diplomecka.pdf - is muni

Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English

and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Lucie Krpalová

A Writer as a Curandera and Writing as a

Healing Process in the Fiction of Rudolfo

Anaya, Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Sandra

Cisneros

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, PhD.

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,

using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………….

I would like to thank Mgr. Kateřina Prajznerová, PhD. for her kind and patient guidance

and my parents, Jarmila and František Krpalovi, for their support during my studies.

Contents

1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 5

2 Writing as a Healing Process .............................................................................................................. 17

2.1 Through Confession to Compassion ............................................................................................. 18

2.2 Writing as an Integrative Process ................................................................................................. 21

2.3 Writing as a Path to Change and Transformation ......................................................................... 25

3 Curanderismo ...................................................................................................................................... 30

3.1 The Indigenous Roots ................................................................................................................... 31

3.2 The Spanish Roots ........................................................................................................................ 35

3.3 Coatlicue and Gaudalupe - Embodiments of Ambiguity, Syncretism and Sympathy ................. 38

3.4 The Storage of Knowledge and Wings of Freedom ...................................................................... 44

4 Antonio, the Dream Shaman ............................................................................................................... 48

4.1 The Healing Language of Dreams and Nature ............................................................................. 49

4.2 The End of God and the Light of Death ....................................................................................... 54

4.3 “But Who Will Hear My Confession?” ........................................................................................ 58

5 Xochitl, “My Full Name Is Xochitl Maria Espinoza” ......................................................................... 60

5.1 Re-Membering Mexico ................................................................................................................. 60

5.2 Her Name Will Be Her Destiny .................................................................................................... 64

5.3 A Healing Balm for Mother .......................................................................................................... 66

6 Celaya, Bigmouth Strikes Again ......................................................................................................... 68

6.1 We All Are Strands of a Caramelo Rebozo .................................................................................. 69

6.2 Breaking the Silence and Fighting the Shadow ............................................................................ 75

6.3 I Forgive You, Soledad ................................................................................................................. 83

7 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 87

8 Works Cited ........................................................................................................................................ 94

1 Introduction

This thesis examines the similarities between the role of a Mexican folk healer,

a curandera, and a writer, as well as the links between the art of healing and writing. I

treat the subject from various angles, including anthropology, sociology, psychology

and comparative literary analysis. I analyze the novels and short stories of three

Chicano writers – Rudolfo Anaya, Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Sandra Cisneros. While

all of them deal with certain aspects of writing and storytelling as a healing process, the

first two also feature healers as the main characters. My argument is that curanderas

share many features, processes and practices with contemporary Chicano writers, for

both a curandera’s healing and the act of writing are in essence holistic processes aimed

at achieving greater balance and integrity.

The connection between the Chicano writer and the curandera healer is not my

original idea. Chicano writers themselves admit they are captivated by this cultural

figure. In the chapter on “The Neuvomexicana Writers” in Women Singing in the Snow:

A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Fiction, Diana Tey Rebolledo introduces “the figure of

the curandera/bruja or healer [as] a cultural symbol, even an archetype, who stands out

as a continuous link from the estoria/ cuentos to the early written tradition, and who

continues to be an important literary symbol for contemporary writers” (46). The

curandera owes her popularity among Chicano writers to her ability to mediate between

the spiritual and the material worlds and to her skill to merge various healing practices.

In order to heal, she includes into her medicine whatever is good for the patient, without

regard to its origin. She is the embodiment of balance, integrity and inclusiveness.

Since Chicano writers stand with one foot in Mexican and with the other in

American culture their bicultural experience draws them close to the figure of the

curandera. They, too, strive for balance in their lives. Similarly to the curandera, they

see their mission as teaching their Chicano community, or anyone living in-between,

how to integrate two or more conflicting cultures and worldviews. This can be

illustrated on the example of Sandra Cisneros who sees her purpose as a Chicano/a

writer in showing the reality of everyday life from various viewpoints and consequently

deepening the understanding between people of various cultural backgrounds: “For

those of us living between worlds, our job in the universe is to help others see with

more than their eyes during this period of chaotic transition. Our work as bicultural

citizens is to help others become visionary, to help us examine our dilemmas in multiple

ways and arrive at creative solutions; otherwise we all will perish” (qtd. in Martinez).

Clearly, Chicano/a writers feel close to the curandera because they learn from her how

to balance and merge their different heritages.

I believe that the connection between pain and writing is especially relevant in

the context of Chicano literature. Since the Chicana feminist and essayist Gloria

Anzaldúa published her collection of essays Borderlands/ La Fronter: The New

Mestiza, in which she discusses the painful experience of the border condition, the

connections between borderlands, pain, writing and integration has become part of a

larger critical body in literary studies. Anzaldúa describes the borderland of Mexico and

United States as a

1,950 mile-long open wound

dividing a pueblo, a culture,

running down the length of my body,

staking fence rods in my flesh,

splits me splits me

me raja me raja (2)

and, once again, as a place where “the U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta

where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it

hemorrhages again, the lifebloods of two worlds merging to form a third country – a

border culture” (3). What Anzaldúa stresses in her descriptions of the borderlands is the

pain at being torn apart, a pain which is present in the psyche of the people who inhabit

this in-between space. However, she also renders this pain as necessary for a creative

act to emerge: “living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets

write and artists create” (73). The conflicts of occupying a borderland space, whether

literally or figuratively, stand as well at the center of Anaya’s, Alba’s and Cisneros’

stories.

Anzaldúa perceives storytelling as a way of coming to terms with traumas,

personal or cultural, and above all making meaning of them: “in reconstructing the

traumas behind the images, I make ‘sense’ of them, and once they have ‘meaning’ they

are changed, transformed. It is then that writing heals me, brings me great joy” (70).

Anzaldúa is not the only Chicana who has introduced the writing process as an

alternative path of healing. In her essay “Constructing Identities as Writers,” Rebolledo

describes writers as mediators between cultures as well as between the past and the

present, and outlines the many ways in which writing can change their and our lives:

writing, after all, is naming, mapping, and leading, as well as creating. It

forms an explanation of the meaning of existence; it can order chaos,

introduce reason into ambiguity, re-create loss, call up the past, and

create new models and traditions. In sum, it orders existence and invents

new worlds. It can denounce injustice and prejudice and may function as

a focus for a shared experience. (117)

All the positive ‘side effects’ of writing, which Rebolledo lists above, have been

validated in the research on the healing ability of writing, especially in the work of

James W. Pennebaker. In the second chapter I will elaborate on his ideas on writing,

which he published in Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions.

Pennebaker emphasizes the ability of writing to lead us to confronting traumas, to

release our inhibited emotions, turn us into our own compassionate listeners, integrate

our feelings and thoughts, and link our perception of the happenings from the past with

new present perspectives, and thus change our view of the events, bring about new

insights, raise awareness and allow for a change and transformation in our lives. Also

books on memoir writing such as Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our

Stories Transforms Our Lives by Louise DeSalvo, Becoming Whole: Writing Your

Healing Story by Linda Joy Myers, and Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion

to the Inner Worlds by Deena Metzger have proven to be very helpful in examining the

writing process in detail, illustrating its integrative and transformative abilities, and

rendering it a truly beneficial holistic medicine. In the above mentioned literature,

writers, psychologists and sociologists alike agree on the fact that writing can bring

about bodily and spiritual healing.

In the third chapter I introduce curanderismo, a Mexican type of folk healing, as

a holistic medicinal system. In its essence, curanderismo constitutes an inclusive

medicinal system and its “strength comes from its practice of always incorporating

whatever is useful and available into its treatments, in an intuitive and creative way”

(Avila 17). Curanderismo views and treats a person not as an isolated individual but

rather as a part of a greater picture – a member of a family, community, sharing in the

natural and spiritual world. While it looks outside for causes of illnesses, it also turns

deep into the psyche of the person. As Clarissa Pinkola Estes puts in the foreword to

Woman Glowing in the Dark by Elena Avila:

Curanderismo deals, as do certain psychoanalytic theories, with the

negative and the positive principles of the psyche. Curanderismo goes

much further, however. One takes into account not only the stories of a

person’s life, the psyche’s dreams, the mundane situation, but also, in

investigating the life of the soul in depths, one prays over the person. The

prayers are for vision, for strength, for wholeness, meaning a kind of

rememberedness. In curanderismo, dreams do offer assistance and

direction. At depth, in the psyche one experiences that the inner and outer

worlds do leak into one another. (7)

Estes further points out that what psychoanalysis and curanderismo have in common is

that they “both rely on encouraging the movement of the psyche toward a more

integrative viewpoint,” bringing ill people back in touch with their inner as well as with

the outer world (Estes 8). Integration and inclusiveness are the foundations

curanderismo has been build on.

The third chapter also renders an account of the origin and development of

curandera’s art of healing. The concept of curanderismo shows many similarities with

indigenous shamanic practices and Spanish folk healers’ medicine. As for the former,

both shamanism and curanderismo share their view of illness and health. In her essay

“The Shaman: Master Healer in the Imaginary Realm,” Jeanne Achterberg defines the

shamanic conception of health:

the purpose [of health system] is spiritual development. Health is the

harmony with the world view. Health is an intuitive perception of the

universe and all its inhabitants as being of one fabric. Health is

maintaining communication among the animals and plants and minerals

and the stars. It is knowing death and life and seeing no difference. It is

blending and melding, seeking solitude and seeking companionship to

understand one’s many selves. Unlike the modern notions, in shamanic

society, health is not the absence of feeling; no more is it the absence of

pain. (107-08)

As for the latter, the Spanish medicinal tradition has brought into curanderismo a strong

presence of the biblical dichotomies of good and evil, but also the ‘shamanic’ notion of

balance as essential for health, which illustrated in greater detail in Curanderismo:

Mexican American Folk Healing by Robert T. Trotter and Juan Antonio Chavira (27-

What I further delineate in the third chapter is what the character of the

curandera personifies for the Chicano/a community, which becomes later on significant

in order to see why the Chicano/a writers so closely relate to this cultural figure. The

curandera shares numerous characteristics with Mexican religious deities. As central

influence to curandera’s practices I view and have chosen the figures of Aztec goddess

Coatlicue and la Virgen de Gaudelupe. Curanderas draw on Coatlicue’s immense

ability to create and destruct, which they make use of through both white and black

magic. La Virgen de Gaudalupe, on the other hand, is inspirational to them through her

goodness and sympathy. Both these qualities are essential characteristics of the

curandera who is said to heal not only with herbs but also with her deep sympathy

which touches people’s hearts. Embodying in nature such contradictory goddesses in

one person, the curandera becomes for contemporary Chicano/a writers a hugely

inspirational representation of ambiguity and unity.

Finally, I am drawing a connection between the role of a curandera and a

shaman in their respective communities, which I view as very similar to that of a writer

in contemporary Chicano society. Curanderas and shamans usually become keepers of

knowledge in their communities. The term ‘shaman’ actually comes from the Evenki

language in Siberia and can be translated as ‘the one who knows’ (Tedlock 6).

Likewise, the English word ‘witch’ from Old English ‘witan’ essentially means ‘to

know’ or ‘to be wise’ (Tedlock 6). Tedlock explains that what constitutes a real shaman

is “the active pursuit of knowledge. This takes many forms: the understanding of animal

and human behavior; the identification of medicinal plants and their uses; the hands-on

healing knowledge of bone setting, massage, and midwifery; and empathetic knowledge

of the human psyche” (23). Yet, the shaman’s knowledge can be understood as “an

intuitive grasp of the complex connections and forms of consciousness in the natural

world,” or wisdom, rather than knowledge per se (Tedlock 137). Curanderas and

shamans alike store the knowledge not for their own sake but to be able in future to be

of help to individuals or the whole communities.

What further connects shamans and curanderas is their willingness to undertake

journeys into their memory, their dreams and imagination, realms that can integrate the

conscious and unconscious, to find new healing stories and images. Shamanic healers

and curanderas believe in the connection between thoughts and reality, and use

“metaphors – ways of thinking about one thing in terms of another – to describe a

mythic world and to help the patient to manipulate sensory, emotional, and cognitive

information in a way that alters his or her perception of the illness” (Tedlock 15). In

other words, they try to mirror the patient’s reality from a different angle, which is

reminiscent of writers’ work in relation to their readers. Thus, healing process can be

viewed as altering our view of reality, and creativity and imagination as a significant

part of this process. In her essay “Crazy Wisdom: The Shaman as Mediator of Realities”

Mary Schmidt puts it as such: “a shaman type will know that his environment or society

is invented and that he must become a creative force in this humanly created

cosmology” (71). We can see that in storing knowledge of the world, using metaphors,

images and stories in order to show new and different perspectives on the reality their

patients/readers find themselves in, and showing them alternative ways of dealing with

their situation, the roles of curanderas and writers come very close to each other.

In the next three chapters I analyze how the healing writing processes together

with the curandera’s healing practices described above manifest themselves in Anaya’s,

Alba’s and Cisenros’ fiction. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, which I analyze in

the fourth chapter, was Anaya’s first novel that won him international acclaim as a

writer, and so generated interest in Chicano writing and opened the door of the literary

canon to other Chicano/a writers. In a sense, the novel is biographical, for Antonio, the

narrator and the main character, similarly to Anaya, grows up in a small New Mexican

village situated on the edge of the llano Estacado (the Staked Plains). In Bless Me,

Ultima Anaya recounts Antonio’s childhood from the age of six and depicts various

influences that contribute to the formation of his identity. Most of the time Antonio

finds himself in a struggle to reconcile the numerous oppositions in his life. Antonio is a

son of parents with different backgrounds – his mother’s family are farmers while his

father comes from the cattlemen tradition. In the course of the novel, Antonio also starts

to question his Christian beliefs, confronting them with a newly discovered indigenous

religion of Golden Carp. Throughout the novel, Antonio notices the ever present fight

between good and evil. Fortunately, Ultima, an old and wise healer who joins the family

when Antonio is six, helps him to orient himself in the chaos of his childhood and to

choose his own path. With her guiding hand Antonio explores and makes sense of the

symbols and images that arise from his unconscious in his vivid dreams. Indeed, his

dreams, intertwined throughout the novel, are of great significance for they illustrate

Antonio’s identity development. I investigate how dreams, and the metaphors and

myths presented in them, are instrumental in Antonio’s achieving greater balance and

integrity, as well as Ultima’s role in this process. As Antonio’s mentor, Ultima teaches

him to build a close bond with nature and feel fulfilled and complete in its presence,

which further contributes to Antonio’s inner equilibrium. Next she passes on to him the

wisdom that compassion and forgiveness are virtues necessary for understanding and

relating to people. As these virtues help Ultima to cure the sick, they are also essential

to Antonio’s becoming a mature man and wise writer.

In Chapter Five, I examine five short stories from the collection The Mystery of

Survival an Other Stories by Alicia Gaspar de Alba - “The Pinata Dream,” “Estrella

González,” “The Prediction,” “The Last Rite,” and “Facing the Mariachis.” In 1993

Alba’s collection was awarded the Premio Aztlan Award by Rudolfo and Patricia

Anaya. The first story introduces us to Xochitl Maria Espinoza, a seventeen-year-old

Chicana enrolled in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Feeling uncomfortable in the

predominantly white academic environment, unable to recover her earliest memory, and

haunted by a frightening dream, Xochitl decides to visit a tarot reader, Hazel Brown, to

help her out of her amnesia. Hazel helps Xochitl analyze her dream in which she

wonders along the Mexican-American border. In the dream, Xochitl’s mother leads her

to a celebration where she is forced to break a piñata, a paper mache star-shaped object

full of candy originally used in Mexican celebrations. With Hazel’s guidance, Xochitl

realizes that the dream is telling her to revisit Mexico where she spent her childhood

and rediscover her Mexican roots and the Mexican part of her identity. Hazel advises

Xochitl to explore her past in her writing. The result of Xochitl’s sessions with Hazel

are the “Xochitl Stories” in which Xochitl depicts the Mexico of her mother’s past as

well as her ancestors, blurring the knowledge from her father together with her research

on Mexico and her imagination. Xochitl weaves her stories around the character of

Estrella González, a powerful Mexican curandera. Imagining her own conception as a

result of Estrella’s magical fertility ritual, in which only her mother and Estrella were

present, Xochitl creates her new identity as a child born of magic and endowed with

magical powers similar to her curandera grandmother. In this particular chapter I

explore the ability of the imagination and memory to create and recover the missing

parts of one’s identity and bring about the feeling of completeness.

The sixth chapter presents an analysis of Sandra Cisneros’ novel Caramelo.

Cisneros counts nowadays among the most known and acknowledged Chicana authors.

Her first novel, The House on Mango Street, won the Before Columbus Foundation's

American Book Award and enabled Chicano women to enter the literary canon (Sagel,

Las Mujeres.com). Similarly to her ‘heroines’ in The House on Mango Street and

Caramelo, Cisneros felt lonely and trapped in a big and loud family crammed in a little

space, and she used to hate the frequent travels to Mexico City to visit her paternal

grandmother, which left her even more withdrawn and made her seek refuge in books

(Sagel, Las Mujeres.com). When Cisneros started to write, her restless childhood and

ethnicity became a rich source of experience to draw on. In her novels and stories she

deals with and speaks against racism, sexism, poverty and shame. In this chapter, I

introduce Celaya as a curandera attempting to heal herself – trying to find a home in

moving between the American and the Mexican cultures, between her Chicano mother

and Mexican father and their different worldviews – as well as fellow Chicanos/as –

through exposing unhealthy patterns in Mexican families, namely the exaggerated love

in mother-son and father-daughter relationships, which often complicates the marital

relations. Cisneros also portrays the frequent lack of freedom and self-fulfillment for

women in Mexican and Chicano society. In her writing, apart from her own voice, she

claims the voice of those to whom it has been denied – the indigenous people in

Mexican society, women in Chicano and Mexican society and Chicanos/as in the U.S.

