CODES OF DISTRESS
AND THE LEXICON OF SURVIVAL

Renato Rosaldo's 1989 critical essay, "Fables of the Fallen Guy,"(6) provides a useful entry into this discussion, for its focus on coming-of-age themes in Chicano literature. Toward "remaking cultures of resistance," Rosaldo situates the three literary works he examines -- Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Alberto Rios' The Iguana Killer, and Denise Chávez's The Last of the Menu Girls -- "against earlier, but still vital, narratives of cultural authenticity" (85). These earlier works formulate an ideology of "pureza" ("purity"), according to Rosaldo: "one in which culture is autonomous, homogenous, and coherent," deriving from a "primal patriarchal order" (ibid.).

To support this view, Rosaldo foregrounds his study of the selected contemporary works with a brief overview of "Patriarchal Precedents and 'Authentic' Culture" -- a comparative study of a "mythic past" in which "the young man received his patrimony, his name, and his 'sacred objects'" through a dream of an ancestral figure (86). Rosaldo cites the classic works of José Antonio Villarreal and Américo Paredes, to invoke the standardized reliability of the Warrior Hero icon in early Mexican-American narratives.(7) This emblematic organizing principle of patriarchy, Rosaldo submits, is "fading" from "earlier and not altogether moribund masculine heroics" (88), leaving the critic to attend to a new cultural politic in Chicano literature. It is, ultimately, a politic of resistance: gendered, age-specific, and sexualized.

Rosaldo's essay is predicated on "what Américo Paredes saw so clearly as the inextricably intertwined realms of culture and politics," and Rosaldo's consideration of the politically-charged confluence of "sexuality and danger" is provocative. Within the three short story cycles analyzed in his work, Rosaldo finds, in Chávez, that through dance a 13-year-old girl "provides a bodily, sexual connection" (90) with a great aunt, who lay dying; in Rios, the "adolescent protagonists" must traverse "the dangers to their emerging sexual personas" through "labored acts of suppression" (91); and, in Cisneros, while facing the "play of sexuality and danger" confronting the child protagonist, "her shoes and dancing stand for her grace" (93).

In extending Rosaldo's analysis, I will focus on his discussion of Sandra Cisneros' Mango Street (1989), particularly on his attention to the "coming of age" theme, within the general coordinates of his study, categorized as "Matrimony," "Sexuality and Danger," and "Grace" or "Potency."

To the thematic coming of age in Cisneros' work, Rosaldo finds that the protagonist, Esperanza, "tells a gendered" story, one that is "[m]ore matriarchal than patriarchal" (85). Rosaldo locates these efforts in Esperanza's "constant play, in her deceptively childlike patter," which "subverts oppressive patriarchal points of culture and fixity" -- as a result, "Esperanza inhabits a border zone peopled with multiple subjectivities and a plurality of languages and cultures" (ibid.).

While I accept Rosaldo's premise that Cisneros' narrator speaks and writes from a border consciousness, I will argue here that Esperanza's ritualized rites of passage into female sexuality are not predicated, as Rosaldo concludes, on the notion that this young woman "meets dangers gracefully by moving on," nor that her "grace" in the face of adversity is emblematized by "her shoes and dancing" (93).

This focus on the mimetic device of shoes and dancing recalls, in a strange way, not the implications of the "Little Red Riding Hood" fable, as Rosaldo suggests; rather, his analysis more closely approximates the image of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. If by "moving on" Rosaldo means to say that Esperanza's epiphany is in the recognition that she can somehow click her heels and go home, then Cisneros' narrative cannot be said to inscribe "resistance" through a new reification of matrimony; her protagonist's "potency" (a term Rosaldo reserves for his discussion of the male-authored text, The Iguana Killer) is reduced to the "grace" of fancy footwork; and the political confluence of sexuality and danger is minimized to a "'childlike' diction which often imitates nursery rhymes" (92). Rosaldo cites, as an example, the following passage from Cisneros' narrative "The Family of Little Feet," in which a mother passes along to a group of girls three pair of faded high-heel shoes:

Across the street in front of the tavern a bum on the stoop.
Do you like these shoes?
Bum man says, Yes, little girl. Your little lemon shoes are so beautiful. But come closer. I can't see very well. Come closer, please.
You are a pretty girl, bum man continues. What's your name, pretty girl?
And Rachel says Rachel, just like that.
Now you know to talk to drunks is crazy and to tell them your name is worse, but who can blame her. She is young and dizzy to hear so many sweet things in one day, even if it is bum man's whiskey words saying them.
Rachel, you are prettier than a yellow taxi cab. You know that. (92)

In this selection, it is not Esperanza speaking to the "bum man," but her friend Rachel. Apart from the obvious "wolf" qualities attributed to the man ("Come here...Come closer please"), in the above excerpt, Esperanza invokes not "Little Red Riding Hood," in this vignette, but a fable as highly charged: "Today," she announces, "we are Cinderella, because our feet fit exactly, and we laugh at Rachel's one foot with a girl's grey sock and a lady's high heel" (Cisneros, op cit., 40). The girls' query Do you like these shoes? is a polyvocal refrain throughout the narrative; it is pre-empted, the first time it is voiced in the child's narrative, by the reflection: "But the truth is it is scarey to look down at your foot that is no longer yours and see attached a long long leg" (ibid.).

