diplomecka.pdf - is muni
TRANSCRIPT
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.
2008
2
I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.
……………………………….
3
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.
4
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
5
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
6
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)
7
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)
8
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
9
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
10
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-
28).
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.
11
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
12
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
13
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
14
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
15
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.
16
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.
17
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;
18
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.
(599)
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
19
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).
20
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
21
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
22
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
67).
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
23
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).
24
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
25
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
26
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).
27
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
28
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
29
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.
30
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
31
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
32
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
33
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.
34
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
35
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
36
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
37
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
38
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
39
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.
40
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
41
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
42
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
43
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,
44
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
99)
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
45
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
them.
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
46
“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
47
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).
48
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
49
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.
50
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
51
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,
52
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
53
(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
54
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
55
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
56
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
57
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.
58
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
59
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.
60
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.
61
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
62
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
63
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.
64
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
65
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
66
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
67
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.
68
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
69
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
70
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
71
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
72
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
73
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.
74
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
75
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
76
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
77
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
78
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
79
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
80
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
81
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
82
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
83
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
84
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
85
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
86
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).
87
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
88
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
89
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.
90
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
91
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
92
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”
362).
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
93
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.
94
Works Cited
Achterberg, Jeanne. “The Shaman: Master Healer in the Imaginary Realm”.
Shamanism: An Expanded View of Reality. Ed. Shirley Nicholson. Wheaton:
Quest Books, 1987: 103-124.
Alba, Alicia de Gaspar. The Mystery of Survival and Other Stories. Bilingual Review P:
1993.
Anaya, Rudolfo. Bless Me, Ultima. New York: Warner Books, 1994.
---. Interview with David Johnson and David Apocada. “Myth and the Writer: A
Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya.” Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya. Ed. Dick,
Bruce and Silvio Sarias. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998: 29-48.
---. Interview with John F. Crawford. “Rudolfo Anaya.” Conversations with Rudolfo
Anaya. Ed. Dick, Bruce and Silvio Sarias. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998: 105-
15.
---. “The New World Man.” The Anaya Reader. New York: Warner Books, 1995.
---. “The Writer as Inocente.” World Literature Today 78 (2004): 41-42.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco:
Spinsters, 1987.
---. An Interview with María Henríquez Betancor. “Writing: A Way of Life.” Gloria E.
Anzaldúa: Interviews/Entrevistas. Ed. AnaLouise Keating. New York, NY:
Routledge, 2000.
Avila, Elena & Joy Parker. Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera Reveals
Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. New York: Penguin,
2000.
95
Avila, Elena & Joy Parker. Introduction. Woman who Glows in the Dark: A Curandera
Reveals Traditional Aztec Secrets of Physical and Spiritual Health. By Clarissa
Pinkola Estés. New York: Penguin, 2000. 1-14.
Barrios, Gregg. “The Nature of Sandra Cisneros.” Nature Conservancy Magazine Fall
2003. <http://www.nature.org/magazine/fall2003/friends/index.html>.
Blend, Benay. “Intersections of Nature and the Self in Chicana Writing.” Bucknell
Review: A Scholarly Journal of Letters, Arts and Sciences 44 (2000), 56-70.
Brande, Dorothea. Becoming a Writer: The Classic Inspirational Guide. London:
Macmillan, 1996.
Broncano, Manuel. “Landscapes of the Magical. Cather’s and Anaya’s Explorations of
the Southwest.” Willa Cather and the American Southwest. Ed. John N. Swift and
Joseph R. Urgo. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2002: ….
Carpenter, Lorene. “Maps for the Journey: Shamanic Patterns in Anaya, Asturias, and
Castaneda.” Diss. U of Colorado, 1981.
Cisneros, Sandra. Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento. New York: Vintage, 2002.
---. “Gaudalupe the Sex Goddess.” Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of
Guadalupe. Ed. Ana Castillo. New York: Riverhead Books, 46-51. <http://scarlet-
blu.livejournal.com/7632.html>.
---. Interview From the September/October 2002 Issue of Book Magazíne. 30 Jan 2008.
<http://www.wam.umd.edu/~cwbarks/caramelo.html#interviewbookmag>.
---. Interview with Elliot Gayle. “An Interview with Sandra Cisneros.” Missouri Review
25 (2002): 93-109.
---. Interview with Jen Buckendorff. “Father’s death Opened New Insights for
Caramelo author Sandra Cisneros.” The Seattle Times 21 Oct 2003.
96
<http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20031021&slug=cis
neros21>.
---. Interview with Martha Satz. “Returning to One’s House: An Interview with Sandra
Cisneros.” Southwest Review 82 (1997): 166–85. <http://www-
english.tamu.edu/pers/fac/karasek/Sandra%20Cisneros%20interview.pdf>.
---. Interview with Pilar E. Rodriguez. “On the Solitary Fate of Being Mexican, Female,
Wicked and Thirty-three: An Interview with Writer Sandra Cisneros.” Americas
Review18 (1990): 64.
---.“Sandra Cisneros: Author of Caramelo Talks with Robert Birnbaum.” 4 Dec 2004.
<http://www.identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum76.html>.
Cochran, Stuart. “The Ethnic Implications of Stories, Spirits, and the Land in Native
American Pueblo and Aztlán Writing.” Melus 20 (1995): 69-91.
DeSalvo, Louise. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling our Stories Transforms our
Lives. Boston: Beacon, 1999.