In Caramelo, Cisneros’ emotional alter-ego, Celaya, designates herself a family

storyteller and summons the family history. The book is divided into three parts in

which Celaya, through her storytelling, travels in time as many as three generations

back. In the first part she depicts her early childhood, her family – her Mexican father

Inocencio, her Chicana mother Zoila and her six older brothers – and their trips to

Mexico to visit Inocencio’s beloved mother Soledad (who is secretly called Awful

Grandmother because of her mean behavior towards Celaya and the other women and

children in the extended family). The first part ends with a family trip to Acapulco and a

bust-up between Celaya’s mother and father after Zoila had discovered her husband’s

love affair and his illegitimate child, a secret that ‘unfortunately’ leaked from Soledad’s

mouth. In the second part, Celaya narrates the story of her grandmother’s poor

childhood, her early abandonment by her parents, her growing up as a domestic help in

other people’s households, and her marriage to Celaya’s grandfather Narciso. Celaya

tells these stories to do a favor for her grandmother’s ghost who asks her to recount the

painful stories of her childhood and youth for others to understand why she became

‘awful’, was so overprotective and possessive of her first-born son, and complicated

other people’s lives so much. In the third part, the teenage Celaya casts light on her

parents’ unhappy marriage and delineates her desire for space, privacy, independence

and self-actualization, which is met by a strong disregard from her father. Despite her

difficult relationships with her family members, Celaya rediscovers the strong bond that

ties her with the rest of her family, especially to her father and Awful Grandmother.

To sum up, all of the novels and short stories analyzed here feature the character

of a budding writer - Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya - who tries to come to terms with

his/her bicultural heritage. All of them are in search of a way of balancing their in-

betweeness and becoming whole. While Antonio struggles to choose between his

mother’s and father’s ways of life, Xochitl needs to uncover her Mexican heritage to

feel complete. Celaya, too, contemplates the differing ways of her Mexican father and

Mexican-American mother. All of them find in writing or telling stories a powerful tool

of overcoming their inner fragmentation. In and through their stories they are able to

release their personal or cultural inhibitions as well as to deal with the pain, shame and

confusion arising from being poor, from being discriminated against and looked down

upon, or from not belonging to one particular place and culture and therefore being

pulled in different directions.

2. Writing as a Healing Process

Multiple studies and vast research over the last thirty years have proven that

writing, indeed, can become a very effective way of healing our inner wounds and of

reaching wholeness. Though body care is an important part of our well-being, human

beings are complex creatures that do not thrive when emotionally or mentally unwell. In

this section I investigate in greater detail what makes writing a potent way of “body

healing, emotional healing, and healing in the deepest layers of the soul” and thus a

truly holistic medicine (Myers xiii). Writers worldwide admit that writing has saved

their lives and helped them to see their life as meaningful. Numerous writers have used

writing to overcome psychic wounds caused by dislocation, violence, racism,

homophobia, anti-Semitism, rape, political persecution, incest, illness and losses of

various kinds (DeSalvo 4). True healing demands healing on more levels of human

existence, or, as Laurence J. Kirmayer says in his essay “Toward a Medicine of the

Imagination,” “[h]ealing involves basic bodily processes of balancing, homeostatic

regulation, and repair, but it is equally a matter of making sense of suffering and finding

a way to continue,” suggesting the important role of the mind in the healing process

(599). It is writing that offers the possibility of healing both body and mind.

In his pondering on the ability of the imagination to heal, Kirmayer also

examines the role of language in healing and gives a thorough account of its ability to

heal in a variety of forms:

through magical invocation, supplication, or prayer; through dialogue

that brings one into relation with another, present or imagined; as recipes

to follow, sources of instructions and imperatives; as conceptual toolkits,

sources of metaphors, analogies, and models to think with; as

instruments to focus and occupy consciousness, as in the use of mantras;

as objects of aesthetic contemplation, as in lyric poetry, to admire their

sound and fit; and as stories to dwell within or labyrinths to explore.

Through these examples Kirmayer shows the multiple layers of language possibilities.

In addition to words’ ability to argue, clarify or describe, through words we can also

conjure and transform reality, for “each of these [examples] has associated with it a way

of inhabiting body and transforming the consciousness” (Kirmayer 599). Writing thus

becomes a means of overcoming and assimilating traumas and wounds of the psyche. In

her manual for would-be-writers Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg elucidates

her inner urge to write in relation to subliming pain: “Writing is deeper than therapy.

You write through your pain, and even your suffering must be written out and let go

off” (190). What Goldberg highlights throughout her book are the transformational and

healing abilities of putting pen down to paper. Let us now examine what makes writing,

though not a miracle cure, certainly a potential process for reaching recovery from little

sores as well as deep wounds of the human psyche.

2.1 Through Confession to Compassion

Over three decades ago James W. Pennebaker, a social psychologist, became

curious about people’s need to disclose their deepest thoughts and feelings along with

their secrets. His interest in relationships between disclosure, inhibition and health set a

foundation to a vast research dedicated to this topic. It led to the publishing of Opening

Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions in 1990, in which Pennebaker makes

his writing-as-healing research public and proves that indeed the inhibition of traumas

can lead to deteriorating health through undermining the body’s immune system, and

disclosure of the painful stories, on the other hand, may, through the lowering of the

bodily symptoms of stress, significantly improve our emotional as well as physical

health. Also Louise DeSalvo, the author of Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling

Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, notes that many researchers, psychiatrists and

psychotherapists assert that the cause of mental illness or suicidal attempts lies not in

the trauma itself but rather in the inability to express/verbalize what has been suffered,

be it rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness or sadness (167-68). Thus putting

the stories of our pain on paper may prove health-beneficial.

Through telling our story we can understand our feelings and thoughts better for

“the act of translating private thoughts into language helps people to understand and

assimilate the thoughts more efficiently” (Pennebaker 174). In his investigation of the

psychological states of holding back and letting go, Pennebaker found patterns in which

inhibition and self-disclosure affect the body as well as the mind. Among others,1

Pennebaker uncovered the fact that “once it [trauma] is language-based, people can

better understand the experience and ultimately put it behind them,” implying that

translating our experiences into language dulls their emotional impact,

changes/transforms our relationship towards them and helps us assimilate them

(Pennebaker 10). Writing the trauma down is also a way of getting it out of the system,

“a method of externalizing” it, which results in less need to rehearse or obsess about it

(Pennebaker 98).

Intuitively, the healing ability of disclosing various transgressions has long been

known, and manifested in the rituals of the Native North and South American tribes, as

1In his research Pennebaker uncovered connections between inhibition and stress levels in the body. Here

is the summery of his findings. First, inhibition is physical work; we consciously make effort to hold

back, not to think, feel or behave in a certain way, which exhausts the body. Second, inhibition affects

short-term biological changes and long-term health; increased perspiration as an instance of the first and

stress-related physical and psychological problems as a result of the latter. Third, Inhibition influences

thinking abilities; it stops us from thinking about the event in a broad and integrative way, translating it

into language and, consequently, understanding and assimilating it. Fourth, confrontation reduces the

effects of inhibition and thus reduces the stress levels in the body. Last but not least, confrontation forces

a rethinking of events; as a result they can be laid to rest, causing harm no more (Pennebaker 9-10).

well as in the most prominent Easter and Western religions in the form of confession

(Pennebaker 1). Tedlock and Pennebaker comment on its cathartic qualities, which are

the result of confession’s ability to “elicit repressed memories that resolve conflicts

[and] reestablish harmonious interpersonal relations, providing emotional catharsis, or

the remembering and re-experiencing of painful memories” (Tedlock 16). In the

Catholic tradition, confession is also connected with “the unburdening of shame and

guilt, enabling a person to move forward in a positive way […] through confession and

unburdening, forgiveness can begin, for ourselves and others” (Myers 23). We can see

that confession, primarily thought of as religious practice, can also act therapeutically.

Both Pennebaker and Myers see the healing value of confession in creating a

sympathetic and forgiving listener. Myers sees that confession can “act as a balance to

cruelty,” when acts of violence are revealed to a compassionate witness (Myers 52).

Pennebaker mentions research that proved that if the confession brings about changes

when the confessor gives the impression of being omnipotent and forgiving (170). Yet,

while he formerly suspected that what makes confession work are the catharsis and the

sharing of our traumatic stories with nonjudgmental compassionate witnesses,

Pennebaker found out that also the students with no expectations of readers/listeners

responding to their story have shown the same improvements in the drop of their stress

levels (23). In Becoming Whole, Myers illuminates this phenomenon. For her, the

concept of empathetic witness is present in the writing of our stories, even when no one

is present to listen, for it turns us into our own compassionate listeners -- “an observer

self whose empathetic listening presence brings validation and acceptance to the writer”

(Myers viii). Not only can writing release our inner tension but it also creates a safe

space to confide in and find peace and the healing compassion or, in Goldberg’s words,

“writing down the bones…writing from our pain eventually engenders compassion for

our small groping lives” (107). Pennebaker’s research along with writers’ experience

confirms that what heals is, ultimately, the act of writing or telling itself.

2.2 Writing as an Integrative Process

In further research of what kind of writing works better in recovery for trauma

survivors, Pennebaker discovered that not only the venting of the feelings but also

greater insight into the events, their causes and consequences, proved to be of much

value. Accordingly, the writing that was most helpful linked “detailed descriptions of

what happened with feelings – then and now – about what happened” (gtd. in DeSalvo

25). What was crucial and lead to improved health was connecting the thoughts and

feelings, as well as the past and the present. Writing creates conditions in which

different perspectives on the past can be compared “so that the writer unravels how the

past impinges on the present but how, too, it’s different” (DeSalvo 25). In other words,

through writing one gains a greater depth of understanding how feelings relate to the

events in life. Besides, in a later study by Pennebaker “Confession, Inhibition and

Disease,” which explored the brain waive activity in people writing about traumatic

events according to Pennebaker’s instructions, it was revealed that there was a harmony

in the activity between the left and right hemisphere, “indicating that both emotional

and linguistic information was being processed and integrated simultaneously,” proving

the integrative abilities of writing on the biological level (gtd. in DeSalvo 23).

Myers, in her writings on memoir, does not forget to point out the integrative

qualities of writing our own life-stories, qualities which are unique to this type of

writing. How can writing process become integrative? Myers clarifies how through

creating a character that is a younger version of us what we create can be called a “dual

consciousness [which] is integrative and healing” (53). In other words, in writing about

our younger selves we claim them a part of us, which makes us more complete. Another

integrative tool is writing from multiple perspectives and thus “weaving a larger, more

integrated story of our life” - a more complex and more complete story (Myers 39).

Writing about ourselves equals to trying to figure out who we are and where we belong,

or as Denis Ledoux puts: “healing is a process of becoming whole. And people cannot

become whole until they know how and where their existence fits into the human

experience” (Myers ix). To put it differently, writing connects us to the rest of the world

because it illuminates our place in it and our relationship towards others. In Writing for

Your Life, Deena Metzger, a writer and therapist, views writing as a bridge-building act

in which “to get to know ourselves, we need to go inside. And also to others – they are

the basis for understanding ourselves […] The writing process […] takes us in [and]

also leads us out. We build the same bridges to react to the inner and outer world” (67).

Metzger sees the ability to retreat into ourselves as well as the “ability to enter into the

psyche of another being, real or imaginary, [as] the root task of creativity and essential

requirement for being in relationship and living in the world,” and thus she renders

writing as not only a creative pursuit but also as connectedness-to-the-world (Metzger

Pennebaker explains that one reason why people tend to make stories is the fact

that human minds have been “trained to move towards completion and to find meaning”

(92). According to Pennebaker, human beings are creatures who naturally seek

completion of disrupted tasks. When traumas interrupt the continuity of our lives, we

tend to talk, think or dream about them intensively, as well as try to find out why they

happened. Pennebaker recommends writing as a powerful tool to discover meaning and

promote self-understanding. Metzger sees meaning “at the core of a creative process

and of storytelling. It is both, the goal and the attribute” (55). Writing slows our mind

down and forces some degree of structure and organization on our thoughts. Apart form

detaching ourselves from the traumatic event, we also become more aware of the

complex causes of events that happened to us along with the complexity of our

emotions accompanying these events. Furthermore, with the new insights found we are

also able to see the events from a different perspective.

Another significant fact Pennebaker found in his computer analysis of the

writings he had collected was that the people who most benefited from writing were

constructing coherent stories. Over repeated writing, the stories became consistent with

a clear beginning, middle and ending (Pennebaker 103). Metzger’s vivid description of

a story praises it for the same qualities as Pennebaker: “a story is like a lens or a frame:

it gives focus, it unifies, it organizes diverse images into a coherent meaning. Without

the frame or focus, the events would be random and disconnected. Story provides the

relationship, the links, the connections” between events in our lives (59). Not only does

a story organize and create relationships which had not been perceived, and thus

provides new insights, but it can heal us through bringing together events, states of

being or parts of ourselves that we suppressed or forgot about:

As in the word remember, we re-member, we bring together the parts, we

integrate that which has been alienated or separated out, revalue what has

been disdained. In other words, self-discovery is more than gathering

information about oneself. The gathering, the coming to know, has

consequences. It alters us. We re-store, re-member, re-vitalize, re-

juvenate, rescue, re-cover, re-claim, re-new. Writing our story takes us

back to some moment of origin when everything was whole, when we

were whole (Metzger 71).

In other words, turning into our own storytellers offers a chance to keep one’s life

coherent, imbued with meaning and more whole.

In her essay On Writing, Healing, and Wholeness: Personal and Cultural

Benefits of Naming What Remains, Laura A. Milner reveals how stories of loss and

pain, because of their universality, can become a significant tool to connect with others.

In Milner’s classes sharing and witnessing stories of loss among her students created an

atmosphere of respect and compassion through “recogniz[ing] common threads in their

histories and […] connect[ing] with each other more fully in the present” (24). Milner

quotes Cassie Premo Steele and her study We Heal From Memory: Sexton, Lorde,

Anzaldúa, and the Poetry of Witness to show how this process works on an individual as

well as a cultural level – be it “the loss of the experience, the loss of others through

death, the loss of a life untouched by trauma, [or] the loss of the memories and histories

of civilizations […M]ourning these losses constructs us as individuals and as cultures”

(qtd. in Milner 24). Both Milner and Steele see looking into history, witnessing painful

events and mediating them further on as an important part of humanity connecting

process for “this recognition of how our histories are woven together enables a

reconnection between people in the present” (Steele gtd. in Milner 23). Through writing

about our pain we gain valuable insights into our pain and are forced into “an awareness

about ourselves and our relationship to others and our place in the world” (DeSalvo 5).

As stories are capable of cohering our lives, whole cultures can create what

Metzger calls larger stories, when she refers to myths, which unify the secular and

sacred realms: “if story is the glue through which both individuals and cultures cohere,

the larger stories heal the pervasive division between this world and the other, between

earth and sacred space” (138). Through myths, archetypal tales, we connect with our

ancestors, the gods, the divine, and thus “integrat[e] the personal into universal […by

allowing ourselves] to dialogue, through myth, with the gods […and] become one with

all of them” (Metzger 137). Telling stories and myths can be then seen as a way of

becoming whole. We can imagine the self as “the single point, the meeting place of the

individual, the integration of all the levels – biological, psychological, intellectual,

historical, cultural, and spiritual. The self is the moment when the greater story rests in

us and all the stories become one” (Metzger 138). From what I explained above,

writing, evidently, can be healing in that it makes us more connected to ourselves, to

others, to the world surrounding us and the spiritual world .

2.3 Writing as a Path to Change and Transformation

DeSalvo herself describes her experience of writing as feeling yeasty, meaning

“alive and growing and changing” and suggests that writing, indeed, has the potential to

change us (DeSalvo 8). When we look at ourselves as the “accumulation of stories we

tell ourselves about who we are,” in changing our stories we can revisit, review and

revise our past (11). The way we rewrite our personal history can change the way we

see ourselves in the present. The transformational quality of writing can be ascribed to

the possibility to master our emotions in representing painful scenes from our life.

Representing not only in the sense of describing the events but, more importantly, “‘re-

presenting’ – presenting scenes from the past as if they were presently occurring. This

would undo, remedy or rectify the effects of early experiences’,” when we chose to see

the past painful happenings in a light of a new knowledge (DeSalvo 18). The same steps

are valid for ‘re-presenting’ our identity. In Relocating the Personal Barbara Kamler

views a text as a representation of a particular experience rather than of the writer

himself or herself, and writing and revising of narratives as an act through which writers

can “reconstruct and renegotiate their identities” when seeing themselves from a slightly

different angle (qtd. in Milner 25).

DeSalvo describes healing as nothing but a shift in perspective. For her, writing

and telling our painful stories can lead to healing shifts in our perception of the

distressing happenings. The healing shift of perspective comes when “new

comprehension [is] integrated in our minds with memories of the events that occurred”

(Myers 25). In his essay “Toward a Medicine of the Imagination,” Laurence J.

Kirmayer, too, highlights the healing ability of narrative by the way of allowing

“symbolic closure, bringing a sense of completeness or coherent emplotment to the

fragmented and chaotic elements of illness experience” (595). He, similarly to

Pennebaker, acknowledges the value of textuality and narratives in creating “more

complex or higher order structures that give meaning and coherence to fleeting,

ambiguous, and disturbing experiences” (595-96). Even when no meaning to an event is

found, writing our story moves “us to a resolution [and the event] becomes

psychologically complete” (Pennebaker 103).

Writing can change the way we relate to the rest of the world. As mentioned

before, writing usually leads to greater self knowledge, which consequently leads to

greater knowledge of the world: “to write we must know ourselves. But in writing we

make ourselves known [and our] self-knowledge activates and substantiates our

knowledge of the world” (Metzger 53). In writing our life stories our relationship to

ourselves and to the world is changed. And so, while the approach might be criticized as

self-indulgent, the metaphorical digging in our psyche leads to greater self-awareness

and “the development of consciousness in oneself is of value to the universe. Thus,

work on oneself is related to work for others” (Metzger 126).

