicana scholar mirrors in multiple ways the slow journey into consciousness of Chicanas as a social group. However, as I note in my conclusion, instead of failing from an inability to adapt to change, I and other marginalized colleagues borrowed from our pasts and our understanding of everyday negotiations in life to survive and produce work that bears potential as cultural critique. This adaptive ability is something I discovered in my reading of Chicana literature from the 1960s, and discovered in the writing of the first half of the twentieth century. Imagine my surprise to discover in early writing women I would call my hermanas in the present. The work of those earliest Chicanas I discuss in this project flow naturally I now see into Moraga, Cervantes, and Zamora; the post-postmodern website and cultural meeting place www.chicanas.com; and inform analysis of the work from Indian women such as Meena Alexander and Bapsi Sidhwa, Irish women such as Nuala O’Faolain, and women writing from places of contest, struggle, and division. I would not make the reductive claim we are all “sisters” in the margins—however, I do claim that close analysis of the language marginalized women used in a space of striations and multiplicities may provide insight into other places, other women. Silence is no longer an option for the Chicana critic; the process of constructing a theory of Chicanisma has begun. Ultimately, however, the project is reclamatory and reconstructive; though much of the struggle Chicanas and other bordered, diasporic women write about is violent, antagonistic to women especially, and sometimes insidious in its persistence, my work in this project is to direct the reader outward, into an exploration of the everyday as a site of resistance, and into an examination of subjectivities and a life that is possible even as critics struggle to explain all the facets of a prism which is nearly impossible to look at twice in the same way. The reconstructive nature of the work here resides in the realities of fragmented subjects and

Introduction

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the potential of the progressively more unbordered world we live in. This project attempts to finally indicate that when subjectivities are multiple, fluid, and possibly in contention with everyday life or the space we inhabit, what women accomplish, though at times not recognized, is the revolutionary act of survival and the more radical act of writing through the prism of their identity.

Chapter One

Politics of Place: Laredo as Case Study

Laredo, Texas was a focal point for much of the radical journalism and writing in Texas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as for activism of several kinds. This chapter explores the town’s structure and social history to demonstrate the importance of place to the development of a border consciousness challenging inequity and racism in society. Leonor Villegas de Magnón describes Laredo as “the hotbed of the revolution” in her narrative The Rebel (78). A more apt place cannot be found to begin the search for a Chicana consciousness in writing from the border. The history of Laredo provides a background for the work of two early Chicanas discussed in this project: Leonor Villegas de Magnón and Jovita González. I posit that Laredo’s geographical position as a “border crossroads” and its blend of cultures, classes, and politics led to a rise in consciousness among many border residents, especially women, particularly as the nineteenth century came to an end. Laredo’s strategic position on the river is important in understanding how the town developed over the years when others failed, but more important is the manner in which the town grew and expanded—as a space of multiple contacts and striations. These striations go deeper than a class system, though indeed Laredo developed a social hierarchy in later years when commerce increased the class divide between los pobres and los ricos. Laredo is a case study of a place giving rise to a socially and politically progressive ethos, and an example of the persistently contentious yet oddly cooperative relationship between two countries The US-Texas border has never been the insurmountable obstacle proponents have wished for; however, it was far more porous in the early part of the twentieth century than it is today, and the lives of those in the border towns was a constant negotiation of multiple “rivers” of people 21

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and attitudes. This negotiation over a long period of slow contact and assimilation of Anglo-Texans and new immigrants, as well as proximity to Mexico, is what gives Laredo historically a powerful ability as a city to survive, and its residents a historical penchant for endurance as well as activism—contact led to assimilation as well as conflict, as in other areas of Texas. The proximity to Mexico and deep link to Mexicans living in the town of Nuevo Laredo across the border has also left Laredo with a strong Chicano/Mexicano ethos and identification, even while growing into an influential and prosperous Texas town on the Rio Grande. Laredo is linked not just by culture to Nuevo Laredo, the Mexican town “born” after the imposition of a national boundary by the US; it is also physically linked by several important bridges carrying commerce, culture, and people from one country to another, and blurring nationality for some residents as they negotiate a water border subject to change.

THE WATER BRIDGE: RIVERS OF IDENTITY At certain points in the history of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (the first social revolution of the twentieth century and the impetus for both activism and exploration of subjectivity and identity by many writers in Mexico and the US), the International Bridge/s at Laredo served as a site of transport and travel for American, Mexican, and Revolutionary forces, as well as being an invaluable site of commercial exchange and cultural commerce.1 Taking my cue from Claire Fox’s reading of the border as a synecdoche of the US and Mexico in The Fence and the River, I argue that the International Bridge at Laredo is a synecdoche of Mexicana/Chicana negotiation of the border in The Rebel and other border texts, a physical manifestation of the tenuous nature of border existence for those living in the region and for women in particular.2 To be sure, much has been made of the metaphorical use of water and rivers to represent women in mythology and literature; while there is not space here to fully develop that argument, I find it compelling nonetheless that the river between Mexico and Texas has been so often present as a background “character” in border literature by Texas women. The river represents not only the residents of the area and life, but also an entire area of hazy political and personal geography—at what point in the river does one “enter” either the US or Mexico, or the US and Mexican states of being? The economic (not to mention social) importance of present-day Laredo international bridges over this synecdoche cannot be overstated; each year hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of goods move over the bridges. The present “International Bridge I” (Gateway to the Americas) has the

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most foot traffic—this bridge connects downtown Laredo to downtown Nuevo Laredo, while “International Bridge II” (Lincoln Juarez) connects Nuevo Laredo to US Interstate 35 directly. In addition, the Columbia Solidarity Bridge and World Trade Bridge move commercial and non-commercial vehicular traffic between the US and Mexico.3 The Texas-Mexico border area remains at present the most frequently crossed international border in the world—the history of the “border crossers,” “migrant workers,” “braceros,” and “wetbacks” is long and complex. While the first ferry across the river was established by the enterprising Tomás Sanchez in 1755, the first bridge over the river was a temporary railroad bridge, built in 1881. The first “International Bridge,” named for then-Mexican president Porfirio Diaz, was a steel and wood structure built in 1889 for foot and wagon traffic.4 The construction of bridges over the river from Laredo into Nuevo Laredo (and indeed in an example from El Paso) also led more than once to demonstrations of border fluidity; upon completion of Laredo’s streetcar system in 1889, the first electric car system west of the Mississippi, the line stretched through downtown Laredo and crossed into Nuevo Laredo and returned, becoming therefore the first international streetcar system in the world.5 No special tickets or fees were required for the border crossing. During the revolutionary period, an American Army lieutenant led a squad of guards to duty on one of the international bridges in El Paso via streetcar, not realizing that the car would pass into Mexican territory during the trip—the “invasion by streetcar” was embarrassing for the Americans but nevertheless, due to revolutionary nervousness, a serious event and one indicative of the border’s haziness.6 One can better mark national(istic) boundaries on something not liquid; at present the geographic boundary between Mexico and the United States is clearly delineated on Laredo’s bridges, a formal painted (or brass-engraved) line possible only because a bridge provides a surface for demarcation. These markers of nations did not exist on the first bridges, as the boundary was subject to contentious debate—the Rio Grande/Río Bravo has changed course several times over the past two centuries. In addition, residents did not particularly care about the “official” border—the river was simply a natural obstacle, easily forded, ferried over, and with the addition of bridges, walked over. Until the post-Revolutionary period, enforcement of the border was almost nonexistent, and for good reason: no one in the area cared to enforce legal boundaries when life and economies were still linked closely with Mexico. The imposition of legal limits represented for Laredo/Nuevo Laredo residents an example of the false power of the distant governments of

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Austin and Mexico City, neither willing nor capable for many years of controlling the border area. As a response to the false power of the Mexican and American governments, we are presented the telling scene in Villegas de Magnón’s memoir of The Rebel in transit on International Bridge, which her brother had helped to open. In brief, while negotiating with American and Mexican officers during the Revolution, The Rebel pauses to consider the words on a plaque set in the bridge: “Peace, Peace, and Only Peace.” She stops in the middle of the bridge, metaphorically between two worlds, while she ponders the two loyalties she is negotiating for the safety of both, that neither be hurt unnecessarily. Villegas de Magnón is neither stopped nor questioned as she enters and leaves national space—she is simply crossing through a space which, while representing a place of contact and division of two countries, is home for her and the residents of the Laredos. This “split” or rupture of politics and geography as well as governmental regulation may be read as a move to reclaim natural boundaries for the residents of the border area. As several peasant characters point out in texts by Niggli and Villegas de Magnón, those who have always lived in the area regard the arbitrary imposition of national borders preposterous: Pancho in The Rebel traverses the river almost daily after the death of his wife, finally daringly effecting a rescue of trapped revolutionaries and bringing them over to Laredo, flaunting (defying?) the idea of borders in a rather dramatic way.7 Such ideas persist in Chicana/o literature to this day—the people “between two worlds,” at home in both yet not necessarily welcome completely in either. For women, the divide becomes at least threefold: Mexican, American, woman. It has been so at least since the coming of the Anglo settlers in the early 1800s that effectively split countries, cultures, and in the case of Laredo, even towns.

LAREDO BEFORE THE DIVIDE: HISTORY AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT Founded in 1755 in what is present-day Webb County, Laredo was established as an outpost by Tomás Sánchez de la Barrera y Garza, with permission from José de Escandón. Escandón had been given authority to settle the province of Nuevo Santander by Spain, primarily to prevent French influence from spreading during the European powers’ struggle for land. The area was home to Coahuiltecan Indians, who traded with the outpost once it had been established, and its proximity to two fords over the Rio Grande led to popularity with travelers.8

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Figure 1. Laredo Border Area9

In the late 1700s Laredo’s first public school was founded, as the villa grew steadily, and a military garrison was stationed at Laredo in 1775, prefiguring the later American presence at Camp Crawford (later Fort McIntosh). Indian raids on Laredo’s primary economic asset—livestock—in the early 1800s ensured the garrison would remain and be active, and Laredo’s nearly singular loyalty to the Spanish crown during the Mexican War of Independence later in the century meant a military presence would be permanent, a situation that during the Mexican Revolution would have social and national consequences on the United States’ relatively new border. Laredo’s political and social organization had been predicated on the desire by Escandón to prevent any one group from completely taking power—his division of the area into fifteen leagues held in common worked to meld the social fabric together, even if in later years the political climate became fraught with conflicts between Anglos and Tejanos. Escandón seems to have anticipated the difficulties inherent in governing a space so far from any controlling government’s influence. Perhaps more pertinent

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to Laredo’s cohesion was the distance of the settlement from the center of Spanish power in Mexico and the resultant need for independent, strong settlers to live in a frontier outpost. Gilberto Hinojosa writes of Laredo’s early development, “Laredoans acted primarily out of concern for their own best interests and only secondarily, if at all, to advance imperial or national goals.”10 Laredo initially developed as a communal system devised by Escandón for survival, and interestingly the growth of the town seemed to mirror the early attempt to provide security for all, regardless of Spanish goals for the province of Nuevo Santander. Therefore, that Laredo’s city council was primarily royalist (particularly the landowners dependent on the Laredo presidio) did not seem to affect the social temperature—most layers of society thrived in the busy border town.11 This tacit (perhaps complacent?) stability served the town well during mid-1800s hostilities between Mexicans and Anglo-Texans. The 1836 Texas War for Independence from Mexico brought great changes to most of the state. Though Laredo had been a significant site for the army of General Antonio López de Santa Anna, the area surrounding Laredo remained relatively tranquil—the official government of the Republic of Texas was not particularly concerned with its extreme Western border, concentrating instead on the development of the central regions farther from Mexico. As a result, most of the citizens of Laredo still identified as Mexican citizens, a situation which in my estimation led to an acute sense of loyalty to Mexicans on whatever side of the border, if not to Mexico’s central government.12 The Texas War, though short-lived, had an influence far beyond its brief duration. Anti-Mexican sentiment manifested itself all over the new republic, leaving many Texas-Mexicans bitter and in some cases dispossessed. The general situation was primed for Tejano retaliatory acts for the “theft” of land. The year 1840 saw the establishment of Laredo as the capital of the short-lived Republic of the Rio Grande. While Laredo was and remains an influential and important city, its distance from both successive government centers (Mexico City and San Antonio/Austin) and the consequent neglect by the central government power of Laredo’s needs as a rapidly growing town led to the landowners of the area rising in revolt in 1838, with the Republic established two years later. Though Laredo was then technically a city of the Republic of Texas, the revolt was put down by federal troops from Mexico. It was not the first nor last time Mexican troops would be moving in and out of the fluid border space around the Rio Grande. The question of Laredo and Laredoans’ national identity—a city in Texas yet manipulated by forces on both sides of the border—seems to

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have been an ill-defined one. Books and articles from the area and even from New York papers (The Times, The Forum) provide a glimpse at an Anglo point of view in which the area, if populated by “Mexicans” however they are defined by the writer, cannot be loyal to the United States. The question of loyalty would come up again and again for Tejana/os over the ensuing years. The town existed in this politically liminal space until the beginning of the Mexican War, when the newly established State of Texas claimed a modicum of jurisdiction in March 1846 with the raising of the United States flag over Laredo, a garrison of American soldiers arriving in the town in November. The defeat of Mexico in the war led in 1848 to the establishment definitively of the Rio Grande as the international border with the United States, bisecting Laredo politically as well as geographically. The Mexican town of Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas was founded by Laredo citizens who did not want to be “instant Americans.” The two towns, like the border towns of El Paso and Cuidad Juarez, are closely linked, both dependent on the other and in many cases in Laredo, both sides connected by family bonds and businesses. Neither Laredo nor Nuevo Laredo could exist as they do at present without the other, but unlike other border towns in Texas, the two were once one, a history which gave rise after 1848 to a consciousness of political machinations imposed by decentralized governments that led to a long established community being summarily cut in half. What this did to the town socially as well as politically is an issue still being explored, particularly through literary analysis, and perhaps can be informed by the analyses of the Indian subcontinent’s partition into Pakistan and India—another wrenching, albeit larger, political division. As evidenced in writing from the area, including essays in newspapers and The Rebel, while Laredoans on both sides of the Rio Grande resented the imposition of a political line, they considered themselves residents of the same border community they had always been, an independent and growing town.

THE PERSONAL AND POLITICAL: RACE AND ETHNIC ISSUES IN LAREDO The economic significance and power of Laredo as a border crossing and international market was given a further boost by the arrival in 1879 and 1881 of two railroads: the Texas Mexican from Corpus Christi and the International and Great Northern connection from San Antonio. The Rio Grande and Pecos Railway was finished in 1882, with the arrival of the

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Mexican National railroad in 1887 completing Laredo’s trading circuit. The arrival of the railroads had a profound effect on the town, bringing with it not merely commerce but a huge influx of Anglo Americans and Anglo-Texans. Particularly on the border of Mexico, Texas at the turn of the twentieth century was a peculiarly political arena with cultural forces in a constant state of flux. Texas had achieved “independence” from Mexico only in 1836, only become a member of the Union in 1845. The Texas Republic had been thrown open to Anglo settlers by Sam Houston, and the prospect of open land (particularly after the Mexican-American War of 1846–48) was hard to resist for easterners. East Texas was inundated quickly, and as the state settled into its particular status as a republic the settlers moved westward. Many settled in Bexar and Goliad counties, and other travelers passed through these areas on their way to California during the gold rush of 1849.13 As has been noted by scholar Armando De León, Anglos entering Texas generally had very little foreknowledge of what they were to encounter: [In] the 1840s and 1850s, the greatest contact between the two peoples occurred and therefore the opportunity presented itself for comparison of civilization. . . . Hence, in the period between 1836 and 1860, white settlers and travelers were having the first significant face-to-face contact with Mexicans. It was during this time that they elaborated most precisely the distinctions between Mexicans and themselves. (De León 14)

As De León further points out, many of the settlers (including followers of legendary Kentuckian David Crockett) arrived from southern states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, bringing with them a perception of race relations born out of a plantation-slave economy which became more problematic and pronounced immediately prior to the American Civil War14 , something which influenced negatively the relations with TexasMexicans. A shift in border identity began to occur, with Texas-Mexicans who began to lose land and rights to the new Anglo-Americans reevaluating their own cultural values. Jovita González in Dew on the Thorn has several characters musing on the disrespect and racism shown by many new settlers in the region. Though not all were by any means unilaterally racist or violent, the recent Civil War “loss” experienced by the Anglo-Americans appears to have made them more willing to simply force long-time residents from the area, in many cases not even bothering with pseudo-legalities.15 The writing of Texan Gilbert D. Kingsbury in the early 1860s perhaps most succinctly sums up attitudes toward “greasers” in the last half

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of the nineteenth century, the period immediately preceding the Mexican revolution and Villegas de Magnón’s book: “These degraded creatures are mere pilferers, scavengers and vagabonds downright barbarians but a single remove above the Digger Indians . . . a complete pest to humanity.”16 Villegas de Magnón comments in The Rebel on this dismissive attitude toward Tejanos and Tejanas and on how the generalized served usefully as a device to subvert US governmental intervention in the Revolution: To the American soldiers they all looked alike, these natives of Laredo and the [hospitalized] Mexican soldiers [in Laredo]. So the hospital traded a milkman or two who came to deliver cans of milk for a soldier or two, sending them out past the guards. It was hours before the escape was discovered. (Villegas de Magnón 102)

As mentioned previously, the development of Laredo border sentiment, identity, and political awareness manifested itself in a proliferation of newspapers from 1890. Much of the debate about national identity and Anglo-American encroachment and influence took place in the editorial pages of local papers, and during the more violent periods of border history the debate moved to the front page. The climate of the time can be tracked in the papers from the period, and the information gleaned from the pages indicates a place of intense ideological and social conflict. Several editorials found in local papers, notably La Crónica, chronicle the border racial tension throughout the early twentieth century. In 1910–11, La Crónica ran many headlines about race or race conflict: “La Cuestión de Razas en Texas” (“The question of race in Texas”), Aug 6 1910; “Barbarismos” (“Barbaric acts”), Nov 12, 1910; “El Antagonismo de Razas es Fatal” (“Race antagonism is fatal”), Nov 19, 1910; “La Prensa de Mexico y de Texas se Interesa porel (sic) Bienestar de los Mexicanos en este Pais” (“The Mexican and Texan press is interested in the well-being of Mexicans in this country”), Jan 12, 1911; “Cobarde, Infame e Inhumano Lynchamiento de un Jovencito Mexicano en Thorndale, Milam Co., Texas” (“Cowardly, Infamous, and Inhuman Lynching of a Mexican youth in Thorndale, Milam Co., Texas”), June 29; and “Por La Raza” (“For the race”), Aug 10, 1911. Many of these articles detail the florid violence Texas-Mexicans and Mexican citizens experienced, particularly the 1910 and 1911 articles “Barbarismos” and “Lynchamiento.”17 The violence was such that even more mainstream papers such as the San Antonio ExpressNews, San Antonio Light, and Laredo Times all reported on the problem.18 The violence did not lessen as the century went on—new settlers and innovations in communications and transportation brought more conflict.

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The gradual move across Texas by Anglo settlers finally reached the border town of Laredo in earnest after the American Civil War. Though a Confederate state, Texas was less affected by Radical Reconstruction than many parts of the South; indeed, the great size of the state alone made it possible for ex-Confederates to move west and be lost in the mix of settlers with no fear of retribution. Additionally, the Civil War in the United States coincided in Texas with the end of the first wave of the industrial revolution, including the start of range fencing, and the rise of what was perhaps the first great proletarian popular revolt in Texas’ statehood: Juan Cortina’s revolt. Nearly mythic in stature in Texas history, the insurgent movement led by Tejano Juan Cortina in 1859 arose from the dangerous and unequal situations Tejanos in the new American state often found themselves in. That the immediate result of the “revolt” was the increase in hostilities against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans is not surprising. The event began in July 1859 after Cortina shot the sheriff of the border town of Brownsville, Texas in response to an ethnic slur. He retreated to his mother’s ranch nearby and from there was able to raid Brownsville to free prisoners and issue several proclamations excoriating the newly “democratic” Texas’ treatment of Mexicans and Tejanos in what was once their own land. He was not driven into Mexico until December of 1859. Cortina’s “revolt” was only the first in a line of movements by people pushed to their limits by a social system which tried in licit and illicit ways to deny property, social, and cultural enfranchisement to legal citizens. Songs about Cortina’s exploits persist to this day along the border region, as songs about the turn-of-the-century Gregorio Cortez persist, preserving a cultural history still denied in canonical Texas history texts. The Nueces Strip, that narrow area of Texas between the Rio Grande and the Nueces river in Western Texas, was the site of many more clashes and rebellions.19 The years 1870–1890 were particularly violent. The Texas Rangers parapolice force, which as a group had been disbanded during Radical Reconstruction, were reestablished in 1874.20 The Rangers, not any more “respectable” than they had been before their disbanding, carried out a reign of terror all through Texas, with their main concentration along the Nueces Strip and the border area. Lynchings and illegal shootings were common. The resulting violence along the border led to incidents such as the lynching of Mexicans found within close radius of a crime committed against a white, and fabricated stories disseminated by papers such as the San Antonio Express and Corpus Christi Weekly Caller.21 Laredo itself, though so far from the violent flash points of Austin and San Antonio during the 1870s and 1880s, nevertheless exploded in violence

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in 1886, following an election between competing political factions in the city.22 The area, so intimate with Mexico, was politically charged not just with local politics but also with the implications of the beginning of the “Porfiriato” in 1884, the rise of Porfirio Diaz to power after a brief respite from Mexican politics. So much political influence being traded across the border and in the Laredo area charged the local election with great significance, as each side in the political riot was determined to win power over Laredo’s increasingly important government, and thereby affect international politics. The Laredo violence of 1886, though small in comparison with other events in the area, inspired great fear in Anglos both in and outside the area. Though troops from local Fort McIntosh quelled the riot with little trouble, military and civilian reports of the incident during the riot alarmed the governor of Texas, who sent a train full of militia and Rangers to quell the already-spent riot.23 Anglos in the area were very aware of their relatively low numbers along the border, and incidents such as the Laredo riot and the later and much more violent Rio Grande City riot of 1888 made whites both extremely fearful and extremely violent in their response to perceived threats. An example of Anglo reprisals may be found in a New York Times article about violence on the border: the reporter found that during violence in the latter half of 1877, more than a dozen whites had been killed while over one hundred Mexicans had been hanged or shot by Anglos.24 Violent incidents were written about extensively in border papers, including by Jovita Idar in the Laredo newspaper La Crónica.25 Laredo’s significance as a site of border politics and culture was further developed in the years immediately prior to the twentieth century, when the United States was about to enter the first governmentally sponsored period of modern immigration control. The anti-Díaz uprising of 1892 led by journalist and editor Catarino Garza established the political climate of the border area as both unpredictable and volatile, as well as the significant impact journals were to have in Laredo politics. Garza’s abortive attempts to overthrow Díaz from a border base in Texas led to Anglo worries about Tejanos loyalty and patriotism, and more particularly led to the worry that instability in Mexico under Díaz would spill over into Texas. While the Díaz overthrow did not occur before the Mexican Revolution, the constant pressure of anti-Díaz revoltosos both inside and outside Mexico was occupying Anglo minds in Texas and elsewhere in the country. Events to come would have many in the United States thinking more than ever about Mexican (and other) immigration, international relations, and the “dangers” of foreign influence in America. The assassination of American President McKinley in 1901, coming precisely at the beginning of a new century filled with promise, resulted in a rise of pro-American nativist sentiment and the

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setting in motion of the first national immigration law to investigate the political thoughts of aliens. The result of the 1903 Immigration Act for the residents of the border area of Texas was not immediately understood nor felt. The first Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to feel the results of rising nativism and political suspicion were those labeled revoltosos by the Mexican press. Members of this community of educated anarchists, socialists, journalists, and progressives included figures that greatly affected incidents reported in Villegas de Magnón’s book, such as Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magón, Juan Sarabia, Praxedis Guerrero, and Antonio I. Villarreal, many of whom wrote or were written about in the progressive border journals of the period. The first and foremost tool of the revoltosos in the United States, particularly in the Laredo and San Antonio areas, was the newspaper. Research has uncovered more than 170 Spanish-language newspapers in the Southwest, including more than a dozen in Laredo and San Antonio alone, including the significant and influential La Crónica, a journal whose influence is still being written about today, and whose writers are among those now considered early Chicana/o activists.

MEDIA AND MEDIATION: THE DEVELOPMENT AND RADICALISM OF BORDER PAPERS, 1881–1920 Coinciding with the end of the nineteenth century was the rise of a startling surge in Laredo intellectual life as represented in serials. The most

Figure 2. La Crónica masthead, 1910

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successful serial at the turn of the century in the area was the Laredo Times, founded in 1881 and still in existence. The Times, while honest and usually relevant in its reportage, as an establishment journal did not always fulfill a need in Laredo during the revolutionary period—the need for open, often antiestablishment, debate and coverage of current events by local writers with a revolutionary ethos.26 This role was filled in Laredo by the Idar family’s La Crónica. Established in the 1890s with Nicasio Idar (1855–1914) as editor, La Crónica was the voice of Texas-Mexican Laredo, notes Laredo scholar Gilberto Hinojosa.27 Like many other papers in the region, including both Spanish- and English-language, the journal also afforded the opportunity for poets and essayists to gain an audience, running a poetry column and frequent guest editorials, often by a member of the Idar family. Nicasio Idar later started two more papers to serve the Spanish readership of Laredo, cementing his reputation as an influential journalist and concerned member of the community, a concern three of his children, Clemente, Eduardo, and Jovita Idar, shared.28 Extant copies of the paper will attest to its revolutionary ideology, but perhaps more important as a barometer of its influence and representation of Texas Mexicans is the large part the paper and the Idar family played in establishing a watershed Laredo event: the Primer Congreso Mexicanista of 1911. This historic meeting, September 14–22, brought together numerous members of established Laredo and Texan business and society. La Crónica invited Texas journalists and all Mexican consuls in the state, members of the benevolent Orden Caballeros de Honor and mutualistas as well as other social lodges, issued specific invitation to women in the region, and provided free advertisement for the meeting.29 In effect, the organizers wished for all Texas Mexicans of whatever social or political standing to have a voice in what they knew to be a significant organizing event in Texas Mexican history.30 In a large article under the aegis of the Caballeros de Honor in the February 2, 1911 issue of La Crónica, Nicasio Idar called for a meeting, with the stated intent of discussing (among other items) school discrimination; the need for community-controlled schools with Mexican teachers; the consular system; protecting Mexican lives and interests in Texas; the need to retain land owned by Tejanos; and organizing what would become the Primer Congreso.31 As the year went on the specifics became clearer, and the call became wide—as noted above, the Idars wanted the meeting to be as representative of Tejanos and Mexicanos as possible, including women who were targeted in a specific ad in the September 14, 1911 issue of La Crónica:

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Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature TO THE MEXICAN WOMEN OF BOTH LAREDOS The Mexican Congress has the honor of respectfully inviting the fair sex of our two beautiful cities to our meeting. . . . 32

More advertisements were printed for the meetings in the paper throughout the year, several encouraging all Mexicans in both Laredos to participate— the democratic ideal of this event is obvious. The Congreso, though significant in its day, was forgotten until José Limón published a history of the event in Aztlán in 1974—as he notes, the very idea of political consciousness manifesting itself before the 1960s Chicano Movimiento seemed ludicrous to scholars of Chicanismo. Limón quotes Alfredo Cuéllar: Until recently no Mexican-American had tried to define the problems of the community in any terms except those of assimilation. It is precisely these ideas of assimilation and social “adjustment” that the Chicano militant rejects. . . . It is interesting to note that is was not until the 1960s that the Chicano leaders emerged to question some of the oldest and most fundamental assumptions of Mexicans in American society. (Limón 86)

Scholarship since the 1970s has revealed many examples of “questioning” by Mexican-Americans, as Limón notes in his discussion of the Congreso: “In the present study I will argue that this early congress and its social milieu anticipate many of the major themes that define the supposedly new ideology of Chicanismo” (86, emphasis mine). That Limón noted the importance of the social climate of Laredo is pertinent to the discussion of the Congreso as well as the women writers in the area. Ultimately the number in attendance at the Congreso may have numbered over 200, including representatives from twenty-four Caballeros de Honor lodges throughout Texas.33 The reach of the Idars was obvious, as several participants came from outside the border area, traveling to Laredo for this unique opportunity to participate in a momentous event. The August 24 issue of La Crónica detailed “Who we are and what we propose” clearly delineating the event’s audience and intent: The Congreso Mexicanista will be the center of protection of all Mexicans in Texas, through demanding justice when necessary and appealing to all who wish to escape the viciousness of the most powerful.

