Newsletter 2004 (Volume 24.2)

Feministas U n i d a s s Karen Díaz Reátegui A Coalition of Feminist Scholars in Spanish, Spanish-American, Luso-Brazilian, Afro-Latin American, and U.S. Latina/o Studies 1 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 About the Artist Karen Díaz Reátegui, periodista y fotógrafa, nació en Lima, Perú. Estudió la licenciatura en Ciencias de la Comunicación, y estudios graduados de periodismo en la universidad de San martín de Porres en Lima. Asimismo, ejerció la docencia universitaria en dicha universidad en los cursos de producción de televisión y fotografía. En televisión, trabajó como productora de programas culturales de crítica de cine y literatura para la Televisión Nacional del Perú (TNP). Sus intereses artísticos involucran también la danza contemporánea, gracias a la cual participó como bailarina en diversos montajes interdisciplinarios, involucrando la pintura, la poesía y la fotografía. Su experiencia en el campo fotográfico incluye fotografía fija para el film televisivo Bajo el mismo cielo (dirigido por Aldo Salvini, 1995) e investigación fotográfica para el libro Base Tokio: la crisis de los rehenes, compilación fotográfica sobre la crisis de los rehenes tomados por los terroristas del MRTA, publicado por el diario El Comercio, en 1997. También ha participado en diferentes exposiciones organizadas por el Instituto de Arte Fotográfico en Lima y Cuzco, Perú: “EROS-NU”. Instituto de Arte Fotográfico. Cuzco, 2004; “Color”. Galería del Banco de Comercio. Lima, 2000; “Erótica II”. Galería L’imaginaire, Alianza Francesa. Lima, 1999; “Erótica I”. Galería de Arte John Harriman, Asociación Cultural Peruano Británica. Lima, 1998; “Nuevas visiones” . Galería de Arte John Harriman, Asociación Cultural Peruano Británica. Lima, 1996; “Autorretratos”. Galería del Banco de Comercio. Lima, Perú 1995. Actualmente, y luego de concluir una maestría en literatura en la Universidad de Georgia, Díaz Reátegui se encuentra realizando un doctorado en estudios culturales en el Departamento de Lengua y Literatura en Arizona State University. Feministas Unidas 2 Pages 29 - 37 3 Pages Page 6 - 13 Pages 1 - 6 Feministas Unidas members at MLA Sessions (14-15) Announcements (16) Reviews (17-28 ) Feministas Unidas MLA Conference Papers (29-41) Pages 38 - 48 Pages 14 - 8 Page About theArtist (1) Index (2) Letter from the Current President (3) Letter from the Incoming President (4-5) Letter from the Editor (6) Feministas Unidas Essay Prize (7) Feministas Unidas Annual Treasurer's Report (8) Feministas Unidas at he MLA (9) Noticias/News (10 -11) Publications (12-13) Michelle Joffroy, "Feminism, Youth Culture and Resistance in Rojo amanecer: Allegories of Citizenship and Affiliation in Mexico 1968" (29-32) Ann Sittig, "Contemporary Mayan Women Speak of Peace, Resistance and Citizenship" (33-37) Roselyn Costantino, "Transformative Pedagogies for Peace and Social Justice" (38-41) Membership Form (42) Membership List (43-48) Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Carta de la Presidenta November 2004 Dear Feministas Unidas Colleagues, I am happy to have this opportunity by means of our newsletter to put down a few words of appreciation and closure as I finish my term as President of Feministas Unidas. It has been a great pleasure and lots of fun to work with the other members of the Executive Committee during the past four years while I was Vice-President and then President. My warmest thanks go to the wonderful colleagues whose steady efforts keep our organization vital and functioning smoothly: Cynthia Tompkins, whose infinite patience and skill make our newsletter possible; Candyce Leonard, on whom we all rely not only for accurate membership and financial information, but for wise counsel on a host of issues; Patricia Greene, who served most capably as Vice-President and got our Essay Contest off to a strong start; and most recently Margarita Vargas, who has done such a great job as Vice President and is now ready for her term as President. A huge thank you and “un fuerte abrazo” to them all. Margarita’s letter below outlines exciting new initiatives and raises the issues that Feministas Unidas must discuss and resolve during the next few years. Our upcoming 25th anniversary will be an ideal opportunity to celebrate what we have accomplished and map out a strong future for the organization. The recruitment of new members and the development of new leadership are ongoing tasks that all of us can contribute to achieving. In closing, let me say again how much I have enjoyed the past four years on the Executive Committee, and how much I look forward to maintaining a strong commitment to and involvement in Feministas Unidas. I sign off with warm expressions of friendship and appreciation to all of our members, and our long list of officers, past and present. Beth E. Jorgensen Feministas Unidas 4 Carta de de la la nueva nueva presidenta presidenta Carta Dear Colleagues and Friends: First of all, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Beth Jörgensen for having assumed the leadership of the organization for three years. She deserves accolades for having agreed to serve Patricia V. Greene’s term, who in turn regretted not being able to fulfill her role as President. As the incoming President of Feministas Unidas, I have two main goals. First, since we are at the eve of our organization’s 25th anniversary, I would like to begin the process of editing a collection of essays of feminist readings in the five areas the organization represents: Spanish, Spanish-American, Luso-Brazilian, Afro-Latin American, and U.S. Hispanic Studies. My idea is to include seminal essays that initiated feminist studies in our respective fields as well as unpublished scholarship that points to new directions. Therefore, I would like to invite current and past members to submit to me abstracts and/ or essays to be considered for publication, as well as suggestions of essays that you deem ground-breaking. The second goal I would like to accomplish is to dedicate the spring issue of our newsletter to Gloria Anzaldúa. Therefore, I would like to extend an invitation to all members of Feministas Unidas to submit either eulogies and/or short statements about how her ideas may have influenced your own scholarship or teaching. In late October, the University of Texas honored the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, if anyone attended any of the events; please submit a summary. At last year’s MLA convention in San Diego, California, I ran the FU meeting and after discussing several possible topics for the pedagogical session, Roselyn Costantino and Dara Goldman offered to organize the panel entitled “Teaching for Peace: Feminisms, Resistance, Citizenship.” We also had a stimulating discussion about the possibility of merging Feministas Unidas and the Asociación Internacional de Literatura Femenina Hispánica. As Cynthia mentioned in the spring 2004 newsletter, this has been an on-going discussion between the two organizations. After the meeting, I took the opportunity to poll various members that I saw throughout the MLA convention and upon my return discussed the issue with the Executive Committee. The following were reasons in favor and against uniting the two organizations. 5 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Letter From The incoming President Reasons to remain separate: 1. FU is an interdisciplinary organization 2. AILFH deals exclusively with Hispanic literature Advantages of a merger: 1. Because many of us already belong to both organizations, we could have one single powerful organization and pay only one set of dues 2. Equal access to the MLA and the AILFH Conference as well as to Letras Femeninas In addition to these practical reasons, there were also personal ones, such as the fact that some women do not want to be labeled feminists, and would prefer not to be associated with FU. It is my feeling that we should respect this position, although it does not mean that we have to stop the dialogue. If you want to share your sentiments, please post them on the list serve. At the convention I also had the honor of representing our organization at the Women’s Caucus. I am happy to report that Feministas Unidas is considered one of the strongest women groups affiliated with the Modern Languages Association. This was quite encouraging and motivating. Finally, if you have taught or are currently teaching film courses, I would invite you to submit syllabi, ideas, notes of caution or anecdotes about your experience to the FU newsletter or the list serve. Some of us are teaching film courses for the first time and would appreciate any information you would like to share. Feministas Unidas 6 Feministas Unidas Letter from the Editor Carta de la editora Queridas/os colegas: ¡Ayer nomás celebrábamos el vigésimo aniversario de Feministas Unidas y ya se nos viene encima el vigésimo quinto! Espero que participen de las convocatorias para los proyectos que menciona nuestra flamante presidenta, Margarita Vargas. Vaya mi agradecimento por haber tomado las actas del Business Meeting de Feministas Unidas en la convención del (MLA) del 2003 Quisiera agradecerle a Beth Jörgensen su apoyo constante durante estos tres años. Con la generosidad que la caracteriza, Beth se encargará del Essay Contest hasta que vice-presidenta habemus. A Candyce Leonard, como siempre, mi reconocimiento por su metódica, eficiente y silenciosa actividad de tesorera. Vaya mi más profundo reconocimiento también a la talentosa fotógrafa y periodista Karen Díaz Reátegui, sobre todo porque ha tomado tiempo de sus estudios para hacer posible esta edición. Es muy grato ver cómo van progresando las amistades que resultan de proyectos comunes. ¡Felicitaciones a Rose McEwen por su tenure! Asimismo, es reconfortante ver cuánto están publicando nuestras/os colegas, ya que todo