What writers further praise about writing is tha one enters an inner imaginative

world, which “can be contained within us, [but] it is also vast, endless and complex. It is

the world of worlds. It is infinite. To enter it is to know something of it and to learn of

the boundlessness of the self […It’s being] all open out into everything that has ever

existed or can ever or may ever exist” (Metzger 7). Freedom and growth are both

intrinsic to writing, for as Natalie Goldberg says: “every minute we change. It is a great

opportunity. At any point, we can step out of our frozen selves and our ideas and begin

fresh. That is how writing is. Instead of freezing us, it frees us” (Goldberg 55).

Writing transforms in many other ways and on other levels. For instance,

difficult emotions such as grief, anger or despair can become transformed into pieces of

art through metaphorical and poetic language. As Goldberg puts it: “We can transform

anger into steaming red tulips and sorrow into an old alley full of squirrels in the half

light of November […] it [writing] makes you burn deeper and glow clearer” (191).

Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, for victims of violence or social injustice writing and

sharing their stories can act as “a balance to cruelty” (Myers 52). DeSalvo, too,

interprets sharing painful stories as a “form of restitution,” a chance to right a wrong

(10). Writing can also transform us into more liberated beings. Through writing stories

of our past, we can find hidden patterns of behavior, which limit or harm us and through

knowing them we release ourselves from them. Writing possesses a transformational

quality. Though not a miracle cure, writing can become instrumental in recovering from

minor or severe traumas, uncovering unhealthy behavioral patterns, increasing

awareness and bringing about life changes.

How are the effects accompanying the process of writing relevant to Antonio,

Xochitl and Celaya and them sharing their life stories? Since the effects of writing

mentioned above were studied in research on how life writing can relieve our pain and

improve our health, my first consideration is that Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya, or

characters who are close to them, find themselves in painful situations or witnesses

traumatic events, which propels the three to write and share the story. Antonio’s story

and the story of Xochitl’s mother are in essence confessions. They are witness to or are

directly involved in murder holding back and feel the need to share this burden. They

need to externalize their trauma. In writing the stories, they look for forgiveness, from

themselves or from their readers. Furthermore, Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya come from

two very different cultural or familial heritages. As a result they feel torn between two

totally contradictory ways of life or they feel incomplete from not knowing both of their

cultural roots. They need to find in what relations do they stand to their community and

the rest of the world, so that they no more feel lost, confused and not belonging

anywhere. That is where the integrative ability of writing and narrative comes into play

and helps them to explore their relationships to the family members and the connections

to the cultures they come from. Last but not least, Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya, feel that

they, their relatives or the cultures they come from need to change perspective on some

issues or harmful patterns of life, considering family, community life or religion. In

writing they find a perfect tool to spot these issues and patterns, as well as a way to

suggest alternative and healthier ways to deal with these issues, and thus promote

change and transformation in their own as well as in the communal lives.

The processes of integration and transformation and the capability of

compassion are the core concepts which Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya are looking for in

their lives and later on employ in their writing. Compassion, transformation and

integration are as well hallmarks of the curandera’s healing and particularly Antonio

and Xochitl become very much inspired by the extent to which curanderas can employ

these abilities in order to heal. Next chapter takes a closer look at the concept of

curanderismo based on the anthropological study of this healing art and at the same

time introduces the characters of Ultima and Estrella in order to highlight the qualities

of the two curanderas appealing to contemporary Chicano/a writers.

3 Curanderismo

Curanderismo is a holistic medical system, which means it takes care of “the

whole person, body and soul” (Avila 44). It can be also called ‘integrative medicine’ in

that it depends on “emotional and bodily contact between healer and patient. It

emphasizes psychological and spiritual components in the causes and cures of sickness”

(Tedlock 14). In Woman Who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals Traditional

Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health, Elena Avila, a contemporary practicing

curandera, introduces curanderismo as a Mexican type of folk healing with roots old as

five hundred years combining several medical practices. According to Avila,

curanderismo began when the Spanish Conquistadores in the New World and combined

their medical practices with those of local indigenous tribes. Avila calls curanderismo

poetically the “three-headed serpent,” for it merges the medicine of three cultures - the

Spaniards, the tribes indigenous to Mexico and what is now southwestern United States,

and that of the African slaves imported by the Spaniards (Avila 15-16). In

Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing, Robert T. Trotter and Juan Antonio

Chavira cite as many as six influences upon the healing, among them “Judeo-Christian

religious beliefs, symbols and rituals; early Arabic medicine and health practices

(combined with Greek humoral medicine, revived during the Spanish Renaissance;

medieval and later European witchcraft; Native American herbal lore and health

practices; modern beliefs about spiritualism and psychic phenomena; and scientific

medicine” (Trotter and Chavira 25). In addition, Trotter and Chavira add new and

contemporary influences to the list, showing the inclusive and evolving nature of this

healing practice.

In this chapter, I investigate two main medical traditions underlying

curanderismo – the indigenous tradition with roots in land-based spirituality, and the

Spanish tradition intertwined with Christian spirituality. I use Anaya’s and Alba’s

portrayals of Ultima and Estrella to mix the factual and fictional and bring together a

more complete portrayal of curanderas. In contemporary Chicano literature, curandera

healers are usually portrayed as powerful figures. Chicano writers value primarily her

strength, independence and sympathy. In terms of her power and integrity, they also see

the links between curanderas and ancient omnipotent Mesoamerican deities, primarily

the goddess Coatlicue. They also liken her sympathy to the Mexican celebrated goddess

La Virgen de Gaudalupe. Both Coatlicue and Gaudalupe are syncretic and ambiguous

figures, the first merging light and dark aspects, the latter the Aztec and Spanish

elements. I attempt to dissect these two goddesses and their influence on Anaya’s and

Alba’s portrayal of curanderas. My examination of Mexican healers ends with a

subchapter on their independence and skill to keep knowledge of the past, which

Chicano writers see as curanderas’ crucial feature and ability.

3.1 The Indigenous Roots

Avila points out that the Africans and Native Americans share a similar set of

believes, and both of their belief systems have been incorporated into curanderismo.

Both cultures have in common “earth-oriented spirituality,” meaning they see the world

around them as inhabited by spirit and believe they can interact with it through

ceremony, offerings and prayer (Avila 22). Next, the concept of illness and health in

curanderisno, as well as in Native and African healing practices, revolves around the

idea of harmony and balance between an individual and his/her environment, or tu put it

differently: “human beings – along with animals, plants, minerals, water, earth, air, and

fire – are a part of the living earth system. Illness occurs when one does not live in

harmony with all aspects of self and nature” (Avila 19). In addition, Avila stresses the

importance of community in the healing process. Family and community can and are

encouraged to participate in the healing process, for “community serves as a link to an

individual’s sense of identity, meaning and purpose,” and sickness can arise when

loosing our sense of identity or purpose of our lives (Avila 22). Last but not the least,

both African and Native traditions believe that human beings possess a soul and a spirit,

which are seen as “not as something holy and disconnected from the body, as the

Spaniards did, but as inside of us, grounded in our physical body, emotions and mind”

(Avila 22). Thus, curanderismo is more than a medicinal practice; it is “medicine and

spirituality practiced simultaneously” (Avila 16).

The belief in spirited nature reflects in Anaya’s and Alba’s writing in the way

Ultima and Estrella gather and treat the medicinal plants. Their methods of gathering

and treating herbs share many similarities with the Native treatment of medicinal plants,

such as “prayers said or sung during the gathering of plants and the preparation of

medicines,” and becoming an integral part of the healing process (Robinett 129). In this

way the curandera establishes a spiritual relationship with the plant. In curanderismo,

certain healers specialize in healing with herbs. These herbalists are called yerberas.

Herbology used to be a specialty of Aztec healers; they have documented over 300

hundred medicinal plants (Avila 32). In Medicine Women, Curanderas, and Women

Doctors, an extensive study of women in healing professions from different

ethnological regions, Bobette Perrone cites curandera Josephita Ortiz y Davis

explaining curandera’s close relationship with herbs: “medicinal plants are powerful,

but the curandera tunes into the essence of the plant itself to appreciate its healing

properties. […] A curandera knows each plant individually, understands its celestial,

lunar and seasonal cycles, its periods” (90). Barbara Tedlock, an anthropologist

focusing on gender in the shamanic profession and a practicing shamaness herself, also

stresses this spiritual connection with herbs in her study The Woman in the Shaman’s

Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in Religion and Medicine. She emphasizes that a healer

“in order to choose the proper medicine for any situation, […] must ‘come to know the

plants’ as living beings [for] it is not alone the plant that cures; the healing comes from

the greater power that exists within the spirits of the plant, the healer, the patient, and

the culture” (137). Not only the power of the plant itself but the plant in tune with the

curandera can do the healing. Ultima, teaches her apprentice Antonio that “even the

plants had a spirit” which he should approach with great care and reverence and “before

I [Antonio] dug she made me speak to the plant and tell it why we pulled it from its

home in the earth” (Anaya, BMU Cuatro).2 Blue corn is the first thing Ultima feeds

Antonio’s uncle Lucas after his near death experience, for “on the day that we can get

Lucas to eat a bowl of atole then he shall be cured. Is that not sacred?” (Anaya, BMU

Diez). Ultima reveres the great healing and life-restoring power of plants, especially the

blue corn. Estrella, too, holds herbs high and spends hours “singing in her garden every

evening before retiring. After her third prayer to the sun at sunset, she would roam

among the herbs for a while, deepening the furrows among them, pinching off the dead

leaves, pronouncing each of their names in Latin, and invoking their essences to come

out of the ground to revitalize her healing powers” (Alba 90). Estrella knows well that

her own healing power stems from and is replenished by the plants.

Indigenous and African cultures “see earth as a place of healing and

transformation” and in that sense the greatest teacher for healers (Avila 23). Ultima

learns from nature that things that do not grow are dead things. She explains to Antonio

that many times when a human soul suffers from illness it is because of the inability to

grow and evolve. Ultima she teaches him that in the dry land of the llano “is faith […]

2 As I work with a printed copy of the novel, which does not show the page numbers, I am using the

Spanish titles of the chapters to locate the quotes in Anaya’s novel.

for nature being, evolving, growing” (Anaya, BMU Veinte). From Ultima Antonio

learns that his “spirit shared in the spirit of all things [and that] there was a beauty in the

time of day and in the time of night, and that there was peace in the river and in the

hills. She taught me to listen to the mystery of the groaning earth and to feel complete in

the fulfillment of its time. My soul grew under her guidance” (Anaya, BMU Dos).

Ultima teaches Antonio that cycles in nature reflect the cycles in the human soul. The

lesson he learns is the notion that there is light as well as darkness and beauty as well as

mystery in nature and one’s soul, and one should not fear it.

In most Native traditions, healers are helped by their power animals which guide

as well as guard them, so called guardian spirits (Harner 40). In Central America the

animal helper is called nagual, derived from the Aztec nahualli (Harner 43). Certain

believes are held about nahualism; not only does the animal spirit protect the healer, it

can also become “another identity or alter ego for him” (Harner 43). Among some of

the Central American tribes shamans are even believed to able to change into their

power animal at their will. Then the word nagual is used not only to name the animal

spirit but also the shaman possessing such transformative abilities (Harner 63). Estrella

and Ultima, too, have naguals at their disposal. Ultima is watched by an owl and either

hoots softly to signal Ultima is not in danger or hoots in alarm to warn her when danger

comes. When she needs her protection, Ultima calls her owl “Espiritu de mi alma!

[Spirit of my soul!]” (Anaya, BMU Veintidos). Estrella’s power animal is a scorpion.

She is immune to scorpion’s poison and uses it in her magical rituals. Her alter ego is a

bright blue-green parrot. Thank to their winged guardian spirits, Estrella and Ultima can

travel between worlds, and mediate between the earth and air, matter and spirit.

In the indigenous worldview, what brings on an illness is any kind of imbalance

and disharmony within a person, be it between the mind, body and soul of, or between

an individual and his/her family, community, and environment. The healer’s role then

becomes to use songs, chants, prayers, spells, and music, together with his or her

knowledge of the human psyche to reestablish “emotional and spiritual equilibrium [and

to strengthen] the self-healing abilities of a patient” (Tedlock 15). In BMU, Ultima tries

to keep Antonio’s psyche in balance when he is torn between the conflicting wishes of

his parents for his destiny, as well as in his religious struggles. Simultaneously she is

developing harmony between him and nature. When Ultima takes Antonio’s hand, she

awakens in him the indigenous sensitivity to the land and he experiences feeling of

being one with the natural world: “the power of a whirlwind sweep around me. Her eyes

swept the surrounding hills and through them I saw for the first time the wild beauty of

our hills and the magic of the green river. My nostrils quivered as I felt the song of the

mockingbirds and the drone of the grasshoppers mingle with the pulse of the earth”

(Anaya, BMU Uno). Ultima is doing what a skilled shamanic healer is able to exercise –

restoring a healthy relationship of individuals to their immediate environment.

3.2 Spanish Roots

The Spanish healing system shares many similarities with the indigenous

concept of health, mainly the idea of balance within individuals and with their

environment (Avila 25). What the Spanish brought to New World was a combination of

Greek and Roman practices of Hippocrates and the Arabic medicine handed down by

the Moors (Avila 24). The Greek physician Hippocrates developed a system of four

humors in the body – black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood, each connected with a

different temper and complexion of the patient. According to Greek medicine, a mental

or physical sickness appeared when the humors were out of “perfect equilibrium”

(Avila 25). Also Trotter and Chavira understand sickness as “the lack of the harmony

with the environment (social and spiritual as well as physical)” and view health as a

“balanced condition” and see the links between health and balance in Spanish medicine

as its main contribution to curanderismo (Trotter 29).

The term curanderismo originates from the Spanish word cura, meaning ‘to

heal’ or ‘to be a priest’ (Avila 16). These two professions overlapped when the Spanish

settlers arrived in the New World. Indeed, the first Spanish medics after the Conquest

used to be Catholic priests and friars. Likewise in indigenous cultures the roles of

healers often overlap with “priests and prophets” for both callings care for their

communities’ needs (Tedlock 23). The double meaning of the word cura is significant

because it connects the role of the healer with the role of the soul-carer and healing with

spirituality. When helpless in treating serious cases, the priests relied on the help of

Spanish curanderas, skilled in using herbs and plants to relieve pain in complicated

affliction. Curanderas on the other hand found in Bible references to “specific healing

properties of animal parts, plants, oil and wine,” and thus the two systems enriched and

strengthened each other (Trotter 25).

What Christianity, further, contributed to curanderismo is the notion of the

eternal fight of good and evil. These strong dichotomies presented in the Bible have

become a strong presence in the practice of curanderismo on many levels: “on the

human level the curandero heals and the brujo (witch or sorcerer) harms; on the

spiritual level benevolent souls and saints can bring luck, health and contentment, while

malevolent souls and demons bring misfortune, illness, and misery; on the highest level

of existence God (the light and giver of health) opposes Satan and his evil works”

(Trotter 28). Where Curanderismo and Christianity part, is when deciding whether

supernatural forces whether of good or evil can be controlled by human beings. As

Christianity declines such a conception, the conviction of certain healers and magicians

that they can manipulate these forces, a theoretical premise of witchcraft and sorcery,

led in Europe to extensive witch hunting that lasted from early fifteenth century until

the early nineteenth century (Trotter and Chavira 31-2). Magicians, at that time,

believed that the spiritual realm can be “tapped by human beings who possess the

correct incantations, prayers, and rituals” (Trotter and Chavira 32). These concepts in

European witchcraft actually closely parallel the indigenous view. Trotter and Chavira

mention that actually “many of the rituals used both by curanderos (to heal) and brujos

(to harm) follow the structure of formulas from the Middle Ages and later” (32).

Tedlock, as well, mentions the misunderstanding of shamanic spirituality in her study of

women in shamanic cultures: “any person who invoked spirits was calling upon the

servants of Satan. Christianity elaborated on this Old Testament heritage: since good

spirits such as angels and saints could not be compelled but only supplicated, any spirits

that could be compelled were by definition evil, as were the practitioners who

commanded them” (Tedlock 50). Therefore, curanderas, though accomplishing

miracles with their cures, were often feared for the possibility of their involvement with

the spirits of evil.

As women who can manipulate life and death and intervene in the curses laid by

witches, both Estrella and Ultima are respected as well as feared. Anaya comments on

reactions to curandera’s power in the interview “Myth and the Writer: A Conversation

with Rudolfo Anaya” with David Johnson and David Apocada: “you don’t necessarily

fear them, but you watch them, crate a distance between them, because if they have the

power to do wise and good things in terms of healing – physical, mental, or spiritual

illnesses – you also wonder do they have the power to create the opposite effect”

(Anaya, “Myth” 31). Antonio notes this ambiguous position of the curandera: “I had

heard that Ultima could lift the courses laid by brujas, that she could exorcise the evil

the witches planted in people to make them sick. And because a curandera had this

power she was misunderstood and often suspected of practicing witchcraft herself”

(Anaya, BMU Uno). When Ultima cures Uncle Thomas and leaves his house, women

shout at her ““La curandera! […] Some women bowed their heads, others made the sign

of the cross [or screamed:] “Hechicera.” “Bruja-”” (Anaya, BMU Once), hechicera

“[meaning] white witch, and […] bruja, black witch” (Mitchell 60). People often do not

distinguish between curanderas and brujas; for them Ultima’s healing is a work of

magic, be it black or white.

In contrast, the healers themselves are very much aware of the two different

purposes of their healing, to cure ill or to cause ill. When her daughter asks Estrella for

potion to kill her son, Estrella refuses for “she was a curandera, not an hechicera, that

she had the power to heal, not to hurt” (Alba 104). Only when she sees the event as one

releasing the boy’s spirit from his tortured body is she willing to help. For their

powerful healing abilities, curanderas are disdained most particularly by priests since

they want “the mercy and faith of the church to be the villagers’ only guiding light”

(Anaya, BMU Diez). To avoid persecution by Christians who might misinterpret their

powers and turn against them curanderas often live in isolation.