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Only Mexican-Texans and Mexican citizens resident in Texas will have access to the Congreso Mexicanista.34

With monies donated by Laredo Texas-Mexican businesses, ads placed in several border area papers, and good attendance (“Un gran multitud,” La Crónica described it), the Primer Congreso was considered a successful endeavor, due in part to the social climate of Laredo: “The Texas-Mexican influence in its political, social and cultural life provided a supportive context that would have been extremely difficult to obtain elsewhere in 1911. . . .”35 Organized as a educational as well as inspirational event, the Congreso mixed music and oratory with workshops or discussion groups. Dr. Limón’s article describes in detail the several points of discussion during the Congreso, including legal injustices and the role of Texas-Mexican women in organizing and advocating for Mexicans in the state. From the Congreso, Jovita Idar and others established La Liga Femenil Mexicanista, a women’s group comprised primarily of teachers, which immediately set to work providing for the free education of Mexican children who could not afford to attend Laredo’s schools.36 The men of the Congreso, including Nicasio Idar, who had served as vice-president of the event, established a group after the meeting as well. La Gran Liga Mexicanista was established as a statewide organization with individual chapters, to “carry out culture and moral instruction among its members; protect its members when treated unjustly by the authorities; create a fund for the organization; and prevent the exclusion of Mexican children from Anglo-American schools.”37 The motto of the group, as was the motto of the Liga Femenil, was “Por la Raza y Para la Raza” (For the Race and To the Race), reflecting the organization’s belief in education and self-advocacy for Tejanos. Indeed, what has struck different authors and critics about these early Chicano groups is the interest in self-advocating and self-help, an important aspect of later Chicanisma—it appears that the activists of 1911 did not expect assistance to come from outside of la Raza. Clearly, the connections between this early twentieth century event and later Chicana/o activism are strong: The particularly firm and unique ideological parallels between the Congreso and the contemporary period are to be found in their mutual interest in cultural retention and a rejection of assimilation, the rights of women and political unification. . . . [and a commitment] to the teaching of the Spanish language and of Mexican history and culture.

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Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature [ . . . ]Similarly today’s activist Chicanas can find strong historical precedent for their work in the activity of the Congreso women and La Liga Femenil Mexicanista. (Limón 99)

Though the concrete effects of the Congreso are uncertain (neither La Gran Liga nor La Liga Femenil appear to have lasted very long), certainly its existence attests to a Chicana/o consciencia in Laredo, fomented by the “social milieu” and the journalistic radicalism of La Crónica and other papers. Limón affirms the event’s Chicana/o nature, and calls for a reevaluation of the pre-1921 period, formerly considered apolitical. The direct impact of the Congreso as a whole may have been limited, but the disparate parts that gave it shape continued to advocate and work for full TexasMexican social enfranchisement, including the Idars, the mutualistas such as the Orden de Caballeros de Honor, and the teachers of the border area, several of whom later joined Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s Cruz Blanca. Further research will likely shed more light on more activist tendencies in Laredo and elsewhere in Texas. The prevalence of newspapers on the border (and their activism) in Texas shatters the myth of an illiterate, uneducated, and uniformed populace. While not all residents were able to read, the existence of so many Spanish- and English-language papers on the border contributed through indirect means to the mass understanding of the political climate: cartoons and oral readings of newspaper stories were methods of spreading the word.38 In addition, the barbed and incisive editorial tone of the reporting and graphic design indicates the editors thought it their duty to clearly present in the most direct way possible the issues at hand. Articles and asides in newspapers were a method of cultural critique at large, while essays and poems provided a creative method of criticism. Nor were the critiques limited to male writers of the area: Jovita Idar, one of the most prolific contributors to La Crónica, who later took over editorial responsibilities, wrote frequently in several papers under the pseudonym “A.V. Negra” (phonetically in Spanish, “Black Bird”) to sharply condemn oppression of all types. Poetry was also quite radical for the period, including that of “La Musa Tejana,” Sara Estela Ramírez. Border journalism was far from being a male-only endeavor; many women published or edited newspapers during the 1900–1920 period of border history, including Sara Estela Ramírez, Jovita Idar, and Andrea and Teresa Villarreal.39 Details of some of the women journalists’ work are sketchy as a result of lost work, yet enough remains to make an excellent argument for their revolutionary Chicana ethos.40

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Many of these papers exist only in parts, including the highly influential and widely read La Crónica. What is gleaned from the extant copies, as Clara Lomas notes in her introduction to The Rebel, is that the papers came about from women’s reactions to “little support but much ridicule from the [Mexican] press” and the climate for women on the border socially and politically: Although few women in the borderlands had the cultural capital required to express themselves in writing, those who did were able to create an alternative means to do so. . . . Villegas de Magnón was one of those well-educated schoolteachers of the border region whose activism not only effected [sic] the lives of many other women of various classes on both sides of the international border but . . . also contributed to the erasure of the imaginary border line and its intruding socially imposed boundaries. (Villegas de Magnón xiii, emphasis mine)

Though scholars may at first be astonished that powerful narratives of, by, and for women have been silenced, a close look at the publishing history of Villegas de Magnón’s work and others’ will reveal some of the blocks. Border journals served as an instrument for voices suppressed in the greater society of the Texas-Mexico border, and were important tools in the development of Chicana consciencia. While English-language journals were more widely read in the Anglo-Texan nexes of power (San Antonio and Austin), the Spanish-language journals of the revolutionary period served to educate the population across classes, and provided a ready (more ready than English-language publications) podium and effective organizing tool for revoltosos and their sympathizers in a fluid and fraught border space. This rare combination of geography, history, politics, and activism that is Laredo, Texas, is clearly an influence on the women writing from this area. The confluence of intellectual, political, and social streams at the border town was given a strong spark by the Mexican Revolution, but as indicated in journals of the time, turn of the twentieth century Laredoans were politically and culturally aware of their standing in American society as Texas-Mexicans, and willing to debate and excoriate against injustice and racism. The town serves as a vivid backdrop to the unique story of Leonor Villegas de Magnón and the Mexican Revolution in Laredo—The Rebel. This text, only recently published in book form, manifests clearly and completely the confluence of multiple social, intellectual, and political streams in the biography of a single woman and her participation in the revolution on both sides of the river—a ambos lados.

Chapter Two

“Do they not remember the brave women?”: Rethinking/Rewriting Border Women in Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel

En las chozas, en los templos, en los palacios, en los campos de batalla, pides esa limosna [de amistad sincera] y nada encuentras, ¿y por que? ¿Tan solo por el delito de ser mujer? —”Soy una triste peregrina,” Leonor Villegas de Magnón1

The focus of this chapter will be on the Mexican Revolution memoir of Leonor Villegas de Magnón, The Rebel, edited by Clara Lomas and part of the Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Literary Heritage Series published by Arte Público Press. I will use the memoir to establish an early Chicana consciousness in literature as well as to further establish the veracity of the claim that a radical tradition in literature by women of Mexican ancestry on the Texas-Mexico border exists from the beginning of the twentieth century in a definite and Chicana form. Here I do not merely connect this work to feminist impulses in the nineteenth century, but explore the definitive establishment of a consciousness arising from the legacy of a non-diasporic postcolonial condition of females in the space of the Texas-Mexico border area. I want to establish, as others have seemed to want to do2, that the idea of Chicana is not merely a 1960s conceptualization, that the impulses and framework for feminist thought on this matter came from earlier women writers, and I want to draw greater attention to the presence of these radical moves in literature often dismissed by critics, including novels and essays that concern themselves with the rhetoric and experience of the everyday. 39

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This text by Villegas de Magnón, however, is not as concerned with the everyday life as is commonly represented, but rather redefines the “everyday” in a period of extreme conflict and risk for all border residents. What the everyday becomes, in The Rebel, is rather unordinary, to say the least. In the case of Villegas de Magnón, I claim that the book in its narrative presents the development of a Chicana consciousness, particularly in its attention to the real impact women had on the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920.3 I find the book an interesting starting place for such a discussion, as not only does it cover the turn of the century, but also a period fraught with social, cultural, political, and ethnic conflict.

THE REBEL WAS A GIRL: CONSTRUCTING A LIFE Born in 1876 in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas and raised in the Texas-Mexico border area until sent to boarding school in San Antonio in 1882, Leonor Villegas was a child of a certain amount of privilege. Her father Joaquín, a native of Spain, was a well-to-do rancher and merchant who married a daughter of a prominent Matamoros, Mexico family, Valerianna Rubio, with whom he had four children: Leopoldo, Leonor, Lorenzo, and Lina. The family settled in the Laredo border area on Rancho San Francisco and grew to a considerable prosperity, with several servants and vaqueros working for them. Two of the servants, Pancho and his wife Julia, are prominent figures in the narrative and their importance is explored in greater detail later in this chapter. The first two Villegas children were born on opposite sides of the Mexican/Texas border—Leopoldo in 1875 in Corpus Christi, Texas, and Leonor the next year in Mexico, a fact not lost on the Rebel as she narrates her life: While [Don Joaquín] was walking about the place, his thoughts were filled with scenes from the year. He remembered that just one year before, his first son had been born in Corpus Christi. . . .”My son born on American soil. My daughter in Mexican territory, and I, a Spanish subject. Who will be the more powerful, he or she?” (7)

Further in that same passage Joaquin’s wife Doña Valerianna notes “A Mexican flag shall be yours. I will wrap it together with your brother’s. His shall be an American flag, but they shall be like one to me” (7). This preoccupation in the background of the narrative with American and Mexican appears later in the narrative during the Revolution, particularly as Villegas de Magnón negotiates being an American resident

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(and citizen), Mexican-born, and Texas-bred. A later section of this chapter more closely addresses the negotiation of Mexican and American as well as border subjectivity. It is important to note that Villegas de Magnón recognized the significance of national identities and the role they would play in her life as well as the life of border residents during the revolution, particularly as this is a clear connection to later Chicana writing Chapter one of The Rebel is a spectacular one, wherein we are given the reason for Leonor’s nickname—during a wild storm Federales searching for local rebels against Porfirio Díaz’ rule mistake the sound of the newborn baby’s cries. Joaquín leads them proudly to his new daughter’s rib and declares “My rebel is a girl” (6). From this rather dramatic beginning, full of portents, we are given a short history of the Villegas family. The early pastoral scenes of happiness describe much about the relationship Leonor had with Julia and Pancho. Leopoldo and Leonor spent much of their daytime play hours with the two servants, watching events around the rancho and asking many questions of the two. While there is a distinction between the servants and the family, there is a strong connection present, unlike Jovita González’ more stern and patriarchal relationship between master and servant in Dew on the Thorn. Julia and Pancho would remain in Leonor’s life until both died. This simple pastoral life was upset when Don Joaquín moved the family to San Antonio, Texas after the Rancho San Francisco was surrounded by the border violence endemic during Catarino Garza’s raids.4 The ranch was signed over to Garza by the foreman (Villegas de Magnón does not give specifics but implies either force or intrigue) and as a result, the Villegas family never returns to the ranch. Immediately prior to the move, the family had been visiting Mexico, during which the young Leonor received a burn, an event mirrored a few pages further in the narrative when the doctor who bandaged Leonor’s hand tends to a similar burn suffered by the young Venustiano Carranza, later president of Mexico. “We will be in the same movement,” he declares, Villegas de Magnón ascribing to Carranza a visionary aura worthy of Revolutionary propagandists (28). It should be remembered that such heightened language and sentiment (in part easily done due to the internal distancing of the narrator allowing for a sense of grandeur and historicity) is of one with the revolutionary memoir genre: Usually [memoirs] will be what the author perceives to be his significant years as a participant in an historical event or his nearness to celebrity or frequently, as in the case of Mexico, a justification for one’s actions and a refutation of one’s enemies. [ . . . ] The author, recalling action

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Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature in which he was a participant, may so distance himself from this that at times he assumes more the role of historian than autobiographer.5

Certainly Villegas de Magnón is aware of her distancing in the text— the persistence of the third-person voice provides both a heightened sense of immediacy and a measure of sentiment, both narrative strategies useful for developing sympathy with the significance of events being described. At times near the beginning of the text, narrative distancing and adherence to the momentousness of the events give rise to a great deal of sentimental narration, as Villegas de Magnón establishes the inevitability of her participation in the revolution. However, particularly as her life becomes more difficult after the death of her mother and remarriage of her father, the narrative tone shifts as she describes being separated from her family and sent to an Ursuline convent in San Antonio. The shift to school for the Villegas children signaled an end to their simple life in San Antonio: all the children were sent to boarding school, Leonor first to San Antonio and Austin, then with her siblings to New York. Villegas entered Mount St. Ursula’s convent in New York, taking a teaching degree with honors in 1895. Returning to her family, now located in Laredo, Leonor traveled to Spain and Mexico, and in Texas met and married Adolpho Magnón in 1901. The newlyweds moved to Mexico where Adolpho worked as an importer. It was in Mexico that she first saw the political chaos inherent in the last days of the Porfiriato, when it was inevitable that Don Porfirio Díaz be overthrown. At this juncture the narrative leaps ahead, reflecting the hectic nature of the early days of the Mexican Revolution, when lines and sides were not yet clearly drawn. Villegas de Magnón begins to sketch carefully for the reader the events leading up to the Revolution, including an impressive amount of historical background to ground the reader who did not participate in the events described. Leaving out five years during which she and Adolpho have two children in Mexico, Villegas de Magnón in chapter seven, “A Blessing for the Rebel,” describes her true “blessing” not as her children, but rather her developing consciousness through exposure to Mexican presidential candidate Francisco I. Madero’s populist, reform politics. In a brief, lucidly written space, Villegas de Magnón goes from an interested, intelligent spectator to propagandist: “Leonor’s heart was in her throat. How superb he was, this small man who stood powerfully great” (75). The first connection to the Idar family of Laredo, a connection to become close and important, appears here—Villegas de Magnón writes, “I shall write fifty articles. I’ll send them to the border to my friend, Idar.

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We will ignite the flame of love and friendship for Madero” (75). From this brief statement arises a significant political consciousness in Villegas de Magnón, to carry her into active participation in the revolution as founder of the Cruz Blanca nursing brigade. The greater portion of The Rebel is concerned with narrating the actions and impact of the nursing brigade; as a medical corps it was effective and useful, but Villegas de Magnón points out the greater service the members of Cruz Blanca provided—that of Constitutionalist rebel intelligence agency. In addition, the success and expansion of the brigade, and Villegas de Magnón’s lifelong desire to present the success of the Cruz Blanca, foregrounded the importance of the “domestic” and gendered activity of nursing in a manner never seen previously on the border. While there is not sufficient space here to detail the importance of what was once considered “merely” domestic work to the greater success of the Revolution (as well as the gender-blurring of nurses active as Revolutionary spies), it is important to note the formidable presence of the nursing brigade on the border, and the access Villegas de Magnón and other women had to the men in power during the Revolution. Gathering a number of Laredo citizens to the white cross banner, Villegas de Magnón, with assistance from Federico and Jovita Idar, Lily Long, her friend and secretary, Laredo teacher Maria de Jesús González and others, formed the nursing brigade almost overnight.6 The genesis of the Cruz Blanca is in the aftermath of a battle around Laredo which left many revolutionary soldiers wounded. In the text she relates: On March 17, 1913, in the early dawn the small garrison of Nuevo Laredo was attacked by General Jesús Carranza. [ . . . ] After a brisk encounter during which the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo were strewn with wounded, Jesús Carranza ordered his men to retreat. Hearing the firing, the Rebel dressed quickly. [ . . . ] Rushing out into the street, she stopped a big new car driven by a chauffeur. Directing him to the offices of El Progreso, she told him to wait for her. She painted a red cross on a piece of paper and had it pasted on the windshield. Telephoning her friends, she told them her plans to go to Mexico and help take care of the wounded; she needed volunteers. With her faithful friend Jovita Idar, a writer for El Progreso, the Rebel encouraged four other young women7 to join them to offer immediate help. (85)

It is significant that the actual founding of the Cruz Blanca nursing brigade is related with such succinctness and lack of drama. If a criticism and possible reason for rejection of Villegas de Magnón’s memoir during her lifetime was

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the heightened prose and sentimental nature of The Rebel, one would expect the most significant event in the book to be subject to hyperbole and romanticism. However, as Villegas de Magnón made clear in her many letters to publishers and in the text itself, most important to her was assuring that the service and actions of the brigade were recognized, not that her founding of it be valorized. From this point on in the text, there appears to be a smoothing out of narration, resulting in less sentiment and more concern with the practical aspects of the brigade’s function, as well as a wealth of invaluable historical information. After founding the brigade, Villegas de Magnón became a full-time staff member of Venustiano Carranza’s Constitutionalist army, so-called because Carranza organized the army in defense of the liberal and progressive Mexican Constitution of 1857, proclaimed by the Liberal party in Mexico City. She became close to the general, advising him and his staff on political matters as well as organizing intelligence gathering and propaganda, much of it written by Federico Idar. The bulk of the narrative covers 1913–1920, during which Villegas de Magnón worked in Mexico and Texas with her growing staff, founding several brigade hospitals. Her biography becomes inextricable from her acts with the brigade; indeed, she begins to efface her own life in favor of the actions of others, including the spectacularly heroic María de Jesús González and Carmen de la Llave, both of whom served as revolutionary officers and spies, and the legendary Adelita of “La Adelita” corrido fame. The effacing serves the ultimate goal well; we can understand and appreciate the sacrifice, danger, and importance inherent in participating in the Revolution, with particular emphasis on the contributions of women to the struggle. Villegas de Magnón does not take for granted that her reader will understand the contributions; several times in the text she breaks off from a distanced narrative style and sounds the frustration she must have felt in a lifetime of attempting to make this story known: Carmen Serdán became the hero of the Madero Revolution. She ignited the flaming torch that illuminated the path for democracy and has tened the overthrow of President Porfirio Díaz. Men say much about themselves. Do they not remember the brave women? Another woman who came to the aid of her struggling countrymen was Elena Arizmendi, who quickly organized the Neutral White Cross that served during the short-lived Madero Revolution. (79)

It is important to note above the credit Villegas de Magnón gives to another medical brigade founder, Sra. Arizmendi. Criticism declaring the Revolution

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work of well-to-do members of Laredo society as a kind of benevolent hobby becomes invalid when narrators are so effacing as to present with equal value the contributions of other activist women. Later in the text, in the final pages of the narrative after Carranza has been assassinated8, Villegas de Magnón muses Too many memories were gathered in the recesses of her mind to allow her to be content with the peace of forgetfulness. Commanded by the dead, and wishing to do justice to the worthy nurses and brave women who so patriotically defended their country, the Rebel watches the outcome of the years that flamed at white heat in the fiery crucible of the Mexican Revolution. (229)

This concludes the memoir of Leonor Villegas de Magnón, a sometimes-breathtaking document that narrates only a small portion of her life. After her “retirement” from Revolution service and reunion with her husband from whom she had been separated for long periods during the revolution, the “second half” of her life began in dire economic straits. Villegas de Magnón had depleted her inheritance and savings during the Revolution, and worked in Mexico and the United States from 1920 until her death in 1955 in a number of capacities, including for the Texas Democratic Party and the National Department of Statistics in Mexico City. She returned to Laredo in 1948 where upon her death in 1955, honored by the Mexican government with five medals for service during the Revolution, she left to her daughter Leonor Grubbs and granddaughter Leonor Smith the various incarnations of her memoirs. Ultimate publication of her story eluded Villegas de Magnón, though in 1961 a version appeared in serial form in the Laredo Times. The 35-year attempt to bring the story of women’s active participation in the Mexican Revolution was perhaps her greatest struggle; to a publisher rejecting the manuscript she writes: Your answer of Oct 09, 1951 has become a fathomless script of knowledge. I love the way you raise my hopes then, suddenly dash me against a pitiless world of chaos and tumbled ideas. I will keep up my good work in the Río Grande as a union rather than a division. (xiv, emphasis mine)

In the next year, she again defends her narrative, this time against a rejection from the University of Texas Press: “No, my story is not a literary gem,

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it has been written in a hurry, but I intend to keep it just the way it is as I want it to reach a certain class of eager readers of the present day” (xlvi). It is likely that many critics will agree with Villegas de Magnón’s own assessment of her writing ability and narrative structure—The Rebel is not a “literary gem.” However, as she continually pointed out, as a historical document and a remedy to official histories of the Mexican Revolution which effaced women’s participation, The Rebel is invaluable to presentday Chicana critical history. That it was not published in her lifetime but exists as part of a larger recovery project attests to the persistence of her family as well as the redefining of and revaluing of historical memoir.

GENRE-BENDING: PUBLICATION HISTORY OF THE REBEL Covering the years 1876–1920, The Rebel is Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s only major work. From this monumental memoir of the Mexican Revolution as experienced on the border by Villegas de Magnón and many of her friends comes a strong feminist ideology and political consciousness. Originally published in serial form by the Laredo Times in the March 19-June 7 1961 issues, The Rebel was rediscovered by scholar Clara Lomas in an attic trunk in the Villegas de Magnón house in Laredo. It is not known if the documents found represent the final draft of a version of The Rebel, and Lomas’ work is based on interviews, the serialized version of the narrative, and the notes in Villegas de Magnón’s home, as well as comparisons with the extant Spanish and English versions of the text found. As Clara Lomas notes in her introduction to the text, the three primary forms of Mexican Revolution historical narratives—historical narrative, memoir, and the novel—privilege a male protagonist with four significant exceptions: Nellie Campobello, Consuelo Peña de Villarreal, Sara Aguilar Belden de Garza, and Luz Jiménez.9 The possibility for critical and popular reception of a female memoir of the Mexican Revolution was remote until 1960, during the rise of the Civil Rights movement. The publication of Nellie Campobello’s memoir Cartucho in that year eventually led to the acceptance and publication of several more memoirs by women.10 In memoirs published by men of the Mexican Revolution, women are mentioned primarily as observers or as soldaderas, with some mentioned as traveling prostitutes or madams, and the classic Adelita figure—warrior, lover, woman. Claudia Schaefer describes the threat women in the Revolution posed to social standards of the day: Even the women who had taken part in the Revolution itself became mythified [sic] by society. The soldaderas, for example, became the

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image of women who take orders faithfully . . . follow their men unhesitatingly. . . . If a woman spoke up, she was no longer dependent on others, nor on their interpretation and control of social reality, and consequently she was a threat to the status quo.11

Clara Lomas points out that “In asking . . . the Mexican government and publishing industry to provide book form for the . . . experiences of ‘real’ women” in the Mexican Revolution, Villegas de Magnón “seems to have been alone.”12 Certainly, given prevailing social standards of the time, her requests on both sides of the border may have appeared both radical and somewhat ridiculous. For Villegas de Magnón, what became most obvious is not that her manuscript was in itself too florid or romantic; indeed, it certainly was as one with other revolution memoirs written and published by men. Between 1920 and 1955 she attempted to publish first a Spanish and then an English version of her story, and was rejected for a variety of reasons, some political, some academic, and some vague. Richard Woods notes that the narrative structure itself of The Rebel was as one with memoirs of the Revolution published between 1920 and 1955, down to its “fragment of life” nature: Memoirs are simply the recording of a fragment of years from a life . . . They lack both the formality and completeness of autobiography proper. . . . [The] Mexican Revolution has been the greatest catalyst for memoirs. The author, recalling action in which he was a participant, may so distance himself from this that at times he assumes more the role of historian than autobiographer. (Villegas de Magnón xxxvi-xxxvii)

Villegas de Magnón’s “distanced” and “documentary” style interestingly provides the memoir with perhaps its most poignant aspect; the narrator is a near-separate entity, an internal “other” which is active and rebels, not Leonor herself as Leonor. The poignancy is a result of the narrative ruptures which pepper the document, moments in which Leonor and “The Rebel” merge and sound notes of frustration and anger: “Men say much about themselves. Do they not remember the brave women?”13 Throughout the text, and indeed throughout her letters in response to publisher rejections, the frustrations ring out as a result of her inability to comprehend patriarchal oppressions even as she is a more privileged member of society. Her loyalty to the women of the Revolution left Villegas de Magnón both outraged and perplexed, though never defeated. Her romantic “Rebel” becomes very real to readers at these narrative ruptures.