Espinoza, Martha. “A Passion for History: A Conversation with Rudolfo Anaya”
Hispanic 12 (1999): 64.
Giles, Sally M. “Sandra Cisneros As Chicana Storyteller: Fictional Family (Hi)stories in
Caramelo”. Diss. Brigham Young U. Aug 2005.
Goldeberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston:
Shambala, 2005.
Harner, Michael. The Way of the Shaman. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.
Kanoza, Theresa M. “The Golden Carp and Moby-Dick: Rudolfo Anaya's Multi-
Culturalism.” Melus 24 (1999): 159-71.
Kirmayer, Laurence J. “Toward a Medicine of the Imagination.” New Literary History:
A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 37 (2006): 583-601.
97
La Llorona. 17 June 2008. 19 June 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Llorona>.
Leon-Portilla, Miguel. Aztecká Filosofie: Myšlení Nahuů na Základě Původních
Pramenů. Praha: Argo, 2002.
Madsen, Deborah L. “Sandra Cisneros.” Understanding Contemporary Chicana
Literature. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2000: 105-34.
Maldonado, Diane L. “Searching for Mother: Chicana Writers Revise and Renew
Malinche and Gaudalupe.” Diss. Pittsburg: Duquesne U, 2004.
Martinez, Miriam. “A Latina of Many Colors, Sandra Cisneros.” Latino Leaders: The
National Magazine of the Successful American Latino Apr.-May 2004.
<http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0PCH/is_2_5/ai_n6137100>.
Menchaca, Denise A. “Body and Soul: Performed Spiritual Enfleshments of Chicana
Identity”. Kaleidoscope: An SCO Journal of Graduate Student Research 1 (2002):
37-49. <http://www.siu.edu/~sco/menchaca.htm>.
Metzger, Deena. Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds.
New York: HarperCollins, 1992.
Mexican Family Historic Sociocultural Premises. 2008. 25 Jan 2008.
<http://family.jrank.org/pages/1166/Mexico-Mexican-Family-Historic-
Sociocultural-Premises.html>.
Milligan, Bryce. “A Conversation with Sandra Cisneros and Pat Mora.” Texas Journal
of Ideas, History and Culture. 17 (1994): 12-17.
Milner, Laura. “On Writing, Healing, and Wholeness: Personal and Cultural Benefits of
Naming What Remains.” Intertexts: A Journal of Comparative Literature 8
(2004). 23-35.
Mines, Stephanie. “Curanderismo: The Hands of Gaudalupe.” 30 Jan 2008.
<http://www.tara-approach.org/article_3.html>.
98
Mitchell, Carol. “Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima: Folk Culture in Literature.”
Critique 22 (1980): 55-64.
Murdock, Maureen. Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory. New York: Seal Press,
2003.
Myers, Linda Joy. Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story. Berkeley: Iaso
Books, 2007.
Myers, Linda Joy. Foreword. Becoming Whole: Writing Your Healing Story. By Denis
Ledoux. Berkeley: Iaso Books, 2007. vii-ix.
Perrone, Bobette, H. Henrietta Stockel and Victoria Krueger. Medicine Women,
Curanderas and Women Doctors. U of Oklahoma P: Norman, 1989.
Rebolledo, Tey Diana. “Constructing Identities as Writers.” Women Singing in the
Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1995:
117-44.
---. “Early Hispana/Mexicana Writers: The Chicana Literary Tradition.” Women Singing
in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tuscon: U of Arizona P,
1995: 11-27.
---. “From Coatlicue to La Llorona: Literary Myths and Archetypes.” Women Singing in
the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of Chicana Literature. Tuscon: U of Arizona P,
1995: 49-81.
---. “The NeuvoMexicano Writers.” Women Singing in the Snow: A Cultural Analysis of
Chicana Literature. Tuscon: U of Arizona P, 1995: 25-47.
Robinett, Jane. “Looking for Roots: Curandera and Shamanic Practices in Southwestern
Fiction.” Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36
(2003): 122-34.
99
Saldivar, Ramon. “Romance, the Fantastic, and the Representation of History in
Rudolfo A. Anaya and Ron Arias.” In: Chicano Narrative: The Dialectic of
Difference. Madison: The U of Wisconsin P, 1990: 103-131.
Sagel, Jim. “Sandra Cisneros: Conveying the Riches of the Latin American Culture is
the Author's Literary Goal.” Las Mujeres.com. 29 Mar 1991. 26 Jan 2008.
<http://www.lasmujeres.com/sandracisneros/cisnerosgoal.shtml>.
Schmidt, Mary. “Crazy Wisdom: The Shaman as Mediator of Realities.” Shamanism:
An Expanded View of Reality. Ed. Shirley Nicholson. Wheaton: Quest Books,
1987: 62-75.
Silverman, Susana Chávez. “Memory Tricks: Re-Calling and Testimony in the Poetry
of Alicia Gaspar de Alba”. Rocky Mountain Review 53 (1999): 67-81.
Stereotypes and Myths about the Mexican Family. 2008. 25 Jan 2008.
<http://family.jrank.org/pages/1165/Mexico-Stereotypes-Myths-about-Mexican-
Family.html>.
Tedlock, Barbara. The Woman in the Shaman’s Body: Reclaiming the Feminine in
Religion and Medicine. New York: Bantum Dell, 2006.
Trotter, Robert T. & Juan Antonio Chavira. Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk
Healing. Athens, Gorgia: U of Gorgia P, 1981.