3.3 Coatlicue and Gaudalupe – Embodiments of Ambiguity, Syncretism and

Sympathy

The religion and mythology of the Aztec culture is very much based on the

duality of the world, similarly to the Christian tradition (Avila 33). Yet, though they see

the world as interaction between good end evil, light and dark, the Aztec deities leave

space for fluidity and ambiguity in this interaction of the opposites. Goddesses such as

Coatlicue or Tlazolteotl can give life or take life. Together with Tonantsin they are seen

as creators of life. What curanderas share with these deities is their intervention in the

matters of life and death.

Coatlicue, or “Serpent Skirt,” is considered the most ancient of the Aztec

goddesses and has been associated with both life and death, and described as a fertility

and creator goddess and the mother of other Aztec gods and goddesses (Anzaldúa 27).

Depicted with “a human skull or serpent for a head, a necklace of human hearts, a skirt

of twisted serpents and taloned feet” (Anzaldúa 27), Coatlicue represents “the

contradictory” and is “a symbol of the fusion of opposites: the eagle and the serpent,

heaven and the underworld, life and death, mobility and immobility, beauty and horror”

(Anzaldúa 47). In other words, she represents duality and the tension between opposites.

Coatlicue impersonates a union of ambivalent features very similar to that of the

curandera. Both Coatlicue and the curandera are feared for their power to manipulate

life and intervene in death.

In Alba’s stories Estrella is likened to a fertility goddess not unlike Coatlicue -

“at seventy [she is still] fertile, thanks to her teas” and in her experiments able to create

potent aphrodisiacs and even seduce accidental young passers-by. (Alba 93). In an

ancient scorpion fertility dance ritual she uses her magic to impregnate her own

daughter, and thus becomes both a mother and a grandmother to the future storyteller,

Xochitl. In addition, during her morning dances to the sun, Estrella becomes a life-giver

when in her presence the first morning rays turn the dry desert land into a meadow

abundant with blue flowers of the flux that once grew at the place. Yet, Estrella also

turns into a devourer of life when she gives her daughter Mercedes a potion to kill her

malformed child. Ultima likewise manifests the ability to intervene in the realms of life

and death. She helps to give birth to children, but is also capable of turning her powers

to kill evil witches.

In addition to being powerful healers, Ultima and Estrella are also very

ambiguous characters since actions can be seen from two completely different

perspectives – either as threatening or as protecting. With Estrella’s arrival in San

Martincito the local curandero Ciriaco disappears, only scorpions, the hallmark of

Estrella’s healing, are found crawling all around his place. As a result, Estrella is feared

for having killed Ciriaco. Generally it is believed that she had sent a plague of scorpions

upon the village and turned the flux meadow into a desert. Yet, the reader also knows

that she came to protect the village from the spirits who chose the place as an entrance

to the land of the dead, “she had been traveling for many months in search of the

pueblo, where she would fulfill her destiny, the place marked in her star chart as The

Rising of The Souls,” and the dry land can be the result of the spirits residing at the

place (Alba 73). Estrella is sent to protect the villagers from their incapable healer, who

is deaf and dumb and thus “cannot hear your fears and sorrows” (Alba 73). For the local

villagers it is hard to understand whether Estrella is acting on their behalf or against

them, as they cannot discern the workings of the spiritual world that Estrella is

following and acting upon.

Antonio, too, cannot discern whether Ultima utilizes the powers of the good or

the bad. The dust devils, or whirlwinds, that appear in the hot summer in the llano are

believed to carry with them the evil spirit of the devil. Once, Antonio gets stricken by a

whirlwind without protecting himself with the sign of a cross. His experience,

surprisingly for him, does not differ considerably from when Ultima blesses him: “I felt

a great force, like a whirlwind, swirl about me. I looked up in fright, thinking the wind

would knock me off my knees” (Anaya, BMU Seis). Later on, when he contemplates the

event, he thinks to himself: “but how could the blessing of Ultima be like the

whirlwind? Was the power of good and evil the same?” (Anaya, BMU Seis). Not even

when she passes the door marked with a sign of a cross, which is said to tell a

curandera apart from a bruja, makes a clear statement about the nature of Ultima’s

powers. Indeed, she is able to pass the door without shuddering or screaming, yet when

Antonio examines the door, he finds the two pins, used to form the cross, lying on the

floor. Though believed to be fighting in the name of the good, Ultima remains an

ambiguous character, and her power partly stems from her ambiguity and the respect it

creates.

Coatlicue’s is also associated with transformation, change and growth. The

process of transformation Ultima views as very natural. According to Ultima life as a

process of letting go of the old and giving way to the new, which is also the most

important piece of advice she shares with Antonio: “you are growing, and growth is

change, make it a part of your strength,” preparing him for the upcoming losses in his

life (Anaya, BMU Veintidos). Estrella, at the arrival in San Martincito, declares that it is

her duty to prepare people for the coming changes in their way of life and to protect

them in that vulnerable state of transformation. Both healers use the knowledge of the

process of change and growth to protect others in vulnerable states of transition, and to

educate them about the positive aspect of drastic changes in their lives.

Another deity whom curanderas draw on in their healing practices is La Virgen

de Gaudalupe, who is nowadays considered “Mexico’s major female spiritual

archetypal figure, the protectress of Mexicans and the mother of the Americas”

(Maldonado 97). Gadalupe is in fact merging the indigenous deity Coatlicue,

specifically one of her aspects, Tonantsin, and the Catholic Virgin Mary, both of them

powerful mother goddesses. In the Aztec culture Tonatsin was a more sympathetic

aspect of the earth goddess Coatlicue, which was later on split apart. Anzaldúa explains

in Borderlands/ La Frontera that the split originated from the fear of an all-powerful

female deity in the male-dominated Azteca-Mexica culture and resulted in emergence of

deities representing either the specifically dark aspects of Coatlicue – Tlazolteotl and

Cihuacoatl - or the light aspects only – Tonatsin, who became “the good mother” (27)..

While Coatlicue desired human sacrifices, the more benevolent Tonatsin “preferred the

sacrifice of birds and small animals” and was revered for her compassionate nature

(Anzaldúa 27). She cared for the health of the people and the growth of their crops. At

the core of Gaudalupe’s popularity among Chicana/o writers lies her syncretic nature.

She is a “synthesis of the old world and the new, of religion and culture of the two

races” (Anzaldúa 30). In 1531 on Tepeyac Hill, where Tonantsin had always been

worshipped, a goddess appeared to a poor Indian named Juan Diego and told him that

she was called Maria Coatlalopeuh (in Nahuatl meaning ‘the one who has dominion

over serpents’), yet because Coatlalopeuh sounded “homophonous to the Spanish

Gaudalupe, the Spanish identified her with the dark Virgin, Gaudalupe, patroness of

West central Spain” (Anzaldúa 29). There the merging of indigenous and catholic

goddess began. Later on, the Roman Catholic Church identified La Virgen de

Gaudalupe with the Mother of God, Virgen Mary, and gave her the attributes of

chastity, purity and devotion (Anzaldúa 30). Nevertheless, Mexicans continue to see La

Virgen de Gaudalupe as “a transformation or rebirth of the native goddesses”

(Rebolledo, “From Coatlicue” 50) and “under the guise of Christian Saints” Mexicans

and Chicanos nowadays still continue to worship “the old spirit entities” (Anzaldúa 31).

Anaya views the figures of Tonantsin and Virgin Mary as not opposed to each other but

“culminat[ing] in the powerful and all-loving Virgen de Gaudalupe” (Anaya, “The New

World Man” 363).

Anaya reveals that Ultima incarnates the nature of Gaudalupe in his essay “The

New World Man”: “[Ultima is] the indigenous mother born of the synthesis of Spanish

Virgin and Indian goddess” (Anaya 361). To Antonio Ultima’s kinship to Gaudalupe

becomes clear in the dream where “Ultima’s owl lift[s] la Virgen on her wide wings and

fl[ies] her to heaven” (Anaya, BMU Uno). Ultima is also described as “una mujer que

no ha pecado,” a woman who has not sinned invoking the Virgin’s pure essence

(Anaya, BMU Once). As for Estrella, when she appears to doubt her healing powers,

she calls upon “the spirit of La Gran Maria, mother of the first name,” a different name

for Gaudalupe, to replenish the faith in her medicinal skills (Alba 96). In addition, the

objects that Estrella stores in her hut include “sacred earth and thorns from the hill of

the Tepeyac,” denoting she draws strength from the goddess Gaudalupe (Alba 95). Both

Ultima and Estrella pray to Gaudalupe and make use of her protective power.

What Estrella and Ultima bring into their healing is the deep compassion of

Gaudalupe. It said that when Juan Diego first saw Gaudalupe, she requested him to

build a temple upon the summit on which he stood so that she could hear the weeping,

complaints and sufferings of all the people and she also cured Juan Diego’s uncle

(Maldonado 105). The story depicts Gaudalupe as a caring and sympathetic mother of

the Mexican people. Gregorita Rodriguez, a contemporary curandera from Santa Fe,

New Mexico, articulates the way in which curanderismo is inspired by Guadalupe’s

compassion: “the curandera cures with her mind. She cures with her experience. But

most of all, she cures with her love for the people” (gtd in Mines). The affinity of the

curanderas in Anaya’s and Alba’s writing with Gaudalupe is evident. The words

Antonio’s father uses to articulate the secret of Ultima’s healing power closely resemble

those of Gregorita Rodriguez: “Ultima has sympathy for people, and it is so complete

that with it she can touch their souls and cure them” (Anaya, BMU Veintidós). In Alba’s

story, Hortensia, one of the village women, is struck by Estrella appearing so ordinary,

“like a normal human being wondering what her neighbors are up to” (Alba 77). Yet,

Hortensia can also see “such suffering in that face,” reflecting how much Estrella cares

for the destiny of her people (Alba 77). Although, Gaudalupe can be seen negatively for

being too passive, when imbued with the aspects of the ancient Aztec goddesses, she

forms a powerful figure in the character of the curandera. A Curandera, like

Gaudalupe is thus seen as a “spiritual healer” of Mexicans and Chicanos/as (Maldonado

3.4 The Storage of Knowledge and Wings of Freedom

According to an old Mexican proverb “a people that loses its memory loses its

destiny” (Silverman 68). In Mexican literature, curanderas are often depicted as keepers

of the past. Alba, herself describes curandera as “the keeper of the culture, keeper of

the memories, the rituals, the stories, the superstitions, the language, the imagery of her

Mexican heritage” (Silverman 68). Tedlock explains that what constitutes a real shaman

is “the active pursuit of knowledge. This takes many forms: the understanding of animal

and human behavior; the identification of medicinal plants and their uses; the hands-on

healing knowledge of bone setting, massage, and midwifery; and empathetic knowledge

of the human psyche” (23). Yet, the shaman’s knowledge can be understood as “an

intuitive grasp of the complex connections and forms of consciousness in the natural

world,” or wisdom, rather than knowledge per se (Tedlock 137). Both Ultima and

Estrella are portrayed as knowledgeable of the natural environment and the distant past.

Anaya’s Ultima is referred to as “a woman of learning” (Anaya, BMU Tres). She

not only possesses knowledge of the human body and psyche, but she also knows the

ways to gain such knowledge – through close observing: “if a person really wants to

know, then he will listen and see and be patient. Knowledge comes slowly” (Anaya,

BMU Tres). Alba’s Estrella is depicted as a scholar and scientist who likes to research

and experiment, and regularly attends “curandera gatherings” to gather new knowledge

from her fellow healers (Alba 90). When Estrella is engaged in creating an aphrodisiac,

she is not so much interested in the pleasure that it can bring her as much as in its

workings. As for her consequent pregnancy, she keeps the baby not because of the

maternal urge but in order to “see the results of her experiment [for it might turn out to

be] a creature to dissect and investigate” (Alba 93). Whether patient and wise or hungry

for knowledge, both curanderas strive to understand the mysterious cycles in nature and

the human body.

Ultima possesses a deep knowledge of the past and in retelling it to Antonio

wants him to remember the history “long before you were a dream, long before the train

comes to Las Pasturas, before the Lunas came to their valley, before the great Coronado

built this bridge” (Anaya, BMU Cuatro). Yet, here goal is not only to know but also

understand how the history affects him at the present, or as Antonio puts it: “how that

history stirred in my blood” (Anaya, BMU Once). Both Ultima and Estrella see history

as essential in constructing identity and strive to keep the indigenous part of their

heritage alive so that their descendents are not denied one of the cultures that created

Estrella and Ultima are highly independent characters living in an extremely

patriarchal society and that is why they, Estrella especially, meet with disapproval from

men. When Estrella enters the village of San Martincito and with her all the changes,

the men are quick to unite themselves against her. As much as this has to do with her

medicinal powers, it is also a power that she holds over men. She challenges their power

in the community. They do not want to “let those women order us around” (Alba 76).

However, her calling brings many privileges for her. Her powers assure her an

independent position outside the roles assigned to women in Mexican society, such as

“taking care of her house, feeding her son and her husband” (Alba 78). As Perrone puts

it in her book Medicine Women, Curanderas and Women Doctors, “Las curanderas

have challenged the normal female role within their culture and have assumed the

authority and leadership traditionally reserved for men. Even as youngsters, the healers

never accepted the submissiveness and passivity that is the fate of nearly all traditional

females in their societies. Most curanderas knew they were different. They broke the

rules in their own ways” and as a consequence were perceived as a threat to male or

Catholic authority (96). Both Anaya and Alba depict curanderas as Rebolledo calls

them - “women of power and ingenuity” (Rebolledo, “Early Hispana” 18).

As much as curanderas enjoy their own freedom and independence, they also

try to pass the knowledge as being independent and in charge of one’s own life as one

of the best remedies for the human soul. The curandera, such as Leopoldina, does not

feel superior to other people and does not exclude them from her knowledge but strives

to “awaken the consciousness of the person that is being treated so that that person can

take charge of their own illness, take ownership and responsibility and thereby

transform the problem. I also invite them to study the same tools I have learned, to

strengthen their own self-healing” (gtd in Mines). As Mines sums Leopoldina’s intent,

curandera tries to raise patients’ awareness of his illness and “awaken the curandera

within them”. Also Ultima stresses the importance of holding your destiny in your

hands without interference of other people, be it your family or friends, as an aspect

crucial for healthy growth of a person: “A man’s destiny must unfold itself like a

flower, with only the sun and the earth and water making it blossom, and no one else

meddling in it” (Anaya, BMU Diez). Ultima can be seen as perfect example of her own

policy. Ultima is a complete creator of her own destiny and in that has a complete

freedom of action, which becomes an inspiration for people who encounter her, such as

Antonio, who learns from her “that […] immortality is in the freedom of man, and that

freedom is best nourished by the noble expanse of land and air and pure, white sky”

(Anaya, BMU Veinte).

4 Antonio, the Dream Shaman

The connection between a writer and a curandera is most vividly illustrated in

Anaya’s novel Bless Me, Ultima. The two recognize each other right at Ultima’s arrival

to the house. Ultima notes that “this was the last child I pulled from your womb, Maria.

I knew there would be something between us,” foreshadowing Antonio’s apprenticeship

in her art of healing (Anaya, BMU Uno). Antonio recalls Ultima from the dream of his

birth, in which he “flew over the rolling hills of the llano. My soul wandered over the

dark plain” (Anaya, BMU Uno). In addition, the ability to fly in our dreams is among

shamans believed to “signif[y] that one’s soul (the part of the soul that flies) is

knowledgeable, a prerequisite for shamanic training,” which may suggest that Antonio,

too, is ready to become a healer (Tedlock 111). In the years to come Antonio is going to

learn from Ultima the knowledge of plants and the human soul and use his powers in

the favor of good. Yet, Ultima dies before Antonio has completed his curandero

training. Unfortunately, she closes the hereditary line of shamanic healers, implied by

her name - Ultima meaning ‘the last’. Since Antonio’s apprenticeship has not yet been

completed, he needs to find a different way to put into practice what he learned from

Ultima about plants, Nature and people. His destiny is to become a writer. Even earlier,

Antonio’s future calling is foreseen by Ultima when she predicts that in future he will

become “a man of learning” (Anaya, BMU Seis). In addition, Antonio is said to have

chosen a pen and paper of all things that were offered to him at his birth. Though

Antonio does not become a curandero himself, in writing the story of his childhood,

Antonio reveals Ultima’s her healing principles.

Furthermore, by becoming a writer, Antonio can fulfill the wishes of both of his

parents, or as Kanoza aptly sums up: “he will grant his mother's wish for a priest by

ministering to the needs of others and by mediating between the earthly and the

spiritual; and, blending his Christianity with pagan mysticism, he will fulfill his father's

desire for an heir who is in touch with the supernatural forces of the land” (167).

Antonio tells a story of reconciling the dichotomies which are creating a havoc of his

life, a story of integration, a story of accepting changes and of the consequent growth.

In doing so, he offers his readers a path to their own inner re-integration and healing.

What Antonio proposes as secure paths to the integrity of our psyche are attention to our

dreams and an intimate relationship to the natural world.

4.1 Healing Language of Dreams and Nature

Though Antonio’s does not live on the U.S.-Mexican border, the borderland

plays an important role in his life. Antonio grows up in the small town of Gaudalupe,

the house of his family situated on the edge of the town, behind the bridge across the

river, bordering on the dry and harsh land of the llano pastures. While Antonio’s

Catholic mother feels closer to the civilized town dominated by the church tower,

Antonio’s father feels close to the wilderness of the llano plaines. Yet, Antonio cannot

decide which way of life is closer to his heart. The difficult decision making between

his maternal and paternal heritages soon surfaces in Antonio’s dreams and becomes a

cause of his inner struggle. Antonio’s first dream illustrates this tension the most

vividly. In the dream Antonio’s soul travels to the site of his birth. There his mother’s

people - the Lunas, the silent and settled farmers, rub the Earth on Antonio’s forehead in

hope of him following their farmer and priest family tradition, only to be interrupted by

the Marez, the wild and restless vaqueros, plainsmen of the llano, who rub the earth

stain off “for man was not to be tied to the earth but free upon it” (Anaya, BMU Uno).