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Who were the “brave” women Villegas de Magnón desired to present to the reading public in the United States and Mexico? In the Spanish-language version of her text, as well as the English version, Villegas de Magnón refigures and rescues from the potentially reductive realm of myth the soldadera and correctly places her back into the active role of Revolution participant. In her presentation of herself, María de Jesús González, Araceli García de González, Jovita Idar, Carmen Serdán, Adelita, and Lily Long, among others, Villegas de Magnón’s narrative breaks with traditional views of Mexican women in a way that, were it not verifiable through photographs and recently recovered memoirs of the Revolution, can still scarcely be credited.14 Aside from still-conventional patriarchal ideas of womanhood and the potential roles of women in a wartime situation (nurse, prostitute, teacher), women in the Revolution had to overcome culture-specific standards, very real violence, racism, being shoved aside, and socioeconomic strictures. Students of Mexican culture can easily enumerate some of the standards that are more specific to Mexican society (and border society at the turn of the century was nothing if not Mexican), including religious standards of subservience and piety, social passivity, economic disfranchisement, and lack of educational opportunity. Villegas de Magnón’s narrative is significant in that it discusses many of the prevailing social mores as background to the more important aspect of the text—the acts of the brigade in the revolution. This provides the reader with a history against which the selfless nature of the nurses can be judged—and the reader must admit that the brigade and the women involved crossed numerous social boundaries and classes selflessly in the work of the Revolution. Perhaps it was the direct and obvious blurring of social boundaries and deconstruction of female social roles in a genre defined primarily by male authorship that initially disturbed potential publishers; Clara Lomas addresses this possibility in her introduction: Why did her various privileges not afford her the satisfaction of seeing her manuscripts in book form? The Villegas de Magnón papers located thus far give a clue to one answer: the mixed response of those who read the work in manuscript form. More specifically, I would like to suggest that the many readings . . . generated critical valuation which significantly sealed the fate of her story. [ . . . ] I submit that various marginalizations situated her story within precarious borders, in particular the marginal status of women’s autobiographies. The autobiographical/memoir genre imprisoned her story within a narrative form which has historically privileged male authority, authorship and discourse, and ignored or devalued those same female qualities.

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Though time and fluctuating attitudes toward women’s roles in society have altered reception of women’s writing, it remains difficult to determine precisely what specific attitudes prompted multiple rejections of an undoubtedly interesting narrative. While it may be tempting to ascribe the rejections solely to patriarchy prevalent in the first half of the twentieth century, and indeed Villegas de Magnón’s text challenges gender assumptions on many levels, it is important to consider as well her particular style of reinscribing women into Revolution history. Attention to her narrative style may assist critics in evaluating the text’s impact on Chicanas of the region then and now, as well as broaden our understanding of the genesis of a Chicana stylistics. Whatever the reason for the text’s rejection prior to its publication in 1994, it is now in print in English, a Spanish-language version published recently.15 Its value as a Chicana historical tool is being recognized gradually as more light is shed on the early Chicana antepasadas. As Villegas de Magnón, her daughter, and granddaughter all desired, the story of the brave Laredo women of the Mexican Revolution is now public.

“DO THEY NOT REMEMBER THE BRAVE WOMEN?”: RETHINKING/REWRITING WOMEN’S ROLES IN REVOLUTION(ARY) STYLE Throughout what at times can be a melodramatic text, there are moments of such lucid sincerity and understanding by the author that readers have to reconsider the work in light of these revelations. Villegas de Magnón writes for the most part in a style reminiscent of the time, a particularly heightened prose and style which can make the intent less than obvious. What makes the novel remarkable for readers and scholars is that in spite of stylistic issues, the story of an exceptional woman (indeed, exceptional women) clearly comes through. Her conceptualization of women in the Mexican Revolution is not only a radical revisioning of present understanding of their participation, but a direct and powerful challenge to society on both sides of the border present and past. Stylistically, the shift from hyberbole and stilted prose into a direct and fast narrative tone represents the shift in Villegas de Magnón’s life from a romantic and impractical view of her world into an understanding of the necessity and importance of revolution. Moments of hyperbole, present early on and somewhat distracting to the modern reader at times, then give way to a clear and active voice as the activity of the Revolution women in the text begins. As mentioned previously, the heightened prose may have been distracting and disconcerting to publishers who rejected the story; however, as

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has also been noted, after the initial (rather stereotypical) setup of Villegas de Magnón’s young life, the prose changes to become more direct, serious, and immediate. An example of the earlier, more florid prose is found in her account of her birth: Outside, the increasing fury of the stormy night threatened at any moment to demolish the house. The waters were slapping against the walls, slipping in through the low windows. Inside the bandit-held mansion, beaten by the wind, threatened by the water, a woman in majestic dignity had given birth to a child. (6)

What remains interesting about Villegas de Magnón’s heightened prose is the novel conceptualization of a female hero/rebel in a very specific genre which did not provide for a female hero. Underlying the stylistic hyperbole is a consistent strain of radical inevitability, all the more remarkable for the hero being female. As the last two-thirds of the narrative begins, the style moves with purpose into a fast, practical, and historically aware voice, demonstrated in the description of the official naming of the White Cross: It was at the time of the Huerta outbreak that the Mexican National Red Cross, organized during the last years of the Díaz regime, failed in its principles of non-partiality and nonpartisanship. In its cause destined to aid the wounded were spies and ammunition for the Federals. It was in protest and to counteract it that the Constitutionalist White Cross was established in Laredo, Texas, serving throughout the Carranza Revolution. (90)

Undoubtedly moments of dramatic rupture occur in the section of the narrative detailing the work of the Cruz Blanca. Yet the shift from romantic rumination and the concern with what might be called the abstracted ideals of a well-to-do educated woman into swiftly moving and practical narration is complete.16 The “conversion,” if you will, is complete, and seems predicated on her gradual acceptance of a Maderan social agenda and the beginning of the Revolution itself. Lomas asserts that the combination of genre “protocol” and intent helped direct the style of The Rebel: An examination of some of [her] particular narrative strategies in light of those memoirs that were actually published [by men] between 1920

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and 1955 reveals that in form and content her text conforms to, rather than challenges, their autobiographical conventions. [ . . . ] many of the narratives are written in a distanced, highly impersonal, documentary style similar to that conveyed by the third-person narrator in The Rebel. (xxxvii) As noted above, the distanced voice allows for a great measure of the hyperbole in the first third of the text—one wonders what the effect might have been without the narrative distance.

Lomas further asserts an effect of the distancing which I take exception to: that the distanced voice represents “this ‘other’ who rebels against the ideology of her aristocratic class, against the boundaries set by society with regard to women’s role [sic]” (xxxvii). Lomas’ assertion arises from her understanding of the distanced voice in the text having the effect of constructing a “fictive witness”—that, according to Philippe Lejeune, the “autobiographer is authenticating his own discourse instead of assuming it directly” (xxxvii). The assertion applies to the sense the reader has of the heightened metaphorical language, particularly at the outset. However, as the narrative continues, instead of “authenticating” a discourse, Villegas de Magnón’s third-person voice serves to appreciate and valorize the acts of her characters, those nurses, servants, soldiers, and politicians. In this distinction lies the ultimate power of her narrative—the story of The Rebel becomes the active story of many people, all of whom are distinguished by their deeds. Their “authenticity” is remarkable in that it is historical and active, and the process of telling the story takes a back seat to the day-to-day movement described in the text. In essence, the memoir of a single woman becomes a memoir of “those patriotic and selfless nurses” of the Cruz Blanca, of “the worthy nurses and brave women” who fought and died for a Revolution which elided their participation and forgot their endeavors. In an all-too-brief aside in the introduction, Lomas notes the radical nature of Villegas de Magnón’s work, even as she concludes the work shares much in common with the memoir genre: With its subversion of assumptions about gender and nationality contrary to dominant discourse, however ambivalent and ambiguous, it could have [has?] been dismissed as a suspect feminine text. Besides questioning, it challenged the common female archetypes depicted in the narrative forms of the Mexican Revolution: the doll-like beauty, the subjugated wife and mother, and the prostitute, as well as Mexico’s condescension toward the fronterizos. (xliii)

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It is not clear in this section whether Lomas thought the text was “dismissed” primarily because it was a “suspect feminine text”; indeed, it is not certain what precisely she means by this. Present critics, the few who are aware of the text, assert it is probable that the book was “unacceptable” in large part due to its radical presentation of women, a presentation at odds with official Revolution history: [The] official historiography of the female participation in the war was occupied principally with the mythical creation of valiant women . . . of the idyllic and heroic image of the soldaderas and certain heroines like Carmen Serdán . . . [T]he revolutionary personages in Villegas’ narrative seem to have more urgent objectives than falling in love.17

Clearly, the women in the story not only have more urgent objectives than falling in love, many left families and homes to take part in the Revolution: Before the small band of volunteers stood the available future to which every human being is entitled; that future was their own. Behind them would soon be an abyss which would separate them from their past, from those they loved, their inheritance. They did not speak of home, nor the ones left behind, but kept their eyes on time. (106, emphasis mine)

The available future for the women of the Cruz Blanca brigade was entirely uncertain—it is to their credit that they and the men who supported the brigade went into that future. It is more to be marveled at that they did so in a space and time of such uncertain, unclear loyalty, nationality, and identity.

THESE BRIDGES WE LIVE: MEXICAN AND AMERICAN IN THE REBEL For an instant they leaned over the railing, above the sleeping waters. Texas here, Tamaulipas there, Idar said thoughtfully. This must not happen. —The Rebel18

A complex aspect of Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s work is this juxtaposition and negotiation of “American” and “Mexican,” and what effect each country has on the players—as well as what effect the players have on the border. Prefiguring the work of Chicanas such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe

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Moraga, and Ana Castillo, Villegas de Magnón wonders throughout The Rebel the impact of having a foot in both worlds.19 Throughout the text, American and Mexican are geographically delineated for political purposes—there is a telling scene described by Villegas de Magnón of a skirmish along the river between Federales and Revolutionaries under Maclovio Herrera, during which she is told that should a bullet cross the river into American space soldiers at Fort Macintosh have orders to fire across the river into Mexican territory.20 Frightened of the possibility that Americans could enter the Revolution on the side of the Federal Mexican government, Villegas de Magnón secures a guarantee from the general that no shots will be fired into Texas by the revolutionaries by having them moved back into the hills of Tamaulipas, away from Texas.21 “Peace, peace, and only peace” Villegas de Magnón thinks to herself as she crosses the International Bridge into Mexico to inform the general of the danger the American soldiers could present, her thoughts provoked by the small marker on the bridge with the same sentiment.22 On the Mexican side she negotiates in Spanish the general’s assent, and on the return journey across the same bridge meets and speaks with the American commander of forces in Laredo in English. In a single scene Villegas de Magnón has traversed border geography, border politics, and border society, all on the one trip back and forth across a single bridge over the river. As noted earlier, in the first chapter of her memoir her father notes after Leonor’s birth, “My son born on American soil. My daughter in Mexican territory, and I, a Spanish subject. Who will be the more powerful, he or she?” Villegas de Magnón was well aware of the political and metaphorical importance of the river border and her relationship to its cities and peoples on both sides. The use of the International Bridge in The Rebel allows the author to point out this connection to us on more than one occasion, particularly by having the narrator pause in the center and look over into the water, at one point musing about the day the bridge opened and her brother gave the speech at the ceremony, a speech celebrating both George Washington and Father Miguel Hidalgo.23 This scene allows us to consider The Rebel’s position on the border and the vague nature of a water border—therefore the use of the bridge and the image of The Rebel in the middle. She is in both countries as well as in a neutral, bifurcated space. The image of a woman standing one foot in either country is powerful and dynamic, and Villegas de Magnón uses it to great advantage. For fronterizas, the nature of their multiple negotiations on the border inherently involves the river in a spatial, practical, and political sense, and it

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is an apt metaphor for Chicanas in this webbed and intricate space—what could be more apt as a metaphor for this Border than a fluid “marker”? This rupture of space/border in family and life—a constant in modern Chicana writing—is a theme running as an undercurrent in The Rebel, an issue Leonor negotiates over time. One can tell her sympathies lie with the rebel forces under Venustiano Carranza, and her self-identity as a Mexicana/Tejana certainly provides impetus to her founding of the Cruz Blanca nursing brigade; however, the space of the border and the fluidity of life in that space leads her to muse several times about the nature of a population divided (geographically) merely by a many-bridged river. As editor Clara Lomas notes, [B]y aspiring to make public the story of a woman who rebelled however tenuously or ardently, against her class origins, religious upbringing, family expectations, political affiliations, and patriarchal social mores, she reveals the multiplicity of selves linked to her sociohistorical context. (Villegas de Magnón xxxii)

As discussed in chapter one, the sociohistorical context of Revolution Laredo was unique, suited to, and perhaps inevitably producing a striated sense of identity, “multiplicities of selves.” More interesting is that a woman was able to produce in this fluid area a narrative of many women crossing social and political boundaries and not lose the impact of the work accomplished by the women. The juggling of transgressions in The Rebel is impressive indeed when considered in light of the intricately webbed space it was produced in. The existence of Spanish- and English-language versions of the text attest to Villegas de Magnón’s understanding of the dualistic nature of her potential audience in Mexico and the United States, and to her belief in the organic, fundamental nature of the relationship between her land of birth and that place she resided in, as well as the movement of history back and forth across the bridge. Her account of women’s lives on the border during the Revolution negotiates a space which is overwhelming to one who has never lived in such an area, and makes the multiplicities clearer for the outsider, whether Anglo or Mexican. The text was originally composed in Spanish by Villegas de Magnón. When she wished to create a text for a wider market in the United States, she composed an English-language version, editing and adapting the Spanish text. Like many women writing from the border, she uses Spanish in the English-language version when it is useful, as when recounting traditions and stories with specific Spanish terminology. However, she does not

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engage in dialect writing nor does she simplify the conversations of the different classes in her text—in this, she is quite modern. When Clara Lomas edited the present version, she worked from all extant versions, including the one published in Spanish in the Laredo Times in 1961. It is difficult to perceive how much of the blending occurred in the initial text, as fragments were not always complete, yet Lomas is able to ascertain the narrative structure by consulting different versions and the historical record. In this way, she duplicates the present Chicana interest in the linguistic fluidity of the border area, where Spanish, English, and “TexMex” are all heard, often interchangeably in single conversations. By diversifying her text for multiple audiences, and by guiding newcomers through a complicated landscape, Villegas de Magnón is addressing directly the concerns of later Chicana writers, but her account is particularly interesting in that it comes from a woman who lived during a time in which the question of where Mexico stopped and the United States began was rather more alive and real than the often distanced and (almost wholly) academic pondering of that question in the seventies and the present. As in the present, across the Chicana world, the lives of those in the border towns was a constant negotiation of multiple “rivers” of people and attitudes as well as culture and society. Credit is due to the borderlands residents who survived and succeeded in such conditions, prefiguring the postcolonial, postmodern explosion of works on this subject in the 1980s and 1990s by Chicanas intimately familiar with social struggle.

CLASS/GENDER REVOLUTION By 1910 there was a noticeable undercurrent of dissatisfaction among all classes of the Mexican population. The middle class could find no opening for their skills. . . . The wage problem developed in the northern states, whose proximity to the United States made workers conscious of their unfair treatment. (Villegas de Magnón 74)

Farther on in this same section of text, Villegas de Magnón notes Francisco Madero’s popularity with the native Mexican Indians, indicating that Madero’s ambitions were to undercut “three hundred years” of Spanish colonial influence. Some criticism has been leveled in recent years, by Chicano critics and others, that the women whose works we have from the nineteenth century could not be considered radical, innovative, or vaguely “Chicana” in the way the term has frequently been defined. However, as I discussed in my introduction, it is necessary to rethink and redefine not only the too-often

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overly cautious definitions of Chicana and Chicana writing, but also the history of Chicanisma in order to give a more complete and complex reading of Chicana history. Where critics such as Raymond Paredes can dismiss the texts of cooking, home economics, and storytelling,24 closer readings of these texts can illuminate the fact that many women had no other way to discuss their lives, their dissatisfactions, and their understanding of their worlds, and took the opportunity to deliver their ideas in the only way generally available to them. Some of these women were privileged by class or money, and for this reason their works have been dismissed as not only too quaint and shallow but also as mere hobbies of the privileged. The climate which nineteenth-century women of color faced in California, Texas, New Mexico, and other areas with a high number of Latina/ os in conflict with Anglo newcomers was one in which the overt resistance to oppression of all types was near-impossible at best and dangerous at worst. That any works survived prove women were interested in their own socioeconomic position and power is a tribute to the determination of authors and scholars to document the period and women’s lives. Clara Lomas quotes from Anna Macías’ history of the Mexican feminist movement and sheds some light on the difficulties women faced when attempting to express their lives and histories. Macías describes six “fundamental reasons” for Mexican/Texas-Mexican women’s struggles for public voice: machismo (endemic to border culture), condemnation of feminism by the church, disagreement and burnout among feminists, lack of government and press support, and interestingly, the fact most of the female writers had to work for a living and could not contribute many hours per week to writing.25 This last in particular helps lay to rest the (frankly male) critical view that these women were toying at revolution and pretending to radicalism. It is unlikely that present critics can easily comprehend the magnitude of Villegas de Magnón’s work in the period in which she lived and worked. Though she was a woman of (limited) means, with education beyond that of many Mexicanas at the turn of the century in Texas, Leonor Villegas de Magnón was no less a Rebel. Throughout the memoir there are instances of class consciousness, or perhaps more specifically a kind of class-blurring. Villegas de Magnón is not unaware of her own status and privilege as a daughter of a successful family. However, as her story progresses, the emphasis comes to rest on her perception of justice and a developing idea of social revolution. Unlike González’ Dew on the Thorn, Villegas de Magnón not only empathizes with the peons, soldiers, and revolutionaries, they are fundamental to her life in several important ways.

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Julia and Pancho, a married couple employed by the Villegas family until the second wife of Don Joaquín arrives, serve not only as family servants, but also as a kind of bridge into the world outside her privilege for young Leonor. Pancho’s first appearance in the text is at the Rebel’s birth, where he is identified as the primary male servant of the household. The reader learns much more about Pancho before his heroic death near the Río Grande later in the narrative: “Pancho was a hero of great knowledge. Often on his walks with the children he would kneel down and put his ear to the ground. . . . He knew the sound of mules, oxen, carts, carriages, and wagons” (13). He becomes, to young Leonor’s mind, a man of vast knowledge and experience, attuned to the space of the border the Villegas family lives in. His wife, Julia, is also a servant for the family—the two marry just before the family leaves the Rancho San Francisco permanently. Throughout the narrative Julia is the more proactive and Villegas de Magnón, perhaps in a sense of solidarity with women of all classes in the text, fills out Julia’s character more completely. It is also Julia who provides a second voice for Villegas de Magnón’s own understanding of the servants’ lives: when Pancho, both frightened and proud of finding he has been sitting over a hoard of gold hidden from Indians they had encountered during the journey from the ranch, exclaims at the amount, Julia scolds him gently: “Look, Julia,” he whispered. “So much money. The Indians would have killed us. “Foolish one, the Indians are our people. Don’t be too proud, Pancho,” Julia chided him gaily. (14)

Julia’s sense of loyalty and identification with the Comanches they had met on their journey reveals a surprising complexity underlying the characterization of the servants. This is not to dismiss moments of class division in the text—Leonor and her family are well-off and they do not pretend that they are not. However, perhaps due to the family’s fracturing after the death of Doña Valerianna, Leonor and her brother Leopold retained a sense of humility and devotion to hard work and enterprise demonstrated to them by Julia and Pancho. Leonor depends on and trusts the two implicitly, and the pair, after they are released from their duties by new wife Doña Eloisa, begin a small vending business with the intent of becoming self-sufficient as well as observing Leonor and her siblings covertly. Strikingly, the two former

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servants possess enough confidence and self-respect, as well as a measure of distaste for the new wife’s “Americanized” ways and her dislike of the more outspoken Leopold and Leonor, to make them critical commentators on child-rearing; of great concern is that Eloisa is not Catholic, and that she will move the children away from Texas. Julia and Pancho seem to provide a voice for Villegas de Magnón’s discontent with her stepmother, and certainly her disapproval of Eloisa’s Americanized ways. In time, Leonor is removed to New York, and Pancho and Julia decide to abandon their long-distance parenting for a business spanning the river between the two Laredos. Pancho’s facility as esquifero provides in later moments opportunity for Villegas de Magnón’s commentary on the fluidity of the border. Their comfort in the border space, on the river, suggests that imposition of a “national boundary” in that space would seem absurd, and nearly inconceivable to residents of the area—particularly those who freely traversed the river for their lifetimes. The two former servants thereby provide a critical paradigm of border residents, as well as a foreshadowing of the class-blurring inherent in the Mexican Revolution. At this juncture the two disappear from the story for several years, to reappear when Leonor is grown, married, and about to embark on her life’s work in the Cruz Blanca. Julia has died, and Pancho is now a ferryman in his little boat, despondent over the loss of his wife. Villegas de Magnón visits him and cheers him—in a few months Pancho will rise to the moment and take part in the Revolution on the side of the rebels. It will also result in his death, mourned by the Rebel as the definitive end to her childhood idyllic existence. As she narrates her story, it becomes obvious that Villegas de Magnón’s narrative distance (including the distance felt when she narrates Pancho’s funeral), far from being a merely a convention of Revolution memoir26, is a method of claiming allegiance with the other “rebel” women of the text of all classes. While Lomas describes the use of the distanced narration as a form of “internal distancing” in the Spanish-language version of the text, a way to “politely” protest social expectations, she later adds that the use of the third-person voice is a way of proclaiming the importance of all participants who rebelled during the Revolution: Her narrative was to point to their deeds as an act of an international social justice which knew no national boundaries. For her all border area participants, regardless of gender, were just as important as anyone else. (xxxix)

Lomas correctly points out the class-based inconsistencies in the text, both those based in the narrative voice and those arising in the text from

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events being described; Villegas de Magnón does describe certain characters through their roles as servants, peons, or villagers. However, I do not believe it is correct to ascribe to the author a classism that positions The Rebel in a social category above certain classes based solely on assumptions about her perception of a societal hierarchy of wealth. Consistently throughout the text, Villegas de Magnón uses the narrative distance to comment on and express solidarity with “those patriotic and selfless nurses” of La Cruz Blanca27, and to demonstrate her fidelity to the Revolution and her ideals: [T]he Rebel had left her three children . . . and with an indefinite idea of her husband’s attitude towards the Revolution, she had set out on an unknown expedition. Before the small band of volunteers stood the available future to which every human being is entitled. . . . Behind them would soon be an abyss which would separate them from the past, from those they loved. . . . They did not speak of home, nor the ones left behind, but kept their eyes on time . . . every minute was counted, every minute belonged to duty at a bedside, at an operating table . . . or writing letters to someone dear to a dead soldier. . . . Once crossing the border, they could not turn back, but became immediately absorbed in the war’s activity. . . . 28

Instead of being merely rhetoric, this describes what The Rebel and the Cruz Blanca brigade did to affect the Revolution, and moves from the individual to the group in action. In the narrative, there are few characters that are not delineated by their acts, rather than by their words. Part of the value of this active approach to character lies in Villegas de Magnón’s ability to develop historical events of great importance through individuals. When the Mexican Revolution (perhaps the most destructive and complex of the twentieth century) is filtered and narrated by those individuals directly affecting a part of it, it is possible to understand the machinations of the conflict more easily. In addition, the voices we hear in the story allow us to understand the real nature of the Revolution—a revolution of multiple classes. Villegas de Magnón had little patience for what she labeled profiteers, traitors, or more bitingly “General’s wives”—those who were not in sympathy with Constitutionalist ideals. As she notes throughout both versions of the text, the Cruz Blanca was comprised of people from across the class structure; indeed, in the work of fronterizos such as Pancho the esquifero, Adelita, María de Jesus González, and Lily Long, the nursing brigade is exceptional in eliding class. It would be naïve to claim the Cruz Blanca was completely class-less, as it is now naïve to believe such women did not exist.

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Official histories of the revolution may have elided, forgotten, or simply ignored women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution in favor of “the mythical creation of valiant women,” yet the undeniable accomplishments of the fronterizas have begun to filter down to their Chicana daughters. The presence of Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s text allows us to understand the work of border women during the Mexican Revolution with something approximating historical accuracy (inasmuch as this history is not yet canonical). The next author I examine reconstructs the lives of fronteriza/os through the very methodology which too often has been accused of reinscribing class and social oppressions—folklore and folkloric fictions. In the hands of Jovita González—teacher, folklorist, and activist— Texas Mexican folklore and folkways are given a fresh relevance in constructing the lives of turn of the twentieth century border dwellers. Her historical fiction Dew on the Thorn asks readers to consider the significance of folklore as well as understand its usefulness as a narrative strategy which interrogates the deeply inscribed hacendado society she describes, and which reveals that society’s flaws. Though this is a near complete turn from Villegas de Magnón’s approach, González’ focus on folklore provides us with insight into the background of the women of La Cruz Blanca and the society they rebelled against, and the fictionalization of these lives provides another narrative strategy for presenting women’s radical thoughts, deeds, and beliefs under the guise of “telling tales.”

Chapter Three

The Moon and the Unfortunate Lover: Folklore and Feminism in Jovita González’ Dew on the Thorn

Soy como el roble, me doblo pero no me quiebro.1 —Jovita González, Dew on the Thorn

Best known for the novel Caballero, co-written with Eve Raleigh2, Texas educator, folklorist, and activist Jovita González (1899–1983) was clearly ahead of her time. A student of famed Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie, González graduated with a Master’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1930 and was instrumental in presenting Texas-Mexican folklore as a serious object of study, politically diverging from her mentor’s attitude toward the Tejanos and striking forth into interesting and revealing territory.3 As both an academic (the first and only Tejana president of the Texas Folklore Society) and an activist (particularly against segregation) Jovita González challenged societal expectations in her novels and essays on folklore of the Texas Mexicans. Moreover, her challenge in the folklore-based Dew on the Thorn was one present scholars of Chicana studies grapple with—how do societally silenced groups represent their lives to the world without the formal tools to do so, and how do their tales inform us of their lives and their legacies to Chicanas of the present? In this historically based short novel, readers understand how folklore, folkways, and the life of the everyday define the residents of the border. Perhaps more revealing of González’ desire to accurately present a picture of the border area she grew up around, the cuentistas, or storytellers, in the novel are members of a working-class, land-based culture, not scholars or women 61

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of commerce—the heroines of Dew on the Thorn are the common folk of the border, and the movement and thrust of the story is directed by the women in the tale, from old bruja to young lover. With skill and sincere appreciation for the power of folklore, Jovita González presents the construction of a Chicana consciousness of empowerment and growth for several of the characters, as well as utilizing folktales to critique the overbearingly patriarchal border society of the early twentieth century. As Leonor Villegas de Magnón did with memoir, so González does with folklore and fiction—building a voice to stand on its own and challenging society to silence it.

