5.4: Cultural Activism

Chicana Artivists Confront Disempowering Representations

Chicana feminist artists and scholars have long-challenged gender oppression during and since the Chicano Renaissance––the flowering of arts, literature, and cultural production alongside El Movimiento. Writers such as Lorna Dee Cervantes, Ana Castillo, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherríe Moraga, performance artists Patssi Valdez of ASCO and Patricia Valencia, and visual artists Ester Hernandez, Santa Barraza, and Yolanda López, among others, have confronted disempowering representations of racialized women and reenvisioned Mexican/Chicanx cultural archetypes through their cultural production. Two figures, in particular, La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche have been reclaimed and redefined by Chicana feminists, challenging the patriarchal ‘mujer buena/mujer mala’ dichotomy that structures women’s and girl’s everyday lives. These artivists (artist-activists) understood that mythologies and cultural stories transmit values, construct which traits are deemed desirable and undesirable, and shape behavior, making their work not merely art for its own sake, but deeply political.

Redefining Guadalupe

Many artists have transformed Guadalupe’s image from a chaste, docile, martyr into an empowered feminist icon. One of the first revisionist images was an etching by San Francisco-based visual artist Ester Hernandez in 1975. “La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos,” displayed in Figure 5.4.1, features a young Guadalupe with an unwavering gaze framed by her long dark hair. She is dressed in a black belt karate uniform, her fists clenched, and one leg is powerfully kicking towards anyone or anything who would harm los Xicanos. Hernandez received praise and backlash for her artwork, including death threats, as did Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Alma López for the digital collage “Our Lady” created nearly 25 years later, displayed in Figure 5.4.2. Like Hernández, López portrayed the Catholic icon as a modern, familiar, corporeal woman. López’s version is a poised brown-skinned Virgen adorned in roses and a Coyolxauhqui cape, with hands-on-hips and a gaze intently focused on the viewer. She stands barefoot on a black crescent moon held up by a bare-breasted female cherub with monarch butterfly wings. The print was part of the CyberArte: Tradition Meets Technology exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2001. Organized attempts to censor the image were led by Roman Catholic clergy and Chicano nationalists who claimed the piece was overtly sexual and therefore sacrilegious. News of the controversy spread online across the U.S. and Mexico, consequently making López and her apparition world-famous. Through artistic reimagining, López created a cultural sign of queer Chicana desire––an action that has been taken up by many other Chicana artists, which is often met with hostility.

Figure 5.4.1: “La Virgen de Guadalupe Defendiendo los Derechos de los Xicanos (Ester Hernandez)” by gozamos is licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

Figure 5.4.2: “Our Lady (Alma Lopez)” by gozamos is licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

Reenvisioning Malintzín

Another icon has been central in feminist cultural activism. The story of La Malinche, also known as Malintzín Tenepal, Malinalli, and Doña Marina, has been taken up in a number of essays, poems, and artwork in divergent ways. Chicana author and publisher Norma Alarcón points out that Chicano and Mexicano men’s representation of La Malinche is vastly different than that of Chicana feminists. Men’s patriarchal interpretations of Malinche tend to focus on her betrayal vis-à-vis her sexuality, assigning the role of servitude to Chicanas/Mexicanas, particularly those in heterosexual relationships. Embodied by La Malinche, betrayal itself is coded as female. Alarcón argues that Malintzín has become a “reference point not only for controlling, interpreting or visualizing women but also to wage a domestic battle of stifling proportions.”³⁹ The impacts of this myth are vast. As the primary transmitters of culture, women are not exempt from reproducing misogynistic representations, which can manifest as self-hatred. If we are expected to love and emulate Guadalupe and her virtues, according to binary thinking we must hate and reject La Malinche and those aspects within ourselves that we share. These are the representations of La Malinche that Chicana feminists have sought to undo and revise.  

In Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero (1993) identify four themes that describe the work of Chicanas who have written about Malintzín. These include

1. Refusal to blame the victim. Malintzín was an Indigenous woman who was sold into slavery by her family and later taken captive by the conquistador Cortes. She was a victim of both historical and political circumstances. 
2. Representative of the conquest of Indigenous Mexico. The revival of Malintzín as central to the process of mestizaje elevates her to the status of the cultural mother, a complex woman representing Chicanas/os Native roots.⁴⁰ 
3. Translation and code-switching. Chicana writers identify parallels in their own experiences with those of Malinche as a translator and cultural intermediary. She too was caught between two worlds––her own culture and that of the dominant Spanish settler culture. Chicanas identify with acts of cultural and linguistic negotiation and interpretation. 
4. Agency and survival. Chicana writers reinterpret Malintzín’s story in a more nuanced way, pointing out that although she was young and enslaved, she was an active subject who made conscious decisions that shaped her own life and made history, not simply a passive victim of sexual conquest. In fact, “it is in her capacity as intercessor and helper that La Malinche takes on the attributes of the Virgin of Guadalupe.”⁴¹

Two noteworthy poetic examples include “Como Duele” by Adalijza Sosa-Riddell and “La Malinche” by Carmen Tafolla, composed in 1973 and 1978 respectively. They are part of a larger body of work that emerged during El Movimiento that seek to reformulate Chicana identity, history, and cultural politics. In the post-movement years, La Virgen de Guadalupe and La Malinche continue to be powerful symbols of Chicana representation. 