Antonio’s dreams internalize and exaggerate his worries and confusions.

However, in dreams Antonio also finds new images which show way out of his

struggle. How is that possible? In her contemplation of the dream world, Metzger views

it as a place of integration and a precious space for fulfillment of our need for

wholeness. She compares a dream to “a relationship [or] a child of two distinct parents”

in regard to its ability to wed our day and night world. Metzger encourages the budding

writers to start to see a dream as “the dialogue between the conscious and unconscious,

[…] an enterprise of cooperation, whereby what is ordinarily held separate is organized

into one unit. The dream is the fulfillment of a longing for wholeness” (Metzger 223).

Dorothea Brande, too, in Becoming a Writer, values the dream world for its integrative

qualities; she reasons that in the dreams “the conscious and the unconscious conspire

together to bring about the maximum effect […] so that the resulting action comes from

the full, integral personality, bearing the authority of undivided mind” (38). Both

authors see the dreams as originating “from a desire for intimacy, the love of creation,

and the necessity to speak,” from similar needs that propel writers to write (Metzger

224). Metzger thus advises the would-be writers to ponder “the dream world [as] the

territory of the writer or the artist” (223), the dream process as a “universal art-making

process” and the actual dreams as “consummate work[s] of art” (Metzger 226). She

suggests that by a close observation dreams and images appearing in them, writers can

actually make dreams’ integrative abilities a part of their own writing arsenal.

In order to reach the syncretic effect of a dream, writers can use its main

technique – metaphorical language. Dream speak to us in language of symbols and

metaphors which are mixed in nature and integrative in character. A kind of language

that “softens the heart and mind, helps to keep us flexible so that rigid distinctions

between apples and milk, tigers and celery, disappear” is Goldberg’s description of

metaphorical language, which strongly resembles the dreaming process (61). Pondering

the origin and abilities of metaphorical language, Goldberg concludes that “metaphor

must come from a very different place than that of the logical, intelligent mind. It comes

from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of

seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant,”

a place such as a dream or our imagination (60-61). Metzger, likewise, finds the power

of a metaphor in its potential to find “the hidden, mysterious connections” (28). In sum,

the magic of metaphors can be attributed to the unique way in which they can of

reconnect what is conventionally perceived as opposed or separate.

Considering their capability to connect, merge and unite, metaphors can be

viewed as healing images, which is validated also by writers themselves. Thanks to her

thorough exploration of shamanic dreaming practices, Tedlock draws attention to the

fact that through a heightened attention to our dream world we can “become more open

to healing images,” images which can cast a different light on our current situation

(Tedlock 118). In Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory, Maureen Murdock’s

even suggests that “in finding a new metaphor the writer is able to move beyond the old

image and be healed” (114). Choosing a different metaphor for any life situation we

find ourselves in, can become a secret key to changing our consciousness.

How close observation of the metaphors and images occurring in our dreams

can help to expand our consciousness and heal is exemplarily depicted in BMU. In his

sixth dream, Antonio demands to get to know which water runs through his veins;

whether the sweet baptized water of his Luna family, the farmers planting according to

the cycles of the moon, or the salt water of the oceans restless as his Marez roots and

tied to the indigenous god, the Golden Carp – the sweet and salt waters symbolical of

his maternal and paternal heritage. In the dream Ultima pictures for Antonio a metaphor

completely new to him, a metaphor of all waters belonging to the same natural cycle,

and thus being all one. He becomes healed by the dream image, or metaphor, of “the

great cycle that binds us all” (Anaya, BMU Once). As a result Antonio realizes that he

can belong to both of the familiar traditions, after which he calms down and can sleep

restfully.

Another important factor that contributes to Antonio’s growing wholeness

becomes his awakening to the spirit of the natural world. When Ultima holds his hand,

Antonio can hear how

the gurgling waters of the river sang to the hum of the turning earth. The

magical time of childhood stood still, and the pulse of the living earth

pressed its mystery into my living blood. She took my hand, and the silent,

magic powers she possessed made beauty from the raw, sunbaked llano, the

green river valley, and the blue bowl which was the white sun’s home. My

bare feet felt the throbbing earth and my body trembled with excitement.

Time stood still, and it shared with me all that had been, and all that was to

come. (Anaya, BMU Uno)

Nature, through Ultima’s touch, is changed into a living being imbued with spirit, in

which everything coexists in beauty and harmony, everything is at the same time still as

well as animated with life. From Ultima, Antonio is learning to perceive “a transcendent

power working in our ordinary lives [and the fact that the] world is as much spiritual as

it is material” (Anaya, Inocente). Anaya often describes his experience of the spirited

nature not as a literary and aesthetic construct but as a truly lived phenomenon,

originating from and connected to the landscapes of his childhood. Like Antonio, Anaya

in his childhood perceived “the river and the hills, having this life to them, this

animation, [which] was very good not only for my growing up but for the imagination,

getting fed by that very spiritual process that was in the natural world around me

(Anaya, “Rudolfo” 106). In the interview with John F. Crawford, Anaya expresses his

belief that people are “animated by the power of the earth--it is in Native American

terms our Mother--it nurtures us, it gives us spirit and sustenance, and I guess if we're

attuned enough or sensitive enough it can give us different kinds of powers” (“Rudolfo”

106-7). Antonio, indeed, starts to perceive Nature as spirited which enables him to

relate to his surroundings in a much more immediate and intimate way.

Anaya also suggests that, at present, stories can play an essential role in

developing close bond to Nature. In one of his interviews, Anaya explains how his

heightened sensitivity to some places was intensified by the stories connected to these

particular places: “there are cuentos or folk tales where you get these little stories about

people who can fly--so in your mind you think, where does this power come from? Is it

the power of imagination that we as a communal group are given by those older, wiser

people, or can it actually be?” (Anaya, “Rudolfo” 106). Having heard stories about the

places actually made Anaya to ponder the power of these places even more and, as next

step, naturally associate the power with these places. In “The Ethnic Implications of

Stories, Spirits, and the Land in Native American Pueblo and Aztlán Writing” Stuart

Cochran argues that the power of certain places comes both from the land and the

stories told about it, and that stories “attribute meaning to the land and through the land”

(71). Throughout BMU, Antonio’s experience mirrors Cochran’s point. When

describing the places of animated or spirited nature, Antonio brings to the light the spirit

as pre-existing in the nature but at the same time creates and strengthens this bond

between people and places in turning his experience into a story and passing it on to the

readers.

Antonio’s stories about the presence of the river perfectly illustrate the process

in which the presence of the spirit in Nature, perceived by the writer/storyteller, is

transmitted to and strengthened in the readers/listeners via the writing/storytelling

process. Antonio shares with us by the river “the silence spoke, not with harsh sounds,

but softly to the rhythm of our blood. […] The presence was immense, lifeless, yet

throbbing with its secret message” (Anaya, BMU Cuatro). Here Anaya draws on his

childhood memories. In “The Writer as Inocente”), Anaya remembers “the river of my

childhood as if it were yesterday. There I still hear voices, spirits moving at dusk - not

only La Llorona, a spirit I really feared, but other powers. Powers of place. The river

was alive, and it spoke” (Anaya). Anaya and Antonio offer the readers the possibility to

view Nature as a living being speaking in its own language. They remind us that we can

build a close relationship to places around us when we closely observe and carefully

listen to them.

4.2 The End of God and the Light of Death

Another healing technique Antonio offers to the readers is re-creating old and

creating new myths. According to Anaya, myths, similarly to metaphors, possess

integrative abilities. In the interview Johnson and Apocada, Anaya talks about the

destructive power of dichotomies in human lives and about the primary function of a

myth – the wedding of tensions (Anaya, “Myth” 39). Discussing the topic with F.

Crawford, he finds the way myths “connect us, to other people, to the myth, to the story,

and beyond that to the historic process, to the communal group” very intriguing

(“Rudolfo Anaya” 107). According to Metzger, myths talk to us on such a deep level

because they bring us closer to the divine: “through myth we come to understand the

greater meanings that play upon us and connect us to the universe” (Metzger 150).

Simultaneously myths connect us to the past. In “Aztlan - a Homeland Without

Boundaries,” Anaya describes myths as “our umbilical connection to the past, to the

shared collective memory. After long years spent in the realm of imagination and

creativity, I came to understand that many of the symbols which welled up from my

subconscious were not learned, they were part of my ethos, symbols from the archetypal

memory residing in the blood” (qtd. in Cochran 81). Metzger, too, sees the myth as a

fusion of our “individual story with the collective one. If story is a means by which we

create our lives, myth is an important agency through which we create culture. And just

as individuals have an inner necessity to tell stories, cultures have the same intrinsic

need to create myths” (Metzger 150). Myths are viewed as cultural creations with

origins in collective memory and connecting people to the ancient past and the whole

universe. Through rewriting myths, we can thus change our relationship to the divine as

well as to the culture we come from.

Following Antonio’s spiritual journey we can see how myths, religion and all

cultural formations can be used to create a personified mythology, or, as Stuart Cochran

puts it in “The Ethnic Implications of Stories, Spirits, and the Land in Native American

Pueblo and Aztlán Writing”: “how a cultural construction informs and becomes part of

an individual's psychological identity” (81). Anaya highlights the potential of personally

created myths to become a source of material for individuals’ growth: “in writing I live

[the myth]. I encounter myself in the myth, and for me it’s a tremendous process in

terms of learning about myself” (Anaya, “Myth” 39). Also Anzaldúa shares this self-

awareness-raising experience of writing personal myths: “I write the myths in me, the

myths I am, the myths I want to become. The word, the image and the feeling have a

palatable energy, a kind of power” (71). While through writing personal myths we can

learn about ourselves, in listening to ancient collective myths, we can learn much about

how we fit into the universe. In her essay “Crazy Wisdom: The Shaman as Mediator of

Realities,” Mary Schmidt describes the way of shamanic healing which “induc[es] the

patient to live out the myth, [in which the shaman] uses metaphor to tap deep problems

and lighten the mental anguish” (72). The patients are then able to make “the connection

between our ordinary life and greater reality” and see where they fit in. (Metzger 151).

This experience, consequently, allows them to “expand our understanding of self by

integrating the personal into universal” (Metzger 137). Myths can be described as maps

of human existence, showing to us who we are, who we want to become and what place

do we have in the universe.

Tony’s sixth dream is a recreation of an apocalyptic Native American myth.

Through this particular dream, Tony finds out that to create his own spiritual system he

can draw on the indigenous as well Christian beliefs. Before he dreams the dream,

Antonio views God and the Virgin, and the principles they represent to him - vengeance

and compassion, in opposition, and favors the Virgin-like qualities over the God-like

ones. In addition, Antonio is puzzled by the concept of sin, and the definitions of what

is good and evil. Another source of inner struggle is his spiritual attraction to the

Golden Carp, which he perceives as violation against his Catholic faith and principles.

These thoughts make Antonio feel that his believes are on the verge of collapsing.

Antonio’s dream transforms his fears into an apocalyptic vision but also suggests an

alternative and more positive interpretation of the destruction of the world. In the

dream, after the whole town has been annihilated the golden carp appears at night and

swallows “everything there was, good and evil. […] The moon smiled on him and

guided him, and his golden body burned with such beautiful brilliance that he became a

new sun in the heavens. A new sun to shine its good light upon a new earth” (Anaya,

BMU Catorce). Antonio’s dream shows the Golden Carp as the god of death as well as

birth. In sacrificing himself and turning into a fish to protect people in the muddy waters

of the river, golden carp becomes a Christ-like character. The Golden Carp comes in the

night, overlooked by the moon and the night sky, which is throughout the novel often

referred to as the Virgin’s gown, thus further linking the carp to her goodness and

sympathy. As he swallows the good and the evil, the Golden Carp, like Coatlicue,

comes to contain both dark as well as light aspects. Antonio’s mythical dream becomes

what Metzger in her description of myths calls a place of “radical transformation,”

transforming his religious believes showing to him a deity which can hold opposing

principles in unity (151).

Antonio likewise shows one can incorporate the natural cycles of life and death,

creation and destruction and their positive outcome into one’s life philosophy. From

Ultima, Antonio learns that spirit can never die and that death is not an end to life.

Again, Ultima makes him see “the great cycle that binds us all,” showing him that death

does not exclude life (Anaya, BMU Once). When her protective owl dies, Ultima

explains to Antonio that it is “‘Not dead—[…] but winging its way to a new place, a

new time – just as I am ready to fly’” (Anaya, BMU Veintidós). Ultima shares her last

secret – the human soul is immortal. She assures Antonio of her after-life presence:

“look for me in the evenings when the wind is gentle and the owls sing in the hills, I

shall be with you ---” (Anaya, BMU Veintidós). After Ultima dies by the violent hand of

Tenorio, Antonio feels as if “the old gods are dying” and he is left with “nothing” to fill

their place (Anaya, BMU Veintidos). However, Ultima’s teachings make him see a new

way to overcome his losses -- leaving the old gods behind, creating new ones and

walking his own spiritual path: “take the llano and the river valley, the moon and the

sea, God and the golden carp—and make something new! That is what Ultima meant by

building strength from life” (Anaya, BMU Veintidós). Antonio starts to understand the

losses in his life in their positive aspect - as events necessary to make room for new

experiences, for his growth and maturation.

4.3 “But Who Will Hear My Confession?”

Antonio recognizes the purifying and healing power of confession instinctively.

After witnessing Narciso’s murder, Tony returns home and lies in violent fever,

repeating what he saw on and on: “[to purge the fever, I] simply had to tell my story”

(Anaya, BMU Quince). Telling his story helps Tony to get rid of the heavy burden on

his soul and to recover from the fever. When in the beginning of the first chapter most

members of Tony’s family expect him to become a priest for his people, he asks

himself: “But then […] who will hear my confession?” foreshadowing his need to

cleanse himself of what is to come (Anaya, BMU Uno).

One can view Tony’s story as a one long confession in which he deals with his

shaken faith in God. He witnesses God to fail many times. God is not able to cure his

uncle Lucas, or to remove the curse from the Tellez family or to save the Vietnam

veteran Lupito from being shot, the family’s friend Narciso from being killed or his

school friend Florence from drowning. Tony starts to view God as a token of

vengeance. Rather than with the unforgiving and punishing God, Tony inclines to the

compassion of the Virgin. The unjust deaths of Lupito, Narciso and Florence lead Tony

to form a new idea: “what if the Virgin Mary or the Golden Carp ruled instead of –!” --

what if there is the possibility of more sympathetic gods ruling in the absence of God

(Anaya, BMU Diecisiete). These thoughts make Antonio shrink from the thought of

becoming a priest. Yet, his friend Florence does not stop encouraging Antonio from

becoming a spiritual man. He notes that the Catholic community not yet ready for the

kind of priest that Antonio would become (Anaya, BMU Dieciocho). Tony possesses

more than a great deal of sympathy in his heart. In telling the stories of Lupito’s,

Narciso’s and Florence’s death, which he witnessed from a very close distance, and by

showing the three characters in a different light --- not as a murder, drunk and

blasphemer – Tony acts as a sympathetic curandero.

Hidden in the levee of the river, a few steps away from Lupito, Tony can give a

completely different picture of Lupito than that of a bloodthirsty crazy-man who in a fit

shot the local sheriff. He is full of compassion for the suffering man. Near the shaking

and howling Lupito, Tony is “torn between a fear that made my body tremble, and a

desire to help the poor man” (Anaya, BMU Dos). Like his teacher Ultima, Tony places

Lupito into the context of greater forces having influenced his wild behavior – the war

in Vietnam and his consequent war sickness - a sickness of his soul. Tony also depicts

the men coming after Lupito not as a group of justice craving individuals but rather as a

flock of men fuelled by fear and revenge. When Narciso advises to approach the sick

man carefully, Tony records his words: “This is not an animal down there, that is a man.

Lupito. You all know Lupito. You know that the war made him sick [. You] are drunk

for blood” (Anaya, BMU Dos). Moreover, Tony creates a more balanced portrayal of

Narciso. He depicts him not as a town drunk but a man who always protected Ultima,

even if it could have cost him his own life and also a man who owned “the magic of

growth in his hands” – a creator of a beautiful abounding garden (Anaya, BMU Quince).

All in all, Tony needs to tell the truth about how the violent incidents happened,

and, moreover, why did they happen. He is bound to reveal the social ills and unhappy

circumstances that made Lupito, Narciso and Florence became social outcasts - the war,

the death of a beloved and poverty. Tony depicts this trinity with a great deal of

sympathy and discloses their destinies to a wider audience hoping he can gain

forgiveness for them from other sympathetic listeners and that they will be remembered

as good people.

5 Xochitl, “My Full Name is Xochitl Maria Espinoza”

Xochitl, or Maria Xochitl Espinoza, “a fiction writer, a storyteller […] another

immigrant to the Midwest,” is a seventeen-year old rebellious girl, the youngest student

of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and, as she describes herself, “besides, […] female

[with] a Mexican last name” (Alba 53-54). We find her haunted by a scary dream and

troubled by a writer’s block when asked to write about her earliest dream and memory.

As we later on get to know, at the heart of Xochitl’s memory amnesia are cultural as

well as personal matters, which cause her great pain. The former, being a Chicana and

not feeling at home in either of the two cultures, and the latter, the loss of her mother

due to insulin overdose. After visiting a wise curandera-like figure, a tarot reader Hazel

Eaves, Xochitl turns to writing intending to rediscover and confront what her mother’s

past and her Mexican roots hold for her.