“I HAVE ALWAYS FELT AT HOME IN TEXAS”: JOVITA GONZÁLEZ AND TEXAS HISTORY Born in 1899 in Roma, Texas, a small border town between Laredo and Rio Grande City in Texas and opposite the Mexican town of Mier, Jovita González spent the first years of her life around the area to which she would later be linked by her fictional work.4 Her parents were educated and middle class, and González was intimately familiar with the region’s history; as she describes it in her own handwritten autobiography found in her papers at Texas A&M Corpus Christi Special Collections, We were fortunate to have with us, at intervals, Mamá Tulitas, our paternal grandmother. She brought to us fantastic tales . . . [and] my Tía Lola . . . a handsome woman with a will of iron and a vast store of family history. It was from her that we learned many things that made us proud of our heritage. (González x)

Without doubt, Jovita González was greatly influenced in her later perceptions of the significance of Tejano folklore by the stories and traditions passed on in her immediate family by women. In a significant moment in the handwritten autobiography, she notes the words spoken to her and her sisters as they prepare to go to San Antonio for the education her father wanted them to have: [B]efore leaving, Tía Lola and grandfather suggested mother should take us to Mier to see Mamá Ramoncita, our great grandmother, for perhaps the last time. . . . [Grandmother said] “Your mother tells me you are moving to live in San Antonio. Did you know that land at one time belonged to us? But now the people there don’t like us. . . . Perhaps they will tell you to go to Mexico where you belong. Don’t listen to them.

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“Texas is ours. Texas is our home. Always remember these words: Texas is ours. Texas is our home.” I have always remembered the words and I have always felt at home in Texas. (xi)

This oral transmission of history from women in her family and her pride in and respect for the Mexican-Spanish heritage she imbibed as a child influenced González’ later work in the collection of folklore. She was the first Texas Mexican to collect Tejano folklore and publish it in English, and her focus on the non-Anglo folklore of Texas placed her ahead of her time and certainly at odds with the dominant methodology of folklore collection in Texas as directed by J. Frank Dobie of the University of Texas at Austin, where she took her Master’s Degree in 1930. She was extremely well-educated (both in her time and in ours), first at what she names a “Summer Normal School” for teacher education, a course she completed in two years, and at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Spanish in 1927. Her Master’s thesis at the University of Texas, “Social Life in Webb, Starr, and Zapata Counties,” collected together for the first time in English folklore and folkways of West Texas Tejanos.5 Upon conferral of her Master’s degree, González began a successful education and research career in Texas, guided in part by her friendship with J. Frank Dobie.6 Having met in the mid 1920s, Dobie and González shared a mentor-student relationship in the small world of Texas folklore studies. Dobie, an influential and widely published English professor at Austin, directed the course of folklore studies in Texas for the first half of the twentieth century through his articles and directorship of the Texas Folklore Society. Specializing in the picturesque rewriting of Texas Mexican folklore, Dobie’s methodology of collecting and dissemination focused on selecting the most colorful motifs for their “flavor,” and then rewriting these texts into a more or less literary English for a non-folklore audience of readers.7 Though Dobie was a significant influence on her initial writing, González diverged from Dobie’s patrón attitude toward Tejano folklore even before she received her Master’s degree. As she notes in an interview with James Charles McNutt, quoted in Jose Limón’s introduction to this text, You see, it was an agreement that we made, that I would not go into one of his classes because I would be mad at many things. He would take the Anglo-Saxon side, naturally. I would take the Spanish and the Mexican side. (xxi)

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Figure 3. Jovita González and students, San Antonio, Texas, April 1934. Source: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Lomax Collection, LOT 7414-F

However, as a fledgling Texas folklorist, González was grateful for Dobie’s early assistance and remained a friend until his death. He sponsored her nomination for president of the Texas Folklore Society, a position she held from 1930–1932, and was a constant champion of her work, even as it diverged from his own into a more locally informed, less romanticized analysis of the oral literature of Tejanos. Américo Paredes describes several academic perceptions in use in Texas-Mexican folklore study in the first half of the twentieth century

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in the 1993 collection edited by Richard Bauman, Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border, describing each one and its limitations for ethnography: Scholars have distinguished Mexican from Mexican American folklore in at least three ways. I will call these (1) the Hispanophile, (2) the diffusionist, and (3) the regionalist views. To express the first view in its extreme form, we would have to stress the pronounced differences between Mexican Americans and Mexicans from Mexico. [The former] folklore, we would say, is almost totally Spanish . . . in its origins. . . . The second way of interpreting . . . which we call diffusionist—sees it as a slight isolated ripple, moving far from its origin in the great waves of Mexican folk culture centered in Jalisco, land of the machos. . . . The converse of the Hispanophile opinion, it regards Mexican American folklore as in no way different, original, or important, since it is merely a collection of decayed chips scattered from the trunk [of Spanish Peninsular folklore]. Mexican American and Mexican folklore can also be differentiated by considering the former a regional folklore and the latter a national folklore. A regional folklore tradition in the United States is defined as the offshoot of some distant trunk of national folklore. . . . This is the point of view, naturally enough, of the modern North American folklorist . . . None of these three ways of seeing . . . is completely wrong.8

Paredes sets up the early dichotomy, replicated into the present in some critical views, between “Mexican-Spanish” folklore and culture and a putatively more bastardized and invalid “Mexican American” folklore. It is a problematic, dismissive conceptualization which Jovita González confronted head on upon matriculating at the University of Texas at Austin, then as now the preeminent institution of Texas cultural studies. Furthermore, a secondary dichotomy existed (and was recognized by Dr. Paredes)—that of “winners” and “losers,” as normalized in popular histories of the early twentieth century, which made extremely difficult the acceptance of non-canonical ideologies of history. As Leticia Garza-Falcón points out in her outstanding history of border writers’ response to the highly filtered “dominative history” promulgated

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about Texas by influential historian Walter Prescott Webb (and less “professionally-sanctioned” work by J. Frank Dobie), Webb is credited with a luminosity in his writing [including The Great Plains] which draws into history readers who might otherwise have been turned away. In this way, Webb shared with [Henry] Fielding some of the concerns for history as chronicle. . . . The important difference is that instead of turning to novel writing, Webb continued, with a few exceptions, to represent himself as a “historian” at a time when the academy . . . thought of history writing as a science rather than as an art form. Webb’s narration reflects the prejudices of his time against a native population dominated not only by the victors but also by the historical representation of those events which had vanquished the former. Webb’s narrative representation too quickly satisfies his audience’s perception of what constitutes history. (Garza-Falcón 25)

The interesting connection between English novelist Henry Fielding’s interest in re-presenting history in the nuanced languages of fiction and Walter Prescott Webb’s desire to “[provide] a myth of a cohesive, unified American culture” becomes more significant in light of the work of Jovita González (and others) to present at least a more complete and complex rendering of border realities through fictionalized narratives. A primary distinction between the fictional work of González (the only trained folklorist of the women discussed in this project), Villegas de Magnón, and Josephina Niggli and the work of Walter Webb is that none of the women writing their narrations claimed to be a trained historian, even while they present events that actually occurred. Each woman understood the importance of storytelling in their narratives, leading to a more complex understanding of “history” through fiction and the point of view of the “losers” in American canonical history: In effect, with its complicated narrative fabric, fictional narration may also reject or at least call into question any clear-cut dichotomies between ‘literature’ and ‘history.’ A certain degree of complex consciousness, which characters’ voice achieve in narrative fiction, entails the convergence and ‘social intercourse’ of several disparate inside interpreters of events. Measured against that complexity, the rigid, monological narrative of externality . . . such as those of Walter Prescott Webb, comes to look like a ‘romancing’ and thus forfeits credibility. (Garza-Falcón 23)

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This construction, perhaps initially tenuous as a critical tool, gains validity when the work of women writers from the border (particularly those working when the Manifest Destiny school of Southwestern history was in full flower) is examined for attempts to redefine, reinvent, and re-present an already historically determined cultural narrative of place. In this accounting, fictionalization and covert challenges to the status quo by Niggli, Villegas de Magnón, and González is a constructive act of re-presentation of a history of place from the point of view of those not previously heard. To more concretely situate González in her time and as a partial product of her education and particular class-consciousness, and to demonstrate her particularly complex and sometimes contradictory negotiation of Texas folklore studies, a brief evaluation of her published work is useful. While she undoubtedly engaged in reductive stereotypes in some of her published work, including Caballero and some articles read before the Texas Folklore Society in the 1920s and 1930s which were influenced by her knowledge of an Anglo audience generally unsympathetic to complex portrayals of Tejanos, González later developed a more appreciative understanding of the importance of redefining Tejano folklore. In addition, she moved farther away from Dobie politically by challenging the perception that AngloTexan “pioneers” were anything but noble hardworking patriots with only the greater good of American Manifest Destiny in mind as they took over land in West Texas. In an article published in Southwest Review in the Summer 1930 issue, González scathingly indicts “fortune-seeking Americans” (read AngloAmericans) and their particular disruptive presence in the borderlands: Economically the landowners as well as the middle class resent the invasion of the Americans. It hurts the landowners’ pride to see these foreigners do in a short time what they had not been able to accomplish in years. They have seen the Americans appropriate all that had been theirs, even the desert plains. . . . The natural result is that the friendly feeling which had slowly developed between the old American and Mexican families has been replaced by a feeling of hate, distrust, and jealousy on the part of the Mexicans. . . . All over the border counties . . . a contest between these two elements is being waged. In the towns the Mexicans see themselves segregated in their own quarters and looked down upon as an inferior race.9

Far from ignoring the Tejano middle and upper classes’ own complicity in their downfall (including their mistreatment of the peon class as a historical

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prerogative from Spanish colonial times), González sees the frustrated Mexicans as unprepared and unwitting as a result of their sense of righteous superiority: It is a racial struggle, a fight between an aggressive, conquering and materialistic people on the one hand, and a volatile but passive and easily satisfied race on the other. It is the struggle between the New World and the Old, for the Texas Mexicans have retained, more than their brethren in Mexico, the old-world traditions, customs, and ideals. The old families resent the gulf between the newly arrived Americans have set between them. Not that they are eager for the friendship of the American families, but they object to the fact they are considered an inferior race. The word “white,” which the Americans use to differentiate themselves from the Mexican population, is like a red flag to a bull. (473)

It is not without irony that González notes the connection between the Mexicans’ fury at being considered inferior by the Anglo newcomers and their treatment of the peones. As she notes in the first page of the article, the “haughty, landed aristocracy, impregnable in their racial pride, lived in a world of their own, sincerely believing in their rural greatness,” while recognizing that the underclass of the border benefited most from the arrival of the Anglo Americans: “No other class of society has gained as much by the economic changes as the peon class” (469, 470). While she then dismisses the peones, stating simply that they are “thoroughly content,” she expands upon her initial concept of blindly arrogant landowners ignoring the changes heralded by the waves of “pushing Americans from the North and Middle West” (473). It is González’ contention, and those of people interviewed for her article, that the landowners could not recognize the danger, as they had been locked into their own sense of superiority, a trope she would explore in Dew on the Thorn in some detail. Further on in this article, published just as she was receiving her Master’s degree from the University of Texas, she explores the implications of this particular type of American on the class and cultural structure of the border town, indicating that treatment of Mexicans became worse as one moved farther away from the Mexican strongholds of Laredo, Rio Grande City, and Brownsville; several men interviewed for the article declared their intent to retain “old world” traditions in the face of encroaching Americanization. However, gesturing toward a realistic future in which Tejanas and Tejanos are successful in competing and surviving in their own land, González admits that the younger Mexicans are being inevitably trained in American schools and traditions:

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Behind them lies a store of traditions of another race, customs of past past ages, an innate inherited love and reverence for another country. Ahead of them lies a struggle for equality and justice before the law, for their full rights as American citizens. They bring with them a broader view, a clearer understanding of the good and bad qualities of both races. They are the converging element of two antagonistic civilizations; they have the blood of one and have acquired the ideals of the other. (477)

Indeed, this trope of inevitable blending of old and new worlds stands at the heart of the tenuously structured narrative of Dew on the Thorn, in which González uses a thin thread of narrative concerning the survival of the Olivares family to challenge, critique, and condemn the static view of Mexican culture on both this side of the border and in Mexico. As Paredes noted, Mexican American (or Tejano) folklore has been too often seen as nonexistent or unimportant, as the bastard offspring of Spanish and American cultural narratology. In ignoring the trenchant information contained in the folklore recounted in Dew on the Thorn by many longtime (and lower class) residents, the chief male protagonists lose almost everything to the invading Americans. They were frankly unable to value or appreciate the warnings in the tales, unable to perceive the important information contained in this unique folklore, capable only of seeing them as picturesque stories of the working classes. Other publications and papers read before the Texas Folklore Society detail her recovery work among the residents of the border, at times putting her at odds with her mentor’s more romanticizing, appropriative approach to Tejano folklore. As noted above, González was the first person to collect and publish Tejano folklore in English, making the work much more widely available to the public. If at times she engaged in a “normalizing” approach (in terms of palatability to an Anglo American academic audience), she is nevertheless a consistent and persuasive champion of the significance and uniqueness of Texas Mexican folklore. That she then turned to fiction writing is not surprising; her work in Caballero is highly informed by her folklore research, and though neither this text nor Dew on the Thorn saw publication in her lifetime, both of her books show a thoughtful attempt to negotiate her perceptions of class, race, gender, and culture through the lens of folklore.10 In both texts, more particularly Dew on the Thorn which was written almost entirely before 1930 and her rise to the top of Texas folklore studies, González closely interrogates and critiques the social structures which led to the downfall of the Texas Mexican hacendado way of life. While

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she consistently set herself aside as a well-educated, proper, and well-bred member of Mexican society, she nonetheless understood the self-destructive behavior of the ruling elite in the face of Anglo American aggression which lead to a general societal collapse on the frontier. Jose Limón, in his work on Texas folk culture in Dancing with the Devil, includes González in his history and analysis of folklore collection in Texas. While the work on González appears primarily interested in her tales of the devil figure in Texas folklore, Limón makes it a point to counter other critics’ dismissal of González as an assimilationist scholar. Citing Gloria Velasquez-Treviño’s critique in her Ph.D dissertation, Limón notes that this critic desired to view González through two lenses of critical possibility: [Velasquez-Treviño considers that] González devotes little attention to the description of female experience. In her prose fiction, the female characters do not appear as protagonists and are assigned very little space within the narrative discourse. When women do appear, they are confined to traditional roles. . . . 11

Velasquez-Treviño also critiques González’ apparent assimilationist modality in her fiction: [The] intermediary social position of Jovita González, which reflects an attitude of both resistance and assimilation to the dominant culture, produces specific ideological contradictions which are imbedded in her narrative.12

This analysis of González, as Limón notes, falls into the same category as Raymund Paredes’ dismissal of some early Chicana writing as too “sappy”; here, Velasquez-Treviño is unable to recognize the nature of those “imbedded” ideologies. Limón notes [ . . . ] there is a clearly dominant line to González’ ethnographic rendering and to her discursive statements. She articulates a class/ race paternalism . . . consistent with that of her padrino [patron], Dobie. . . . Yet . . . I do not sense here “ambivalence” in an ordinary understanding of the term, as a synonym for “uncertainty.” González seems quite certain most of the time of her allegiances. . . . I would insist, however, pursuing Velasquez-Treviño’s own metaphor, that these are indeed imbedded and have to be extricated to yield any

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sense of resistance. . . . Because they are imbedded, I would suggest that the problematic with González is not ambivalence but repression. . . . (Limón 69–70)

The obvious difficulty for earlier scholars of Jovita González was that the work available from her until recently was less critical overtly of society than her recovered work in Dew on the Thorn. The “imbedded” critiques in this text are more apparent than in Caballero, and her work in Dew on the Thorn precedes her “official” entry into folklore studies and a relationship with J. Frank Dobie. Any “repression” Limón or other critics mentioned appears to have intensified as González became a professional folklorist, particularly her early collecting which was more influenced by Dobie than her later work. Indeed, perhaps a little-recognized aspect of González’ work by critics thus far is, as Limón points out, that her work (and the work of Villegas de Magnón and Jovita Idar) existed “at another historical moment, unsupported by the luxury of a ‘growing ethnic-feminist consciousness’” (Limón 74). While the idea of ethnic feminism as “luxury” is arguable, his point is well-made—all the women discussed in this project worked without a feminist or women-centered movement in support. Indeed, part of my interest in these women is their existence and work prior to a general ethnic-conscious feminist movement. I believe this is one of the reasons the ambivalence of some of the women writers of the time seems to stand out—not only were they working in a very controlled and structured society, the importance and significance of women’s lives in writing had not been recognized, as indeed the sociocultural importance of women of color in general had not been recognized by society at large. The rise of feminist theory and consciousness in the 1960s (and the resultant struggle to expand the early concepts of “women/feminist” by women of color) meant a reevaluation of women writers and female representations in culture. However, as discussed elsewhere in this project, the uphill battle for understanding self-representation of Chicanas and their covert critiques from a time when overt attacks were extremely rare outside journalism continues. José Limón, González’ most recent editor, commends González for resisting her “father” Dobie and his influence while writing her own “coded” critiques (Limón 75). Neither Leticia Garza-Falcón, the most complete and recent scholar of González, nor myself would presume to place Jovita González in a potential father/daughter relationship with Dobie, aware of the explosiveness of that structure from a theoretical and sociocultural point of view.

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While Limón’s text is not about González as complex border scholar and negotiator of margins, the oddly patriarchal attitude toward his sole female inclusion in Dancing with the Devil reflects some present critical stances toward “fence-sitters” of the past. Limón does not completely ignore González’ attempts to covertly encode critiques of power—they are obvious, particularly in Dew on the Thorn. However, his approach is indicative of the all too-troubling attitude toward works like González.’ The most recent scholars, overwhelmingly female, have begun to reevaluate the work of the past, when attitudes critical of the status quo had to be couched carefully if they were to see publication. In addition, present scholars are examining the social context of the times and evaluating the work done by women in times of significant repression, questioning the evaluation as “assimilationist” of any female who did not wave a rebel flag. One of the best recent critics of female borderlands writers, Leticia Garza-Falcón, is able through her close analysis of notes, writings, and interviews to present the complex character of Jovita González in greater clarity: “As a folklorist and a novelist, Jovita González’s dual identity presents a complex case, insofar as her earlier folkloristic writings published by the Texas Folklore Society do not reject the dominant culture’s general views of her people, while her recently recovered novels, Dew on the Thorn and Caballero, respond energetically to [Walter] Webbian formulations of history” (Garza-Falcón 76). It is highly unlikely that dismissal of Jovita González’ work will be permissible in future Chicana scholarship. The nature of “dual identity” or warring influences among early Chicana writers is being addressed more and more as present Chicana scholars reevaluate narrative strategies utilized by women writing from sociocultural positions of disempowerment in the past. What Garza-Falcón, Norma Alarcón, and other present Chicana critics note is how the method of couching critique in narratives of the everyday continues to the present in much Chicana writing, including that of Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, and Josefina López. In her use of the everyday life and “common” folklore of fronterizos, González in Dew on the Thorn enacts in the 1920s a strategy for (and by) women who cannot declare their discontent aloud.

“DISTANT RUMBLING”: DEW ON THE THORN Published in 1997 as part of the Recovering the US-Hispanic Literary Heritage series from Arte Público Press (University of Houston) and edited by José Limón, Dew on the Thorn was the first fiction written by

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Jovita González. Composed primarily during the 1920s and forgotten until Professor Limón’s recovery work in the 1980s, the novel is a very loosely structured work of seventeen chapters held together by a strong strain of history. Initially planned as a work of twenty-five chapters, the book was reconstructed and contains some narrative lapses, rendering sections somewhat jarring, yet as a whole the narrative holds together well.13 It is the use of folklore as the primary narrative device in the book, however, which gives Dew on the Thorn both its richness and its tentative structure. Subsumed under the historicity of the text and the folk tales and motifs González uses to construct her narrative is a thin plot of Anglo encroachment on the complacent hacendados.14 The plot serves primarily to provide opportunities for González’ female characters to transmit instruction, warning, and education through folklore of the border, and is resolved hastily at the end of the book with a short lesson in the historical realities of the time. In the story of the Olivares family’s trials on the border, from Spanish land grants to the arrival of the post-U.S. Civil War Americans, González created a viable, palatable surface on which to impose the importance of folklore and oral history for a possible diverse audience.15 While the work was not published in her lifetime, all of the folklore was collected and presented or published in pieces throughout her career, demonstrating González’ recognition of this folk art’s importance and potential explosiveness, as well as her constant negotiation of the Webb/Dobie conceptualization of Texas Mexican life.16 Opening at the dawn of a new century of change, in both the social structure of the area and technological advances, Dew on the Thorn immediately sets up the family of the Olivares, a rich and prosperous family descended from Spanish land grantees. In this first chapter, “The Family of the Olivares,” González details the history of the family from the land grant of 1764 to Juan José Olivares from José Escandon’s survey team, to 1904 when the book proper begins. Significantly, she details a rich history and then explains that generations of simplistic, colonial life have rendered the patriarchs of the family, in particular Don Francisco de los Olivares as the present head of the family, incapable of seeing threats to their livelihood by the arrival of “poor” Americans. Resisting a more romantic notion of colonial power, González painstakingly details the fall from grace of the Olivares family following the 1836 Texas War for Independence from Mexico. Originally owners of a large grant east of the Rio Grande near present day Rio Grande City, the Olivares at the end of the 1836 war found themselves suddenly attacked on

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their own land by Anglo Texans eager for the newly “independent” Texas soil. As was true of many landowners in the area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande (the area was a zone of contention between the Republic of Texas and Mexico for years), the Olivares found themselves violently thrown off their land unexpectedly: Mexicans were courageous and could fight! . . . [Don Cesareo Olivares] shuddered at the mere thought of the approach of these Americans. . . . When news came that Santa Anna had been defeated and that his troops had been forced to leave the country he felt as though the world had gone mad. He could not believe it! It was impossible! . . . And then one morning when he and his caporal were riding through the pastures they had been accosted by a stranger who told them he had come to take possession of their land. And when he had replied that the stranger must be mistaken because he . . . was the rightful owner, the foreigner had taken out his pistol and had killed the caporal without any warning. “Let that be a lesson to you Mexicans,” the man had said, “that’s how we shall deal with anyone who opposes us. . . . (7)

This tale was repeated in Texas border history for many years, with almost every landholding family divested of their property by force or coercion. She continues the story with the violent death of Don Cesareo’s son Juan at the hands of American ranchers, leaving Don Cesareo heartbroken and driving the family from Texas into Mexico. Cesareo dies after experiencing what González deems “the bitterness of defeat, the thought that he had lost the heritage of his ancestors” (9), leaving his formidable wife Doña Ramona to raise their three children and encourage their hatred of all Anglo Americans: “My son,” she often told Francisco, “later in life when you are a man, you are bound to meet the enemies of your family. When that happens there is only one thing for you to do. Kill—and kill without compassion. Spare no one; if one of these foreigners should fall into your hands—kill him. If he should ask you for mercy, kill him; if he should kneel at your feet and beg for his life, kill him. Did they have mercy on your uncle Juan? Did they show mercy to your father?” (10)

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Ramona eventually softens toward the Americans, but only after more than thirty years have passed. The newcomers are now refugees from the American Civil War, and she finds them much more appealing, particularly as one of them marries into her family and helps the Olivares regain part of their original holdings in Texas. Again accessing historical facts, González provides a leavening of the intense race conflict on the border by introducing John Warren Preston (Don Juan) as a bridge between the Mexicans who have been dispossessed and the government of the new American state of Texas. Deftly negotiating with the original titles to the land from Spain, Don Juan manages to regain for several old landholding families parts of their claims—for several old families in Texas, including one of the more influential ones in San Antonio, legal recourse brought some relief. Having contained over one hundred years of history and cultural encounters into a short first chapter of the Olivares, the true narrative begins in the second section, after Ramona has sent her eldest son Francisco back to Texas to claim the Olivareño, or “The Stronghold of the Olivares,” the title of the second chapter. In this chapter, González lays out for readers a grounding in peon/master relations, establishing Francisco as an old order hacendado and criticizing his complacent sense of superiority: “Don Francisco de los Olivares lived like a feudal lord. Princely in generosity, but vindictive in revenge,” González notes, “A tyrant by inheritance and breeding, Don Francisco was feared and respected by all who knew him” (12). Francisco is very much the distractedly superior near-noble who was unable to see the implications of invading Americans, even with the family history of being driven off their own land. Also introduced in this second chapter is another strong, influential female—Francisco’s wife Margarita. Like his mother, Margarita is strong, powerful—but practical. Unlike Ramona, whose primary purpose in the narrative seems to be establishing Francisco’s hatred and distrust of Americans and giving voice to an entire generation of the dispossessed, Margarita is the beneficiary of a more stable society, as well as more familiarity with the neighboring Americans. It is she who brings Francisco down from his characteristic rages and who channels energy into improving the miserable lot of the peons of the Olivareño: she harbors a maternal feeling for the servants and seeks to improve their lot by education, entertainment, and more importantly, shelter them from Francisco’s ire. In this chapter which is, like the first, rich in detail of the specifics of the quotidian life of the ranch, the first of several folklore sections appears. “The Devil in Texas,” a trickster tale of Pedro de Urdemañas of TexasMexico folklore fame, is told to enlighten a ranch servant. The lengthy tale ends the chapter, which is significant primarily in the book as a whole for

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its explicit and detailed description of peon life—González set out the daily, desperate life of the peons to contrast with the comfortable and privileged life of the Olivares. However, far from presenting the depressed state of the peons and abandoning them, González picks up their stories and establishes several women of the ranch, as well as Margarita, as influential and prescient in their telling of Texas Mexican folklore.