Sidebar: Poetry

“Como Duele” by Adalijza Sosa-Riddell⁴²

Ese, vato, I saw you today          [Hey, buddy]
en Los y Sacra
en Santa Barbara, Sanfra
and everywhere else.
You walked, Chicano chulo,
eagle on your jacket,
y “carnales y carnalas,”                [brothers and sisters]
Y “Que Viva la Raza.”

But where were you when
I was looking for myself?
As if I didn't know.

Where the MAN and
all his pendejadas?                      [stupidity]
sent you,
     To Dartmouth, Los Angeles City College,
     Barbers School, La Pinta,
     Korea, and Vietnam; too many of you
     returned wrapped como enchiladas
     in red, white, and blue.

A Chicano at Dartmouth?
I was at Berkeley, where,
there were too few of us
and even less of you.
I'm not even sure
that I really looked for you.

I heard from many rucos               [old people]
that you
would never make it.
You would hold me back;
From What?
From what we are today?
“Y QUE VIVA”
Pinche, como duele ser Malinche.   [How it hurts to be Malinche]

My name was changed, por la ley.  [by the law]
Probrecitos, they believed in me,
That I was white enough
to stay forever,
that I would never find you again.

I found you, Chicano,
but only for a moment,
Never para siempre.                      [forever]
Temilotzin died the morning after,
Malinche.
It's too late.

The world does not wait
for indecision,
neither do Chicanos.

And mis pobres padres                   [my poor parents]
taught me
not to hurt
others too much,
Malinche, pinche,
forever with me;
     I was born out of you,
     I walk beside you,
     bear my children with you,
     for sure, I’ll die
     alone with you.
Perhaps I died before,
when I said good-bye
al barrio y al Cruiser.
He went to road camp,
por grifo y peleonero.                      [for drugs and fighting]
While I was saved––
for what?

Pinche, como duele ser Malinche.
Pero sabes, ese,
what keeps me from shattering
into a million fragments?
It's that sometimes,
you are el hijo de la Malinche, too.

“La Malinche” by Carmen Tafolla⁴³

Yo soy la Malinche.

My people called me Malintzín Tenepal
the Spaniards called me Doña Marina

I came to be known as Malinche
     and Malinche came to mean traitor.

they called me––chingada
                                        Chingada.
(Ha––¡Chingada! ¡Screwed!)

         Of noble ancestry, for whatever that means,
I was sold into slavery by MY ROYAL FAMILY––so
that my brother could get my inheritance.

…And then the omens began––a god, a new civi-
lization, the downfall of our empire.
         And you came.
         My dear Hernán Cortés, to share your “civi-

lization”––to play a god, . . . and I began to dream… 
                                                  I saw
                                                    and I acted.

I saw our world 
          And I saw yours 
                    And I saw–– 
                                        another.

And yes––I helped you––against Emperor Moctezuma
Xocoyotzín himself.
I became Interpreter, Advisor, and lover.
          They could not imagine me dealing on a level
                         with you––so they said I was raped, used
                                                            chingada
                                                                ¡Chingada!

But I saw our world
                    and your world
                              and another.

No one else could see.
         Beyond one world, none existed.
And you yourself cried the night
the city burned
     and burned at your orders.
The most beautiful city on earth
                                   in flames,
You cried broken tears the night you saw
                                   your destruction.
My homeland ached within me
                    (but I saw another).

Another world––
          a world yet to be born.
And our child was born… 
          and I was immortalized Chingada!

Years later, you took away my child (my sweet
mestizo new world child)
          to raise him in your world
          You still didn’t see.
                    You still didn’t see.
And history would call me
                                             Chingada. 

But Chingada I was not.
          Not tricked, not screwed, not traitor.
For I was not traitor to myself––
          I saw a dream
                    and I reached it.
                                   Another world……… 

                                                                 la raza.
                                                                  la raaaaa-zaaaaa………

---

Footnotes

³⁹ Norma Alarcón,  “Chicana’s Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd edition, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 182.

⁴⁰ For a nuanced discussion of this topic see Sheila Marie Contreras, “From La Malinche to Coatlicue: Chicana Indigenist Feminism and Mythic Native Women,” in Blood Lines: Myth, Indigenism, and Chicana/o Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 105-132.  

⁴¹ Tey Diana Rebolledo and Eliana S. Rivero, eds. Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993), 193.

⁴² From Rebolledo and Rivero, Infinite Divisions, 213-215. Originally published in El Grito VII, no. 1 (September 1973): 76-78.

⁴³ From Rebolledo and Rivero, Infinite Divisions, 198-199. Originally published in Canto al Pueblo: An Anthology of Experiences (San Antonio, Texas: Penca Books).