5.1 Re-Membering Mexico

In Xochitl, similarly to Antonio, the borderland conflict is internalized.

Xochitl’s Chicano identity places her into the painful position of not belonging to either

of the two cultures. In the U.S. her prose-poems, influenced by the Mexican tradition of

storytelling, do not fit the workshop curriculum and are taken seriously neither by

professors nor students. Her childhood at the Mexican border Xochitl remembers only

faintly from her dreams. Every time when in her dreams she visits the Juarez/El Paso

border, Xochitl feels awkward and out of place. She feels ashamed for not knowing the

Spanish language properly and having a gringa (white American) accent. Meeting the

poor children in their ragged and dusty clothes while she is dressed in white satin

disconnects and humiliates her even more.

Furthermore, Xochitl’s mother, Mercedes, has always kept her Mexican

memories to herself: “She used to say there was too much pain in Mexico, and that she

couldn’t stand remembering the pain,” and thus leaves more space for Xochitl’s

imagination to picture Mexico as a threatening territory (Alba 60). Talking about her

past in Mexico, Mercedes’ words feel like “thorns in her throat” (Alba 105). To her,

Mexico embodies suffering - a notion which her daughter unconsciously absorbs.

When Xochitl suffers from nightmares and cannot remember her earliest

memory, she comes to Hazel for help. Hazel identifies the root cause of Xochitl’s

problems as a piece missing in her identity. She encourages Xochitl to find out more

details about her Mexican past, which is essential for “resurrection, or perhaps

restitution, the piecing together” of her self (Silverman 68), or as Hazel calls it -

“regrouping her Self-concept” (Alba 63). Hazel sees that Xochitl’s dark dreams and

amnesia are caused by insufficient knowledge of her past and ancestors. Her advice

becomes crucial for if Xochitl continues ignoring her Mexican heritage, she might, as

Avila formulates it when talking about any kind of severe imbalance in our psyche, be

“growing one-sided [,which can cause] the roots of the person […] pull loose from the

ground” (Avila 7). In her mind, Xochitl dismisses Hazel’s ideas of self-exploration and

balance as being essential for her to unblock as New Age platitudes. However, her body

reacts in an opposite way: “suddenly all her bones ached, and her heart felt as though it

had been ripped out by the roots” (Alba 67). Xochitl’s body knows well she needs to

undertake an inner journey to reconnect with her past and blocked memories, and that

she cannot sacrifice her Mexican identity anymore.

Hazel suggests writing as a medium for Xochitl to travel in time to her Mexican

past and come back as a more complete being, for “writing is your truth. If you infuse

that truth with Xochitl’s spirit, I think you could achieve a true balance between the two

sides of your identity. And that’s when you experience rebirth” (Alba 67). To become

more whole, Xochitl is advised to take an “inner journey […] a spiritual journey, or a

quest for the Self. Even a physical trip or vacation,” which she metaphorically does in

her writing, through traveling into the past to the other side of the Mexican border (Alba

63). In her writing, Xochitl tries to re-create her Mexican part. To explore her mother’s

past, Xochitl enters an unknown territory of her past in stories that are “part memory,

part fantasy” – assembled together from what her father told her, what she researched as

well as from her imagination (Alba 69). Not knowing many facts about her past, Xochitl

fills the gaps with her imagination.

How can the stories about herself and her mother’s past actually be of helpful

for Xochitl to assemble the missing part of identity if she only imagines them?

Murdock’s exploration of memory and imagination in Unreliable Truth illuminates the

relationship between these two realms and suggests the kinship between them, instead

of regarding the memory as factual and real, and imagination as fictional and unreal.

Murdock contemplates the reliability of memory and implies that “perhaps [memory] is

purely invention, a particular point of view, an angle of perception. A created fiction”

(Murdock 11). She explains that to go back to our past, we need to recreate it in our

imagination, which means “we can never separate the remembered event from our

imagination: They stick together” (13). Memory is always fused with our imagination.

Seen from this angle, memory and imagination can be seen as overlapping spheres.

Both memory and imagination are viewed by Murdock and Metzger as

originating in the unconscious. Metzger sees imagination as an inner realm which

allows us to tap deep into our past, into

what Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious – what I like to think of

as creative unconscious (in its communal aspect) or the imagination (in

its personal aspect) – is the sea of internal and eternal values, images,

cultural memories, and experiences that inform our dreams and creative

work while just as often, challenging the prevailing modes of the state,

the society, or the community in which one lives. (6)

Murdock describes memory similarly: “memory is made up of more than the conscious

experiences of our personal past. It contains as well the vast chamber of our personal

unconscious: the dreams, images and metaphors that enlarge our lives. Perhaps, too, the

memories, dreams and reflections of the whole collective” (66). Both memory and

imagination are seen as coming from the same source, the unconscious, and

consequently individuals are viewed as created not only through their lifetime

experience but also shaped by their cultural experience.

Story writing can be seen as a willed way of entering the realm of the

unconscious, connecting with the distant past and reassembling ourselves. Since long

time ago trips to the inner world, into our imagination, have been among creative people

connected not only to creating a piece of art but essentially to exploring and making

their selves. Metzger renders the inner world of imagination and “the images,

inspirations, dreams, nightmares, intuitions, hunches, understandings that arise from [it

as] the prima material from which everything, including ourselves, is constructed [;] to

be willing to live within the imagination is to commit oneself to gathering together of

the pieces that might begin to form a self” (Metzger 7). Xochitl’s hunting for images

from her mother’s past and creating stories from them in the end emerges as a person

more aware of who she is and where she comes from.

5.2 Her Name will Be her Destiny

Through writing her stories, Xochitl is able to reshape her identity. In

reconstructing the story of her conception as part of an ancient ritual and a magical

experiment, in which Estrella impregnates Mercedes using a magical substance derived

from a black egg, Xochitl re-imagines herself as a successor in the line of powerful

Mexican women, whom ancient gods are awaiting - “the one Mothers were waiting for”

(Alba 96). In addition, the birthmark in the shape of pincers on Mercedes’ forehead is

seen by her ‘adoptive’ father Dionosio as a sign of her being protected by some greater

power, power that helps Estrella, to makes use of such dangerous substance such as

scorpion’s poison. Writing becomes a source of empowering.

Another significant topic that reoccurs throughout the “Xochitl Stories” is the

power of naming. According to Goldberg “Seeing names makes us remember. A name

is what we carry all our life, and we respond to it […] It is important to say the names of

who we are, the names of the places we have lived, and to write the details of our lives”

to feel in a closer relationship with the people and places around us as well as with

ourselves (77). Goldberg renders the act of knowing and remembering names as

connecting us to our environment and ultimately to ourselves. Xochitl shows how

names function as carriers of personal and cultural identity at numerous points in her

stories. For example, her Aztec name excludes Xochitl from a Christian ritual of

baptism. In order for Xochitl to be baptized, her mother is forced to give her also a

Christian name - Maria. Her full name now is Xochitl Maria. Nevertheless, by the nuns

at school her Aztec name is completely ignored and she is always referred to as Mary.

Being treated as Mary can be also seen as one of the factors which make Xochitl so

unaware of Mexican heritage. We come to understand that using/not using her Mexican

and Christian name opens/closes Xochitl the doors to their respective cultures and

rituals.

Xochitl further shows how taking power over the culture’s names and words can

lead to manipulation of that culture. At one point Estrella informs Mercedes about the

origin of her name: “five hundred years ago, the name Mercedes and the religious order

from whence that name came did not exist in our language or our culture. Then, they

came. Took our gods and our land away. Changed our language and our ways” (Alba

101). On the example of the Spanish Christian settlers changing the language and

customs of the indigenous population in the New World, Estrella shows Mercedes how

words can be abused in the name of power to eradicate a system of thought and belief.

In addition to illustrating how names tie us to the past and culture, Xochitl

shows the way names can point into the future and influence our destiny. Xochitl herself

represents such an example. Xochitl is given a Mexican name not to forget about her

Aztec past and indigenous roots. Estrella knows well that “if she does not have an old

name, the new world will devour her. […] With a name like Xochitl, she will find it

more difficult to forget” about her past (Alba 102). However, as Hazel points out, it is

not Xochitl’s destiny to change her identity into a purely indigenous one. When Estrella

says that Xochitl is the one mothers are waiting for, she means all mothers – the Aztec

goddesses, such as Coatlicue, as much as the Virgin Mary. It is her surname Espinoza,

the thorny one, which links her to the la Virgen de Gaudalupe. Roses are the flowers

that Gaudalupe gave to Juan Diego on the Tepeyac hill to prove her existence.

Gaudalupe merges aspects of a Christian and indigenous goddesses and thus points into

a direction that Xochitl can take. Xochitl’s mission is to become both, Xochitl and

Maria. In other words, she needs to remember her indigenous Mexican as well as

Spanish Christian roots. Furthermore, Xochitl was born in what the Aztec astrological

system calls “the flower day, the day called Xochitl” (Alba 101). In Aztec culture

people born on flower days are predestined to become artists and mediators of visions

(Leon-Portilla 237). Writing herself into a curandera’s line, Xochitl also adopts some of

curanderas’ aspects. Similarly to a curandera, Xochitl’s role is to become a keeper of

the Mexican past and culture, in Estrella’s words, “the memory will be the destiny of

she who comes” (Alba 100). Xochitl thus follows her destiny in writing stories which

preserve her past. In addition, the stories become a means for Xochitl to heal her

incomplete self.

5.3 A Healing Balm for Mother

In her stories, Xochitl shows that buried pain needs to be confronted. When

repressed during the daytime it, finds its way out from the unconscious into nightmares.

In her essay “Memory Tricks: Re-Calling and Testimony in the Poetry of Alicia Gaspar

de Alba,” Susana Chávez Silverman examines the role of memory in Alba’s writing as

central to survival, cultural or personal (68). According to Silverman, memory moves

the speaker and the reader through pain, its sublimation, acceptance, towards healing

and survival (69). In the willed act of remembering painful events, Silverman sees,

similarly to what Pennebaker’s research proved to be true, a confrontation with pain, a

quest for psychological balance and attempt to seek the salve for wounds.

The importance of Xochitl telling the painful stories of the past and sharing

them with other Chicanos/as and Mexicans, is suggested by Estrella’s prophecy, in

which Xochitl becomes “a voice in the new generation” and “will never bloom if the

memories are buried” (Alba 102). Through confronting and sharing difficult and

excruciating experiences, Xochitl can bloom, or in other words grow, find strength and

bring beauty to the world. Her stories show silence as an integrity damaging act and

telling stories as a life saving practice. Xochitl’s medicine is made of words.

When retelling her mother’s painful story, Xochitl acts as a sympathetic

curandera. In the story “Facing the Mariachis,” Xochitl discloses the story of

Mercedes’ rape by the crazy curandero helper Apolonio, her mother’s marriage to him,

and the birth of their monster child. To save herself from going crazy and to save the

tortured spirit of her child, Mercedes visits Estrella, who gives her poison to kill her

child and later on her husband. When married to her second husband, Mercedes still

loses sleep over the murder of her son and feels a strong urge to confess to him. Xochitl

depicts her mother’s desperation at that time as well as years after when Mercedes

shares the story with her husband, an act which for her feels as if “the thorns in her

throat had become nails” (Alba 106). Even after her confession Mercedes still feels

guilty for the murders. However, Xochitl in vividly picturing her mother’s horrid

childhood and adulthood turns the readers into the sympathetic listeners who are able to

do what she cannot do herself – forgive her.

Xochitl also releases another of her mother’s secrets and burdens, which

Mercedes was not able to confide in her husband herself – the child that was planted in

her by Estrella’s magic in return for providing Mercedes with the poison. Xochitl

finishes Mercedes’ confession in hope of lifting the burden from her shoulders. From

her childhood, Xochitl remembers her mother putting herself into a trance to talk with la

Virgen de Gaudalupe. In the light of the events, Xochitl uncovers through her stories

she can deduce that her mother was in need of a great deal of sympathy that only a

direct contact with la Virgen could have provided her with. In the course of telling her

mother’s story, Xochitl believes in the healing sympathy of the human heart of her

readers as well as her own.

6 Celaya, Bigmouth Strikes Again

In her essay “Body and Soul: Performed Spiritual Enfleshments of Chicana

Identity,” Denise A. Menchaca compares Sandra Cisneros to a curandera for in her

stories about Mexicans and Chicanos/as she “skillfully named the damaged psyche and

with her words, wove a text that contained the curandera’s remedio, a healing tincture,

to help banish the dark illness of shame.” In this chapter I explore of what Celaya’s

remedio consists. In her study Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature,

Deborah Madsen concludes that “to be a writer is, for Sandra Cisneros, to have the

opportunity to do something for the silenced women and for all women by inventing

new paradigms, by defining new Chicana voices, and by living as a liberated feminine

subject of the story she has written for herself” (134). In Caramelo, Celaya, along with

Cisneros, examines the familiar and social ills that affect women in Chicano and

Mexican culture. She also portrays the poor social status of Chicanos/as in America.

Yet, she does not forget to point a finger at her own culture and reveals the Chicano and

Mexican shame for their indigenous origins. In the interview “A Conversation with

Sandra Cisneros and Pat Mora,” Cisneros explains what literary success means to her:

“that I could change the way someone thinks about my community, or my gender, or

my class” (Milligan 16). In order to allow such change, she is “hold[ing] up mirrors:

from the Mexicans to see themselves from the point of view of the Mexican-Americans.

Mexicans-Americans to see themselves from the point of view of the Mexicans,

Americans as seen by Mexicans, all those mirrors that get refracted” (Cisneros,

“Sandra”). In naming the disease, Celaya as well as Cisneros hopes to find the remedy.

In writing the family stories, which she is not supposed to do, Celaya breaks from the

tradition of silent women in her culture, and thus avoids the negative patterns which had

been programming the behavior of women. Consequently, she reinvents and heals

herself. She is offers the gift to her readers to claim their own voice. Similarly to

Antonio and Xochitl, she is an inhabitant of a borderland in search of her identity. In

writing her stories Celaya not only heals other members of her community, but finds her

place in the community and her role within her family and thus becomes more

integrated; in putting down her stories, she can be uniquely herself as well as belong to

the family tradition.

6.1 We All Are Strands of a Caramelo Rebozo

Like Antonio and Xochitl, Celaya finds her place of living in-between confusing

and frustrating. While Antonio feels the constant pressure of deciding which way to

pick as his future way of life and Xochitl is denying one part of her cultural heritage,

Celaya lacks a sense of belonging to any of her ancestral cultures, Mexican or

American. In the interview “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female, Wicked

and Thirty-three” with Pilar E. Rodriguez, Cisneros notes that Mexican-Americans are

“always straddling two countries, and we’re always living in that kind of schizophrenia,

that I call being a Mexican woman living in American society, but not belonging to

either culture. In some sense we’re not Mexican and in some sense we’re not American”

(66). In addition, Celaya, similarly to Cisneros, is the only daughter in a family of six

sons and often feels as if she was living in their shadow. Her father, Inocencio, usually

proclaims to have a family of seven sons, which makes Celaya feel unimportant and

invisible. Cisneros, too, the only daughter in the family of sons uses a play on words to

describe her feeling of being “only a daughter” (Cisneros, Interview). Celaya describes

her home as a storage room, with things constantly appearing and disappearing, “things

bought here [America] to take to the other side [Mexico] and things bought on the other

side to bring here” (Cisneros 14). She lives in a borderland, which she finds difficult to

take root in.

Celaya names the third part of her family stories “The Eagle and the Serpent or

My Mother and My Father” (Cisneros 233). The eagle and the serpent in its beak

constitute the central image on the Mexican national flag and for a long time Celaya has

explained the symbol to herself as United State and Mexico fighting. Later on she thinks

of them as the story of her mother and father, who, as well, constantly fight each other.

One might say they actually are Mexico and the U.S. fighting. Despite the fact they are

both Mexican-American, Inocencio feels much closer to the Mexican culture, while

Zoila gravitates to the American one. While Inocencio indulges in watching old Pedro

Infante movies and reading Mexican telenovelas, Zoila steals the college readings of her

sons, not to waste her mind away. Unlike most Mexican women Zoila, is not religious.

Inocencio loves to tell a good story, while Zoila wants to hear the truth, the facts. It is

not surprising that Celaya feels confused and disoriented at home.

Celaya’s family inhabits both sides of the Mexican-American border and thus

they family undertake annual car trips to Mexico to visit her Grandmother, Inocencio’s

mother Soledad. In the scenes of these family gatherings Celaya illustrates the rancor

between the Mexicans from the two sides of the border. Celaya’s grandmother

complains about the inability of her grandchildren to speak proper Spanish as well as

the failure of their mother to teach it to them: “My daughters-in-law have given birth to

a generation of monkeys” (Cisneros 28). When Celaya refuses to eat grandmother’s

mole dessert, “practically all chocolate, with just a teeny bit of chile, a recipe as old as

the Aztecs,” because it prickles her tongue, her grandmother accuses her of denying her

Mexican roots (Cisneros 55). Also at school in San Antonio after she tells in a history

class the story of her great-grandfather from Seville, Celaya is considered to act like a

white girl, “pretending like [she’s] Spanish and shit [and] better than us” (Cisneros 354-

55). explains In her dissertation “Sandra Cisneros as Chicana Storyteller: Fictional

Family (Hi)stories in Caramelo,” Sally M. Giles that the Chicano culture, a border

culture, is not recognized either by Mexico or by the U.S.: “In Mexico they are seen as

foreigners who speak pocho or anglicized and therefore less authentic Spanish, if they

in fact speak any Spanish at all [and] at the same time, Chicanos are often regarded as

immigrants in the U.S. even when their families have been in the country for several

generations” (17-18). Ending up beaten and crying: “I never belonged here. I don’t

know where I belong anymore,” Celaya’s sentiment echoes that of other Chicanos/as

and borderland citizens (Cisneros 356).