This moment may be exactly described as one of border consciousness, as the girls see themselves simultaneously as children and as growing young women. They sit and play with the shoes, trading colors between them, "and keep on like this for a long time until we are tired" (40). Then:

It's Rachel who learns to walk the best all strutted in those magic high heels. She teaches us to cross and uncross our legs, and to run like a double-dutch rope, and how to walk down to the corner so that the shoes talk back to you with every step. Lucy, Rachel, and me tee-tottering like so. Down to the corner where men can't take their eyes off us. We must be Christmas.
Mr. Benny at the corner grocery puts down his important cigar: Your mother know you got shoes like that? (40-41)

The grocer then warns the girls that "them are dangerous," and "you girls too young to be wearing shoes like that." He scolds them to remove the shoes "before I go call the cops" (Cisneros, 41). The pacing of the narrative quickens here, as the girls "strut" through the cat-calling of a boy, and the perceived jealousy of "six girls with the same fat face" who "pretend we are invisible. We just keep strutting" (ibid.).

It is at this point in the narrative that the girls meet the "bum man," who offers Rachel a dollar for a kiss. The tone shifts then, from giddiness to anxiety, as the girls make a sobering appeal to Rachel: "We have to go right now, Lucy says taking Rachel's hand because she looks like she's thinking about that dollar" (42). Again the narrative pacing quickens, as the girls run home, past each previously-detailed neighborhood site -- but "up Mango Street the back way, just in case" (ibid.).

Clearly, the girls sense the threat of male aggression in this scene and, like the girl children in the myths and legends studied by Rank, Cisneros' girls decide:

We are tired of being beautiful. Lucy hides the lemon shoes and the red shoes and the shoes that used to be white but are now pale blue under a powerful bushel basket on the back porch, until one Tuesday her mother, who is very clean, throws them away. But no one complains. (42)

Rosaldo does offer, almost as an aside, the acknowledgment that the "sexuality and danger" inscribed in Esperanza's world "most often involve male violence and both literal and figurative efforts to confine and subordinate women" (93). To extend this analysis, it is important to recognize that, in this brief narrative by Cisneros, there is a strongly articulated motif of withdrawal from the consequences of feminine attractiveness -- consequences that the girls understand to involve male impropriety or aggression. Like in the Cinderella tales described by Rank, the girls eschew their access to the "privilege" of conventional female "beauty," hiding the shoes under a "powerful bushel basket," not unlike the manner in which Rank's princesses of the Cinderella and Appolonius legends are set to sea in well-sealed chests or barrels.

That this mantle of responsibility to maintain cultural propriety should be placed upon female children is, perhaps most centrally, a true rite of passage, or coming of age, particularly for Chicana characters, who have been traditionally rendered within constrictive, subordinate cultural roles.

The girls' behavior -- and, indeed, resistance -- in Cisneros' "The Family of Little Feet" are resonant of the Chicana character "Angela," in Milcha Sanchez-Scott's contemporary play, Roosters (1987). The playwright, a mestiza of Latina, Asian, and Anglo-European heritage, relocated with her family to Southern California, as an adolescent. There, Sanchez-Scott bonded most especially with the Latino communities. She considers Roosters to be her "tearing-away-from-home play," the work which, upon completion, signaled that "I was really my own person."(8)

The girl character in this work, who is appropriately named Angela, costumes herself in angel's wings, and plays at making cardboard cemeteries in the dirt of her Southwest yard. Her two dolls are santas, St. Lucy and St. Teresa. Her play is sardonically celestial, until she is interrupted by her older brother, Hector, who charges her to "Stop hiding. You can't be a little girl forever" (254). Angela ignores him, and continues alternately speaking in the voices of her santas:

ANGELA (As St. Lucy): St. Luke! St. Luke! Indeed! How that man got into Heaven I'll never know. That story about putting peas in his boots and offering up the discomfort to God is pure bunk. I happen to know he boiled the peas first.

HECTOR: I don't want you to hurt. It's time to grow up.

ANGELA (As St. Teresa): St. Lucy! I can only think that it is the loss of your eyes that makes you so disagreeable. Kindly remember that we have all suffered to be saints.

HECTOR: Are you listening to me, Angie?

ANGELA (As St. Lucy): Easy for you to say! They took my eyes because I wouldn't put out! They put them on a plate. A dirty, chipped one, thank you very much indeed! To this day no true effort has been made to find them.

HECTOR: Excuse me!. . . Excuse me, St. Teresa, St. Lucy, I just thought I should tell you . . . a little secret . . . your hostess, Miss Angela Ester Morales, lies in her little, white, chaste, narrow bed, underneath the crucifix, and masturbates.