contribuye a crear un corpus crítico sobre la mujer en la literatura (peninsular, latinoamericana, chicana, latina, luso-brasileña). Espero que apoyen a nuestras colegas tanto en las sesiones del MLA y especialmente en la de Feministas Unidas . Creo que el tema es fundamental y muy apropiado, especialmente dada la situación actual. Lamento no poder asistir, durante ese período estaré tomando un cursillo para ser madrina de bautismo en la Patagonia… Ojalá que el sacerdote no me excomulgue antes… Habrá elección de vice-presidenta, ya que dos de nuestras colegas han sido realmente generosas. La haremos electrónicamente porque no tengo los statements de ambas. Vaya mi más sincero reconocimiento por ofrecerse a servir a esta comunidad. Supongo que la situación actual me hace comprender lo afortunadas/os que somos al tener estos ‘imagined communities,’ que para mí siempre han estado vinculados a la vida académica de este país. Tal como lo menciona Margarita, en mis funciones en el comité del MLA sobre la condición de la mujer, me ha sido grato comprobar que se nos considera una de las más poderosas organizaciones afiliadas. Por favor, contribuyan a que continúe así. Pasen la voz, enlisten a sus estudiantes, entreguemosela fortalecida y renovada a la nueva generación. Finalmente les deseo ¡Felices Fiestas! y ¡Que se cumplan todos sus deseos (Quizá no todos, todos, Uds. sabrán cuáles) en el 2005! !Vaya un fuerte abrazo! Cyn 7 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Feministas Unidas Essay Prize The Executive Committee of Feministas Unidas, an allied organization of the MLA, is pleased to announce a call for papers for the Fourth Annual Feministas Unidas Essay Prize competition for scholars in the early stage of their career. Feministas Unidas, founded in 1981, is a coalition of feminist scholars working in the areas of: Spanish, Spanish-American, Luso-Brazilian, Afro-Latin American and U.S. Hispanic Studies.. The Feministas Unidas Essay Prize is awarded for an outstanding unpublished essay of feminist scholarship on women writers in the areas covered by our organization’s mission (see above). The purpose of the essay prize is to promote feminist scholarship on women writers by those who are entering our profession or who are in the early stages of their professional career. The prize is the product of a collaboration between Feministas Unidas and the Asociación Internacional de Literatura Femenina Hispánica. The selection committee is drawn from officers and members of Feministas Unidas and the editorial board of Letras Femeninas. Feministas Unidas reserves the right not to award the prize in a given year. AWARD: $200, and publication of the essay in the December issue of the journal Letras Femeninas. The author of the winning essay must be a member of the Asociación de Literatura Femenina Hispánica at the time of publication of the essay. ELIGIBILITY: Graduate students, instructors, lecturers and untenured assistant professors who are current or new members of Feministas Unidas are eligible to submit their original research for the prize. GUIDELINES: An unpublished paper completed in the year 2004. Length: 18-25 pages, double-spaced, including notes and works cited. Format: MLA style NOTE: Prepare according to instructions for “Anonymous Submissions.” Languages: Spanish or English Deadline for submission: February 28, 2005 Announcement of award: April 15, 2005 SUBMIT: Three hard copies of the essay 200-word abstract of the essay Author’s c.v. Submit all materials to the chair of the selection committee in one of the following ways: 1) Hard copy of all materials listed above and as an e-mail attachment 2) Hard copy of all materials and one copy on diskette MAIL TO: Prof. Beth E. Jörgensen, Feministas Unidas Modern Languages and Cultures Box 270082 University of Rochester Rochester, NY 14627 E-mail: bjgn@mail.rochester.edu Feministas Unidas 8 Treasurer's Treasurer's Report Report END-YEAR TREASURER’S REPORT 2004 Submitted by Candyce Leonard 15 November 2004 The interdisciplinary nature of our organization makes Feministas Unidas unique and allows us to explore a virtually unlimited number of fields of study relating to Hispanic women. Please consider sponsoring a younger scholar or graduate student as a means of professional development. PART ONE: GENERAL FUND Previous Balance Credits (dues, donations & dividends) Subtotal $ 5,715.00 1,225.00 $ 6,950.00 Less $ 599.35 87.50 (1) Spring 2004 newsletter (2) web page formatting General Fund Balance $ 6,253.15 PART TWO: SCHOLARSHIP FUND Previous Balance Plus donations since Spring 2004 newsletter Subtotal Scholarship Fund Balance 9 $ 2,345.00 230.00 $ 2,575.00 $ 2,575.00 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Feministas Unidas at the MLA Feministas Unidas at the MLA Thursday, 30 December 738. Business Meeting of Feministas Unidas 1:45 – 3:00 p.m., Congress C, Loews Presiding: Margarita Vargas, State Univ. of New York, Buffalo Wednesday, 29 December 546. Teaching for Peace: Feminisms, Resistance, Citizenship 3:30-4:45 p.m., Commonwealth Hall A1,Loews Program arranged by Feministas Unidas. Presiding : Roselyn Costantino, Penn State Univ., Altoona 1. " Teaching Peace: Feminism, Youth culture and Resistance," Michelle Joffroy, Smith Coll. 2. " Contemporary Mayan Women Speak of Peace, Resistance and Citizenship," Ann Sitting Metropolitan Community Coll., Nebraska 3. "Talking Dirty in the United States University Classroom: Pedagogies of Peace and Humanity," Roselyn Costantino, Respondent: Dara Goldman, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana Feministas Unidas 10 Noticias/News Anita Vélez Mitchell Noticias On Friday November 19 at 8 p.m. The Pan American Symphony Orchestra performed at the West Park Church located at 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, New York. November 19th commemorates the discovery of Puerto Rico and the concert is a Homage to a Puerto Rican Artist, a consummate performer, writer and director whose remarkable career spans more than five decades. Miryam Criado Criado nos recuerda que hace casi dos años les pudió consejo sobre la aceptación que tendría publicar un libro para estudiantes de español en su tercer o cuarto año sobre escritoras hispanoamericanas, españolas y latinas. Sus cartas y sus consejos la animaron a comprometerse con este proyecto y por fin esta el libro terminado. Les envía la información por si quieren solicitar una copia gratuita a Prentice Hall. http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/0,1144,0131838229,00.html Susana Chávez Silverman Chávez Silverman (Pomona College) nos comunica que su recently published book, Killer Crónicas: Bilingual Memories (Wisconsin, Oct. 2004), was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly. The review can be seen on amazon.com, donde también se puede pedir el libro, for a ganga price. Aviéntense, compañeras! Susana gave a reading from the book at Bard College in September; in October the book was presented (by Ana María Shua and Andrea Ostrov) at the Biblioteca Nacional, where Susana also gave a reading. David William Foster Recent feminist and gender-marked publications: “Teatro argentino - espacio urbano - visibilidad gay: postulaciones para una teorización.” Estrategias postmodernas y postcoloniales en el teatro latinoamericano actual: hibridez-medialidad-cuerpo. Ed. Alfonso de Toro. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert Verlag, 2004. 303-15. “Phoenix as Dystopia in Cherríe Moraga’s Hungry Woman.” Hispanic Journal 23.2 (2002 [i.e., 2004]): 91101. “Más allá de la visibilidad gay en Buenos Aires.” Las ciudades latinoamericanas en el nuevo [des]orden mundial. Ed. Patricio Navia and Marc Zimmerman. Mexico, D.F.: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004. 125-32. “El lenguaje patriarcal, el lenguaje de los idiotas: La escualida familia de Lola Arias.” ArtelertA, No. 8 (2004): 19-22. 11 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Noticias/News “Dreaming in Feminine: Grete Stern’s Photomontages and the Parody of Psychoanalysis.” Ciberletras 10 (2003): 10 pages. http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v.10/foster.htm “Queering Latin American Popular Culture.” Contemporary Latin American Cultural Studies. Ed. Stephen Hart and Richard Young. London: Arnold; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 253-65. “Eva Perón en drag/el drag de Eva Perón.” Arteletra 2.6 (2003): 26-28. “Notas sobre la dinámica de la homofobia.” Portales; Boletín del Colegio de Sonora 43 (2003): 6-7. “Review essay on Daniela Rossell, Ricas y famosas.” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 32 (2003): 217-22. “Defying the Masculinist Gaze: Gabriela Liffschitz’s Recursos humanos.” Chasqui 32.1 (May 2003): 10-24. Luzma Umpierre Varios de sus poemas y, en especial, su diálogo poético con Sandra Maria Esteves, aparecerán en una nueva antología de American Literature de Houghton Mifflin en 2005. Umpierre será homenajeada por el Puerto Rican Literature and Culture Discussion Group el 29 de diciembre 2004 durante la convención del MLA a las 7 p.m. en el hotel Loews. Finalmente, Umpierre dio una lectura de poesía en Middlebury College durante el verano de 2004. Fue nominada para el premio “6 Who Care’” en la comunidad de Maine. Melissa Dinverno In December 2003 Dinverno received the Women’s Caucus of the Modern Languages’ 2003 Florence Howe Award for Outstanding Feminist Scholarship for her article, “Gendered Geographies: Remapping the Space of the Woman Intellectual in Concha Méndez’s Memorias habladas, memorias armadas”. The article originally appeared in Revista de estudios hispánicos. (Jan 2003) and will be reprinted in Widening the Discourse, a volume that collects feminist scholarship from the past ten years. It will be edited by Roseanna Dufault and Mihoko Suzuki and is under consideration by the MLA editorial board. Rose McEwen McEwen received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor at State University of New York at Geneseo. She is also the coordinator of SUNY Geneseo´s Latin American Studies program. Feministas Unidas 12 Publications Publications Mujeres mirando al sur, Zulema Moret, ed. “¿Qué es el sur en la memoria del tiempo vivido, en los caminos atravesados para salvar la vida, en la noción de otredad desde la lengua que se hereda?” se pregunta la editora de este libro. Una antología de poetas sudamericanas residentes en USA intenta responder algunos de algunos de los temas que circundan este interrogante: el viaje, el nomadismo, los exilios, los cuerpos, la enfermedad, la identidad, los crecimientos. Asómate a leerlas, encontrarás sus voces a través de sus poemas y de entrevistas que nos explican su poética, sus obsesiones, las influencias y las búsquedas que las caracterizan a lo largo de su trabajo creativo. Marjorie Agosín María Auxiliadora Alvarez Carmen Aravena Lilianet Brintrup Hertling Mariela Dreyfus Ivon Gordon Vailakis Victoria Guerrero Peirano Consuelo Hernández Gladys Ilarregui Zulema Moret María Negroni Alicia Partnoy Emma Sepúlveda Rocío Silva Santiesteban Cecilia Vicuña Antonieta Villamil Lila Zemborain ISBN: 84-7839-322-6/Editorial Torremozas, Madrid, 2004 Si deseas comprar este libro puedes encargarlo a Zulema Moret (moretz@gvsu.edu) o por teléfono al: (616)-791-1681/ Precio: 15 usd www.torremozas.com/autores/miranalsur.htm www.elcultural.es/HTML/20041021/Letras/LETRAS-SEM/Otrasvoces.asp 13 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Publications The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitional Spain de Lisa Vollendorf saldrá en marzo de 2005 con Vanderbilt University Press. El feminismo reivindicado de Lisa Vollendorf, saldrá en julio de 2005 con Icaria (Barcelona) en la serie Mujeres y culturas. Antología de escritoras argentinas de Maria Claudia Andre (ed.) Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2004. Esta antología intenta rescatar para la Argentina y el resto de los países hispanohablantes una imagen del decir y el pensar femenino en sus diferentes manifestaciones literarias y, por su medio, presentar no una sino múltiples y variadas aproximaciones de una identidad genérica en lo que respecta a la vida, la cultura y la sociedad contemporánea. Con ello no se pretende separar o segregar la literatura escrita por mujeres del resto de la producción cultural, pero sí crear un texto en el cual se enfatice y celebre la diversidad de temas, estilos y técnicas delineadas por las escritoras más destacadas en la Argentina de hoy. Se reúnen aquí obras de poetas, dramaturgas y narradoras sin obedecer a un orden o un eje temático con el cual se las defina. Cada segmento contiene de una breve bibliografía, una entrevista personal y una selección de una o varias obras escogidas por las escritoras mismas. Las entrevistas son un medio de incorporar la voz y la cosmovisión de las autoras y de brindar al lector una perspectiva individual que permita relacionar a cada escritora con el contenido de su obra a un nivel que trascienda lo textual. Podría decirse que la fibra que conecta a cada una de las autoras aquí incluidas es primordialmente su postura iconoclasta e innovadora con respecto a los cánones tradicionales formulados en torno de la expresión artística y literaria. Cada una de las autoras, además de haber editado una gran cantidad de obras y de haber logrado un amplio reconocimiento tanto dentro como fuera del país, continúa escribiendo y participando activamente en la producción cultural argentina. Las autoras incluidas son: Angelica Gorodischer, Luisa Valenzuela, Maria Rosa Lojo, Liliana Heker, Diana Bellessi, Maria Negroni, Mirta Rosenberg, Susana Torres Molina, Aida Bortnik, Griselda Gambaro y Diana Raznovich. Reina de otro cielo. Modernidad y autoritarismo en la obra de Pedro Lemebel. Bernardita Llanos. Santiago: Editorial LOM, 2004. Acaba de salir el libro Reina de otro cielo. Modernidad y autoritarismo en la obra de Pedro Lemebel (2004) en Santiago en la editorial LOM del que soy coautora. Es el primer libro de crítica que se escribe sobre su obra como escritor, performer y activista homosexual. En mi capítulo hago una lectura feminista de algunas de sus crónicas urbanas donde discuto la relación masculinidad, violencia y estado en la ciudad neoliberal. Feministas Unidas 14 Members of Feministas Unidas at MLA Monday, 27 December 34. Poet Profiling in Spain and Latin America 7:00-8:15 p.m., Anthony, Loews 2. “Nicolás Guillén and Poet Profiling,” Frances Betty Jaeger. 98. Sons catalan: Popular Music in Catalonia, 1900-2004 8:30-9:45 a.m., Jefferson, Loews 3. “Surviving Success in contemporary Catalonia: The Mainstream, Nationalism, and Catalan Rock,” María Van Liew, West Chester Univ. Tuesday, 28 December 124. Las fronteras del estudio mexicanista, el estudio mexicanista de la frontera 10:15-11:30 a.m. Jefferson, Loews Presiding: Debra Ann Castillo, Cornell Univ. 171. FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) in Creative Writing: Activism and Aesthetics 12:00 noon-1:15 p.m., Jefferson, Loews 3. “The Erotics of Joy: Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and the FGM Debate,” Jennifer Browdy De Hernadez, Simon’s Rock Coll. Of Bard. 177. Community college Scholarship: Highlighting Exemplary Project 12:00 noon-1:15 p.m., 413, Philadelphia Marriott 1. “Use of a Mayan Literary Expression Web Page,” Ann L. Sitting, Metropolitan Community Coll., NE. 178. Gender and Nation 12:00 noon-1:15 p.m., 203-B, Convention Center Presiding: Maryellen Bieder, Indiana Univ., Bloomington. 3. “Afterthoughts,” Roberta Johnson, Univ. of Kansas. 207. Modernity, Aesthetics, and Gender in Modern and contemporary Spanish Literature 1:45-3:00 p.m., Congress A, Loews 2. ‘configurations of Modernity in Fin de Siècle Spain: Emilia Pardo Bazán’s Literary Essays”, Iñigo SánchezLlama, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette. 273. Gender Inside Cuba: The Fiction of Mirta Yáñez 3:30 – 4:45 p.m., Washington C, Loews A special session; session leader: Sara E. Cooper, California State Univ. Chico. 1. “Transgender Transgression in La hora de los mameyes”, Sara E. Cooper. 277. Translation and Psychoanalysis. 3:30 – 4:45 p.m., Congress A, Loews Respondent: Carol S. Maier, Kent State Univ., Kent. 15 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Wednesday, 29 December 377. Homage to Manuel Vázquez Montalbán 10:15 – 11:30 a.m., Regency Ballroom C1, Loews 1. “Questions of Language and Nationality in Marsé and Vázquez Montalbán”, Maryellen Bieder, Indiana Univ., Bloomington. 513. Science and the Comedia 1:45 – 3:00 p.m., Commonwealth Hall A1, Loews 1. “The Scientific Arts of Theater: Early Cosmological and Biosocial Accounts of the World as theater in lope and Calderón”, Catherine M. Connor, Univ. of Vermont 520. Interdisciplinary in Action III: Performing Interdisciplinary (Gypsies, Scientists, Activists) 3:30 – 4:45 p.m., Regency Ballroom C1, Loews Speakers: Lou Charnon – Deutsch, State Univ. of New York, Stony Brook 546. Teaching for Peace: Feminisms, Resistance, and Citizenship 3:30 – 4:45 p.m., Commonwealth Hall A1, Loews 1. “Teaching Peace: Feminism, youth culture, and Resistance”, Michelle Joffroy, Smith Coll. 2. “ Contemporary Mayan Women Speak of Peace, Resistance, and Citizenship”, Ann L. Sittig, Metropolitan Community Coll., NE 3. “Talking dirty in the United States Classroom: Pedagogies of peace and Humanity”, Roselyn Constantino 596. Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia: Homenaje a Luz María Umpierre 7:15 – 8:30 p.m., Congress C, Loews 4. “Luz María Umpierre’s Rocochet of Eradicated Remembrances”, Arleen Chiclana, Univ. of Michigan, Dearborn 612. Ethnicity in the Hood 9:00 – 10:15 p.m., 303, Philadelphia Marriott Presiding: Luzma Umpierre, Auburn, ME 1. “El tango merengue”, Ruth Irupe Sanabria, Perth Amboy, NJ Thursday, 30 December 683. Transoceanic Perspectives on Twentieth Century Peninsular Studies 12:00 noon – 1:15 p.m., Lescaze, Loews Presiding: Roberta Johnson, Univ. of Kansas. 708. Literature and Citizenship: Caricatures, Tertulias, and Asilos in the Work of Galdós 12:00 noon – 1:15 p.m., Commonwealth hall D, Loews 1. “La desproporción visual en las caricaturas galdosianas de los años 70: Técnicas formales y procedimientos retóricos en el contexto del neokantismo”, Iñigo Sánchez-Llama, Purdue Univ. 738. Business Meeting of Feministas Unidas 1:45 – 3:00 p.m., Congress C, Loews Presiding: Margarita Vargas, State Univ. of New York, Buffalo Feministas Unidas 16 Announcements Twentieth- Century Literature and Culture Conference University of Louisville, Feb. 2005 Feministas Unidas Session 3: “Female Body/National Identity in Latin American Culture and Literature” Organizer and Chair: Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey, Texas State University – San Marcos 1. David William Foster, Arizona State University “The Feminization of Social Space in Patrícia Galvão’s Parque Industrial.” 2. Bernardita Llanos, Denison College “Género interdicto en Chile: Berenger y Eltit.” 3. Susana S. Martínez, DePaul University “Mediated Images: Visual Representations of Mayan Women in Modern Day Guatemala.” 