Celaya relates herself to her female ancestors by creating the imagery of

weaving stories. In the Disclaimer to Caramelo Celaya proclaims that “these stories are

nothing but story, bits of string, odds and ends found here and there, embroidered

together to make something new. I have invented what I do not know and exaggerated

what I do to continue the family tradition of telling healthy lies.” She continues the

storytelling tradition of the Reyes family to tell healthy lies, in other words white lies,

stories that comfort others when they fall into trouble. In addition, Celaya

metaphorically links herself to the long line of weavers in Mexican culture. In interview

for Book Magazine Cisneros mentions her associative process when she wanted to join

a tradition of storytellers:

‘I don't have women who are writers in my family,’ she says, spreading

her arms as if to indicate not just her mother, aunts and grandmothers but

all of Latin and American literature. ‘Who are my antecedents?’ Without

such role models, without such guidance, she says she simply ‘imagined

these women as weavers, and I am part of their tradition. Writing is like

sewing together what I call these ‘buttons,’ these bits and pieces.’ The

storyteller as weaver. The storyteller as a maker of rebozos. (Cisneros,

Interview)

Celaya partly retells and partly reinvents the family stories, and so follows a similar

pattern as weavers, “each woman learning from the woman before, but adding a flourish

that became her signature, then passing it on [as if all the mothers and daughters were at

work]” (Cisneros 93). In joining the tradition of weavers, Celaya recreates her identity

as one taking root in Mexican culture, yet she also keeps her originality and signature

by adding her own designs, her own perspective and language, to the stories.

Through her writing, Celaya discovers that a caramelo rebozo, in possession of

her grandmother, has become a central motive in her life. In the Book Magazine

Interview as well as in the novel, Cisneros describes the Mexican rebozo as a

“quintessential mestizo—or mixed—object” (Interview). The long shawl with a hand-

woven fringe is an object of multiple origins and uses. “It evolved form the cloths

Indian women used to carry their babies, borrowed its knotted fringe from Spanish

shawls, and was influenced by the silk embroideries from the imperial court of China”

(94) and served a variety of purposes: “shawl, apron, scarf, headdress, baby sling and

tablecloth” (Interview). The process of creating a rebozo requires the ability to use

tradition as well as originality. Tedlock, in her exploration of Aztec women weavers

makes a link between the rituals surrounding the weaving of cloth and those performed

during childbirth. She reveals a connection between the two processes – weaving a

textile used to be equated with the development and birth of a fetus, for “the very

process of spinning and weaving, like that of childbirth, calls for the ability to access the

spirit world for the power to create something new” (Tedlock 223). The caramelo

rebozo, inherited from her great-grandmother Guillermina and passed on by Celaya’s

grandmother becomes a symbol of continuity, multiplicity and creativity.

Furthermore, the weaving of rebozos as well as stories can become a means of

survival, not only of the old traditions but of an individual as well. In the story of her

great-grandfather Eleuterio, Celaya realizes that by art and “creating something you can

keep yourself from dying” (Cisneros 127). Celaya’s storytelling saves her as well, for

she is no longer lost in the in-between. Similarly to the curandera Ultima, who creates

the vision of unified reality in the image of fresh and salt water cycles, Celaya creates a

vision of human lives interconnected and continuing like the strands of rebozoes. In

addition, as Giles notes, in using multiple narrators in her stories, besides herself also

her grandmother’s voice, the voices and stories of her parents and other family members

as well as of historical figures, Celaya fosters “collectivity and a sense of cultural

cohesion and inclusiveness” (3). Like a curandera, Celaya can use multiple heritages,

her mother’s language of facts as well as father’s tradition of embroidered tales, meld

them, and use the stories as a healing balm.

Through writing her stories, Celaya not only joins the generations of weavers

but also explores her ties to the members of her family. Already in the first chapter of

Caramelo, she reveals her connection to the paternal side of the family, the Reyes,

through bodily description. On an old family photograph, she is “squinting the same

squint” as her father, while he has “the same light skin” as the Awful Grandmother

(Cisneros 3). Through recreating the childhood of her father and grandmother, Celaya

uncovers and invents traits she shares with them and thus reinvents her identity.

Similarly to Antonio and Xochitl, she uses her memory and imagination to reintegrate

her personality.

In her stories, Celaya creates her father as someone who “in another life […]

might have been a philosopher. Or a poet. He liked to think and think, a skinny youth

who enjoyed examining life at length,” someone who is interested in the workings of

the world and human life (Cisneros 198). In addition, “Inocencio’s head was filled with

too much remembering. Things he thought he remembered, and things he remembered,

and things invented for him to remember” (Cisneros 198). Similarly to Celaya, he

possesses a vivid imagination and the ability to retreat into himself, “into the he, within-

the-he, within-the-he. Without the body, that bad actor. Simply his soul, pure and

unencumbered, oh!” (Cisneros 199). Her father’s portrayal foreshadows Celaya’s own

interest in “self-exile” and “interior inquiry” (Cisneros 199). He is also the founder of

telling “the healthy lies” in his family, stories adjusted to make people feel better about

themselves or the situations they find themselves in. Inocencio’s traits can be viewed as

curandera-like. He has a traveling soul, he is able to retreat to his interior to search for

medicine within his soul and imagination, and offer a medicine in the form of a story –

the “rococo embroidery that came to be a Reyes talent” (Cisneros 163).

As the stories in Caramelo cumulate, it becomes more apparent that Celaya and

her grandmother, Soledad, share also certain family traits; both are storytellers and

excel in interfering in other people’s lives. However, whereas the first one strives to

heal with her stories, the latter is seen as a witch for her ability to mix with and

complicate the lives of those near her. Zoila describes Soledad as a “big-mouth […] a

fat spider in her web […] nothing but a troublemaker. If there was a way for her to tie

knots in other people’s lives, believe me, she’d find it” (Cisneros 404). Celaya, too, sees

her grandmother’s actions as “spell[s] somebody wicked cast” (Cisneros 351). When

the Awful Grandmother makes Rafa, Celaya’s oldest brother, stay in Mexico, to attend

a military school and learn Spanish, Celaya compares her grandmother to the “witch in

that story of Hansel and Gretel. She likes to eat boys and girls. She’ll swallow us whole,

if you let her” (Cisneros 23). In addition, her grandmother deeply hurts Celaya with the

remarks on her not enough feminine body. Being extremely sensitive to her

grandmother’s reproaches, Celaya explores the ability of words to heal instead of hurt.

6.2 Breaking the Silence and Fighting the Shadow

The maturing Celaya in the third part of Caramelo characterizes her family as

“so Mexican, so much left unsaid” (Cisneros 428). Accordingly, she views her work of

storytelling as “separate[ing] the strands and knot[ting] the words together for everyone

who cannot say them, and mak[ing] it all right in the end” (Cisneros 428). Celaya sees

human lives as strings that tie and knot when we meet people important for us in our

lives; naturally, most knots are created within our own family. Her role, then, is to

connect her family members at points where their communication has failed; most often

this happens when they need to express love for others. For example, when Celaya flees

to Mexico with her lover and hurts her father’s feelings, she wants to say “I’m sorry. I

love you, Father. Please don’t cry, I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I can’t say stuff like

that. I don’t say a word” (Cisneros 395). In other instance, Celaya translates her

mother’s words when Zoila objects to leaving Inocencio: “He needs me. It’s too late.

She means, I need him, but she can’t say that, can she? No, never. It’s too late, I love

you already” (Cisneros 415). In filling in the blank spaces in the conversation or

translating their emotional content, Celaya heals the emotional distance among her

family members. In addition, in writing her revealing translations of emotions down,

Celaya offers the love medicine to other members of Mexican community. In an

interview with Robert Birnbaum, Cisneros describes the reactions to her reading the

stories to an audience: “if you are Mexican, they feel like crying because they feel no

one has written about this and they are emotionally overwhelmed. I get a lot of

weepers” (“Sandra”). This illustrates the healing potential of her stories.

In telling stories that others are too emotionally inhibited to say, Celaya does not

shrink from the truth, and is not afraid to even share stories that reveal familiar or

cultural taboos and destabilize and shake familiar or cultural myths. Myers describes the

nature of family myths as “family defense patterns, habits and differing points of view

[…] passed on from generation to generation, creating a web of confusion about what

the truth is. These patterns help to maintain the family’s often erroneous and distorted

view of itself” (Myers 47). The distortion of the family and cultural myths is often seen

as an unfavorable and deceitful feature of the writers by other family and cultural

members. Myers remarks that in their role of a family memoirist, “many writers and

other creative people have been the truth tellers/ shit disturbers in their families. They

were the different ones, the loudmouths, the ones who challenged the family rules and

myths” (Myers 42). It is not surprising that Celaya’s description of herself in the

ungratifying role of a family storyteller echoes similar attitude of her relatives:

“Metiche, Mirona, Mitotera, Hocicona-en Otras Palabras, Cuentista-Busybody, Ogler,

Liar/Gossip/Troublemaker, Big-Mouth-in Other Words, Storyteller” (Cisneros 351).

This aspect of destabilizing familiar and cultural myths is viewed by many

Chicano writers as witch-like, “a role which they associate with resistance [-] as does

the witch, who has characteristics that are seen by traditional culture as negative,

Chicana writers, too, in their struggle for self-expression, sometimes express the

unacceptable” (Blend). Facing the disfavor of their closest ones, family memoirists and

storytellers are still driven to let their stories out, for they hope that by bringing the

wounds caused by dysfunctional or oppressive family and cultural myths to light, they

can free themselves from the patterns that keep them from being authentic. Celaya

points out the urgency of telling the silenced stories because “the stories that you never

talk about you have the most to say” (Cisneros 109). Myers notes that the act alone of

“claiming your own voice is profoundly healing” (Myers, 43) and through “challenging

the homeostasis in the family [and culture, the memoirists] grow up to have strong

voices” (Myers 42). In an interview with Maria Henriquez Betancor “Writing: A Way

of Life,” Anzaldúa describes the healing effect of exposing the wounds caused by

oppression and racism: “in talking about certain experiences I have to go back into the

wound, and it hurts! But every time I do it, it hurts less; the wound starts to heal because

I’ve exposed it” (248-49). In other words, telling one’s personal truth can be perceived

as a disturbing yet at the same time a deeply healing act.

As she did in her previous work The House on Mango Street, in Caramelo

Cisneros takes the opportunity to reveal the lives of Chicano women in contemporary

society as well as in the past and show how they are discouraged from actively

participating in public life as well as from creating their own destiny. In telling the

stories of sad and desperate women, Celaya not only shows their suffering but also

brings into the open its origins, depicting the harm some of the familiar and cultural

patterns can cause. She is raising the awareness about these harmful patterns and in

avoiding them, she offers a cure.

Through Celaya’s stories, one gets to know the frustration of women whose only

sphere of self-realization becomes the family and the household. Even though Celaya’s

mother, Zoila, is an independent thinker, she runs into Inocencio’s disapproval when

she wants to start working for the family budget. Her only sphere of influence is “the

kingdom of kitchen” (Cisneros 113). In his research of Mexican proverbs and sayings,

Diaz Guerrero came to the conclusion that they depict the central position of family

within Mexican culture. Further on he explains that the Mexican family is based on two

propositions: “(a) the power and supremacy of the father, and (b) the love and absolute

and necessary sacrifice of the mother” (gtd. in Mexican Family). Celaya shows the role

of a devoted mother as the only one lending some importance to women by telling how

her grandmother turned “invisible […] after her role of mothering was over” (Cisneros

347). She also points out that while a man has the army to “make a man out of him and

all that shit [,] what’s available to make a woman a woman?” (Cisneros 361). The

attitude, “you have to make sacrifices. Family always comes first. Remember that” is

echoed throughout Celaya’s storytelling often said by her grandmother who passes it

further on to her son Inocencio (Cisneros 67). In depicting her grandmother as sad and

lonely and her mother as angry and aggressive in their circumstances, Celaya indicates

that the familiar myths of self-sacrifice and a life reduced to family chores can become a

straight way into despair.

Further on, Celaya notices the exaggerated love between mothers and their sons

in Mexican families, and through her stories illustrates how later on this familiar pattern

is damaging to the women in Mexican marriages. Most aptly these attitudes are

reflected in the titles of Mexican telenovelas, a popular past time of a large number of

Mexicans and read by Celaya’s father, such as “‘Wives There Are Plenty, But Mothers-

Only One’” (Cisneros 63). The mature voice of Celaya analyzes the relationship of her

father and his mother and concludes: “there is nothing Mexican men revere more than

their mamas; they are the most devoted of sons, perhaps because their mamas are the

most devoted of mamas […] when it comes to their boys” (Cisneros 128). But she also

notices the same tendencies in her mother: “All you ever worry about is your boys!”

(Cisneros 364). She can see that an unfavorable result of the exaggerated love for sons

equals at the same time to the exaggerated neglect or hate of the daughters. As she

pertinently notes: “there is no commandment that says honor thy daughter” (Cisneros

243). Furthermore, Celaya’s grandmother calls her children hijos, meaning sons, even

though she has a daughter as well. When Celaya asks her “-And your daughter? [her

grandmother answers] –What about her? [and] gives me that look, as if I’m a pebble in

her shoe” (Cisneros 29). The daughters in Mexican families are under best conditions

ignored and at worst disdained.

Another tragic result of the exaggerated love of Mexican mothers towards their

sons manifests itself in mothers interfering in the affairs of their children long after the

have become adults. When mothers lack the attention of their sons, they become

contentious and weepy, which is seen as a sign of mothers’ devotion. However, Celaya

offers a more appropriate explanation of their mother’s difficult behavior: “a

meddlesome, quarrelsome, difficult, possessive mother is seen only as a mother who

loves her child too much, instead of the thing she is - an unhappy and lonely person”

(Cisneros 165). In the interview with Gayle Elliot, Cisneros mentions this is exactly her

purpose, to demythologize the character of the caring and devoted women who are seen

by her culture as models for young women to strive for (Cisneros, “An Interview”).

Celaya also shows the unhealthy patterns in Mexican marriage and love affairs.

Here again the names of the telenovelas tell us a great deal about the preconceptions of

Mexican romantic relationships and marriage: “‘Virgen Santisima, You Killed Her!’

[…]’He Doesn’t Give a Damn What You Feel’ […] ‘The Unhappiest Woman of All’

[…] ‘The Woman with Whom He Had Relations’” (Cisneros 63). Another such

example is told in the myth of prince Popocatepétl and princess Iztaccihuátl. The prince

kills the princess and later on mourns her death. When Celaya asks her grandfather why

the prince killed her, her grandpa cannot give her a satisfactory answer, except for “I

suppose that’s how Mexicans love” (Cisneros 57). Inherent to the Mexican conception

of love is the idea that a woman needs to suffer, and metaphorically or literary die for

love. Another myth concerning marriage is mentioned in the titles of the telenovelas as

well as in the study of Stereotypes and Myths about the Mexican Family -“Infidelity

exists in the marriage” (Stereotypes). Furthermore, even when women get to know

about the affair, they usually do not abandon the marriage, for it is their fate to suffer for

love. Celaya depicts how extramarital affairs are tolerated, unexamined and passed from

one generation to another as a part of Mexican cultural preconceptions regarding marital

relationships. Soledad’s husband Narciso has an affair with the sexy singer Exaltation,

Aunty Licha’s husband is unfaithful to her, and even Celaya’s father is no exception to

the rule, having an illegitimate child in Mexico City. All the women in Celaya’s family

“suffered the way only Mexican women can suffer, because [they] loved the way

Mexicans love” (Cisneros 184). Celaya shows how harmful such myths around the

subject of Mexican love are and forms alternative formulas to set the women free by a

different attitude towards love. After her boyfriend Ernesto leaves her, she slowly

comes to a realization that “He was my destiny, but not my destination,” encouraging

other women not to get stuck in unsatisfactory relationships and marriages and move on

(Cisneros 401).

One of the points of Celaya’s critique becomes the attitude of Mexicans towards

sexuality – or rather the lack of openness towards their body knowledge and the

ignorance women are kept in, what Cisneros, in her essay “Gaudalupe the Sex

Goddess,” calls “a double chastity belt of ignorance and vergüenza, shame”

(“Gaudalupe”). Celaya refuses innocence and purity, besides devotion and self-

sacrifice, as the ideals Mexican women are meant to aspire to. In retelling her

grandmother’s life story, Celaya describes her as “castrated before birth. And she had

been. Not by knife except an abstract one called religion. So naïve was she about her

body, she did not know how many orifices her body had, nor what they were for. Then

as now, the philosophy of sexual education for women was --- the less said the better”

(Cisneros 156). Celaya reveals that the reverence of la Virgen Gaudalupe, the Mexican

icon, serves to keep women away from the knowledge of their bodies and their sexual

self-sufficiency and freedom. In an interview with Martha Satz “Returning to One’s

House: An Interview with Sandra Cisneros,” Cisneros reflects on the denial of body

knowledge to Mexican women: “wherever there is a source of power for women it is

forbidden. Sex is forbidden by male society because men know where our nuclear

reactors are, so to speak”. Cisneros further attacks the ideal of la Virgen Gaudalupe as

“an ideal so lofty and unrealistic it was laughable. Did boys have to aspire to be Jesus? I

never saw any evidence of it. They were fornicating like rabbits while the Church

ignored them and pointed us women toward our destiny—marriage and motherhood.

The other alternative was putahood [-prostitution]” (Cisneros, “Gaudalupe”). Anzaldúa,

too, comments on the limited choice of roles for women in the Mexican society: “she

could turn to the Church as a nun, to the streets as a prostitute, or to the home as a

mother” (Anzaldúa 17). When Celaya wants to move from home to start life as an

independent person, her father describes her behavior as “como una prostituta. […]

Como una perra, like a dog. Una perdida. How will you live without your father and

brothers to protect you? […] When I breathe, my heart hurts. Prostituta. Puta. Perra.