“BLESSED BE . . .”: FOLKLORE AS CRITIQUE In the chapters following the initial two, González takes a great leap forward in Texas women writers’ fictional representation of their gender; in the chapter “Border Honor,” a visceral portrait of domestic abuse and its attendant damage is presented and critically assessed as to its impact. Juana, an elder among the servants, recounts the cruel abuse inflicted on Rita, the wife of a local landowner who had fallen into a strange illness. Rita is, in the presence of her young son Cristóbal, beaten and whipped by her husband Ramón to “drive the devil out of her.” Though she survives the abuse, which is the result of advice given to Ramón by a “witch healer” named Tío Anselmo, Cristóbal becomes withdrawn and sullen, and resents his father deeply. His father is estranged from his son, and the presence of the sullen and nearly silent Cristóbal is a precursor of things to come for the entrenched landowners—those who would not learn to grow beyond their limited feudal experience and who engage in destructive behaviors would ultimately fail in their attempt to maintain their lives in the face of the Americans. González’ interest in and determination to recount this story of abuse which forms Cristóbal’s character and marks Don Ramón in her narrative for tragedy is a significant moment in early Chicana literature—few if any other depictions of domestic violence endemic to the border region exist. One of the few others is found later in Dew on the Thorn. Later in the tale, a frightening example of domestic abuse is introduced in yet another story concerning a “devil” figure. A young woman named Paula is heard screaming in the night, and is later discovered to have been horribly beaten and then branded by an “unseen hand.” Interestingly, this section is edited out of the final version published by Arte Público: [Don Francisco said] “Believe me or not, she was branded on the face! A cross, some two inches long, very definitely marked, showed an angry red on her dark skin. . . . I asked her who had done it and she told me an unseen hand had tortured her all night. She found herself unable to move, as though her arms and limbs were tied by a wire to the bed. She

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screamed in fear, but the worst had not yet happened she had not felt the hot iron searing and scorching her face. She says she even heard the sizzling of the raw flesh. . . . when she came to she was tormented by a pair of slanting, green eyes which shone luminously in a corner of the room. She thinks it was the Devil” “The Devil was no doubt the husband, as your wife so well suggested,” said Don Alberto. (Garza-Falcón 108)

It is Margarita, Don Francisco Olivares’ wife, who is cognizant of the domestic abuse. Both Francisco and Don Alberto recognize the man’s potential for abuse. In the original copy of the book, it is revealed that the husband was away, and that the local priest is unwilling to intervene, dismissing the attack with “I can explain a miracle but things like that are far beyond me” (Garza-Falcón 108, italics mine). The cleric also reminds the hacendados that only the lower classes of people would believe in an attack by the Devil.17 As Garza-Falcón perceptively writes, It must have been a difficult thing for González to negotiate her knowledge of such stories with her academic world, especially because these stories relate the treatment of women, their defenselessness in the face of such denial and/or complicity on the part of both the community leadership and the law. What would academics make of such stories, and how would they perceive her for knowing them, if she did not distance herself from their source? (108–109)

These two examples, along with the above understanding, are revealing to present critics. Though edited out of the final draft, González’ commitment to writing this tale of domestic abuse and community complacency demonstrates a strong empathy for women in repressive situations. Culturally, abuse of women is publically frowned on in Mexican-American or Tejano communities—in practice, as noted by González and Garza-Falcón, the private domestic space is often discussed as being “beyond interference.” Only time has begun to shift blame and responsibility for abuse from women, as long-held sociocultural beliefs about “mujeres decentes” and the idea that men were allowed to be much more sexually permissive are finally changing to indict the abuser as well as (or fortunately, instead of) the abused. Interestingly, a critique of formerly acceptable behavior among the sons of the landowners is made by the hacendados themselves in the book:

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Ramón and Francisco discuss Ramón’s eldest son Carlos’ indiscretions with the servants on Ramón’s ranch. Francisco, with memories of his mother’s violent reaction to hearing of his own youthful indulgences with servant girls, counsels Ramón to rein in Carlos, lest he “disgrace” the family with illegitimate children: “I had a mother who made me see the shamefulness of such behavior. ‘How disgusting would it be,’ she said to me, ‘to see in lowborn creatures the likenesses of your ancestors.’”(35) Francisco, showing a maturity given to him by his mother and wife’s perceptions not only of proper behavior for a rich man’s son but of the proper relationship between men of all classes and women, advises Ramón to attend to the changing social climate brought by the Americans and their own children’s exposure to Anglo American culture. This constant undercurrent of encroachment links the chapters from the third through the final one, and is used to justify the presence of several more cautionary folktales. As recounted by men and women, the cautionary tales describe that particular chapter’s intent; in the chapter “Tío Patricio,” the old wise shepherd Patricio is introduced as a voice of reason as well as a transmitter of important folkloric information—he recounts a sad tale of how the female cardinal ended up much less colorful than her male counterpart, but that the process left the male much more vain, arrogant, and ignorant: “ . . . [Whenever] the male begins to fuss and scold, she, knowing the vanity of his sex, tosses her little head and flies off laughing at the stupidity of husbands, who like hers, are all woman-made and yet are proud of what they think is their own achievement.” (50)

Interestingly, Cristóbal is the listener and sighs “He is very much like my father” immediately after hearing the story (10). He is a reminder of the arrogance of the male landowners, an arrogance that is complacent (as noted by González in “American invades the Border Towns”) and not driven by the hatred of familiarity as Ramona’s was—an arrogance that is sometimes misplaced and greatly abused. As a second warning tale, the next folktale recounted by Patricio is also about birds, and also about arrogance leading to a fall from grace and a need for the support of a woman. At the conclusion of this tale, Francisco and Margarita are mentioned by Cristóbal, reminding the readers of the couple and separating them from the mention in the singular of Ramón—a foreshadowing technique repeated with folktales throughout the book. In addition, the tale should serve as a warning to readers of the danger of rashly making decisions, encouraging full discussion, particularly with the women in the text.

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At the end of this chapter, Carlos, having been caught with cattle thieves and horsewhipped by his father Ramón, leaves for Mexico in shame. His departure casts a pall over the ranching community and indeed, the novel takes a dramatic downturn with Carlos’ departure. The gloom descends even over the Olivares—youngest daughter Rosita was in love with Carlos and mourns his loss. This chapter, titled “The Unwelcomed Guest,” introduces a figure from border folklore, Antonio Traga-Balas (Bullet-Swallower) to provide us with a message for the ailing Rosita from Carlos in Mexico. However, and more important for the subversive and delicate work of criticizing patriarchal social structures and outmoded hacendado perceptions of life, is a moment in which Margarita confronts her husband about Rosita’s illness. After being told Rosita’s love for Carlos is straining her heart due to stress, Margarita rails at Francisco: “What is a name to the life of a daughter?” argued the mother. “A name is family honor, honor comes from the soul, and the soul belongs to God.” “How like a man you reason! I can forget family honor. I can forget all, all, to save the life of my daughter. What is a name? A hollow sound easily carried away by the wind. Something that passes; but a daughter, ah, Francisco! A daughter!” she continued softly, “is a being so tender and so loving. . . . Would you sacrifice her?” (63)

However, Francisco is unable to reconcile his wife’s wisdom with his colonial sense of propriety, even to save his daughter’s life. Margarita understands that the culture they live in, which has been nearly exclusively old-world Spanish, is unable to persist in a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world. She also recognizes that her husband does not see clearly the changes coming to their land and family. This theme of old meets new develops rapidly in the text after the departure of Carlos. The entire book drives toward the foreboding end, particularly after Don Francisco declares that Rosita will marry the man he chooses: “Yes, our poor Rosita, this will kill her.” “No, compadre, [Francisco says] like the women of our race she will suffer but she will do her father’s wishes.” “You mean?”

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After this portentous announcement, González introduces the mystical character Tío Patricio, one of the voices she uses to introduce the folktales she uses as warnings to the landed class. Back and forth from here on out in the novel, González weaves a complex tapestry of folkloric tales to drive the text and a veiled but constant critique of the blindness of the old order. Until the rise of Don Francisco’s biracial grandson Fernando, the doom of the Olivares seems to be certain.

“WE STAY!” Fernando is, in the final fourth of the book, the driving force of the move by González to demonstrate the fruition of her folkloric warnings. He begins to understand, through contact with Americans and a general optimistic outlook, that to survive in the border area the old order has to rise up and meet the new—including the lovers Carlos and Rosita. Fernando is the son of Francisco’s brother Fernando, who married the daughter of Anglo-Texan Don Juan Preston, and young Fernando is the first Olivares who tries to be accepted by the Anglo community: To his great surprise and astonishment Fernando found himself interested in learning English [after speaking to Don Juan] and in knowing the Americans better. Unlike the men of his class he wanted to work, and much to his father’s surprise and Don Francisco’s mortification, he had himself hired without their knowledge as a clerk in a general store in Corpus Christi. . . . Thus is was that he acquired in a practical way much more than the English language. Great was his surprise at the treatment he received in the American town. Had he received a slap on the face he would not have felt worse. The fact that his family had been in the country for five generations meant nothing to these Americans whom he had some so prepared to like. . . . In their eyes he was just a Mexican, and a Mexican was something to be treated as an inferior being. (151)

However, Fernando is persistent in his desire to learn English, and so he remains and grieves over the racism he experiences. The experiences make

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him bitter, and the story begins to move full circle back to the beginning and Doña Ramona’s hatred of the Americans for pushing the Olivares family from their land: The words which as a child he had heard from [her] lips came back to him in a rush, “Never trust them, we were born enemies and enemies we shall remain.” He had wanted to be their friend and they had rejected him, had treated him as he would not have treated one of his peones at home. (152)

The rejection of Fernando makes him determined to become a leader for his people in the region. He explains to the store owner he works for, who admires Fernando, “I came prepared to learn you ways . . . but how can I do that when not for one moment am I allowed to forget that I am a Mexican?” and finishes with another comment hearkening back to the beginning of the book: “I came willing to become and American, but instead of that I am now more determined to remain what I have always been, a Mexican and a gentleman” (152). In this chapter González also makes clear her own attitude toward Anglo encroachment and hacendado complaceny, as she did in “America Invades the Border Towns”: The experiences that he had met and the history of his people made him see that the border needed a leader, and what better leader could they find than he who understood and knew the Americanos? It was fifty-five years since the land of his ancestors had become part of the United States, and all this time the rancheros had lived happily ignorant that they were foreigners in a foreign land. He could see that they were unprepared politically and educationally to cope with the situation. . . . He saw what his work was to be: to awaken his people to the fact that they were part of the country in which they lived, and urge them to exercise their rights as American citizens. (152–153)

Additionally, Fernando makes it clear his desire to educate the people in “American ways,” including learning English, does not mean he wanted them to give up their pride in their culture. He merely understands that the landowners, “impregnable in their racial pride and blinded by their belief in their rural greatness,” cannot see the future, and understands that “to protect ourselves” the people have to understand the Americans (153). Interestingly, as Fernando rises to political power, it is only his uncle Don Francisco Olivares who cannot understand the changes to come, and

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rapidly. Francisco refuses to vote for Fernando in a local campaign, ignoring the Anglo threat. Francisco is finally convinced by his wife to vote, but not because he believes in Fernando’s agenda—Margarita plays on Francisco’s sense of family loyalty. Fernando’s rise to political power by understanding Anglo culture is mirrored in Texas history from Juan Seguín, a general in the War for Texas Independence who later lost his power, to Henry Cisneros. Political reality in South Texas demands an appreciation for the bicultural nature of the border area, and rarely is a politician allowed to play to only one culture— even our present President plays to Texas Mexicans by speaking Spanish occasionally in public. However, Fernando’s success is not mirrored by the rest of the Olivares family. Rosita and Carlos are finally reunited in the chapter “Blessed be the Moon and the Unfortunate Lover.” However, their joy is tempered by the presence before this chapter of one titled “The Woman Without a Soul.” In this chapter, a lost woman comes upon the Olivareño wailing that she has no soul. She is revealed to be a past resident of the ranchero, Carmen, who lost a love due to her parents’ stubbornness. The priest who assists her comments that he does not feel it was her fault—had her parents’ pride not been immovable, Carmen would not have wandered off and “lost her soul.” Carlos is then revealed as being near the ranch, and a measure of hope appears in an otherwise depressing section. Carmen is a tragic figure, reminiscent of the figure of La Llorona, the folkloric figure of the Wailing Woman. In this folktale, a woman drowns her two children (often the children are the mixed-race offspring of a Mexican Indian woman and a Spanish soldier) and then haunts the river she drowned them in, crying her grief. It has been used in Mexican and Tejano culture to scare children into staying inside at night and stay away from rivers, lest La Llorona snatch them up. Unlike the folkloric figure, however, Carmen does find a place, a new home with the Olivares family, by marrying Manuel de los Olivares, Francisco’s cousin. Her “redemption” of sorts leads to the lovers’ reunion, yet reminds readers of the portentous nature of the entire text in terms of the Olivares’ future. In the final chapter, “We Stay!,” the family is celebrating the marriage of Rosita and Carlos. The happiness, however, is tempered by the thoughts of the priest who has just linked Rosita and Carlos: He was happy! If only these Americanos had not come to upset the life of the rancheros. Just when everything was going so well . . . these people, who were coming in crowds, were not helping the situation

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with their attitude towards the Mexican population. Perhaps they resented the air of reserve and arrogance with which the Texas-Mexicans received them. It was hard to say! But trouble there was to be, he could see that. And it was coming soon. (175)

Again, it is not Francisco, the emblem of the old, who worries. Indeed, Francisco interrupts the reverie and asks what the priest is so concerned over: “ . . . I was seeing the future.” “And what does it say to you, Padre?” “I see hundreds of strangers at your doors. I see them struggling for possession of this country.” (176)

Francisco’s response to the priest’s exhortations to take care and prepare for the invasion is more of his usual; “Change! Change! That’s all I hear about now!” he says, and insists on enjoying the festivities. Doom hovers over the event, however, until the caporal (foreman) of the ranch comes to Francisco to explain that the vaqueros have been lured away by the American ranches with the promise of greater wages. Francisco explodes in rage, but the priest explains “It has always been the same, my son, the new against the old. You and I are the relics of an epoch that is rapidly disappearing. The Americanos bring a new age. Men like Fernando and Alberto are the links that will join this incoming era with what is doomed to perish.” “With what is doomed to perish? . . .” “Yes, my son, it will not be long from now before this land will be invaded by the newcomers; it will not be long before you will become an alien in what you once considered the heritage of your ancestors.” Twilight descended. The long shadows of evening enveloped the patio in a purple haze. Don Francisco, bowed head in hands, said nothing. When hearts weep there is no need for words. (178)

Francisco is despondent over this news, and goes for comfort to his wife Margarita: “The same story again, are we to be driven from our

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homes? Are we to abandon all that is ours?” Margarita, answering “with the pride of her race,” declares “This land is ours. It was blessed by the blood of the fathers who made it a Christian land. It was blessed by the blood of our ancestors who fought and suffered for it and conquered it, that we, their children, might have a home. The Americanos may come. They may take the land, but our spirit, the spirit of the conquerors, will live forever. Texas is ours. We stay!” (179).

González thus gives the last, powerful words in the book to a woman, who has constantly struggled to make her husband see his folly. These words echo Ramona’s more bitter ones near the beginning of the book, yet are less hateful. She can acknowledge that perhaps land will change hands, and the Olivares may move again, yet as she states (and as has been stated by Chicanas and Chicanos over the years), “Texas is ours. We stay!” Throughout the book, González has had women and women recounting tales which act as warnings to the landowners, presenting the kind of warnings in this early text to the complacent rancheros that she would later more forcefully present in her journal articles. Undoubtedly, if González had an understanding of the impact Anglo American “invasions” would have on the border area in the early 1920s, she would recognize the impact later in her career, as she traveled the border area collecting folklore and observing closely border life. This observation may be a clue as to her later involvement in education and anti-discrimination movements in South Texas—Fernando the younger may well be the voice of González in the text, along with Margarita. Both characters recognize the threat of change presented by the Anglos, and both understand that some times of new culture or life has to develop when the clash of cultures occur. Both are willing to engage with the encroaching culture on their terms, and when presented with an obstacle either go around, leap it, or adjust it so that it fits into their gradually more complex lives. Perhaps this is what González did in her career as a folklorist with her mentor, J. Frank Dobie. As noted earlier, she understood that they valued Tejano culture differently, and that Dobie was persistently dismissive of the folklore González would later collect in its entirety, without editing it for “non-folkloric” consumption. While she imbibed the field’s language and general approach (as many scholars must do when beginning in a field), she nevertheless maintained her own understanding of the real significance of Texas-Mexican folklore. This led to a greater feel for and appreciation of the tales, and made her an early champion of Texas-Mexican creative

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expression, and her willingness to resist Dobie’s powerful influence to carve her own niche in Texas folklore studies cannot be overlooked. It is only unfortunate that an appreciation of her work, and an understanding of how much potential and power she saw in Tejano folklore and the everyday expressions of Texas-Mexican life, could not come about until the late twentieth century with the publication of her two novels. As Garza-Falcón sadly notes, “With regard to her university [folklore] work, one must ask if we would have any of her works today had she not made some concessions to the Anglo male patriarchy of the academy” (Garza-Falcón 130). “Jovita González reminds us of what a long road it indeed has been for Mexicanos in Texas to achieve finally their own voice,” Ramon Saldívar writes of González in his 1990 book Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. From knitting during her collection activities to offer a “nonthreatening” image of a female scholar, to confronting a massive institutional concept of Texas-Mexican culture as barren or bastardized from Spain, Jovita González paved the way with her persistence and her ability to concede some to gain much. It is perhaps her ability, along with other border women, to write dissent into narratives of seemingly everyday life, to walk in multiple worlds, that marks Jovita González as an important and very complex foremother of Chicanas working in the academy, and Chicana writers in the present. To her work struggling through a remarkably repressive institutional culture, scholars, writers, and critics owe a great deal more than we can repay.

Chapter Four

The People Beyond the Mountains: Crossing Boundaries with Josephina Niggli’s Mexican Village

I, too, am in the far lost land. Oh, Sainted Heaven, if I but had wings. —“Mexican folk song,” quoted by Josephina Niggli1

Josephina Niggli’s body of work, impressive in its own right particularly in the field of drama2, has yielded up another facet in recent history—the semiepic novel Mexican Village. First published to general acclaim in 1945—the New York Herald Tribune called it “without peer in its field”—Mexican Village has been rediscovered and hailed as important by Chicana scholars not merely for its early publication, but for its complex rendering of the life of a Mexican border village through folklore, songs, and regional traditions. In her sensitive and perceptive handling of the villagers and the one “outsider” who yet finds himself at home, Josephina Niggli manifests in Mexican Village a complex negotiation of society, culture, border/s, and identity set on the western side of the Rio Grande, which I analyze here as operating in the same manner as Chicana texts set on the Texas side of the Mexican border. This is, indeed, a text about marginal identities and the negotiation of influences internal and external—an essential aspect of Chicana literature whether this side or el otro lado del Río Grande. Born in 1910 in Monterrey, Mexico, and raised in the town of Hidalgo and the surrounding area until being sent to high school in San Antonio, Texas in 1925, Josephina Niggli, was “a unique case vis-àvis questions of ethnic identity and nationality”—as described by María Herrera-Sobek in the introduction to Mexican Village, Niggli “grew up 87

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bilingual and bicultural”3. Her Swiss-Alsatian father had lived in Mexico since 1893, having moved from Texas, where he married Niggli’s GermanIrish-French mother.4 The border chaos during the Mexican Revolution sent the family back and forth across the US/Mexico border during much of Niggli’s childhood. This nomadic and at times dangerous life of border crossing contributed to Josephina Niggli’s conceptualization of herself once the family was able to settle in 1925 in San Antonio. Upon entering Incarnate Word College (now the University of the Incarnate Word), Niggli began to explore writing as a career, winning several poetry and short story contests before her graduation in 1931.5 Her writing developed further at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from which she received a Master’s degree in drama. She later taught drama and radio- and playwriting there, as well as at Western Carolina University. It was in North Carolina that she produced her most significant works, including the play Soldadera (1936), Mexican Village (1945), and the significant radio writing handbook Pointers on Radio Writing (1946).6 At this juncture, Niggli was established as a dramatist, scholar, teacher, and innovator in radio and theater. She did not consider herself, however, a Chicana teacher, scholar, or writer, as noted by Maria Herrera-Sobek: In a telephone interview I conducted with her . . . in the early 1980s, Niggli was pleasantly surprised I considered her a Chicana. In that interview she graciously stated: I am very flattered you consider me a Chicana. . . . Other Chicano critics have also considered me a Chicana. . . . However, I must tell you that I don’t know if I am a Chicana. I have an interesting background different from Chicanos. I was born in Mexico but my parents were not Mexican. My parents were Scandinavian.I came to the United States as a young girl and have lived here ever since. (xx)

As Herrera-Sobek points out, Niggli’s general lack of a political Chicana consciousness is a note to consider when defining her work as Chicana. If the accepted, easy definition of Chicana is a “person of Mexican ancestry born or raised in the United States” (xx, emphasis mine) is applied to Niggli, the situation is not clear.7 Her lack of political affiliation with Chicana social ideals problematizes a clear identification. However, her careful thoughts on the subject, added to the experiences of her life which manifest themselves in Mexican Village and other works as Chicana representation, are the basis for my understanding of her work and identity construction as Chicana. Certainly, her lifetime affection for and affiliation with Mexicans/fronterizos

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in her work validates her consciousness of margins and representation, if not always a clear comprehension of sociocultural constructs. Niggli’s considered reply to the question of ethnic identity shines light not only onto her own understanding of her complex identity, but on the fluid definition of Chicana over the post-Revolution era, from Villegas de Magnón’s “problem” of class through Jovita González’ exploration of folklore and folkways in the changing Texas border area. Niggli’s writing in Mexican Village takes the work of past women and expands it outward to demonstrate not only portability of complex identities, but also the application of Chicana identity exploration to positions outside the United States. As mentioned above, Niggli’s “uncertainty” arises primarily in the critic observing and cataloging the aspects of “Chicanisma” which can be used to define the boundaries of Chicana Studies, particularly if those definitions arise out of masculinist Movimiento history. In the introduction to this project as well as my discussion of Leonor Villegas de Magnón, the boundaries and structure of Chicana literature and cultural expression have been pushed farther back and established as realities well before a standard textbook definition of Chicana as a “female Chicano, existing after the 1960s.” In this chapter, which I envision as one in which all the boundaries are pushed even farther, the discussion turns to a writer and work which challenge once more the hegemonic structure “Chicana.”8 One of the more interesting boundaries, or borders, against which I push in this chapter is Niggli’s own interesting, somewhat deprecating, self-identity. Is it, therefore, possible to name Niggli a Chicana writer? In this chapter, I will argue the validity of this claim. As mentioned previously, the background necessary to understand my reading of Mexican Village as a Chicana work lies in the first three chapters of this project as a whole. Taken out of context, or with only a vague and undetermined idea of the complexity of Chicana, Niggli’s work here can seem picturesque and as a reinforcer of stereotypes; after explaining Niggli’s own uncertainty concerning her ethnic identity, Maria Herrera-Sobek in the Introduction to Mexican Village elucidates Although Niggli was not conscious of being a Chicana . . . she nevertheless had a strong sensibility and knowledge of Mexican life, customs, and traditions. Her intense interest in exploring the history, psychology, and folkways of Mexican people and her consistent inclusion of the above vectors in her works, make her a direct precursor of Mexican American literature. . . . (xxi)

In another section, however, Herrera-Sobek mentions that Niggli’s interest, as enumerated above, combined with a very Chicana preoccupation

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with the realities of everyday life, which was then couched in a somewhat romantic notion of culture. This reality, threaded through with complex characters and stereotypes9, is a narrative strategy which will be repeated in modern Chicana literature, from Sandra Cisneros to Lorna Dee Cervantes. The subject of “vectors” is one which for my project helps ease Niggli closer to Chicana, as the preoccupation in modern Chicana literature with borders, margins, crosshatching of those margins, and fluidity of identity is a “vectoring” which Niggli explores in her text. The definitive answer to Niggli’s modern categorization may not be easy—but it is that very unease as well as the interest and combination of “vectors” noted above which allows the consideration in a serious manner of Niggli as a border-influenced, cross-cultural early Chicana. Her challenges cannot, and are not, easily ignored in her text, nor should they be dismissed for our own modern inability to easily fit her into a stereotype of Chicana. Further discussion of Niggli’s ethnic quandary merits a book in itself—at present her writing speaks clearly in this project as Chicana. The dismissal, as noted in the discussion of Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s The Rebel, of a romanticized narrative of the everyday which upon close examination yields up consistent challenges to a status quo, would be unfortunate. Mexican Village, while hardly a “Chicana Manifesto” of struggle, is nevertheless a carefully structured, wonderfully rich examination of the issues present in Chicana literature, elucidated through many of the same expressive methodologies of present Chicana literature, and resulting in much the same; a nuanced, highly complex, and very present delineation of an individual struggling to define and defend identity as a marginal person. Though erstwhile protagonist Bob Webster cannot be Chicana, his search for identity in the borderlands town of San Nicolás Hidalgo (the “Mexican village” of the title) resounds with Chicana critics. Josephina Niggli’s struggle to present a complex web of life for border residents and her own understanding of multiplicities represents a Chicana attempt to come to terms with something amorphous but real, as fluid as the body of an otter on a fast current in the river which acts as one of many physical borders to the residents of Hidalgo. In her set up and framing of the entire text, Niggli chooses to work from the outside inward in several ways to better present Bob Webster’s complex identity; she begins the tale at the margins of the town in “The Quarry,” metaphorically placing the yanqui mixed-race Bob on the outside looking in, having just arrived in the area with a mysterious background and no desire to stay for more than one year. Webster understands his marginality and gives us insight into his fractured sense of identity:

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Two of the children had seen him. . . . They all looked at him with the blank eyes of the Indian, expecting nothing, giving nothing. He felt the blankness so strongly that he turned away, feeling as he had always felt, an outsider, a person to be tolerated but not accepted. [ . . . ]When he was small he had accepted this loneliness as part of his heritage, but later in Europe he had felt the lack to be a part of himself, and so he had come to Mexico, hoping that the nostalgia of the blood might be satisfied. (10)

The sense Webster has of his identity as something that is somehow genetic or wedded to the blood of family (which we understand to be part-Mexican) is a driving force for him throughout the text; later, when it becomes clear that he not only speaks Spanish well but knows various Mexican traditions and folkways, the people of the village begin to wonder along with Bob what kind of identity and home he will claim for himself. Perhaps due to their longtime residency in a border area, incredibly complex and fraught with fallout from the Mexican Revolution (the first chapter is set in March 1920), many of the residents of Hidalgo have a less difficult time accepting Bob Webster as either a Mexican or biracial. Different groups in Hidalgo accept Bob with little difficulty: when Bob meets two of the more important characters in the tale, Andrés Treviño and Pepe Gonzalez, the young caballeros’ main concern as they recognize Bob as a Spanish-speaking, sympathetic, very probably mixed-race man of their own age, is that he speaks Spanish so well that of course he must become a member of the new Casino in Hidalgo. Similarly, within a week of his arrival, quarry workers recognize Bob as sympathetic with traditions of the indios who work the rock; Bob not only defers to the quarry foreman’s experience and age by addressing the man as “Don” Anselmo, he joins in the nighttime singing at the quarry. Weaving folklore and songs deftly into the narrative, Niggli introduces Bob’s deep understanding and appreciation of his mother’s Mexican culture. Further on in this rich chapter, Bob meets and wins over the leading citizens of Hidalgo, through his understanding of traditions, mastery of Spanish, and in particular his appropriation of deeply entrenched folkloric myth—he “becomes” the semi-legendary El Caballo Blanco (White Horse), named for the pure white stallion he rode as he robbed gold and silver from the quarries and towns. A clue to Bob’s history lies in his knowledge of the myth and its power: His grandmother’s voice sounded faintly, as though he were hearing her through water. “Always he rode a white horse. They forgot his name, but the horse they remembered.”