4. Cristina Ferreira-Pinto Bailey “Brazil’s ethnic profile in the repressed female body.” CONGRESOS Dis/location: Writing Exile / Migrancy / Nomadism / Bordercrossing May 5-7, 2005Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) Dept. of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics Deadline for submission of abstracts (200 words): February 1, 2005 Papers or creative works may be presented in Spanish, English, French or Portuguese Contact e-mails: hhazelto@alcor.concordia.ca, gramirez@alcor.concordia.ca Website (includes Call for Papers in HTML, Word and PDF): http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/cmll/Call_for_papers_Dislocation.htm La Asociación de Escritoras de España y las Américas (1300-1800) tuvo su última reunión en la Universidad de Houston durante el pasado mes de octubre de 2004. Se invitan abstracts para el próximo congreso, el cual tomará lugar en Georgetown University en septiembre de 2006. Para más información, favor de visitar nuestra página web: http://www.aeeahome.org/ o mandarnos un mensaje a aeeamail@yahoo.com. 17 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Reviews ILUMINACIONES Ofrenda de propia piel, de Alicia Kozameh. Alción Editora, Córdoba, 2004, 125 páginas. Ofrenda de propia piel reúne ocho relatos escritos entre 1992 y 2003. Si están separados por el tiempo de su elaboración, esos textos convergen en lo que constituye un eje: la reconstrucción de la experiencia carcelaria, o más bien de cómo un grupo de mujeres logró sobrevivir a la prisión, y la reflexión sobre sus efectos. Ése es por otra parte el núcleo de la literatura de Alicia Kozameh (Rosario, 1953), como se aprecia en sus obras anteriores, y la proyección de su circunstancia de ex prisionera política de un gobierno constitucional y la última dictadura militar argentina (1975-1978). La ficción, más que el testimonio directo, es la instancia de aproximación a ese mundo; al mismo tiempo, en vez de la ficción convencional, que neutraliza el alcance de la palabra y la separa de cualquier efecto en la práctica, hay una reinvención de ese ámbito de pertenencia, en el cruce de memoria e imaginación, que interpela y moviliza al lector. Según se lee en “Acumulación”, el texto que oficia de introducción, Kozameh armó el libro como quien enhebra cuentas sueltas. “Bosquejo de alturas” y “Último mensaje” se articulan alrededor de un momento preciso: el golpe militar de marzo de 1976, cuando los guardianes deciden interrumpir el contacto de las presas con el exterior, mediante la prohibición de las visitas y del envío de cartas y libros. “El encuentro. Pájaros” recupera otros hechos, pero se sitúa en una etapa posterior, en la que esas mujeres recuperaron su libertad y planean reunirse por primera vez fuera de la cárcel, una cita con el propósito de continuar la resistencia que las unió y las puso al abrigo de la destrucción. Este texto formula interrogantes que se extienden hasta el presente y de esta manera vincula los anteriores con el resto, y en particular con “Vientos de rotación perpendicular”, que vuelve sobre los episodios de secuestro y desaparición, y “Alcira en amarillos”, donde se ensamblan, como en un rompecabezas, fragmentos de la vida de una mujer y su caída en la cárcel, caída en sentido literal, dado que la prisión es descripta como un embudo y quien es detenido desaparece. “Dos días en la relación de mi cuñada Inés con este mundo perentorio”, “Mungos mungo” y “La forma” abordan una cuestión conexa: los interrogantes y las respuestas actuales, las formas en que el pasado es parte del presente. “He aquí el collar que soy –concluye Kozameh-. Las cuentas de las que estoy hecho”. Y no se trata de una simple figura sino de algo que formula de manera nítida la manera en que se concibe, y la manera en que concibe su propia escritura. En principio hay que observar que la historia no está cerrada. Kozameh declara una especie de insatisfacción (“quiero mejores cuentas”, dice). La memoria supone siempre un relato del presente, y aquí se señala además un “dudoso estado de equilibrio” entre las partes que la componen. También son cuentas pendientes, entonces, no tanto en el sentido de asuntos que resolver o diferencias que ajustar como en el de hechos que han quedado abiertos y pertenecen ya más al futuro que al pasado. Este libro es un recuento, agrega Kozameh, y de inmediato evoca la otra acepción de aquella palabra: “recuento es lo que, dos veces al día, con cada cambio de guardia, en las cárceles, llevan a cabo los celadores para asegurarse de que nadie se fugó, se burló de ellos, logró trasponer los mandatos impuestos”. Algo que sólo se aprende en sótanos, podría decirse, parafraseándola. Esa frase condensa la situación de la prisionera –en la experiencia de estos relatos- con sus guardianes. Las presas despliegan una resistencia organizada, en la que el engaño y la burla sutil del régimen carcelario son armas decisivas: se proponen “vigilar a los que las vigilan”, como se dice en “Bosquejo de alturas”. Feministas Unidas 18 Reviews Según advirtió Kozameh en un reportaje1 , la escritura, un recurso importante en esa situación límite, había sido igualmente necesaria antes de la cárcel: “Escribir fue, desde muy chica, la manera de entrar en contacto con el mundo, o de aislarme de él cuando no me proporcionaba placer”. Esa función antitética está presente en la escritura tal como se producía en la cárcel: era el modo de conectarse con las demás, con las mujeres de otras cárceles y con el exterior, a través del texto a veces cifrado, a veces forzosamente transparente (“Último mensaje”) que se confiaba a una carta; y también parte de aquello que se opuso a la cárcel. En “Bosquejo de alturas” se relata cómo las presas formaron una biblioteca, con textos que transcribían en papeles de cigarrillos y que debían guardar en sus propios cuerpos. Para ellas, se lee, “la biblioteca es indispensable. Contiene sus pensamientos. Su caudal intelectual. Su aprendizaje. La enseñanza de unas a otras. El intercambio. La justificación de resistir. La biblioteca confirma la existencia de todas”. Esa acción tenía lugar en el marco de un sistema de comunicación clandestino, con el que las presas organizaban grupos de estudio, preveían situaciones de emergencia y trataban de mantenerse al tanto de los hechos que ocurrían afuera. La escritura debía mantenerse oculta, “sobre papeles ínfimos, enroscados y vueltos a enroscar, envueltos con papel celofán de atados de cigarrillos, y vueltos a envolver con polietileno, sellados con calor, armados del tamaño de un caramelo y mantenidos en nuestras bocas por si en alguna emergencia había que tragárselos”. La experiencia de la cárcel, por otra parte, proporcionó también una forma: la carta –como aquellas que se escribían en prisión- es un género frecuente en la narrativa de Kozameh. Es posible, incluso, que su estilo sesgado, los círculos que traza la narración en su desarrollo, sean derivaciones de las estrategias que se tomaban al escribir en la cárcel, cuando había que despistar a los censores que leían las cartas antes de que salieran al exterior. Los escritores se distinguen por el uso que hacen de ciertas palabras, por la manera en que liberan a ciertas palabras de los lugares comunes y las escriben como si esas palabras fueran utilizadas por primera vez, como si inventaran esas palabras. En el caso de Alicia Kozameh una de esas palabras podría ser luz. La cárcel era el sitio de la oscuridad, en sentido estricto; aquí se habla del “aire oscurecido”, se habla desde un sótano y cada vez que se recuerda se desciende a ese sótano. La cárcel, en particular la Alcaidía de Mujeres de Rosario, era un lugar donde las detenidas, entre otras cosas, tenían prohibida la luz. “Fulgores, estallidos, activados en zonas ocultas”, dice la frase inicial y el leitmotiv de “Bosquejo de alturas”, que sitúa precisamente los modos en que emergió aquella luz. Son fulgores que despiden los cuerpos de las presas, como un aura desprendido de sus cabezas y sus manos: “dejan salir a través de su cuero cabelludo y de sus uñas una forma de claridad que las va iluminando y las retroalimenta en el silencio”. Son brillos que iluminan las miradas y también las palabras: “Son algunas palabras. De entendimientos. De desacuerdos. Se rozan, se frotan en el aire. Producen luz”. Esa palabra tiene aquí un sentido específico. “Luz –se dice en ‘Mungos mungo’- no es la del sol. Luz es la legítima y natural claridad o tiniebla con que entendemos la existencia”. Escribir significa iluminar. Y esa luz de la escritura es la que viene de aquel pasado. Son los pequeños gestos que perduran: la rana que una presa cosió “con dedos improvisados antes de la requisa”; el ojo de vaca que vino mezclado con la comida y con el que otra detenida puso en fuga al jefe de los guardias; la sábana que alguien sacó de su cama para que se rearmara el telón y continuara la función de teatro, después de otro torpe abuso; los tres tanques de biromes atesorados bajo la baldosa suelta del baño; el dolor de muelas que una noche tuvo despiertas a todas las presas. Lo que le pasó a una les pasó a todas. Las imágenes del pasado, dice uno de los personajes de Ofrenda, son las únicas que pueden otorgar las medidas del presente. El pasado, se lee en otro relato, no es ni más ni menos que el presente. En cuanto leemos nos ponemos en marcha hacia ese pasado. Es decir que el pasado es también parte de lo porvenir, es lo que se perdió y lo que puede ser recuperado, lo que aquí se entrega como ofrenda. Ahora, como antes, 19 Fall 2004 Anita Véle Volume 24.2 Reviews está “la misma necesidad de saltar hacia lo imprevisible y liberarse”. Ese pasado fue sombrío, fue el tiempo de la muerte y de la derrota, pero en aquella misma oscuridad se encendió esa luz poderosa que lograron un grupo de detenidas y que Alicia Kozameh está preservando a través de sus palabras. Una luz tan intensa que, en la lectura, resplandece como un fuego. Hay un poema de Paul Eluard, “Para vivir aquí”, que dice: “Hice un fuego, lo azul me había abandonado./ Un fuego para ser su amigo/ Un fuego para entrar en la noche invernal,/ Para vivir mejor.