Perdida. Papa” (Cisneros 360). Through her stories, Celaya shows the limited range of

unappealing role models for women as well as the imposed boundaries in their sexual

exploration. Through attacking these models, she forces Chicano women to rethink

them and find alternative and healthier lifestyles, unbiased by cultural myths.

Celaya also heals the Chicanos through exposing the wounds they have suffered

in the American society. For Celaya, this means being poor and leading a life of

constant moving and belt-tightening. In such saddening environment, “talk is all I’ve

got going for me,” explains Celaya after she is scorned for making up stories of her

noble origin in her class (Cisneros 353). Through the telling of her tale, she is inventing

her importance in a society which deems her invisible, in a society where to be called

“Mexican is an insult” (Cisneros 210). Celaya compensates for the poverty on the

material level through the abundance of her stories.

Further on, she shows that the pressures in American society for the ethnic

minorities to assimilate nearly have nearly killed her father. There being not enough

demand for his traditional upholstering skills, he is forced to rename and change his

enterprise to please the American mass production. Soon after becoming “The King of

Plastic Covers,” he becomes withdrawn and later on suffers a heart attack (Cisneros

396). Celaya shows how the public sphere influences the private lives and psyches of

people. Like a curandera, she shows how the health of a person is influenced by forces

much larger than the individual.

Celaya also exposes the tendencies in Mexican society to create a hierarchy of

Mexicaness, in which lighter skin denotes a nobler origin. The more pronounced

Spanish roots, manifested in the lightness of the skin, are looked upon as a sign of

superiority, in contrast with the darker shades of brown revealing the indigenous

ancestry of the Mexican people. At one point in the novel, Celaya mentions that her

stories stem from the feelings of shame: “I do […] have shame. That’s how I know

where the stories are” (Cisneros 205). In accordance, she puts down also stories of

shame. When Soledad comes to work at Regina Reyes, she is reminded of the

“backward, Indian variety […,] of her own humble roots, a peasant Reyes from the

country filled with witchcraft and superstition, still praying to the old gods along with

the new, still stinking of copal and firewood” (Cisneros 113). Celaya puts at display the

shame of Mexicans at their indigenous roots, which they associate with poverty and

irrationality. Through depicting children on the Mexican side of the border playing in

the dust, wearing dirty rags, Celaya’s stepsister Candelaria having lice, Celaya exposes

the harsh reality, which will ideally initiate steps towards change. Last but not least,

Celaya is redefining the Mexican ideals of beauty, which prefer the American standards

- “blond-blond-blond and white-white-white. Very pretty, not like you” (Cisneros 29).

Instead, she creates the image of beauty out of what is essentially indigenous, the brown

skin “smooth as peanut butter, deep as burnt-milk candy […] A color so sweet, it hurts

to even look at her” (Cisneros 34,37). Celaya does not shrink from attacking the social

status quo, whether American or Mexican, and provides alternatives behavioral patterns

and views of life and love for both cultures.

6.3 I Forgive You, Soledad

When Soledad dies, Celaya feels no sense of loss for her grandmother. She starts

to write Soledad’s life story only after her grandmother’s ghost starts to haunt her.

Soledads wants Celaya to tell everyone that “I need everyone I hurt to forgive me. […]

You need to tell them for me, I’m sorry Celaya. […] Make them understand me”

(Cisneros 407). At the moment when Celaya starts retelling the Soledad stories, she

starts the healing work of a curandera. Through storytelling, Celaya is repairing

Soledad’s relationship with other members of her extended family. In showing her

grandmother’s unbearably lonely childhood after the early death of her mother, the

abandonment of her father, growing up in her aunt’s overcrowded family, working as a

helper in poor Mexican households and later on suffering her husband’s extra-marital

love affair, Celaya builds compassion for her grandmother. In the stories, Celaya often

lets her grandmother’s voice step in to stress what it felt like “without a mother, without

a father, without even a dog to bark on” (Cisneros 102). Though her stories are

originally meant for others to forgive her grandmother, thank to telling them Celaya

starts to understand her grandmother better. And she also finds other similarities to her

grandmother. Like Soledad, Celaya finds herself a stranger in her own family, the only

girl among the boys and feels extremely lonely. In addition, both of them occupy a

world in-between, Celaya the borderland between the Mexican and the American

cultures, her grandmother the one between this and the other world. The grandmother’s

pleas for forgiveness from the world beyond soften Celaya’s heart and for the first time

Celaya is able to engage in a dialogue with her other then just obeying her commands.

In Writing Down the Bones Goldberg notes that “art is communication. Taste the

bitterness of isolation, and from that lace feel a kinship and compassion for all people

who have been alone. […] Reach out in your writing to another lonely soul,” and

Celaya follows her advice (Goldberg 233).

Neverthelles, Celaya is also willing to look at the skeletons in her own closet.

The encounters with her grandmother in her writings open up the space for Celaya to

confront her shadow side. At one point Celaya notices “my grandmother is starting to

peer out at me from my skin […] the grandmother’s face in mine. Hers. Mine.

Father’s,” and she starts to realize that their similarities go further, beyond their similar

appearance, into their psyche (Cisneros 394). Not only do they share their talent of

storytelling but also the strong, possessive and protective love for Inocencio:

I am the Awful Grandmother. For love of Father, I’d kill anyone who

came near him to hurt him or make him sad. I’ve turned into her. And I

see inside her heart, the Grandmother, who had been betrayed so many

times she only loves her son. He loves her. And I love him. I have to find

room inside my heart for her as well [.] Him inside her, me inside him,

like Chinese boxes, like Russian dolls, like an ocean full of waves, like

the braided threads of a rebozo. […]And we are all, like it or not, one

and the same. (Cisneros 425)

As a real curandera, Celaya is able to transform the dark into the light. She rewrites the

shadowy and witch-like figure of her grandmother into a wise curandera warning her

not to repeat her life mistakes. Celaya listens carefully to her advice – to love herself

first before she loves somenone else, to have more men before entering marriage and

not to be jealous – all these are the traps of love that Mexican women fall into

dangerously easily. In feeling compassion for her grandmother, Celaya at the same time

creates compassion for and accepts her own shadow side, the jealous and possessive

part of her personality, and thus becomes more integrated and whole.

Celaya’s experience closely follows that of the author of Becoming Whole:

Writing Your Healing, Linda Joy Myers. Myers started writing her family memoir to

consciously “develop more compassion for her [abusive grandmother.] I began writing

the story of my grandmother as a young woman. […] I imagined her pain and her

heartache as I wrote these stories through her eyes. I felt that I was healing not only

myself, but her as well. […] By telling her stories, I was able to free myself – my

grandmother – from the past” (Myers 98). Murdoch, too, comments on the healing

ability of memoir writing, and notes that it is “the act of writing rather than the writing

itself that provides an opportunity to heal. The compassion, regard and deep respect we

grow for ourselves and each other is what creates the shift” (76). Writing can bring us

to forgiveness.

Celaya, in her writing, realizes she is not alone in her suffering. Her tales can be

viewed as her gradually connecting to the world, first to her immediate family and later

on to all of humanity. In her stories the connection usually comes after an emotionally

trying period. After her lover abandons her, Celaya goes to a church, looks up

and la Virgen looks down on me, and, honest to God, this sounds like a

lie, but it’s true. The universe a cloth, and all humanity interwoven. Each

and every person connected to me, and me connected to them, like the

strands of rebozo. Pull one string and the whole thing comes undone.

Each person who comes into my life affecting the pattern, and me

affecting theirs. (Cisneros 389)

Feeling close to all those seeking for protection and compassion of la Virgen

Gaudalupe, she realizes her pain and heartbreak is a part of the human experience and

she feels united with the rest of mankind; just like when Aunty Light-Skin said: “I hurt.

But sometimes that’s the only way you know you’re alive” (Cisneros 389).

Conclusion

In my thesis I show the links between the role of a curandera and a writer and

between the processes of healing and writing. I have come to the conclusion that all of

the three budding writer characters – Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya - use, to various

degrees, the three abilities of writing analyzed - to integrate, promote change and find

sympathy for oneself as well as others. Since they use their writing to heal themselves

and people close to them, they can also be compared to curanderas.

From what I found out, what leads Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya to writing and

storytelling is their distressing position of living in-between, of occupying borderlands,

and needing to share their painful and confusing experience. While Xochitl and Celaya

cross between the Mexican and the American cultures, Antonio is a trespasser between

his maternal and paternal heritages and between Catholic and indigenous religion.

Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya share the same feelings of not belonging to any of the

cultures and having to choose only one of them. They are trying to find a way to fuse or

balance their diverse legacies. In writing and storytelling, Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya

find a method of bringing the various cultural and religious traditions together.

One of the ways which helps Antonio’s and Celaya’s heal their psychological

wounds and reintegrate their psyche is finding integrative healing images. To Antonio,

these images come in dreams. The unifying image of salty and sweet waters being of

one origin and part of one great cycle makes him see that the similarities and

connections rather then the differences between his paternal heritage, which is

associated with the sea and the restless and adventurous blood of his father, and his

maternal heritage, which is quiet and bound to the earth and the cycles of the moon.

Thank to this image Antonio realizes that in his future he can draw on both legacies.

Celaya, too, discovers and creates an image, which symbolizes the interconnectedness

of the fates of her ancestors and her family members – a caramelo rebozo. In the image

of a rebozo Celaya later on finds a metaphor for her future calling of a family

storyteller. Celaya reimagines herself as a next in line in the tradition of weavers, and in

her storytelling employs what is typical for rebozo weaving. Being of Mesoamerican,

Spanish and Chinese origin and blending the traditional ways of weaving with new and

original patterns, rebozo weaving reflects the way Celaya tells her stories - they are a

mixture of facts, songs, photos and imagination. Both Celaya and Antonio find healing

hybrid images which enable them to merge their colorful cultural background and in

putting the images to paper they also offer their readers a receipt how to make use of

this cultural advantage.

Also traveling into the past and finding out more about their relatives and

ancestors makes the characters feel more connected to their culture. Both Xochitl and

Celaya take a journey into their memory and imagination to retrieve some more answers

to the questions of who they are and where they come from. Xochitl through scraps of

knowledge from her father, from research and her imagination creates a vivid picture of

Mexico as far as three generations back. The imaginative process leads her back to the

Mexico of her great great grandmother and revives the Mexican part of her identity. She

recounts the life of curandera Estrella, describes her magical powers, starts to see

herself as her descendant and tries to use words in a similar magical way – to create

long bygone worlds. Celaya likewise finds, in telling the stories of her grandparents and

parents, similarities of character and patterns of behavior. She takes after her father in

her appearance and her dreaminess and is tight to her grandmother through her curious

interest in other people’s lives. She shares their desire to tell or hear a good story. And

as her grandmother, she feels overwhelming love for her father. The realization of the

many similarities between her and her father and grandmother leaves her at the end of

the story feel a profound connection to her family.

To find their psychological integrity and their place within their culture,

Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya travel into the realms of dreams, imagination and memory.

I have discovered that all the three realms are in essence very similar. Whether

dreaming, remembering or imagining, Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya diving into the

collective unconscious and in this sphere they are able to find healing images or

complete healing stories, bring them back and offer to the readers of their stories. These

journeys help them to shape their identity and rediscover themselves. According to

Anaya, the journeys into our unconscious are of great importance to our development as

human beings because “you rediscover who you are individually in your collective

memory, not in your individual memory” (Anaya, “Myth” 46-47). That is also on of the

main messages of Antonio’s, Xochitl’s and Celaya’s writing.

What further contributes to Antonio’s, Xochitl’s and Celaya’s wellbeing is the

reconnection to their indigenous roots. Antonio, with guidance of Ultima, uncovers the

spirit in and language of nature and starts to share what he can hear in the presence of

the river and hills. He is not lonely in nature; on the contrary nature becomes his

companion. Xochitl’s and Antonio’s depict curanderas and their animal helpers, whose

spirits are closely linked, so that if one of them dies the other will follow. Both young

writers show the interconnectedness of human spirit with that of nature. What Celaya

does is bringing the people indigenous to Mexico into focus and introducing them as

those who influenced the design and patterns of rebozos, and metaphorically also the

lives of Mexicans and Chicanos. She weaves them back into the history.

Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya likewise make use of the transformative ability of

writing and language as such to change our thinking patterns and views of the world.

Antonio, for instance, completely rewrites his religious believes. After hearing and

reading stories of several religious figures or deities – God, the Virgin, Jesus and the

Golden Carp – Tony becomes confused considering his own faith. At first Antonio is

scared by the possibility of losing faith in the Christian God, who is too vengeful for his

taste. But the myth in which he encounters a powerful Golden Carp, who is sympathetic

and at the same time a sum of aspects of all the deities mentioned above, brings him

peace. Recording all the stories of all the different gods leads him in the end to a

thought he might think of his own story and become a creator of his own religion.

Xochitl and Celaya on the other hand show the power of words and stories to

manipulate individuals and whole cultures. Xochitl presents the arrival of Spanish to the

New World as such an example. Celaya brings in the issue of Mexican proverbs. Yet,

she also uses her stories to transform other people’s consciousness in showing the

unfavorable consequences of such sayings. In addition, Calaya portrays and criticizes

the flaws of Mexican society, such as the lack of positive role models for women, the

exaggerated love between mothers and sons, the taking of infidelity for granted, the lack

of opportunities for self-realization for women, the women’s ignorance of their own

bodies. Celaya also scrutinizes the injustices on the other side of the Mexican-American

border, namely the pressure on Chicanos/as to assimilate into the American society and

to conform to the American market, or being largely ignored. Celaya does not shrink

from showing the shame of Mexicans at their indigenous roots. She believes that

through writing about harmful patterns of behavior, we raise the awareness, of others

and our own, about such matters, can prevent people from continuing in such behavior,

and, ideally, change it.

Last but not the least, all of the future writers find in writing a way of

unburdening their or their relatives’ painful issues and secrets and thus make use of the

ability of writing to confront and release the pain from one’s body. In confronting the

distressing events, they usually find more compassion for themselves as well as the

people around them. When Antonio, Xochitl or Celaya write about suffering, they

realize that their painful experiences, be it losses, dislocation, rape, humiliation or

shame, are universal, that they recur from generation to generation and constitute what

binds them to the rest of humanity. As Metzger puts it: “through compassion we

become half of a metaphor: we are the one who is identified with all things. Without

compassion we will never know anyone or anything, not even our own story. Too much

judgment, too many ideas and attitudes will stand in the way of the fundamental

principle that we are similar to, connected with, and part of everything else” (196). Both

Antonio and Xochitl turn into confessors in their stories. Antonio’s confession

comprises of the decline of his faith in God and of considering alternative religious

figures. The “Xochitl Stories,” on the other hand, voice her mother’s confession -- that

of getting poison and killing her malformed son as well as her abusive husband.

Antonio and Xochitl depict how hard it is for them to find forgiveness for themselves

and search for sympathy in their readers. Celaya, too, in the course of writing the stories

of her grandmother’s lonely childhood and unfulfilling marriage, gains understanding of

her difficult life and builds up compassion for her. Antonio’s, Xochitl’s and Celaya’s

stories clearly depict how story writing promotes compassion and forgiveness.

All the three characters, Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya, can, for numerous

reasons, be compared to curanderas. Like curanderas, they offer the readers recipes of

how to become whole. Writers as curanderas use the power of words and narratives to

create visions of unity as well as completely new worlds. They are able to cross the

boundaries in their lives and see unity behind seemingly different paradigms. All free of

them represent mediators between cultures and the past and the present. Like

curanderas, they travel into the realms of dreams, memory and imagination with hope of

finding the clues to their inner healing and in search of a remedy for their relationships

and themselves. Like curanderas, they keep their past alive, for they are aware of the

links between the past and present, of how their past influences who they are at present.

Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya can be viewed as curanderas in that they strive to raise

self-awareness and transform consciousness, whether their own or of other people, in

order to lead a more positive life and live in a healthier society. They can say what is

unacceptable, and thus initiate steps towards a change. They strive for growth and

development in their own lives as well as in their society. As Lorene Carpenter aptly

observes, “both fiction and sorcery de-familiarize the world to perceive things in a new

way, shock us into awakening,” and thus writers similarly to healers can act as agents of

change and transformation (8). Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya also, like curanderas, have

a special place in the Chicano society. On one hand they are highly independent and

become creators of their own destinies, on the other hand, they don’t lose touch with the

cultures they come from and metaphorically take care of them in their writing. Metzger

praises the power of words, for they “could create magic, […] they were magic. […]

they would create worlds, could describe worlds, explore worlds, and also be the bridge

between one world and another,” and Antonio, Xochitl and Celaya take the complete

advantage of this power (3). For Anaya, Alba and Cisneros “the writer may well be the

new shaman for the old displaced tribes of the Americas” (Anaya, “New World Man”

I hope that I have proved that writing, indeed, can make use of painful

experiences and turn them into a goldmine of wisdom. Cisneros views the writing

process as such. She remembers that “I suffered a lot when I was a child, feeling things.

But I also experienced beautiful things very deeply, not just sorrows. As a kid I used to

look at a flower, and I'd feel this unity with the universe” (gtd. in Martinez, “A Latina”).

Pondering her writing process, she explains that it brings about both pain and pleasure

and that to undergo the first results in arriving at the latter: “you can be extremely

heartbroken and write about something heartbreaking, but if you stay with it long

enough, it will bless you with light. That’s the wonderful thing; that’s why we write. It’s

the light and that spiritual connection” (Cisneros, “Father’s”). Her experience echoes

Natalie Goldberg’s advice for beginning writers: “you can go through to the other side

and actually come out singing. You might cry a little before the singing but that is okay.

Just keep your hand moving as you are feeling. Often, as I write my best pieces, my

heart is breaking” (174). All writers would agree that through writing from a dark place

one might become blessed with the light.

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