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Bob continues by questioning the quarry foreman about the legend, eliciting an immediate and powerful response from Don Anselmo: “In these mountains it is not good to mention the Caballo Blanco, for the witches, in their laughter, might fetch his spirit before you. . . . When I was small my father told me many stories, and they were true, for my father spoke the words. But there was once a man of my people, the Huachichil, who rode through all these mountains . . . without fear. His horse was white, and from the horse came the name El Caballo Blanco. . . . [he] guards [his stolen] treasure very fiercely, so that all who try to find it go mad from seeing him ride toward them on his white horse.” (12)

Ironically, yet unknown at the moment Anselmo speaks these words, Bob is directly descended from the Huachichil Indian Daniel Menéndez, who was El Caballo Blanco, and Bob’s grandfather. Indeed, Bob plays on his understanding of the power of superstition when he acquires for his own use a white horse, in order to help gain command over the workers of the quarry. It is not without a measure of trepidation, however, that Bob decides to “become” his ancestor. He briefly thinks through the idea, both the potential power of the image he would present and the knowledge that he was predicted to own such a horse: “When you are grown, young one, you, too, shall own a fine white horse, and the knowledge will console him in purgatory.”10 Bob worries briefly about the predestinatory feel of buying the white horse—Niggli adds, “his skeptical mind could not prevent the cold touch of fear within him that was a part of his heritage” (24, italics mine). The remainder of this chapter details El Caballo Blanco’s story and sets Bob up to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps in several important ways. By allowing the reader access to Bob’s internal dialogue, Niggli sets a tone of conflict between at least two extremes: the rational, practical side of Bob’s Anglo-American experiences as a well-traveled, World War I veteran, and the buried and suppressed Mexican Indian side, which informs Bob’s emotions, beliefs, and reactions to San Nicolas Hidalgo. These extremes, however, do not represent a “choice” Bob has to make between his two cultural influences; rather, they are emblematic of Niggli’s understanding of cultural conflict arising among bicultural, or biracial, people. Setting this conflict within a protagonist who is himself in a borderlands, she presents a wealth of possibilities. Niggli’s slow and detailed rendering of Bob’s character allows us to see the process by which a person functions in the quotidian even while struggling with self-identity. Bob functions quite well in Hidalgo for most of the

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text, using his childhood knowledge and his adult experiences in World War I and the US southwest to gain headway in the town. At the same time, he is searching for a home and a sense of self that will allow him to accept his marginalities. The demonstration of the quotidian negotiations of life and his internal conflict and insecurities renders Bob Webster a case study for the exploration of a Chicana process of identity. Bob’s gender is, until he becomes interested in a woman herself from the margins of the town, not minor but of the least concern for readers interested in his gradual understanding of who he is and where he “fits” in this borderlands community.

EL MOLLINILLO: BLENDING AND BLURRING ROLES IN MEXICAN VILLAGE As befits a text concerned as a whole with a young man’s ten-year journey to discover who he is and accept that identity, Niggli’s work in Mexican Village is resplendent in multifaceted characterization. Aside from Bob Webster’s own (somewhat spectacular) identity development, Niggli presents us with several lengthy expositions of characters operating against type and blurring societal roles. A prime example, and one which links the text to Dew on the Thorn, is Pablo the goatherd. A quiet and distant figure in the text until chapter four, Pablo takes center stage in this story of his tragic love for another marginal character, Anita O’Malley. A young Irish woman from Hidalgo whose primary talent is dancing, Anita is bullied by her drunkard father into performing to support them both, and is seen during a wedding by Pablo, who falls desperately in love with her. In fact, Pablo’s presence at a wedding would be unlikely. However, he is much liked by the residents of Hidalgo, who believe his unfortunate kinship with the Devil not his fault, only an occupational hazard: Pablo, the goatherd, was one of the tribe of Lilith. Goats are sons of Grandfather Devil, and the herder must make his pact with the Devil before the goats will obey him. . . . The day he signed himself to Don Timotéo Gonzalez as a herder, the town went to mourn with his mother for his dead soul. What matter that Father Zacaya insisted Pablo still had the right to come to church? The priest was born a city man and knew nothing of the Devil’s power in goats. (147)

Pablo, unlike other residents of the valley, however, has a general pleased sense of himself and his status in the community:

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Post-Revolutionary Chicana Literature [W]as it not a true thing that many times the Devil came and snatched their souls, leaving their bodies to wander around in darkness? Pablo knew all this, but Pablo laughed at the Devil and his witch wives. . . . No man would dare fight him because of the Devil’s curse. And, in a way, his presence meant good luck. For Pablo could give or withhold the Devil’s curse at his own pleasure. (147–48)

In addition, Bob, Father Zacaya, and some of the younger residents of Hidalgo are able to see Pablo as a friend and confidante, even as they are aware that local superstition will prevent Pablo from being accepted as a full member of the town. Bob in particular is close to the goatherd and depends on him for practical advice—Bob’s marginal status as a Yanquí and at the same time a member of the community resonates with Pablo’s own insider-outsider status. In this respect, Pablo is emblematic of Josephina Niggli’s own insideroutsider status—successful writer, educator, and member of a diasporic community of Mexicans, who has a deep understanding of the several margins represented by belonging to the latter group. Niggli resembles her characterization of Pablo more than her portrait of the early Bob Webster, in that she possesses an understanding of the community in which she lived—she was a native of the culture, where Bob is an outsider and ignorant of many societal structures and beliefs. The independent nature of Pablo is what connects instantly with the red-haired Irish dancer Anita at a wedding, and leads in time to Pablo’s own death. As Niggli describes it, They were both pagans. Perhaps that accounted for it. Perhaps it was like calling to like. No one can be certain of these things. . . . Their eyes met. It was as simple as that. Neither one had ever heard of Olympus. They knew nothing of nymph and faun. But they knew, somehow, that this was not the same as the love of the bride and groom sitting so proudly on the sofa. Here was fire calling to fire, flame answering flame. (148)

Their passionate love affair burns very hot and links them tightly, yet as might be imagined, such passion is unable to last. In less than a day, Anita’s father scorns her love for Pablo, who he dismisses as worthless, spurring Anita to declare she will not leave Hidalgo to go with her father to Mexico City. Locking her in her room, her father returns with a gun

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to threaten Anita. When a servant screams, Pablo arrives and tries to protect Anita from her father, and is fatally shot in the struggle. The O’Malleys leave on the train to Mexico City before Pablo’s murderer can be discovered. The rest of the chapter details Anita O’Malley’s difficult journey over five years back to Hidalgo. She works very hard at learning dance, using it to help her deal with the pain of Pablo’s death. Becoming very popular in a traveling show, Anita exists in a marginal space of grief, unable to come to terms with her father’s responsibility for Pablo’s death. Her popularity leads, however, to General Valdez, a former Revolutionary general who has become fascinated with tales of “The Great O’Malley” and comes to see her for himself. That same night, however, Anita momentarily believes a musician to be Pablo and has a nervous breakdown. The general goes to assist her and the story of Pablo and her life is told in flashback to him. Anita, struck by the general’s kindness, agrees to marry him though she tells him, “You know I don’t love you—that I have promised to belong to no one but Pablo” (164). For his part, the general is satisfied that he was able to rescue Anita from her abusive father and provide her with a measure of security. Anita’s tragic story only turns more disastrous, after General Valdez is killed by a jealous former manager of hers. In the end, she is left alone in her home on the Street of the Hidden Water, lighting candles to the memory of her dead love and as well to the memory of General Valdez. To read this tragic and depressing tale in the middle of a book about the gradual enlightenment of a marginal figure is to question its purpose. Certainly, there is commentary on the marginal figures of Pablo and Anita, and the sparks that fly when they connect—there is critique to be made of the instability of the borderlands, psychically and socially in “The Street of the Hidden Water.” However, as Niggli resumes her portraits of the remaining residents, we wonder about its purpose in the structure of the text; we have to try to understand Niggli’s intent in placing this narrative at this juncture of the text. An answer lies in Niggli’s complete structural control of her narrative, placing certain narratives between those contrasting in tone, and building empathy and interest in her characters. The “building” of Niggli’s Mexican village of Hidalgo and the structure of her narrative are intimately linked to the gradual understanding for the reader of the story—creating a mosaic of meaning from carefully detailed and deliberate representation.

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BUILDING A VILLAGE: NIGGLI’S “FAR OFF LAND”— DISPLACEMENT AND HOME The structure of Mexican Village—a series of ten connected vignettes named for sections of the town—demonstrates both the mobility of Chicana subjectivity and the importance of the everyday to that subjectivity. The narrative carries the story of mixed-race Bob Webster as an undercurrent throughout, demonstrating that fractured subjectivity crosses borders, languages, race, and gender. While Bob’s gender can be problematic for readers looking for Chicana subjectivity, reading Niggli carefully allows readers to understand more completely the levels of complexity and marginalization represented in the text. Gender, meaning, and geography intersect here in such intricate patterns that simplistic readings of Mexican Village disappear in light of Niggli’s deliberate and nuanced work in the narrative. In her own understanding of a concept present-day readers will understand as a part of developing Chicana consciousness—an analysis and sense of place—Josephina Niggli problematizes what can be mistaken as a sleepy, dull border town and explodes the narratives into a representation of internal and external borders to be crossed. She divides the town into sections and defines the limits of San Nicolas Hidalgo by the rising cliffs northward, the river east and north, and the railroad south of town. Within those “borders” are, as in many towns, definite divides based on labor, class, and tradition. The first site for exploration is the large rock quarry where Bob Webster begins his stay in Hidalgo. The quarry workers live in traditional hollowed-out caves nearby, which they consider healthy and safe, and which Webster, the new foreman, considers appalling. This initial reaction from Bob to what he sees as a primitive life is based on his “American” sense of propriety—he is not yet in “The Quarry” cognizant of Mexican life or folkways and is presented as something of an elitist. However, it is important to note that Niggli’s structure of the text places Bob on the outside of town, as a stranger. His disgust is tempered for the reader by his naiveté and by the Mexicans’ tolerance for his elitism, and also by his near immediate attempts to throw himself fully into the job as quarry manager. Bob cleans out the old offices of the manager and claims his space as the jefe, utilizing his childhood understanding of Mexican culture to establish himself in some way as a man of substance. This setting itself is a recognition of the complexity of Chicana identity—metaphorically, Bob is a complex person who is creating a new, more appropriate identity for himself in a space which is intricately webbed, allowing more easily for a person of indeterminate identity to develop without limitations. While Bob’s constant questioning of his own identity

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continues internally, his external world becomes more accepting as each chapter passes, until “Don Bob” is a member of the community as completely as the priest or the alcalde. The development, while marked at times by commentary from different characters, almost always manifests itself as quiet asides, presenting time passing and Bob becoming more “Mexican” than “American.” As much as Bob develops greater understanding of his marginal identity and the interstitial world he has decided to live in, the first chapter of Mexican Village is also important in its development of the world in which Bob lives. “The Quarry” introduces almost every important character, from each part of the village that Niggli will explore chapter by chapter. The chapter also introduces Bob’s major unresolved conflict concerning claiming an identity, something which influences his relationships with other characters in the text—his father’s rejection of him and a prior lover’s rejection of him, both circumscribed by a single epithet spat at Bob: “Indian!” Though the chapter is nearly brimming with information to take in, it is Niggli’s structure which demands such detailing. Starting from the outside in, as a stranger such as Bob Webster would, she takes us with him into the village, through evaluation by the residents and leaders of Hidalgo, to the beginning of acceptance as a member of the community. In this way, Niggli makes the reader connect to Bob’s journey from the outside in, from stranger and at home nowhere to leader in the community and secure in his place in Hidalgo. It is a journey she involves us in early on, delving deep into the traditions and life of the town and exposing all the layers one by one; from the quarry through plaza life at night, into the areas of town named in each one of the following chapters, and setting up for the reader a practical and imaginative “map” by using several important figures besides Bob who travel through all the areas, connecting threads and building the story for the audience. This mapping is both practical (we must understand the layout of the town inasmuch as each area is represented in a different chapter to represent a different trajectory of her tale: folklore, myth, romance, history, etc) and metaphorically rich for a critic of the borderlands and Chicana identity. Work from writers in other borderlands also often detail an internal “mapping” of human subjectivity which plays out in journeys and travels across a landscape which itself is metaphorically linked to the character’s identity development. Those figures in these texts who can cross the landscape and map out a path for themselves or others to be a guide are the ones most successful in negotiating the borderlands and border identity. Bob as a beginning traveler has to find his own path, but there are traces left by those who went before, including those who reside in the interstices

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between Here and There, who make the borderlands home. Some of the figures gain a great measure of power from their journey and, more importantly, from the understandings they develop of the area they are traversing, including Bob himself. Some figures, however, are necessary victims of Niggli’s narrative structure; the chapters detailing tragic love and death deal with characters whose personal identity development was hampered by cultural strictures are placed in such a way as to cause the reader to pause and consider the sociocultural reality of the border in her otherwise entertaining text. The cultural chaos of the post-Revolution period is well-represented in these chapters—”The River Road,” “The Street of the Hidden Water,” and “The Plaza of the Viceroys”—and these chapters also provide a wealth of cultural background to explain the complexity of the seemingly quiet town of Hidalgo. Underneath the sleepy, peaceful image of the Mexicans you may know from other work as Anglo-American readers, Niggli seems to say, resides a deeply complex, highly contentious history of a real people and a real community. In many ways, the three chapters of tragedy are Niggli’s moments of most obvious social commentary—in these carefully spaced chapters, she writes in most detail of several stereotypes of women, men, and love in Mexican culture, countering Anglocentric views of Mexicans yet allowing the drama of love gone wrong to be fully explored in a careful manner. The overall result is a sympathy for the characters in the chapters, particularly as the main characters in the three tragic sections are all background figures in the rest of the book. Exploding myths, particularly of women, Josephina Niggli uses these tragic pauses to evoke in the reader a deeper understanding of her Mexican villagers.

MAPPING MEANING: STRUCTURE AND INTENT Near the middle section of the book, the first tragic chapter in Mexican Village, “The Street of the Hidden Water,” about the melodramatic love affair between Pablo the goatherd and Anita O’Malley follows the humorous chapter “The Chicken Coop” and is placed before the more expository, romantic, and historical “The Street of the Cañon.” In narrative terms, the introduction of the tangential love story of Pablo and Anita, only linked tenuously to Hidalgo, is perhaps not desirable. However, bearing in mind Niggli’s occupation as a playwright, the moment and its placement dramatically serves to deepen the empathy of the reader with the characters. In addition, the tragic nature of the story is lifted slightly by our memory of the previous chapter “The Chicken Coop” and

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is mitigated by the very historically-informed next chapter, which also details a love gone “right” The second tragic chapter in Mexican Village details a life derailed by a brotherly love and an obsession with fame, as well as traveling between Mexico, America, and Spain. In “The Plaza of the Viceroys,” about the bullfighter Gitanillo and his sister Lolita, we are introduced to the story and then moved to the past almost immediately. We meet Lolita and her husband Rubén in the present, then Niggli begins the story of Gitanillo and his impulsive life as a bullfighter. The tragedy common to tales of bullfighting strikes—Gitanillo is killed at the peak of his fame, and Lolita finds the cost of a charm she has asked a witch to use on her brother to soften his overprotective heart that she may be with her love Rubén. As befits a drama, the charm takes effect because Gitanillo is killed in the bullring. Lolita, understanding the “high cost” the witch had referred to, decides her brother’s death does not invalidate the promise she made to him long ago that she would give her heart to no one but himself. Demonstrating Niggli’s understanding of social mores of the area and period, the remainder of the chapter details how Rubén and Lolita came to be living as husband and wife in Hidalgo. Taking advantage of a historical event, the San Antonio, Texas great flood of 1921, to explain the loss of marriage documents, Lolita and Rubén move to Hidalgo in 1923 with a lie of a life in place and a modicum of happiness without the official fiat of marriage. The placement of this chapter, right before another comico-romantic chapter (“The Plaza of Independence”), once more builds up residents’ history, while drawing empathy in for the climax of the story, which is not Bob Webster’s decision to remain in Hidalgo as a citizen. Rather, the climax appears in “The River Road,” the long chapter which follows “The Plaza of Independence.” In this chapter, there is a central female figure who becomes enmeshed in events nearly out of her control. As in the other two chapters, there are tragic repercussions, but not without some kind of understanding and revelation. The female figures in the text, not Bob Webster solely, inform us as to the roles of women in the borderlands, their strength, and their adaptive capacity. In many ways, they are the models for Bob’s long journey to himself. Structurally, therefore, Niggli has three chapters out of ten which detail high tragedy, interspersed between chapters of exposition in which lovers often discover themselves and become committed to each other. In each of the three chapters—”The Street of the Hidden Water,” “The Plaza of the Viceroys,” and “The River Road”—there is no sermonizing about the implications of forbidden or dangerous love, or love between different

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social classes, something which is impressive in its own right but also informed by Niggli’s empathy with the borderlands dwellers. Setting the text as a whole immediately after the Mexican Revolution, Niggli can play with “conventional” mores and demonstrate a fluid understanding of social values and the negotiation of a complex quotidian. The near-chaos of the post-Revolutionary era meant not only that traditions had to be recovered, but also that, like the post-World War II era in the United States, gender and societal roles had started to redefine themselves. Each chapter of tragedy recalls, as well, the reality of the often-tragic destruction of the family or couples due to the Revolution and the fallout of that conflict. Niggli’s intent in the interspersing of the chapters was not only to utilize conventions of melodrama her audience would recognize—the romance, the bullring, the fallen woman, the involvement of the devil and superstition, all of which she dealt with admirably—but to recognize and remind readers of the complexities of life in the area, and the complex lives of seemingly simple people. For, despite her concern about accepting the “Chicana” label, Niggli was intensely concerned with the representation of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in English literature, and more precisely the representation of the many women who have long gone unnamed in the history of the borderlands. In this way she shares the intent of “naming” the unknown and demanding attention and respect for the women of the time with Leonor Villegas de Magnón and her present literary “daughters” in Chicana writing. Undoubtedly women’s roles and their freedoms were restricted as the social fabric was knit anew by the government, though it never was the same as the pre-Revolutionary era; what Niggli demonstrated in her text was the non-academic, non-governmental reality of the everyday. Regardless of how the men of the valley may have wanted to reconstruct a stereotypical society (which much modern research has concluded was highly patriarchal—see Walter Webb’s histories for examples) in which women had a more limited role, the presence of strong, courageous women in the text belies that attempt. Niggli takes several of the stereotypical or archetypal female roles in Mexican culture—the fallen woman, the bruja or wise witch, the wife— and carefully peels aside the “conventional” perceptions of these figures to challenge a male-oriented point of view on the society she is representing.

LAS SOLDADERAS: REWRITING WOMEN IN THE POST-REVOLUTION Tracing backward from Mexican Village in her writing, critics can observe Niggli’s consistent attempts to construct complex and careful female characters

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prior to Mexican Village, as in her play Soldadera. One of Josephina Niggli’s most enduring works, one still performed in theaters today, this 1936 play about women soldiers in the Mexican Revolution challenges stereotypes of women in the Mexican Revolution. Writing about the reclamation of these figures from the mists of an overwhelmingly male-authored Revolution history, Carmen Salazar Parr and Genevieve Ramírez note that Niggli’s characterizations of females “are not the stoical mujeres sufridas [longsuffering women in a patriarchal system]; instead, their form of self-sacrifice is their deliberately assumed role as active agents for change.”11 This play was the first to address the role of women fighters in the Revolution in a manner valuing their participation, and is still in print. Prior to this successful drama, images of Revolution women revolved around thinly-veiled whore archetypes (especially “Adelita,” discussed in chapter one of this project), suffering mothers of dead Revolutionaries, and the occasional waiting wife, as represented most often in biographies of male Revolution participants. Niggli’s work in Soldadera served as a precursor to the much longer and more complex novel Mexican Village, wherein even as she was mindful of an Anglo-American audience’s expectations, her control of narrative allowed the presentation of several significant, complex “stereotypical” women. Taking archetypes mentioned above and others, Niggli reveals a complex association of social, cultural, and gender constructs being redefined in Mexican Village. Niggli also provides readers with several more simplistic or overtly stereotyped female figures, including the main antagonist of “The Chicken Coop,” who is shamed at her own wedding for her greed, and a jealous lover who kills a rival in “The River Road.” Those figures are stereotypical as presented and can be, for a casual reader, either comforting or annoying. María Herrera-Sobek notes, referring to this seeming contradiction, Both Niggli and her main protagonist Webster seek to cross cultural boundaries. We can see this in the author’s attempts to make accessible to American readers [Mexico]. In this sense we can explain her use of Mexican and gender stereotypes. Through the insertion of familiar models (i.e. stereotypes), Niggli sought to render acceptable to the American public that which was to them exotic and different. As an author, she had to grapple with this conundrum: how to please her intended audience but not fall into “tourist picturesque” representations. . . . She solved this by opting for some stereotypes and at the same time developing other character in a more true-to-life manner. (xxix)

In utilizing this precarious blend, Niggli anticipated her audience and also evaluated their social understanding of things Mexican. In 1945, when

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Mexican Village was published, the United States was on the verge of success in the Pacific theater of World War II, nationalism was at a high, and anti-foreign sentiment pervaded much of the country, from the Japanese internment camps to anti-German marches in the east. Gauging her audience carefully, Niggli gave them a modicum of the conventional attitudes toward Mexicans and women, while weaving throughout the epic tale of Hidalgo many instances of complex characters and excellent storytelling which gently insinuates the everyday lives of the characters into the tale. Perhaps the most important female figure in the story, and certainly the most mysterious character aside from Bob himself, is María de las Garzas, a secretive, beautiful blond woman who lives alone on the far side of the town and whose story is told most completely in “The River Road.” While María, to an American outsider with little understanding of social construction in Hidalgo, appears to be a “fallen woman,” her story as it develops in small hints throughout the text allies her more closely to women who hover on the edge of society, such as witches, prophets, and widows—respected in their aloofness, feared for their perceived power, and cloaked with an aura of unapproachability. One of these powerful women, Tía Magdalena, a respected and feared “eagle witch” and Bob’s housekeeper, is often more comic than serious, allowing Niggli to use her more widely throughout the text in different ways. María, however, is aloof and serious, limiting her narrative usefulness until the chapter specifically about her life. Her tale is by far the most sensitive to character and Niggli’s work in this chapter is perhaps the most careful and well-crafted. In the long chapter, Niggli also is able to present several types against convention, increasing the chapter’s importance to present critics. In “The River Road” the story of a lifelong love between María and Alejandro Castillo, the youngest son of Don Saturnino Castillo of Hidalgo, is explored in detail as Alejandro prepares to marry the beautiful Evita Cantú. María’s history before she met Alejandro in the valley near Hidalgo is vague, but implied is that she is the mixed-race daughter of a blond Anglo and a Mexican. Father Zacaya describes her in an earlier chapter as the “blond beauty . . . [who] lived in the cliff caves and watched the people of the five villages travel back and forth—watched them not with the humility of an outcast, which she was, but with the arrogance of the great lady of the village, which she was not” (111). She is from the Gallineros, or near the chicken coops, a less affluent area of town, and for as long as anyone can remember in the village, she has been alone. Alejandro falls in love with her while very young, though María is quite aware Don Saturnino will never approve of their love. While part

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of María’s allure is her universally acknowledged beauty, her independent spirit is particularly legendary in the valley—at the beginning of the chapter, her photo is entered in a regional beauty contest, pitting her against Evita and astonishing conservative elements in the valley who consider María an outcast. That a never-married, semi-wild woman who lives outside town could represent the beauty of the town is appalling to think of for Hidalgo, yet she wins the contest easily. María easily deflects the criticism, at one point even driving a lesser bruja, Nimfa, into the local casino when the witch attempted to insult María. Her pride and overwhelming confidence set her at odds with some of the populace, including the woman considered the “second-most” beautiful in the valley, Evita. Far from recounting a simple jealous love story, Niggli organizes the chapter with an eye to character development and dramatic momentum. Starting with the beauty contest, Niggli carves out a fascinating story of class, society, and racial blending, reminiscent of Bob Webster’s struggle to find a place to call home. María is, like Bob, biracial, an outsider, and seen as mysterious by the residents of the area. Both have connections to the valley by blood—the major difference aside from gender between the two is that Bob’s relationship to El Caballo Blanco is inserted early into the story, grounding him as a primary character. Therefore, in terms of dramatic structure, Bob cannot die before the end of his own story—Maria, however, is a more viable tool for expressing class and social conflict (as well as the result of jealous lovers’ quarrels). The arc of “The River Road” is remarkably vast, covering a period from 1910 to 1929. The history of the Castillo family is developed in this chapter as well—in the final (rather convoluted) chapter Bob’s connection to the Castillos and their wealth is revealed. Thus, with so vast a frame, we can observe María’s development from a half-wild child of seven wrestling with Alejandro (then ten) to a beautiful, independent young woman. In her development Niggli presents an interesting, perhaps unique at the time, female characterization. Far from being all flashing eyes and coquettishness (and even her “rival,” Evita, is not merely a beauty), Maria grows through the tempest of the Revolution and her own sense of independence into a formidable woman who chooses to be alone. Though enamored of Alejandro for years, she understands more completely than he that to marry her would mean forsaking his father’s desire to have him marry Evita. When Alejandro, who has been very ill for some time, realizes he has only a short period to live, he commits to the decision to marry as his father dictates: “How could he write the truth? How could he write . . . ‘There is so little time left for me. It means the giving up of my beautiful María, but

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we love each other enough for that, and you are my father, and I love you, and there is a duty on me’” (335). Alejandro and María are kept apart by a social structure that condemns a biracial female who chooses not to marry, in her case even going so far as to position her outside the town proper. Reading this chapter in view of present Chicana writing, we can identify María as embodying femaleness—though present Chicana marginalized characters do not often live in a rural area which may be more conducive to community shunning, the internal, social, and cultural marginalizations are all motifs in modern Chicana literature which are present in the characterization of María. Niggli understood the Anglo-American audience for her text, however, and therefore “The River Road” does follow some general conventions; the lost love, the two beautiful women at odds over a single man, and a result which resolves the situation in a conventional way for Mexican border storytelling—with tragedy and death. Alejandro marries Evita, who does not love him but wants his wealth (introducing a gold-digging, jealous wife into the mix of stereotypes), and they agree to be married in name alone. They return to Hidalgo, where Evita’s consuming jealousy leads her to discover who Alejandro truly adores. Confronting María and Alejandro when they are talking, Evita attacks María and Alejandro stops her. In the next moment, Alejandro falls dead of a progressively worsening lung disease after exerting himself in the struggle with Evita. Evita understands that María truly loved Alejandro and is proud of the fact she was able to give him up for the sake of his father’s wishes. A short while after the funeral, Evita goes to see María, and the two women discuss the events which lead up to Alejandro’s death, as well as María’s unfortunate beginning: “I was born in the Gallineros. . . . Other children are born there without names. But their mothers marry at last and these children grow up with the others. My mother killed herself.” “That is a sin too,” Evita said stolidly. “They punished me for it. For that and for being . . . beautiful. They drove me out of the Gallineros. I had no place to go but the river bank. I lived in a cave. . . . I had to steal my clothes. When I walked in the town men tried to love me.” (364)

Evita grows enraged when she realizes the extent of her rival’s love for Alejandro, and their lifetime connection. María explains

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“I want you to understand about Alejandro. We met when he was ten, and I—well who knows how old I was? [ . . . ] But from the beginning we belonged to each other. He taught me to read and write. . . . In my world he was the only soul who loved me. “Don’t you understand? He was like a god to me. [ . . . ] He was all my life. We were lovers, yes!” María came to her feet, flung back her head, spoke the words as a proud challenge. “If you think I’m ashamed, you’re wrong. I’m proud of it. Prouder than any bride that stands in the church!” Without conscious thought Evita stepped forward, put her hands against María’s chest, pushed with sudden strength. (364)

Evita murders María in a kind of semitrance, not truly conscious of what she has done until she runs home and embraces Alejandro’s picture. She has heard in her head María’s last triumph over her: “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for sending me to Alejandro!” (365). To compound Evita’s punishment for her jealousy and greed, Father Zacaya insists María be given full Catholic funerary rites, Bob volunteers to pay for the funeral, and Don Saturnino Castillo decrees that María shall be buried on his land, next to Alejandro. Her triumph, hard won out of patience and honor, is that she shall lie forever next to the one love of her life. The excellent writing in this chapter and Niggli’s great care in constructing the story of the lovers prevents it from descending into hysterical conflict between two women. Even Evita’s murder of María is simple, straightforward, and written in a manner that leaves readers with only a hint of regret, for immediately we sense how María has triumphed over Evita’s act. In its entirety, “The River Road” is a rehabilitation of and meditation on border women and their lives which problematizes simplistic renderings of Mexican women in border fiction in a manner which allows readers to accept Niggli’s challenge while remaining intrigued by the story. It is a fine balancing act, and one difficult to reproduce—indeed, present Chicana writers struggle with a desire to present accurate representation with a desire for a wide audience. Many could do worse than consult Josephina Niggli’s work in “The River Road.”