// Y le di todo aquello que el día me hubo dado”. La luz de la escritura, de Ofrenda de propia piel, es como un fuego porque es algo que reúne, y también algo que abriga, que conforta, y sobre todo cuando la rodea un espacio inclemente u hostil. Alicia Kozameh pone muchos materiales para graduar esa luz, para reavivar ese fuego. Y, a través suyo, las otras mujeres que estuvieron presas y de las que es su memoria. por Osvaldo Aguirre Osvaldo Aguirre (1964) reside en Rosario y trabaja en el diario La Capital como editor del suplemento cultural Señales. Ha publicado Las vueltas del camino (poesía, 1992), Al fuego (poesía, 1994), Velocidad y Resistencia (relato, 1995), La deriva (novela, 1996), Estrella del Norte (novela, 1998), Historias de la mafia en la Argentina (investigación histórica, 2000), El General (poesía, 2000), Enemigos públicos (investigación histórica, 2003) y La Pandilla Salvaje. Butch Cassidy en la Patagonia (investigación histórica, 2004). Review Sandra 2004. 164 (paper) of Julia by Ana María Moix, translated by Kingery. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. pp. ISBN: 0803232357 (cloth); 0803282915 Francisca González Arias, The University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Feministas Unidas The voice of poet and novelist Ana María Moix was one of the most unique that emerged in the late days of the Franco dictatorship and the early years of the transición. The recent publication of Sandra Kingery’s translation of Moix’s 1970 novel Julia now makes this important text available to English-speaking audiences. Aspects of the story narrated by the twenty-year old daughter of the Catalan bourgeoisie are reminiscent of iconic works by numerous Spanish women writers of the late twentieth century: the stifling interiors representative of the oppressive control exercised by Julia’s family recall the atmosphere of Andrea’s Barcelona in Laforet’s Nada; and the interlude Julia spends in the idyllic mountain town where her anarchist grandfather 20 encourages her independence recalls the rural setting of Ana María Matute’s Historias de la Artámila. That the story unfolds during one long night of insomnia brings to mind the frame of Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás, published a few years after Julia. The Reviews Review of Julia by Ana María Moix, translated by Sandra Kingery. University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln. 2004. 164 pp. ISBN: 0803232357 (cloth); 0803282915 (paper) The voice of poet and novelist Ana María Moix was one of the most unique that emerged in the late days of the Franco dictatorship and the early years of the transición. The recent publication of Sandra Kingery’s translation of Moix’s 1970 novel Julia now makes this important text available to English-speaking audiences. Aspects of the story narrated by the twenty-year old daughter of the Catalan bourgeoisie are reminiscent of iconic works by numerous Spanish women writers of the late twentieth century: the stifling interiors representative of the oppressive control exercised by Julia’s family recall the atmosphere of Andrea’s Barcelona in Laforet’s Nada; and the interlude Julia spends in the idyllic mountain town where her anarchist grandfather encourages her independence recalls the rural setting of Ana María Matute’s Historias de la Artámila. That the story unfolds during one long night of insomnia brings to mind the frame of Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás, published a few years after Julia. The autobiographical elements, the narrator’s psychological complexities, and the scathing view of the Catalan bourgeoisie offer significant parallels with the novels of Esther Tusquets, to whom Moix dedicated Julia. Moix’s original voice is evident from the start in the recurring hallucinatory visions that terrorize the protagonist: “gleaming eyes observing her, intently” (2), and in the manner in which the story unfolds. Julia’s consciousness moves back and forth between the present and the past – between her life as a university student at the Faculty of Letters in Barcelona subjected to the tight vigilance of her family, and the past: the child’s efforts to garner some of the attention that her self-absorbed mother lavished on her siblings; the death of her older brother Rafael when she was barely an adolescent; and the seminal event of Julia’s young life, a violent rape at the age of six at the hands of a family friend. That incident is at the root of Julia’s nocturnal fears, her listlessness and detachment, and, as she duly recognizes, her sense of “remaining isolated from everyone else, at the margin, in another world” (152). The horror experienced as a child is to blame as well for her inability to enter into relationships with the opposite sex —the student activist Carlos’s kiss unleashes another nightmare from which Julia awakens only to relive the setting of her rape “a beach, rocks, a sea urchin, the paddle boat floating on the sea” (155). Readers may reproach the author only for the bleakness of her vision. Moix paints a grim picture of a young woman locked into her pain. Though some of the women in Julia’s life alleviate the harshness of her situation, they do not deliver her from it. Eva, her father’s first love, and to whom Julia’s thoughts turn repeatedly at the start of her “long night,” is a college professor who provides Julia with much needed refuge with her offer of work/when she offers her work as an assistant. But when Eva cuts short a telephone call from a distraught Julia, the young woman attempts suicide. While the mysterious nocturnal interlocutor in Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás drew out the protagonist’s imaginative energy, the recurring figure of “little Julia,” in “shorts and navy blue sweater with an anchor drawn on the chest” (43, 44 162 163), that haunts the protagonist of Moix’s novel, prevents her from realizing her creative potential at all levels, dooming her to relive the scene of her ultimate victimization: “the sun beating down, sliding over her skin once again, and an ancient pain inside her body” (161). As dawn, and with it, the novel’s conclusion, approaches, Julia recognizes her helplessness in the face of this “persecuting god”(43, 163). 21 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Reviews Sandra Kingery has produced a highly readable English version despite the challenges of word plays. The maid’s song, which evokes the fear of death in the young Julia —“Cada vez que Aurelia se ponía a cantar si vas a Calatayud . . . Julia recogía ataúd sin poder remediarlo” (Seix Barral: Barcelona, 25)— is rendered ingeniously as “Did You Ever Hear That Coughing Sound,’” which brings to the child’s mind the image of a “coffin” (14). Though Ana María Moix was one of the most original writers of her generation, her work has not received the same amount of critical study as other Spanish writers of the period. Hopefully, the publication of the English translation of Julia will inspire renewed, and merited, critical scrutiny devoted to this author. Francisca González Arias, The University of Massachusetts at Lowell. Feministas Unidas 22 Reviews Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda. Tu amante ultrajada no puede ser tu amiga: Cartas de amor/Novela epistolar. Introducción y edición de Emil Volek. Madrid: Fundamentos, 2003. 303 pp. Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda (1814-1873, “Tula” to her friends or “la Avellaneda” to literary history), born and raised in Cuba (the setting for her still-widely read, multiracial melodrama, Sab) experienced a remarkably successful career, contributing as novelist and dramatist to the cultural boom of early 19th century Spain. This volume testifies to the writer’s status as a Spanish protofeminist who embraced romantic ideology amid her life as a nomadic, bicultural intellectual, moving between cities, lovers, friends, genres, nations. Her love letters, passionate and polemical, are profitably read alongside the cogent analysis presented in Susan Kirkpatrick’s Las Románticas, Volek offers lively, readable texts accompanied by provocative observations about romanticism’s relevance to modern and postmodern forms and sensibilities. Coming to Spain in her early 20s, Avellaneda earned the respect of contemporaries when they commented, “¡Es mucho hombre esta mujer!” The force of Avellaneda’s character is expressed in terms of romantic values that enabled her to live in the vanguard of her times and to unfold in mediocre surroundings. She capitalized on her status as a mysterious “extrangera” [sic], independent, unconcerned with appearances. Romantic ideology seems to have motivated, rather than dissuaded her: as Volek observes, “a woman’s voice, bound to emotion and deprived of reason was sought, stimulated and wellreceived by masculine voyeurism.” She downplayed her real-world problems (unsought pregnancy, abandonment, a dying child) and demonstrated, instead, the auto-didact’s wide-ranging search for antecedents, which she found in George Sand (rejecting marriage), in Madame de Stael (comparing herself to the fictional heroine of Corinne), in Rousseau (for self-justification) and Pascal (to aver the heart’s reasons). She meets disappointment not by pining away or dying of melancholy, although she considers joining a convent, to her mother’s horror. Rather, she emerges with a firmer sense of what she expects from intimacy: love, yes; friendship, always; a man – well, not really. An alternative title for the book could appear in the final set of letters, directed to Antonio Romero Ortiz: “Háblame de aquellos goces del alma que no conciben sino los seres superiores.” Her prose — which details a full range of “goces” — whets the readers’ thirst for more. The specificity of the personal letter makes for lively reading that would surely relieve us of the tendency towards grand sweep, jumble-sale generalizations that prevail in current approaches to literary history, new historicism notwithstanding. Personal letters are particularly valuable for the construction of well-informed, lively, relevant criticism, juicy with anecdote, tantalizingly for their proximity and indeterminate status, somewhere to the left of prose and to the right poetry and (in Avelleneda’s case), not far from drama. As texts that