ANGELA: Heretic! Liar!

HECTOR: Poor Jesus, up there on the cross, right over her bed, his head tilted down.

ANGELA: Lies! Horrible lies! (254)

Hector here adds the last straw: "Poor saint of the month," he grieves, "watching from the night table," to which Angela replies, "I hate you!" (ibid.). After Hector exits the stage, heeding his mother's call to breakfast, he passes one parting shot, through the window of the house: "Just be yourself. A normal sex-crazed fifteen year old girl with a big gigantic enormous butt" (254).

Angela, still sitting outside in her wings, among the cardboard tombstones, directs herself in prayer to Heaven:

Send me to Alaska
Let me be frozen
Send me a contraction
a shrinking antidote
Make me little again
Please make my legs
like tiny pink Vienna sausages
Give me back my little butt. (254-55)

Angela's efforts toward at least the appearance of chastity and purity are structured in mediated opposition to the character of her aunt, Chata, who is described by Hector in the following dialogue with the worker Adan:

HECTOR: Today she woke up at five o'clock, spit a green booger the size of a small frog into a wad of Kleenex. She wrapped her soiled black "7th Fleet" kimono around her loose, flaccid, tortured, stretch-marked body and put her fat-toed, corned yellow hooves into a pair of satin slippers. She slap-padded over to the sink, where she opened her two hippo lips and looked into the mirror. She looked sad. I looked at those lips. . .those lips that had wrapped themselves warmly and lovingly around the cocks of a million campesinos, around thousand upon thousands of Mexicanos, Salvadoreños, Guatemaltecos. For the tide of brown men that flooded the fields of this country, she was there with her open hippo whore's lips, saying "Bienvenido," "Welcome," "Hola," "Howdy." Those are legendary lips, Adan.

ADAN: Yes. . .muy yes.

HECTOR: What a woman, what a comfort. Up and down the state in her beat-up station wagon. A '56 Chevy with wood panels on the sides, in the back a sad, abused mattress. She followed the brown army of pickers through tomatoes, green beans, zucchinis, summer squash, winter squash, oranges, and finally Castroville, the artichoke capitol of the world, where her career was stopped by the fists of a sun-crazed compañero. The ingratitude broke her heart.

ADAN: Oh my gooseness!

HECTOR: She was a river to her people, she should be rewarded, honored. No justice in the world.

ADAN: Pinci world. (256)

The relation of these two female iconographies, in the characterizations of Angela and Chata, humorously typify the contemporary Chicana struggle with the virgen/puta dichotomy. The destabilizing element here, as Renato Rosaldo suggests, is the inscription of "multiple subjectivities," in the postmodern move from "essential" categories of identity. For Angela, whose behavior is at once pious and irreverent, the chastity of la virgen leaves room for what Rosaldo terms a "playful" substantiation of the self. And Chata, declared a "whore" by her nephew, is also -- albeit facetiously -- recognized as "a river to her people," imagery that is consonant with indigenous Earth Mother iconographies. The bending, if not shattering, of these cultural binarisms fosters an exploration of the new cultural spaces to which Rosaldo refers in his study of sexuality and danger.

More difficult to traverse is the cultural and political terrain widened by Sandra Cisneros in other, starker vignettes in The House on Mango Street. If contemporary Chicana characters may be said to struggle, especially, with the cultural constraints of strictly polarized norms for female sexuality, then Cisneros' configuration of girls struggling against brutality and degradation enunciates both the outrage and power attendant to that struggle.

The figure of the girl-child as sexual seductress is foregrounded, to a new degree, in Cisneros' haunting one-page narrative "Red Clowns." Here, the act of "telling" is occluded -- in keeping with Harvard psychiatriast Judith Lewis Herman's models of traumatic revelation -- as the narrator haltingly relates a scene of molestation:

Sally, you lied. It wasn't what you said at all. What he did. Where he touched me. I didn't want it, Sally. The way they said it, the way it's supposed to be, all the storybooks and movies, why did you lie to me? (99)

The narrator, presumably still Esperanza, recounts her experience at a carnival, where she waited "by the red clowns" for her friend Sally, who has disappeared with "that big boy," and is lost to Esperanza's view. There is a tone of regretful accusation, as Esperanza repeatedly reminds her friend that "You never came for me." She invokes, "Sally Sally a hundred times. Why didn't you tell them to leave me alone?" (100). The narrative continues as an internal monologue, achingly directed to the absent Sally: "Sally, make him stop. I couldn't make them go away. I couldn't do anything but cry. I don't remember. It was dark. I don't remember. Please don't make me tell it all" (ibid.).

Like the survivors' stories in today's studies of trauma, Esperanza's narrative here fits a well-documented pattern:

The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to proclaim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma. People who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional, contradictory, and fragmented manner, which undermines their credibility and thereby serves the twin imperatives of truth-telling and secrecy. (Herman 1) (9)