THE CHICANA ART OF LIVING AND DYING: MOVING FROM THE INSIDE OUT Taken as a whole, Mexican Village accomplishes what Chicana literature of the border sets out to do; to present ourselves to ourselves and others,

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and to make manifest the negotiations one makes while living in a fraught, highly complex place of nearly infinite possibility. What Niggli’s writing represents in the greater work of this project is evidence that shifting a Texas borderlands ethos into Mexican territory does not, for the Chicana writer, mean the text loses its power or validity as border interrogation. Rather, I posit that Josephina Niggli’s novel retains a clear level of engagement with the issues pertinent to Tejana border writing from the first half of the twentieth century. As we have seen throughout this project, these issues encompass identity, culture, society, and ways of living in a space subject to fluctuating politics and populations—and as such, is an indication that the work of women writing from the border, the interrogation of a Chicana border ethos and border living, is mobile if the space to which it travels is similar in societal structure and influences. This would indicate that Chicana explorations of multiple subjectivities are not only mobile, but can inform other multiply-bordered women, including postcolonial women in India and Ireland. Chicana subjectivity travels. Leaving aside the implications of my work on border subjectivity for other marginalized, multifaceted writers, this implies that Chicana subjectivity as expressed by the writers explored in this work and those from the sixties through the present is grounded not only in a space of multiple contacts and striations, but also in the multifaceted internal landscape of a Chicana writer expressing a Chicana ethos of border subjectivity. Therefore, work done with an eye to exploring and explaining Chicana multiplicities (social, cultural, racial, and gender) by a writer who understands the presence and influence of these multiple currents reveals these multiplicities as present in an area not physically on the border of Texas and Mexico. This multiple subjectivity is internal (as can be easily imagined) as well as specific to a certain understanding of space, place, and the quotidian and how all of them intersect in, on, and around the body of the marginalized in whatever place the subject lives. In her discussion of the multiple “regions” of the town of Hidalgo, the primary locale of Mexican Village’s stories, Niggli crafts a mosaic of subjectivity within the patchwork mapping of the town in the book as a whole. The subtlety of layering is a kind of complex preview of later Chicana “magical realist” or occasionally dreamlike rendering of the everyday, such as Sandra Cisneros’ work in Woman Hollering Creek or Ana Castillo’s Massacre of the Dreamers. That this subjectivity is mobile should not perhaps be surprising, but is another example of the elasticity and adaptive capacity of Chicanas and Chicana writers. Leaping back and forth in time, Niggli builds a story that takes many conventional themes about Mexicans and demonstrates that they can be

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used in a manner that is complex and affecting. Her most significant accomplishment in the book is this ability to meld overt stereotypes in masterful storytelling, deriving a unique vision of borderlands dwellers—multifaceted, real, strong, driven, and deeply rooted in the life of their community. She does not, at her best in this book, engage in stereotypes for the sake of them, even while she plays to her audience. Few times in the book is anyone made a fool of and not allowed some recovery later, or not made a fool of as a result of some overwhelmingly bad decision or personality flaw, such as pride. As a result, the community of Hidalgo in particular is rendered in a more realistic fashion than an unsympathetic writer lacking understanding of border culture could achieve in the end. Ultimately, Niggli’s work in Mexican Village is not intended to simply present to us Bob Webster’s identity development. As detailed above, the book is rich in detail, redefinition, characterization, and a true blending of the quotidian (including superstition, folklore, and sociocultural beliefs) and themes too often only seen as stereotypical in a manner more realistic. In her radical refiguring of some of these themes, and her command of storytelling, Josephina Niggli presents a reader armed with some knowledge of Chicana literary development (or merely armed with an understanding of border history and women) a profusion of possibilities. If one wishes to be entertained, certainly there is a great deal of entertainment in her text; if one wants a sociocultural presentation of a borderlands area, there is indeed such in Mexican Village; if one wants to explore identity development in a multiply-marginalized person, Bob Webster (and others) will provide ample information. Those looking to understand and investigate the quotidian, to understand how people can survive and thrive in a hostile, extremely fluid environment, will be most pleased with Niggli’s accomplishments as well. In the end, perhaps Josephina Niggli’s own perception of her identity does not matter given the work in Mexican Village. Certainly, her claim to a “Scandinavian” parentage has relevance, as it informs the critic of her own tentative identification. Given the mix of heritage in her background, it might be safe to say she was rather unique, and hence rightfully uncertain as to her ethnicity. There is no doubt, however, that Niggli’s primary cultural influence was Mexican and American, and specifically Texas-Mexico border culture. Her constant travels back and forth in the early years of her life also gave Niggli a sense of displacement or marginalization regardless of her ethnic self-identification, feelings which informed her work through Soldadera and Mexican Village. Perhaps what Niggli gives the modern Chicana scholar is a sense of the infinite divisions, and infinite possibilities, of Chicana identity, even in the way she dealt with the characters and situations in her book. Through

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an exploration of identity, margins, fractures (both in the characters and in her narrative), and how people survive “in between” on many levels, Josephina Niggli accomplished with this text one of the earliest explorations of what it might mean to be a marginalized person on a margin—of what it might mean to build a Chicana identity in writing. If her tool was a mixedrace male, her results were no less interesting or trenchant for her modern readers, who recognize in Bob Webster and Niggli’s brilliant multilayered writing the expression of something fresh, new, and wholly unique—the attempt to represent that which is still being defined: Chicana.

Conclusion

A Tolerance for Ambiguity

The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity . . . She learns to juggle cultures . . . nothing is . . . abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else. —Gloria Anzaldúa, “La consciencia de la mestiza: Toward a New Consciousness”

In Texas, there has been for many years a kind of near-schizophrenic attitude toward identity and ethnicity. When I went to Iowa for graduate school in 1996, I realized that the fine line I had been dancing between self-identity and society at large was very thin indeed—when home in San Antonio and South Texas, I never hesitated to call myself “Mexican.” This was simply our way of indicating that we were not “white”; those who were we named either “bolillos” (literally, little white bread rolls) or “Americanos”—simply “Americans.” It did not strike me until I moved to Iowa at 25 that perhaps the world was not as brown and white as it seemed. As a result of my own realization of the “inaccurate” self-identification I had chosen from childhood, I was forced to reevaluate my identity— who was this female Texan of Mexican ancestry, whose parents and almost all grandparents and great-grandparents were longtime residents of Texas (or Coahuila y Tejas), who spoke poor Spanish but excellent English, who had never in her life been called any ethnic slur, and who had grown up as the “majority” in South Texas? Shifts from Joyce and Shakespeare occurred rapidly after reading Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, and realizing my newfound questioning was something I was heir to. What the shift moved me into is the exploration that is ongoing, in part in this project. What I discovered I shared with Anzaldúa, her sisters Cherríe Moraga, Angela de Hoyos, Bernice Zamora, and others, is the realization of 109

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my fluid identity. Shifting descriptors—”Chicana,” “Latina,” “Tejana”—is but a small part. I discovered I shared an intense desire to explore the possibilities that seemed to be inherent in the slightly schizophrenic, boundless idea of a borderland dweller. As I read, I understood some of what I read as being transmitted from female to female over time, in subtle fashion, in ways that males would not be privy to. Often, the education occurred in the kitchen; sometimes in holiday celebrations—but most often, I found, in the lived example of women everyday. The phenomenal survival skills of women in my life and in the lives of other Latinas in Texas seemed almost to be fed to us, learned as we watched our mothers and grandmothers. I did not, as a scholar, believe that this was all there was to the identity of Latinas—especially and particularly Tejanas. I knew, based on my life experience, that the tendency to resist male dominance in its totality went back at least one hundred years in my family alone—what I did not know precisely is how it could have survived a period in which I “knew” there was no substantive support system outside of small groups of women. Perhaps the most significant accomplishment of my personal life was discovering and reevaluating early women’s experiences on the border with Texas and Mexico—areas my family and I both know well. Stories of my grandmother’s life resonated as I read stories of the Revolutionary women and nurses of La Cruz Blanca, of the delicate renderings of the everyday experience which seemed so immense, as if I were seeing them for the first time—making tortillas, singing, cooking, platicando, cleaning. I understood better how women supported each other, and even went beyond that—how women were able to participate in a major social and cultural revolution in measurable and practical ways. Leonor Villegas de Magnón, Jovita González, and Josephina Niggli share many things, as women of/on the border; each was preoccupied with the sociocultural fabric of Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century, and each carried memories of border life and strife as they moved away from the border post-Revolution. As demonstrated in this project, each woman confronted their sociocultural understanding of border life in different ways—memoir, folklore, fiction, and even journalism—and the link between them all, spanning fifty years, is the preoccupation with naming and identifying border residents as highly complex, stratified, and resisting stereotypes of Texans and Mexicans, and an interest in the added marginality of being female. What of the Chicana nature of these texts? What is the connection between Villegas de Magnón and Anzaldúa, or Cherríe Moraga? It would be best, after dissecting some of our antepasadas’ work, to let their “daughters” speak on Chicanisma:

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The English-language literary tradition . . . is the third source in Chicana literary tradition [the first two are oral histories and writing in Spanish]. This material is rich in variety and ranges from . . . María Cristina Mena . . . and Josephina Niggli . . . to self-published texts by writers who were known only locally, such as Cleofas Jaramillo. In her research on early Chicana narratives, Gloria Treviño argues that not only were Chicanas active in creating a literary tradition in English, but they were also consciously pursuing the creation of a “female space,” one that “articulated the concerns particular to the minority woman.”1

Rebolledo in this text, Women Singing in the Snow, articulates coherently the arguments for inclusion of early women writers from the Southwest in the Chicana “canon,” explaining that theoretical attempts to codify Chicana writing often fails as a result of a static idea of Chicanisma: The assumptions implicit in many critics’ writings is that ‘true’ Mexican American literature cannot ignore social concerns and that the Chicano/ Mexican-American culture is a monolithic concept best described as a ‘culture of resistance.’ However, as we define what is resistance, we see that these writers not only were describing the loss of their lands and culture, but they also were actively resisting culturally defined roles. . . . (33)

I cannot determine, without appearing somewhat petty, reasons for a general dismissal of women’s writing not immediately calling for a bloody uprising. In the struggle for the “canon,” Chicano writers most often lifted to this height are those who present the most aggressive Movimiento struggle—Luis Valdez, Alurista, Corky Gonzáles. Of the women who have become somewhat canonical, such as Sandra Cisneros or Denise Chavez, only Cisneros has achieved “star” status. Interestingly, neither Chavez’ nor Cisneros’ work are overt calls for revolution. However, their work, when given the close reading deserved, will reveal a current of discontent, anger, and fracture, the undercurrent Raymund Paredes sensed when dismissing on one hand women’s writing from the early years and acknowledging the discomfort he felt on the other. While it may be petty, if not critically dangerous, to wonder if his “discomfort” was a male lack of empathy with women’s “languages” of home and place or with female situations which rarely allowed for open rebellion in a highly structured patriarchy, nevertheless the Chicana critic has to wonder at any such dismissal of early women’s writing. While acknowledging that

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household books and cookbooks perhaps are not the representative examples of a literature of resistance, in combination with newly discovered texts of a more overtly discontented nature these texts resonate with women writing against the grain. While not every woman could join the Mexican Revolution as a soldadera, many were able to hide weapons and soldiers, join nursing brigades, and listen to news readers in plazas—in short, the cultural chaos on the Texas-Mexico border during the Mexican Revolution fomented much more than a democratic government in Mexico. Little was the same on the border after the ten-year struggle, including gender relations. With so many men on both sides of the border dead or gone, women struggled to make life work in any way they could, moving, working, moving back—in many ways, enacting the first of the great waves of motion along the border in modern times and previewing the border’s future as international crossing. As mentioned in chapter two, fronterizos had little concept of international boundaries—the Río Grande/Bravo has always been seen as “optional,” for it was easily forded. Women and their families moving back and forth across the river, as Josephina Niggli’s family did during the Revolution, was accepted, as was the idea (indeed, expectation) that the women would keep the family and body together. The intriguing fact is not only were families and bodies kept whole, but that women managed to do so in a space of so many different margins, both cultural and social. In discussions with colleagues I have often been asked how it would be possible to live a normal life if one constantly interrogated the nature and construct of her own identity. My response, based on my research and self-realization over time, has become “We do it every day.” To be a Chicana with an active consciousness and a sense of identity is to interrogate that very identity—what is it that “makes” a Chicana? What forces change that identity? Can one “unbecome” a Chicana? How do we negotiate all the margins and sociocultural pressures surrounding and bisecting us, causing what Gloria Anzaldúa calls “psychic restlessness”? The answer remains, “we do it everyday.” As evidenced by the existence and rediscovery of early Chicana texts from the border, this interest in and search for an identity and voice for women stretches back at least to the fracturing nature of the Mexican Revolution. For Tejanas, influenced by Texas-Mexican culture, this cataclysmic event resonates to this day in writing—the scarring, mapping, renegotiation, and blurring of boundaries are all present, as is the construction of new “languages” to speak in, both verbal and physical. It is the Revolution which I view as the catalyst for much of the Chicana writing in the first half of the twentieth century, for Villegas de Magnón’s

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desire to participate as well as chronicle women’s work in the Revolution, for González’ preoccupation with documenting the folklore and history of the Tejanos and their unique voices, recognizing the blend of Mexico and Texas, and for Niggli reinscribing the war for identity among margins within her male protagonist, Bob Webster, making him a canvas on which to explore identity, negotiation, and boundaries. Indeed, in this latter tale it is the disappearance of Bob for several chapters throughout the text which allows Niggli to explore this border area and indicate what kinds of social, cultural, and gender pressures exist for border dwellers, providing the reader with several interesting female characters to balance Bob’s development. Far from being female-dismissive, Niggli’s work enacts a complex negotiation of a marginal identity, something which factors into Chicana writing—in this case, on the body of a male. A reader may take away a sense of the additional idea that “male” represents, to Bob, a “margin” which we rarely read as such—thus, Niggli’s work problematizes any fluidity of identity for marginalized people. While Bob’s sex may be obvious, his gender socialization is not, and he struggles with his identity as a son, male, and husband-to-be. In the end, this exploration of some of the earliest Chicana writers from the Texas-Mexico border may answer as many historical questions as it raises identity issues; in the historical reclamation of women by Villegas de Magnón, we discover a new voice and concept of border women, yet we wonder at the understanding of American vs. Mexican—where does she fall, or is she inscribing a new space, as Gloria Anzaldúa did later in Borderlands/La Frontera? When Jovita González utilizes Tejano folklore to critique existing social castes and classes, is she desiring that the text be read by those who would be historically in most need of its education (los ricos), or is she championing the practical, survival instincts of those in possession of most knowledge but silenced (los pobres)? How do we understand the multiple layers of meaning available in Niggli’s Mexican Village—as enjoyable fiction, as knowledgeable critique, as social commentary, as a presentation of a complex identity enacted, as befits a dramatist, through a multiplicity of characters? The answers to these questions lie in each individual Chicana, indeed, in each reader of the texts. As previously mentioned, I foresee Chicana theory rising to confront literature from other marginalized women, particularly from border areas—I also foresee a constant renegotiation of Chicana until the word itself represents multiplicities for women. Until then, I and other Chicana critics attempt to redefine and reconstruct Chicana literary history, recovering work and making connections across time, as in the connections I make between women in Laredo and their association with each

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other in supportive community. Until this recovery is complete, as a critic and scholar with a newly developed sense of historicity in Chicana literature, I will question the history we have been “given,” a selective history at best. In the end, as I participate in this recovery process and reevaluation of history, I echo the words of mixed-race Pilar in John Sayles’ Lone Star as she determines to construct her own history: “Forget the Alamo.”

Appendix

La Crónica

La Crónica was founded in 18961 with Nicasio Idar as editor. Idar later became owner and editor in 1910, publishing the first edition of the “Segunda Epoca” of the paper in September of that year. In the endeavor he was joined by his children Federico, Clemente, Eduardo, and Jovita. Eduardo became a “roving correspondent” based in Brownsville, TX, in 1911, while Clemente wrote many of the paper’s editorials. Clemente Idar was also instrumental in driving Leonor Villegas de Magnón to request the nationalization of the Cruz Blanca, as noted in a letter to her dated May 18, 1914. Clara Lomas quotes from this letter in her biography of Clemente Idar in The Rebel. Federico Idar, the only Idar child born in Mexico, was a roving correspondent in Mexico and later served as state senator from Monterrey, Nuevo León. He was assassinated in 1938 by anti-labor forces for his work defending the rights of railroad workers. Along with her sister Jovita, Elvira Idar served in the Cruz Blanca, eventually assuming directorship of the brigade’s Nuevo León hospital. Jovita Idar’s contributions to the family weekly were often unsigned (as were other articles in the paper). She was also a significant contributor to other border journals, including El Progreso, El Eco de Golfo, and La Luz, and in 1916 founded Evolución, which she published until 1920, the year she moved to San Antonio after Rangers surreptitiously destroyed her printing presses. La Crónica’s offices were on Matamoros street in Laredo. The advent of Idar as editor took the paper quickly into the realm of politically active, radical, and powerful journalism.

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Appendix

Figure A-1. September 1910 edition of La Crónica, announcing the “segunda epoca” of the paper2

The captioning of the above masthead reads in part: LA CRÓNICA SEMANARIO INDEPENDIENTE Periodico Independiente Dedicado a defender los intereses de los Mexicanos y mexico-texanos, en Texas ____________________ Laboramos contra el fanatismo, la ignorancia y la supersticion. Trabajamos por el progreso y desarrollo industrial, moral e intellectual, de los habitantes mexicanos en Texas. ____________________________________________ (from the September 1910 edition) LA CRÓNICA INDEPENDENT WEEKLY Independent Periodical Dedicated to defending the interests of Mexicans and Texas-Mexicans, in Texas. ______________________

Appendix

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We labor against fanaticism, ignorance and superstition. We work for the progress and industrial, moral and intellectual development of Mexican residents in Texas.

Another missive from the newspaper (from the February 5, 1910 edition, p. 2, my translation): THE MISSION of “LA CRÓNICA” has been since its first age to educate politically, socially, and morally the people, and [it] always has encountered “black birds” that have intended to bury their poison darts, killing our ideals and aspirations. Futile and despicable work!

EDITORIAL STAFF OF LA CRÓNICA, 1910–11 Registered as Second Class Mail at the Laredo Post Office under Act of March 3, 1879 Registration renewed February 21, 1910 Publishers and Owners: Idar é Hijos Editor: Nicasio Idar Collaborators (listed February 1910): Señorita Sara Estela Ramírez, Dr. C. Danés Cassabouch, Ignacio A. De La Peña, D. Rafael L. Molina, I.R. Rodriguez, J.J. Mercado, Astrea, Senda In 1911 Leonor Villegas de Magnón was added as a columnist, while in March of 1910 Sara Estela Ramírez began her own paper, Aurora.

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION 1. Though González and Villegas de Magnón lived and worked (as well as wrote from) the Laredo area, Josefina Niggli, born in Mexico, traversed an area between San Antonio and Mexico, including Laredo, for most of her early life. This geographical exception will be discussed further in chapter four. 2. Valdez of course is better known as a playwright (Zoot Suit) and as a founder of El Teatro Campesino, the well-known Mexican farmworker guerrilla theater, now producing plays in its own impressive building in California. 3. See Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, and Herrera-Sobek’s introduction to Beyond Stereotypes. 4. While this may seem to be essentializing the concept/s of Chicana presently in use, that the word has a generic use is seen in the categorizing of literary works and, unfortunately, usually denotes simply a “female Chicano.” 5. Quintana, Alvina. “Political Representation and the Emergence of a Chicana Aesthetic.” Cultural Studies. Vol 4 No 3. October 1990. Italics mine. 6. Mujeres en Marcha. Chicanas in the 80s: Unsettled Issues. Berkeley: Chicano Studies Library Publications Unit, University of California P, 1983. 7. For purposes of length I exclude here the longer history of Chicano, and refer readers to Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America for an excellent explication. 8. All of these women published in or edited some of the earliest Chicana/o journals, including El Grito del Norte and Aztlán. 9. Garcia, Alma M. “The Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse, 1970– 1980.” Gender & Society. June 1989. p. 364 10. For more on the development of Chicana feminism, see Rebolledo, Women Singing in the Snow, Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, Marta Cotera, The Chicana Feminist, and Alma García, ibid. 11. An indicator of the small inroads made into the literary canon (and therefore “respectability and artistic merit” in the mainstream of American life)

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12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

Notes to the Introduction is the presence of a small number of Chicana texts in literature anthologies for colleges. By far the most visible Chicana writer is Sandra Cisneros, whose The House on Mango Street is often considered a “children’s book,” ignoring the text’s cultural critiques. Perhaps more typical of the haphazard insertion of Chicanas into anthologies for diversity is the lifting of a story from Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek, a collection of tales deeply influenced by folklore and poetry. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume 2, does so with the profoundly complex “Little Miracles, Kept Promises,” providing little analytical support. By the fourth edition of the anthology, this story was gone altogether. Paredes, Raymund. “The Evolution of Chicano Literature.” In Baker, Houston A. Three American Literatures. New York: Modern Language Association, 1982. Sosa Riddell, Adaljiza. “Chicanas and El Movimiento.” Aztlan. Vol 5 No 2, 1974. Recent research has uncovered many articles and essays demonstrating authors’ cognizance of the importance of Chicana-identified literature to Movimiento Chicanas—see Cotera, The Chicana Feminist and Diosa y Hembra, as well as Clara Lomas’ essay “The Articulation of Gender in the Mexican Borderlands, 1900–1915” in Recovering the U.S.-Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol. 2. The construction of this canon by Chicanas from its inception has been both contested and highly significant in that women are looking deep into the past to recover the “lost” Chicanisma of our foremothers, revealing a strain of women’s advocacy heading back into the 19th century. In addition, the presence of a canon of literature does not mean this canon is accepted into the greater canon of “American Literature” as taught to secondary and college students—that concern is another project for a later time. This poem, by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, was considered the Chicano National Anthem in the early 1970s. Limon, Jose E. “El Primer Congeso Mexicanista de 1911: A Precursor to Contemporary Chicanismo.” Aztlán, Vol 5 No 1, Sp 1974. pp 85–106. Ibid p. 99. Without critiquing their work, and acknowledging their contributions, these groups include the League of Latin American Citizens (1927), The Order of the Sons of America (1920), and the later American GI Forum (1948) and Mexican-American Political Association (1959). Professor Limón offers a charting of “intent” of various groups from 1911–1970 and their assimilationist stance as constructed by Professor Ralph Guzmán; see Limón, p. 101. As discussed in Chapter Two, the hyperbole of the early section of the text gives way to a more serious and focused voice as the story moves into the Mexican Revolution. Villegas de Magnón, Leonor. The Rebel. Houston: Arte Publico, 1994. pp 204–207. This book, edited by José E. Limón and María Cotera and published in 1996 by Texas A&M University Press, was coauthored with Eve Raleigh

Notes to Chapter One

22.

23. 24.

25.

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(pseudonym of Margaret Eimer). Leticia Garza-Falcón has done excellent work on Caballero and who might have written what in it. See Garza-Falcón, Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance, Austin: UTXP, 1998. González herself gives her year of birth as 1904 in a short autobiography used as a preface to Dew on the Thorn’s 1997 publication; Texas Folklore Society records indicate 1899. See Garza-Falcón, p. 258. Ibid p.260. Herrera-Sobek, Maria. “Introduction.” In Niggli, Josephina. Mexican Village. Albuquerque: UNMP, 1994 (2nd edition) p. xxix. Italics mine. Herrera-Sobek’s introduction, while offering a tantalizing hint as to the richness of the text, is unfortunately too brief to explore in detail Niggli’s work. However, she does provide an apt starting point for discussion. My italics remind the reader of both the presence of stereotypes in Mexican Village and her work in the text of trying to overthrow them. They are both important and aggravating in the text, though her ultimate result is, I believe, very satisfying to the modern Chicana reader. Dvorkin, Joseph Henry. “Voices from the Gaps: Josephina Niggli.” Online database. University of Minnesota Voices from the Gaps project. http://voices.cla.umn/authors/NIGGLIjosephina.html Accessed 7/10/03. para 2. Though several writers have utilized Sor Juana as a model of female intellectualism and resistance, her historical status as cloistered nun presents a difficulty to Chicana theorists. The women I discuss in this work, and the period from which they arose (all writing during or affected immediately by the Mexican Revolution) are in my mind the closest Chicana ancestors from the Texas-Mexico border area. My claim of their Chicanisma arises from the understanding that the Mexican Revolution, like the Indian partition of 1948, produced a social and cultural shift of extreme force, manifesting itself often in the writing of newly fractured peoples. The writing of women from cultures and spaces affected by such huge shifts is to me more layered by virtue of the women’s comprehension of their own gendered marginalization as an aspect that thread deeply into the other marginalizations of class, culture, and society, as well as the implied non-diasporic postcolonial condition I describe elsewhere.