writers direct to real but non-print addressees, the personal letter is ideal for speculating on possible or likely relations between the real versus imagined worlds of writers. How to address these questions while creating order amid sometimes conjectured chronologies is a task that Volek’s introduction aptly descibes as one of establishing dialogue between the various texts and creating multiple narrative foundations. To describe or compare these letters as an epistolary novel is to welcome the unspoken, so that the otherwise inscrutable characters of the addressees are fleshed out, particularly in the notes and introduction. One is reminded of the fictional biographies and autobiographies appearing in Argentine literature from the early 1980s onwards, and the attempts to come terms with the “huecos” of social history, throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Most gratifying in this edition is the writer’s rapid, lucid polemic, built from her skill in conjuring her interlocutors to life and subsequently developing the perfectly-wrought, precise and fast-paced summaries of every possible twist and turn of romantic ideology ….all as reflected in a woman’s sensibilities. The letters are also readable as the biography of a headstrong young woman reflecting on life with her weak mother and cruel stepfather, almost escaping via a bad marriage, becoming instead a histrionic writer who scorns convention, now a successful woman of letters, living on “Calle del Desengaño” in Madrid, all the while stubbornly “excéntrica,” 23 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Reviews working feverishly into the night. Here is the matter of Avallaneda as unbounded romántica, which the introduction presents as as argument for how the interchangeability of literature and experience leads way to modernist subjectivity. While few of us may live secret, all-consuming loves, and fewer still rely on networks of intermediaries to avoid the tenacious vigilance of family and society, while the range of truly prohibited love may have diminished, there remains the sense that some people merely play at love while others (such as la Avellaneda) put love at the center of any kind of life that’s worth living. The volume walks a fine line, raising the question of the continuing vitality of romantic codes on one side, while nimbly documenting the twists and turns of Avellaneda’s romantic drama, on the other. A life as busy as Avellaneda’s admitted no time for polishing multiple drafts, and the social life of her day took place in full public view, under multiple codes. The letter, in these circumstances, becomes a place for unburdening the soul, and the private, the opportunity for truer, uniquely direct communication. The accumulated texts ultimately reveal how to say less — how to live between men, how to maintain one’s composure amid deceipt and disenchantment — and how to say more, registering and liberating the accumulated emotional energy of the day, and documenting writer’s repeated willingness to establish and break rules that may or may not be with us today or tomorrow. Elizabeth Horan Arizona State University Feministas Unidas 24 Reviews Susana Chávez-Silverman’s Killer Crónicas: Urbane Gardens of Earthly Delight In pages that poke about and rattle the cages of multiple genres, Killer Crónicas presents a codeswitching performance por excelencia, directly related to the text’s roaming of cultures, places, and times and its creation of an engaging and distinctive “voice.” Multilingualism, multidimensionalism and mixture are the watchwords, here. Not either/or, neat linguistic segregation, compartmentalized, no-threat translations catering to what English-language public supposedly want. As the catalogue data on the copyright pages states, this work is “written in a combination of English and Spanish.” Evidence of the author’s keen sense of the sad, the bizarre, and the wickedly funny appears in coinages such as the “everhovering guilt (c)académico,” or the dedo-en-la-llaga indexing of stereotyped Latinx/@ represenations in noting the tendency to unwitting self-parody, that is, two-dimensional tropicalizing or self-tropicalizing. The linguistic inventiveness of Killer Crónicas asserts a new genre whose contexts are multiple, just barely suggested in the copyright page’s catalogue data of “Latin Americans in the United States, Biography.” The US Library of Congress website reveals that Killer’s nearest shelf-neighbors ( E 184.S75 etc.) are five copies of Linda Chávez’s Out of the Barrio, arguing for assimiliation into an English-only United States. The other near neighbor at the Library of Congress, a Chronology of Hispanic-American History, again stresses US Hispanics. With provincialism to the left and to the right, what’s not ambiguous, despite the book’s stubborn refusal of center or periphery, is that the “Latinidad” of Killer Crónicas is des/bordademente international. We get faux translations, literally making the reader (or listener) look twice: ternura, not permanencia, for tenure, or measuring the vast distance between “de memoria” and “by heart.” Polizie, untranslated Afrikaans. Ecriture, metier, the only French I found. There’s the neologisms of “tropiléxico,” “retrotrajar(se)” and “disapointeada” and “Califaztlán.” “Southland” (the adjective) gets a new meaning alongside inland-ness (not el interior). Many coinages are spellings geared to reproduce language-in-use, as in “swearing parriba y parrabo” while others beautifully sum up the scene, as in “abueleril” cantante (in my current favorite crónica). Even as the River Plate and California provide the launching sites for these meditations, the Spanish represented aims towards inclusion, Simón, mano, oye, ¿cachai? Full of referents to silences and stories not told, haunted by alternative versions earlier set into circulation electronically but absent from this edition, Killer Crónicas works from and reproduces a network that recalls bermuda-grass rhisomes in the southland’s ex-desert. The distinction between the printed versus performance versus electronic variants of Killer Crónicas underscores the printed text’s engagement with the current Anglo-American category of “life writing, ”inclusive of biography and autobiography, memoir, and letters. The author embraces the letter’s fragmentation of subjectivity and related courting of real readers engaged with named places and communities at given points in time. Noting, dedicating, invoking and generally interpellating readers, past present and future, offers a variation on call-andresponse. Compare “Otra vez en Hurlingham Crónica,” just past the center of the book, with the closely related closing text, “Killer Crónica.” If appeals to readerly interaction may seem at times overdetermined (as in “Axolotl Crónica”), the recourse to traditions both oral and literary that permeate the very structure of the tales’ tellings make Killer Crónicas unrivaled pirates’ gold. By quoting mulitple voices and pointing to the genesis of these texts in letters, the texts of this “biography” reach towards collective creation and deflect the possible charge of work directed towards an in-group. The evidence of traces left where passages were excised, condensed, or moved, leave all readers (and not just those “in the know) with a sense of mystery, I think, an awareness of deliberate 25 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Reviews incompletion. I find myself considering, with sympathy, the mixture of reticence, anguish and justifiable pride appearing in the speaker’s portrayals of her absolutely unforgettable parents, whom I certainly knew in multiple contexts in Santa Cruz, but need not to have known, to appreciate this author’s work. Drawing from Spanish literary tradition, travel writing’s relation to crónicas and to cartas de las Américas enters into these texts, which are likewise haunted by the trinity of Borges, Cortázar and Pizarnik. Less obvious antecedents are performance poetry and US avant-garde language experiment. For the comic possibilities of dialogue and dialect and the sheer rawness of the NewWorld travel tales there’s hints of Mark Twain and Hunter Thompson. Where Chávez-Silverman is unmistakably new, what she shares with Moraga and Anzaldua (and not with Sandra Cisneros, for example) is her meditated refusal of hegemonic monoculture, the insistence on transnational locations reflected in linguistic experiment. The pressure of constant movement decenters and destabilizes the writer’s subjectivity, as Wendy Martin writes of Colonial American travel narratives and of travel tales generally. But there’s also the related, not-too-distant tradition of spiritual autobiography (Augustine, Teresa), whose sensual experience of overwhelming rapute forces a recognition in which the writer feels compelled set her past life in perspective. Future-wise, this new millenium picaresque novel has the strangest of California road trips recalled at dead center, our heroine simultaneously learning to drive and coming to semiconsciousness of gender. Whether picaresque, or memorias, or travelers’ tales, the writer commences with one stated goal, and winds up, full-circle, having accomplished something else entirely, certain only of further uncertainty and invoking the reader to provide justification as, for example, the familiar theme of “escape from Los Angeles” in “Anniversary Crónica” unpredictably segues into the urban sprawl of Buenos Aires, or Soweto. Welcome home to red dirt, to car repair shops, to McDonalds, to Wal-Mart. In travel writing, the answers to two questions often distinguish the migrant from the immigrant, the tourist from the resident. How did you get to place you’re describing? What are you doing in that place? Mini Barrio Norte Crónica” examines the narrator’s relation to the acts of buying and consumption that travel often foregrounds, since