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE 1. 2.

3.

At present there are four “international bridges” over the Rio Grande from Laredo—two feed into Nuevo Laredo. Fox, Claire. The Fence and the River. Minneapolis:UMP, 1999. p. 69. This exceptional study of border culture and border politics is particularly useful for analysis of representations of the Revolution in US popular culture, especially photography. “LAREDO INTERNATIONAL BRIDGE SYSTEM” http://www.ci.laredo. tx.us/bridgesys/Bridgesystem.htm. Accessed July 11, 2003.

122 4. 5. 6.

7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

Notes to Chapter One Thompson, Jerry. Laredo: A Pictorial History. Virginia Beach, VA: The Donning Company/Publishers, 1986. pp. 258. Ibid p. 88 Coerver, Don M. and Linda B. Hall. Texas and the Mexican Revolution: A Study in State and NationalBorder policy, 1910–1920. San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1984. pp 41–42. Villegas de Magnón, pp. 88–91. “LAREDO, TX.” The Handbook of Texas Online. http://www.tsha.utexas. edu/handbook/online/articles/view/LL/hdl2.html [Accessed Mon Jul 7, 2003] par. 1. Map made from scanned outline of Texas, rivers and names added by myself. Hinojosa, Gilberto M. A Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo 1755– 1870. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983 p. xv. “LAREDO, TX.” The Handbook of Texas Online. http://www.tsha.utexas. edu/handbook/online/articles/view/LL/hdl2.html [Accessed Mon Jul 7 13:17:17 US/Central 2003] par. 4. Hinojosa also notes that Laredo’s city council, which voted to support the Spanish crown during the Mexican War of Independence, did not seem particularly concerned with the War; no Laredoans appear to have fought in the conflict. See Hinojosa, p. 26– 27. The identification of residents of the border areas as Mexican or American or both (or neither) has been a subject of intense study by women of color for its radical potential as a theoretical and practical tool for change and for understanding liminality. The discussion has been informed and fed study of both Irish women writers and South Asian postcolonial women as well as American women of color. See Anzaldúa and Moraga, This Bridge Called my Back and Anzaldúa and Keating, this bridge we call home. DeLeón, Armando. They Called them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. Austin: UTXP, 1983. 14. Ibid. p 14 De León’s They Called them Greasers and Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America provide examples of the ex-Civil War veterans’ movement into Texas, as well as the violence inherent in many of the land acquisitions. As quoted in De León, p. 15. See Appendix for details of La Crónica’s publication history as well as excerpts of articles written by the Idars. La Crónica commented disparagingly on the coverage of the atrocities by the San Antonio papers several times after the 1910 lynching of Antonio Rodriguez in Rock Springs, Texas—see November and December 1910 issues. The Nueces Strip was in question during the Republic of Texas’ existence, with Mexico claiming that the river was the international boundary, and Texas claiming the land all the way to the Rio Grande, but not making much overt attempt to control the land until later. According to historian David Montejano in Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 (Austin: UTXP, 1987), “In short, between 1836 and 1846 the strip . . .

Notes to Chapter One

20.

21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

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constituted a veritable ‘no-man’s land’ claimed by the Republics of Texas and Mexico but actually controlled by Indian tribes” (Montejano 30). See Rodolfo Acuña’s Occupied America, “Remember the Alamo: The Colonization of Texas,” for more on the history of the Texas Rangers. The Rangers had been established in the 1820s as a small volunteer group to “keep the peace” in a frontier Texas—in a short period of time they began to serve as private police for ranchers in the area. According to Americo Paredes’ With His Pistol In His Hand, the rangers became known as rinches de la Kineña—rangers for the huge Richard King ranch in Texas. De León, pp 88–89. These were only two of the Anglo-owned papers to call for the arrest and detainment of Mexicans for incidents which had never occurred. However, their “news” items resulted in several deaths after hysteria was fanned in the white communities of Duval County and Corpus Christi. Newspapers blamed the inaccuracies on “unreliable” sources, though they had claimed, upon first publishing the information, their sources were “of good authority.” This political riot on April 7, 1886, between “Botas” and “Guaraches” which represented old politics and reformists in Laredo, is covered in its entirety well by Jerry D. Thompson in his Warm Weather & Bad Whiskey: The 1886 Laredo Election Riot. The bloody riot left at least thirty dead, and has been noted as the only example in American history of “dueling with artillery.” De León pp. 92–93 As quoted in De León, p. 98. See Appendix. Hinojosa, Gilberto M. A Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo, 1755– 1870. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1983. Hinojosa also notes “The Anglo-American [society] was depicted in the pages of the Laredo Times.(120)” “LA CRONICA.” The Handbook of Texas Online. http://www.tsha. utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/LL/eel6.html [Accessed Thu Jul 10, 2003] par. 1. Idar became owner as well as editor in 1910. An entry in the Records of the Mexican Revolution has an editorial from La Crónica that states its founding year as 1896, but there seems to be no proof of the assertion. See Documentos Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana XV. Vol 3 Bk 1, p 180. In addition, Federico Idar served as staff secretary for Villegas de Magnón’s Cruz Blanca brigade, while his sister Elvira served as hospital director of the brigade’s Nuevo Laredo hospital. Federico went on to become a Mexican senator, active in labor causes, until his assassination in 1938 in Mexico. Interestingly, little has been made of the connection between the Idars and The Rebel. See Clara Lomas’ Appendix II, “Bio-Bibliography of Historical Characters,” in The Rebel, and Appendix here. Limón, José E. “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911: A Precursor to Contemporary Chicanismo.” Aztlán. Vol 5 No 1, Sp 1974 p 92. See also “CONGRESO MEXICANISTA.” The Handbook of Texas Online. Limón notes the peculiarly “Chicano” nature of the Congreso in his essay.

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30. Several editorials and articles by the Idars in La Crónica from 1910–1911 declare the importance of organizing for political power and practical protection from Rangers and the courts, as well as to gain better representation in politics for disfranchised Texas Mexicans and Mexican nationals. 31. Limón, José E. “El Primer Congreso Mexicanista de 1911: A Precursor to Contemporary Chicanismo.” Aztlán Vol 5 No 1 Sp1974. pp 91–92. This article is the basic source for information on the Congreso. 32. The original text in Spanish reads: “A la mujer mexicana de ambos Laredos: El Congreso Mexicanista se hace el honor de inviter muy respectuousamente al bello sexo de estas dos ciudades hermanas. . . .” La Crónica, September 14, 1911, p. 1. 33. Several issues of La Crónica detail the attendees; by Aug 10 of that year, almost 100 people were listed as coming to the Congreso. 34. “El Congreso Mexicanista.” La Crónica, Aug 24, 1911, p. 3. Translation mine. 35. Limón p. 96. . See also La Crónica, Jan 26, 1911, Vol 3 No 5 p. 3. 36. Ibid. p.98. Among the other founders were Soledad de la Peña, María Villareal, María Rentería, and M. de Jesus de León. Jovita Idar was selected President. 37. Ibid. p. 97–98. 38. Villegas de Magnón notes in The Rebel that General Bernardo Reyes read parts of his writings on soldiers’ rights aloud in a Tehuacán park; perhaps more importantly, she notes the enthusiasm and ubiquitousness of the heraldic newsboys who announced headlines and important events in the paper. These indicate a strong current of public interest and desire for information. In the United States lectores were common in Latino areas, serving a pre-radio audience. Radio, of course, revolutionized public discourse and was coming rapidly into its own in the early part of the twentieth century. See Villegas de Magnón p. 72 and 93. 39. These papers include the following: 1901 La Corregidora, Laredo—founded by Sara Estela Ramirez; 1907 La Voz de La Mujer, Laredo—founded by Isidra T. de Cardenas; 1910 La Mujer Moderna, San Antonio—founded by A. and T. Villarreal; 1910 Aurora, Laredo—founded by Sara Estela Ramirez; 1913 El Obrero, San Antonio—founded by Teresa Villarreal; 1913 Pluma Roja, Los Angeles—published by Blanca de Moncaleano; and 1910 La Crónica, Laredo—editing and contributions from Jovita Idar, Leonor Villegas de Magnón, and Andrea and Teresa Villarreal, among others. 40. See Clara Lomas’ introduction to The Rebel as well as “Spanish Language Media Issue” Journalism History 4:2 Summer 1977. The special issue includes a reproduction of San Antonio La Prensa’s celebration of “Mas de Cuatrocientos Periodicos en Español Se Han Editado en los Estados Unidos” on pages 52–53. The compilers of the list for La Prensa note that it is possible that some papers in existence from approximately 1835–1938 were not included in the list due to lack of registry with bibliographic services or simply a lack of hard copies of any numbers of the serial. It is possible, based on evidence from the earliest definitively known US Spanish-language

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paper, El Misisipí (1808), that the earliest Spanish-language serial in the US was Diario de New York, but its existence has not been proven.

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO 1. Villegas de Magnón, Leonor. The Rebel. Houston: Arte Publico, 1994. The translation (by Clara Lomas) reads: “In huts, in temples, in palaces, and in battlefields, you beg for that charity [of sincere friendship] and you get nothing. And, why not? Is it only for the crime of being a woman?” From the Poem “I am a Lonely Pilgrim,” by Leonor Villegas de Magnón, in the introduction to The Rebel written by Lomas (xxviii). 2. Critics such as Leticia Garza-Falcón and Tey Diana Rebolledo have made critical movements toward this end, and their work has been important for the development of my own theories of Chicana feminism. See Women Singing in the Snow and Gente Decente. 3. The “proto-Chicana” concept, which I have chosen not to use in favor of a more direct descriptor, seems to me reductive of the work of women writers I will discuss here. It has, however, been used previously by critics searching for a way to discuss what formerly was perceived as anomalous literatures of resistance by women on the border. See Grider and Rodenberger, Texas Women Writers, “Ever Radical.” 4. Garza’s “revolt” still stands as a populist, legendary rebellion in the border area. See Acuña’s Occupied America. 5. Woods, Richard. “An Overview of Mexican Autobiography.” Auto/Biography Studies 3 (Summer 1988): 13–14, as quoted in Clara Lomas’ introduction to The Rebel, pp. xxxvi-xxxviii. 6. Not much is known about this Anglo American woman, who spoke only English yet traveled as friend, confidante, and secretary to Villegas de Magnón. Information on her at present seems to be limited to The Rebel. Her presence in the narrative is significant in that she was not expected to have as much invested in Mexican politics, and she represents the historical reality of Anglo-Texans fighting alongside Tejanas and Tejanos to protect their border area and assure a prosperous future for the region. 7. Lomas in an Appendix to The Rebel indicates that the first members of the organization were Villegas de Magnón, Jovita and Elvira Idar, María Alegría, Rosa Chávez, and Dr. M.M. Dávila. (237–238) 8. Venustiano Carranza rose to the Mexican presidency in 1914. He was assassinated six years later, on May 21, 1920, by factions of the next president of Mexico, Alvaro Obregón. Carranza was preceded in death by the great Revolutionary General of the Armies of the South, Emiliano Zapata, in 1919. Legendary General of the Armies of the North and sometime Carranza supporter Pancho Villa was killed in 1923. Carranza’s death effectively ended the Mexican Revolution, as Obregón initiated many land and labor reforms. His government was recognized in 1923 by the United States. However, when reelected in 1928 after a four-year break during which Plutarco Elias Calles was president, Obregón was assassinated on

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9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20.

July 17 of that year. During the ten-year period of the revolution Mexico had six presidents, including one provisional president. The U.S. had four presidents in the same period. Villegas de Magnón, Leonor. The Rebel. Editor Clara Lomas. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 1994. pp. xxxv-xxxvi. These women all published their works after Villegas de Magnón’s death. Note that the serialized version of The Rebel ran in 1961. As quoted in Villegas de Magnón, p. xxxiii Ibid. p. xxxiii. Appendix III of The Rebel contains a list of autobiographies of the Mexican Revolution published between 1920 and 1955. Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte, Jesus mío, published in 1969, is included in this list under the “Soldadera” section. Ibid 78 Recent collections of photographs can be found at the American Memory section of the Library of Congress website, and recently published biographies include Memoria de Mi Viaje (Memories of my Journey) by Olga Beatriz Torres (translated into English by Juanita Luna Lawhn), 1994. Robert Runyon, a Texan photographer, captured many of the people and events of the Revolution; see Samponaro, Frank N. and Paul J. Vanderwood, War Scare on the Rio Grande: Robert Runyon’s Photographs of the Border Conflict, 1913–1916. Austin, Texas: The Texas State Historical Association, 1992. It is not known how Villegas de Magnón divided up her language use in life—when she lived in Mexico, one assumes the home language was consistently Spanish. She was fluent in English and comfortable moving from one language to the other, as demonstrated in the bridge-crossing scene in the book. During the section of the text detailing the Revolution, the most romantic and dramatic sections deal with Venustiano Carranza; it is clear Villegas de Magnón is a great admirer of the general. It is important to note, however, that the Rebel chides the general several times in the text, indicating her understanding of the gravity and precariousness of the situation as well as her insistent belief women had as much right to help conduct the affairs of the Revolution as men. Rocha Islas, M.E. “Los textos narratives y su importancia historiográfica: Las memorias de Leonor Villegas de Magnón.” In Herrera-Sobek, Maria, and Virginia Sánchez Korrol. Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage, Vol 3. Houston: Arte Publico, 1993, pp. 76–91. Translation mine. Villegas de Magnón 205. A significant aspect of Chicana literature as we presently understand it is the search for a way to negotiate a sense of multiplicity—of self, identity, place, and society. See Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera. A fine image of American “visual tourists” to Mexico during the Revolution appears in Claire Fox’ The Fence and the River; on page 84 is an image of Americans watching Mexican revolutionaries across the river at a distance of approximately 30 feet. The Mexican Revolution was sometimes

Notes to Chapter Three

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

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seen as an interesting diversion for Americans who would gather on hills to watch battles across the river in Mexico. Villegas de Magnón 204–206 Ibid. p.206 Ibid p. 77. See Introduction for Paredes’ dismissal of these works and backhanded admission of their disturbing tendencies in Houston A. Baker’s Three American Literatures. Ibid. xiii. Ibid. p.xxxvii. Ibid. p.xxxix Ibid. p. 106.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE 1. “Like an oak I may be bent, but not broken.” González, Jovita. Dew on the Thorn. Houston: Arte Público, 1997. p. 3. 2. Pseudonym of Margaret Eimer. 3. González was the first Texas Mexican to record Tejano folklore in English, as well as one of the first Tejana recipients of a Master’s degree, and by extension one of a handful of Chicana degreed scholars nationwide in 1930. 4. In Gente Decente, Leticia Garza-Falcón’s excellent work on reconsidering history and literature of the border are, Appendix B notes significant dates in González’ life: according to records in the Benson Collection archives at the University of Texas at Austin, González’ year of birth was 1904; the Texas Folklore Society records her year of birth as 1899. Garza-Falcón, Leticia. Gente Decente: A Borderlands Response to the Rhetoric of Dominance. Austin: UTXP, 1998. 5. Acosta, Teresa Paloma and Ruthe Winegarten. Las Tejanas: 300 Years of History. Austin: UTXP 2003, p 94. 6. Interestingly, only critic Leticia Garza-Falcón has noted that Dr. Carlos E. Castañeda also influenced González, and indeed was her master’s thesis champion. 7. Limón in González, pp. xix-xx. Jose Limón comments on Dobie’s methodology in his introduction to Dew on the Thorn, noting as well that Dobie was not a trained folklorist but a member of the English department at Austin. 8. Paredes, Americo. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Edited by Richard Bauman. Austin: Center for Mexican American Studies, UTXP 1993. pp. 3–6. 9. González, Jovita. “America Invades the Border Towns.” Southwest Review. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1930. pp. 469–477. 10. González saw herself as a member of the educated gente decente, literally the “decent people,” as noted in Leticia Garza-Falcón’s study of Jovita González. See Garza-Falcón, “The Historical Fiction of Jovita González,”

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

in Gente Decente. Of particular interest is her discussion of the lengths González would go to in order to put her interview subjects at ease, including knitting while interviewing them lest they think she was one of “las otras” (those other women), or a “common” woman. Velasquez-Treviño, Gloria. Cultural Ambivalence in Early Chicana Prose Fiction. Ph.D Dissertation. Stanford University, 1985. As quoted in Limón, José. Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Politics in MexicanAmerican South Texas. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1995, p. 69. Ibid., p. 69. Surprisingly, this text is not edited as cleanly as others, nor error-free. The cumulative effect, including a wealth of typographical errors is, at times, rather distracting. The large estates owned by the upper classes in Mexico and west Texas were called haciendas; thus the owners were known as hacendados and functioned in the same manner as the landed gentry of the US east coast. This negotiation of Anglo American and Mexican American potential audience is not new nor has it disappeared—see Josephina Niggli’s careful negotiation of the same in Mexican Village, chapter four in this project. In his introduction to González and Margaret Eimer’s Caballero, Jose Limón makes note of something which indicates to myself and Leticia Garza-Falcón that González was entirely aware of the social “unacceptability” at the time of her as a Chicana writer in Caballero and Dew on the Thorn: “According to [interviewer Marta] Cotera, [Edmundo] Mireles also said that, even if [a manuscript for Caballero] existed, he would not have wanted the manuscript published then in the 1970s, as he feared for its reception in the Chicano . . . ambiance of the period. For there reasons, Mireles announced to Cotera that the manuscript had been destroyed . . . [At] the precise moment Mireles announced Caballero’s destruction, Jovita González, unobserved by her husband, made a brief wagging gesture with her hand to Cotera, clearly negating her husband’s statement.” Limón, José. “Introduction.” In González, Jovita, and Margaret Eimer. Caballero. College Station: Texas A&M P, 1996. pp.xxi-xxii. Interestingly, given Limón’s interest in the “Devil” in Texas folklore, he dismisses or ignores the persistence of the “Devil” in these scenes of domestic abuse.

NOTES TO CHAPTER FOUR 1. Niggli, Josephina. Mexican Village. Albuquerque: UNMP, 1994. p.426. (first edition was published 1945 by UNCP) This is the epigram to Chapter Ten of the text. Each of the ten chapters begins with an epigram pertinent to the chapter. 2. Niggli authored the important play Soldadera, as well as Pointers on Playwriting (1945), a technical handbook which went into a second edition (1967), and collected her work into the anthology Mexican Folk Plays in 1976. She was a Western Carolina University professor of drama and

Notes to the Conclusion

3.

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

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10. 11.

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journalism from 1956 until her retirement in 1975, after which a collegewide scholarship was named for her. See Dvorkin, Joseph Henry. Voices from the Gaps: Josephina Niggli. University of MN http://voices.cla.umn. edu/authors/NIGGLIjosephina.html [Accessed 7/10/2003]. From the Introduction to Mexican Village, p. xvii, by María HerreraSobek. In Niggli, Josephina. Mexican Village. Albuquerque: UNMP, 1994. First edition published 1945 by the University of North Carolina Press. Dvorkin, Joseph Henry. Voices from the Gaps: Josephina Niggli. University of MN http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/NIGGLIjosephina.html [Accessed 7/10/2003]. paras 1 & 2. Dvorkin, para 3. Herrera-Sobek discusses briefly Soldadera’s importance to Chicana literature and representation in her discussion of Niggli’s writing after moving to North Carolina; see Niggli, xvii. Generally, Scandinavian countries include Sweden, Denmark, Norway, but not Switzerland. Niggli’s definition of her parents as “Scandinavian” provokes questions of her understanding of the term—the closest culture in her background to Scandinavian cultures is Swiss, and the greatest percentage of her heritage is French, through both her mother and her father’s Alsatian heritage. Herrera-Sobek refers to Niggli’s parents as “Scandinavian American” (xvii), for reasons unclear—perhaps due to Niggli’s response above to questions of ethnic identification? Herrera-Sobek also seems to comprehend Niggli’s background as definably of “Mexican ancestry”—perhaps due to Niggli’s long history with the border. Certainly, her cultural influence was Mexican and border Texan. This challenge exists only so far as Chicana has become defined as meaning a very restricted period and consciousness in modern American literary criticism. As with much women of color literary criticism, the definition has been challenged prior to my work, demonstrating the difficulty of defining something in intense motion and intricately webbed. In my own work, Niggli does not represent a challenge so much as an example of Chicana adaptability and the ability of these women writers to negotiate something which is difficult even to describe outside their work. Herrera-Sobek wonders in the Introduction if Niggli’s use of some stereotypes of Mexican culture is a sop to an Anglocentric American reading public; see xxii and xxix. Niggli 25. The italics are in the original and represent Bob’s grandmother’s voice in his head. Parr, Carmen Salazar and Genevieve M. Ramírez. “The Female Hero in Chicano Literature.” In Beyond Stereotypes: The Critical Analysis of Chicana Literature. Edited by María Herrera-Sobek. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Review Press. Pp 47–60. Definition in brackets mine.

NOTES TO THE CONCLUSION 1. Rebolledo, Tey Diana. Women Singing in the Snow. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1995, p.24.

130

Notes to the Appendix

NOTES TO THE APPENDIX 1. Several sources have no date for the paper—it is relatively uncertain when the first issue appeared. 2. The images of La Crónica were scanned from microfilm of extant copies of the paper and digitally altered for clarity. The microfilm was from the collection of the University of Minnesota and I am indebted to the library staff of the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL for locating this film.

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Index

A La Adelita 7, 44, 46, 48, 59, 101 Anzaldúa, Gloria 1, 4, 6, 17, 52, 109, 110 Arizmendi, Elena 44 and Borderlands/La Frontera 112, 113

C Campobello, Nellie 46 and publication of Cartucho 46 Carranza, Venustiano 4, 10, 44, 45, 50, 54 Castillo, Ana 1, 7, 53, 72, 106 Chicana (definition of) 2–4 Chicano Movimiento 2, 4, 6, 7, 34, 89, 111 Constitutionalists (Mexican Revolution) 43, 44, 50, 59 La Crónica, Laredo, TX newspaper 29, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 115–117 and El Primer Congreso Mexicanista 33–36 La Cruz Blanca 11, 36, 50, 51- 52, 54, 58–60, 110, 115 founding of 43

D de la Llave, Carmen 44 Diaz, Porfirio 23, 31, 41, 42, 44, 50 Dobie, J. Frank 12, 61, 63, 66, 70, 71, 73 and Jovita González 63, 64, 67, 84, 85 and Texas Folklore Society 63, 64

E Escandón, José de 12, 24, 25, 26, 73

G García de González, Araceli 48

Garza, Catarino 31 and Villegas Family 41 Garza-Falcón, Leticia 65, 66, 71, 72, 77, 85 González, Jovita 2, 5, 12–14, 17, 21, 28, 41, 56, 67, 89, 110, 113 and Caballero 61, 67, 69 and Dew on the Thorn 60–85 and J. Frank Dobie 63, 64, 67, 84, 85 and Master of Arts thesis: “Social Life in Webb, Starr, and Zapata Counties” 63 and Texas Folklore Society 61, 64, 69 González, María de Jesus 48, 59

H Huerta, Victoriano 50

I Idar, Federico 43, 44, 115 Idar, Jovita 7, 8, 31–36, 43, 48, 71, 115 Idar, Nicasio 33, 35, 115, 117 International Bridges, Laredo, TX 9, 11, 22–24, 53

L Laredo, TX 2, 6, 8–13, 17, 21–37, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 58, 62, 68, 113, 115, 117 and Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas, MX 9, 22, 23, 27, 40, 43 Laredo Times 29, 33, 45, 46, 55 La Liga Femenil Mexicanista 7, 17, 35, 36 Limón, José 6, 7, 8, 12, 34–36, 63, 70, 71, 72, 73

139

140 Lomas, Clara 10, 37, 39, 46, 47, 50, 51, 52, 54, 55, 56, 58, 115 Long, Lily 43, 48, 59

M Madero, Francisco I., president of Mexico 42, 43, 44, 45 Magnón, Adolpho 42 Mexican Revolution: death of Pancho in The Rebel 58 intellectual agitation of 6, 8–9 and Josephina Niggli 15, 88–89, 100– 101, 110 and Leonor Villegas de Magnón 10, 37, 39–60 Mireles, Edmundo husband of Jovita González 13 Moraga, Cherríe 1, 4, 6, 7, 17, 18, 53, 109, 110

N Neutral White Cross 44 Niggli, Josephina 2, 5, 14–17, 24, 66, 67, 110, 111, 112, 113 and Mexican Village 87–108 Nueces River 30 Nueces Strip 30, 74 Nuevo Santander, Spanish province 12, 24, 26 and José de Escandón 24, 26

P Pancho el esquifero (in The Rebel) 24, 40, 41, 57, 58, 59 and wife Julia 40, 41, 57, 58 Paredes, Américo 64, 65, 69 El Primer Congreso Mexicanista 6, 7, 33–36 El Progreso, Laredo, TX newspaper 43, 115

R Ramirez, Sara Estela 36, 117 Recovering the US-Hispanic Literary Heritage publication series (Arte Público Press, University of Houston) 10, 12, 39, 72 Republic of the Rio Grande, 26 Republic of Texas 26, 28, 74 Rio Grande 8, 22, 24, 30, 45, 57, 73, 74, 87 as international border with Mexico 9, 11, 23, 26, 27, 112

Index Rio Grande City, Texas, 9, 12, 62, 68, 73 1888 riot, 31

S San Antonio, Texas, 12, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 37, 40, 41, 42, 62, 75, 87, 99, 109, 115 and Incarnate Word College (matriculation of Josephina Niggli) 15, 87, 88 and Jovita González 63, 64 and Leonor Villegas de Magnón 40, 41, 42 and Our Lady of the Lake University (matriculation of Jovita González) 12 and Ursuline Convent (matriculation of Leonor Villegas de Magnón) 42 Serdán, Carmen 44, 48, 52 Soldadera, play by Josephina Niggli 14, 88, 101, 107 Soldaderas (women fighters in Mexican Revolution) 46, 48, 52, 100, 112

T Texas War for Independence 26, 73

U University of Texas at Austin 12, 61, 63, 65, 68 Urdemañas, Pedro de, Texas-Mexican border folklore figure: in Dew on the Thorn 75 Villegas Family: Eloisa, stepmother 57, 58 Joaquín, father 40, 41, 57 Leopoldo 40, 41 Lina 40 Lorenzo 40 Valerianna Rubio, mother 40, 57 Villegas de Magnón, Leonor 2, 5, 8, 10, 17, 21, 24, 29, 32, 36, 37, 62, 66, 67, 71, 89, 90, 100, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117 Leonor Grubbs, daughter 45 Leonor Smith, granddaughter 45 and The Rebel 39–60 and Venustiano Carranza 41, 44

W Webb, Walter Prescott 66, 72, 73, 100