being a consumer is intimately involved with gender and class and age and race/ethnicity. Could a more “genuine” sensibility be available to the tourist willing to eschew, as the narrator does, some privileges and comforts associated with travel: laundry services; a predictable car; the easy use of a taxi; unremarkable plumbing? Doing with less/adapting seems to open way to the exquisitely ambiguous pleasures of semi-recognition and semi-anonymity, of almost but-not-quite passing (as a native). Passing, on the other hand, may mean being subject to a taxidriver’s misogynistic and anti-semitic rantings, as in “Lost and Found Crónica.” These meditations on pan-Latin and Jewish post-holocaust identity arise from irremediable specifics, from successive locations and dislocations, from and in language, among friends and family and a range of maddenly unpredictable, provisional, organic dwellings. Life is full of weird rituals: riding in cars, settling in, getting to work, going out dancing. Against the depressingly similarities of bars, ‘burbs, and highways is the unexpected pleasure of nature’s desdoblamiento across hemispheres: the lofty purple of the jacaranda, the piercing scent of nard. Amid the longed-for, nomadic memories of recycled 70s perfumes and songs, there’s always, we’re told, another story. May there be many more. Elizabeth Horan Arizona State University Feministas Unidas 26 Reviews Review of La tregua de la piel by Carmen Moreno The central theme of Carmen Moreno’s La tregua de la piel is present from the first line of the “Preludio”: “Toda mujer escapa por el agujero del iris …” Throughout the collection’s three major sections (“El dolor,” “La piel” and “La tregua”), the poetic subject is caught in an endless cycle of searching for that which has escaped: happy memories that take refuge in the distant realm of the past, loved ones whose disappearance leaves the grieving poetic voice alone in the darkness of a house made empty by their absence. Dramatic tension is generated through the recurring motifs of silence and darkness. In poem after poem the poetic voice (generally unmarked for gender, save for a handful of adjectives such as “herido” in “El vuelo abierto” and “erguida” in “La inmortal”) is portrayed as under the influence of a “shadow.” The “sombra” is linked with loneliness and abandonment in “Mujer con el corazón en la mano”: Ahora, en la casa, se balancea insólito, un anuncio de desahucio, que me relega a la penumbra, y te trae hasta mí. Si hubieses venido en el dolor de la noche, si te hubieses quedado a pesar de todo, ¡qué diferente sería hoy mi sombra! Elsewhere the shadow appears as an indispensable companion (“No se mantiene en pie la sombra / que me ayuda a existir […]” from “El vuelo abierto”) and even as a representation of the poetic voice’s idealized self (“Voy creciendo desde adentro, / desde la tierra que se vuelve sangre, / para hacerme sombra niña, mujer sin tiempo” from “Niña mirando relojes”). The book’s multiple female poetic objects—occasionally addressed by name in titles, within the poems or in dedications—are reduced to a series of disembodied fragments (hands, eyes/gaze, lips/voice), emphasizing their inaccessibility and lending a dreamlike (and often nightmarish) quality to Moreno’s anguished tributes. The poet often dispenses with subjective or objective specificity altogether, favoring the use of infinitives in poems such as “Mujer con propósito de enmienda”: “Temer lo que no se ve / de un moda natural e inconsciente; / saber de la soledad que provoca el silencio / como se sabe del dolor recíproco; […].” The accumulation of so many vague, fleeting impressions makes one wish for more concrete, earthy images such as the arresting metaphor found in the magnificent “El dolor de Alejandra Pizarnik”: (“soy, tan sólo, / la culata de un revólver en la que se marca un muesca”) or the simile that closes “Como la espuma del mar” (“las gotas golpean el aire / como pequeños valses de crema de azúcar.”) The last piece in the collection, “Carta a una mujer que tiembla” (identified in the dedicatoria as “mi único poema de amor”) seems at first glance to suggest a resolution, an end to the pursuit of a constantly fleeing love object: “Prometiste llegar, y llegaste / sin dejar más huella / que tu sombra abrazada a mi sombra.” The union of the two shadows points to the possibility of a mutually fulfilling relationship, though the final lines mark a return to the familiar distance between the “I” and her/his idealized, inaccessible object: 27 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Reviews Que eres princesa de un cuento de hadas que baila a ritmo de swim el día que me quieras y no ha de dejar de quererte quien te mira desde el otro lado, te mide los pasos, y pide que te quedes. Though the cycle of poems comprising La tregua de la piel gives eloquent expression to the experiences of love, loss and the desire to recover what is lost, the insistent repetition of a limited set of vague, often fragmentary images threatens to render Moreno’s poetry as ethereal and ultimately ungraspable as the loved ones who inspire it. Stacy Hoult Valparaiso University Feministas Unidas 28 Reviews Carmen de Urioste Azcorra. Desiderátum. Chihuahua: Editorial Chihuahua Arde Editores, 2004. This collection of thirty-three poems, divided into three sections (“De la muerte,” “Del amor,” and “De la ausencia”), traverses the depth and breadth of life’s most complicated yet compelling experiences: love and life. Each section, as with each poem, exists both individually and as a whole, creating metanarrative dialogs throughout the collection. This is accomplished through three intertwined concepts: unity of structure, mix of contrasts, and desire for connectivity. Unity of structure is found within each poem, from poem to poem, and from section to section. As one example, the first poem of the first section, “Celebración de la última mirada,” presents a case for enclosed unity through the imagery of the staircase that is ascended in the first stanza and then descended in the last; the upward and downward motions reiterate the trajectory of the relationship. “Realidades” and “Al tercer día” exemplify the poem to poem connection. The former ends with the schematic and thematic reference to the lover who advises: “Piensa mejor que he salido de mi tumba” (16), while the latter begins and ends with “Al tercer día…” (17). The implied references to Jesus’ resurrection add a depth to the poems’ interpretation. Each section is also linked. The request in the last poem of the first section [“Detén, amor mío, tu pisada...” (20)] introduces the theme of the next section, “Del amor.” Similarly, the last poem of the second section emphasizes the need for emotional love, while the first poem of the last section illustrates the passionate physicality of carnal love. The hybrid nature of love, death, and absence is also depicted through the use of contrasts. The interplay between presence and absence, of both love and lover, is noted often, for instance in “De la ausencia,” which begins with a declaration of love and ends with only silence: “¡Ay amor!…Mas ahora / silencio” (51). In “Lección de mecánica,” the emotional difficulty of separation is depicted through tangible distance. Nevertheless, throughout the collection of poems, the contrasts between the ordinary and profound elements of life is at times touching. “Canción de despedida” is a reminder of the fleeting nature of life (and love) and a warning to all of the importance of every moment and every word: “Mi última palabra fue cualquiera, / esa que se dice sin pensar o cajón de sastre” (12). Ultimately, the need for individuals to connect meaningfully with others, inspite of the possibility of the pain of separation/absence, is the most powerful and poignant illustration in Desiderátum. The pervasive use of the “yo” narrator, the search for “la palabra” (spoken or written), and the desire for “la voz” reiterate this. The alternative to connectivity is chillingly depicted in “Las visitas:” “Busco, indigo, pregunto, ofrezco, intercambio / y nadie. / Aquí vivo, tengo deseos / y.” (49). Just as there is structural progression within all aspects of this collection of poems, there is also a thematic urgency to connect poet with reader with world, individual with individual: “Cansada, termino mi poema / dedicado al mundo y sus gentes, / teniendo la voz en la palabra reflejada.” (39). One is reminded of the interplay between Rosario Castellanos and Emilio Pacheco: Castellanos explores the challenge of using the word; Pacheco examines the difficulty of understanding it. Carmen de Urioste Azcorra has presented a well-written and deeply profound exploration of love and life, one that captivates, provokes, and calls to the reader for understanding, interpretation, and connection. Dawn Slack, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania 29 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 MLA 2004 Conference Papers Michelle Joffroy Smith College Feminism, Youth Culture and Resistance in Rojo amanecer: Allegories of Citizenship and Affiliation in Mexico 1968 On the evening of October 2, 1968, while Mexico City prepared to host the 1968 Summer Olympics, government tanks patrolled the city’s main streets, and “hundreds (some estimates say thousands) of students were massacred in Tlatelolco… their bodies…burned or dumped in the ocean.” The popular student movement, which had swiftly galvanized disparate and historically counterposed sectors of the emerging modern Mexican state during the summer of 1968, was effectively silenced, symbolically “disappeared” on the bodies of the dead and missing. Historically the October 2 massacre at Tlatelolco marks the culmination of over a decade of civil protest in the name of political, cultural, educational and economic reform, but is remembered popularly as the violent end of a burgeoning and potentially threatening social movement predicated on, and oriented by, an emergent and participatory youth politics. As framed within contemporary Mexican social and cultural studies, the 1968 student movement articulates a disjuncture in the Mexican post-revolutionary State’s cohesive, historical and political narrative, which can now be divided into the roughly twenty-year period of political and economic stability pre-68 and the subsequent political crisis and unmasking of the true Mexico, post-68. The cultural implications of the student movement are perhaps even more farreaching, inasmuch as it served as precursor and referent to subsequent regional cultural movements of the 1970’s, second-wave Mexican feminisms, and innovative forms of popular urban organization beyond the limits of official state political parties. The movement can thus be read as a catalyst precisely for the construction of alternative revolutionary bodies, spaces and social identities beyond official state subject formations. The movement and its violent repression effected a profound reconsideration of citizenship in relation to processes of democracy, cultural autonomy, and political action. In fact, in the aftermath of 68 Mexican intellectuals—writers, poets, filmmakers, artists—began to openly interrogate the state’s own historicizing practices, as well as its relationship to imperialism within and beyond its borders. In this essay I explore some elements of Jorge Fons’ 1989 film, Rojo amanecer, as a visual allegory for the teaching and analyzing of modern state violence and the varieties of resistance and action that students—both women and men—theorized and enacted during the summer of 1968 and up to the night of the Tlatelolco massacre. I argue, first, that the film’s restricted use of space—filmed almost entirely in the Tlatelolco-Nonoalco apartment complex that borders the Plaza de las tres culturas—is essential to the representation of a “culture and politics of containment” within the family (literally) and state (figuratively), against which activist youth rebelled. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring the ways that this space simultaneously provided the social and cultural scripts for a radical politics of peaceful, participatory citizenship in a modern context. My theoretical and pedagogical model is comprised of three critical frames of analysis: a feminist critique of the film’s mapping of gender roles in the Mexican “revolutionary family,” particularly highlighting the tensions between prescribed femininities and masculinities of the Feministas Unidas 30 Joffroy modern Mexican state and an emerging affiliation with a cosmopolitics of women’s rights and youth liberation; a socioeconomic analysis of the film’s allegorization of capitalist modernity and internationalized consciousness, articulated through a politicized “youth” identity that is both potentially liberatory and self-destructive; and an analysis of the technologies of violence in the Mexican modern state—including surveillance, paramilitary tactics and “disappearances”—and the film’s construction of a social and political space for the theorization and practice of forms of citizenship and resistance grounded in a politics of internationalism/trans-nationalism.1 Rojo amanecer, released in 1989 and directed by Jorge Fons, is just one of a number of fictionalized representations of the 1968 popular student movement that re-imagines and interrogates the Mexican “revolutionary family” as both the site of the its formation and the object of its rejection. However, rather than reverting to the social or political realism that defines many of the literary treatments of the movement, Fons’ film most closely approximates a modern allegory of social revolution and resistance. Like all allegorical texts, Fons’ visual narrative enacts its fictions on two simultaneous levels: the literal and the figurative, wherein the literal is naturalized and recognizable, but is always and already alluding to a meaning other than, and in addition to, the literal. Thus, the literal “family” in the film is also the figurative, allegorical “revolutionary family” of the post-revolutionary Mexican State. Beto, Alicia, Jorge, Sergio, Graciela, Carlitos, and “Abuelo” are characters that compel viewers to identify across recognizable class, gender, and generational subjectivities, and yet simultaneously interrupt the possibility of complete affiliation because of the psychological flatness of their allegorical status. These “personajes” are both objects of our identitarian desires, and subjects of a figurative meditation on the struggle to articulate competing versions of modernity. The space of narration, which is literally limited to the interior and immediate exterior of the family’s home—the outside corridor and rooftop of the high rise apartment building— figuratively evokes the highly contained cultural and political space of an emergent modern Mexico. I would argue that it is precisely the emergent nature/quality of modernity that the film’s spatial restrictions are unpacking, and this is invoked most powerfully through dissonant visual elements that mark and define the conflicted geography of the modern home/State. Within the parameters of allegorical narrative, the film tells the story of the night of October 2, 1968 as the story of one Mexican family and its encounter with the violent culmination of the student movement. As framed by the parents, Beto and Alicia, the student movement is an external crisis that threatens to interfere with the stabilized and modernizing core of family life. Both parents make references from the very opening of the movie to “esos revoltosos” and argue that “ustedes no tienen por qué estar metidos en esto,” in an effort to distinguish and distance their sons from the central participants in the movement. Allegorically, the inner-sanctum of the family home reproduces the national space, with its imagined impermeable boundaries that define and protect a collective “us” from the perilous “other.” Beto and Alicia’s response to the movement reveals how the desire for modernity and social stability—in the context of the “economic miracle” of post-revolutionary Mexico—motivates Beto and Alicia’s cautionary discourses. The will to modernize and stabilize compels them to enforce the boundedness of their home, the allegorical space of their cultural and political power. Nevertheless, despite the enormous effort to impose a culture and politics of containment, the film evokes the impossibility of this containment through symbols that both define a modernizing identity and rupture the boundaries of the home: the television, with its constant interjection of news and information from around the world; the poster of Che Guevara that hangs on the wall of Jorge and Sergio’s bedroom—a defiant invocation of international liberation struggles and extra-national affiliations; and the movement pamphlets and radical newspapers that 31 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Joffroy Jorge and Sergio bring home from the university. This “invaded” home/State is then further fragmented into particularized spaces that facilitate the performance and negotiation of gendered social scripts. These performances enact the conflicting discourses of national and revolutionary identity within the delineated contexts of modernity, gender roles, and a “cosmopolitics” of women’s rights and youth liberation.2 One of the film’s earliest scenes is centered on the family breakfast table and positions Sergio and Jorge in a heated debate with their parents, Beto and Alicia, and their grandfather, Abuelo. The debate emerges out of an initially playful reproach to Sergio and Jorge from Beto to build up their physiques so they won’t look like weaklings—“hagan ejercicios”—as he defeats Sergio in a kind of thumb war. The jesting quickly deteriorates into an angry criticism by Abuelo of the “melenas de maricones” that the brothers wear and the “música de maricones” (the Beatles are on the radio) that they enjoy. From there it moves swiftly to an admonishment from Beto to quit the movement, stop playing patsies to the government’s political manipulations, and to instead focus their energy on their “responsibilities”—an allusion to the brothers’ privileged position as beneficiaries of the revolution’s gains. As Abuelo concludes, “malagradecidos, por su papá comemos, por él tienen escuela, si no educación.” Despite the seemingly neat divide along generational lines, however, the film resists a simplification of competing arguments. Abuelo clearly takes a harder line against the brothers’ claims to a patrimony of revolutionary identity, arguing that the current “disruption” fails to meet the standards of the true revolution, and concluding that “en mi día los hubieran fusilado.” Beto, though, invokes his generation’s failures—an allusion to the medical workers’, railroad workers’, and civil servant strikes of the 1950s—as an example of the governments’ ruthlessness when dealing dissent. From this perspective, his warning “se les va a dar un escarmiento; con el gobierno no se juega,” is not an argument against the brothers’ and the movement’s claims to a legitimate place in the national script—either as “real men” or as “true revolutionaries”—but rather highlights an otherwise obscured dimension of national politics. The revolution’s successes and the subsequent economic boom that propel Mexico toward modernity have in fact produced a new sector of political power and cultural control. The imminent presidential elections, Beto argues, are in fact the motivation for the government’s hardline approach to the protestors, not the protestors themselves or their demands. Beto’s entreaties to Sergio and Jorge to resist the government’s trap are a call to engage the complexities of a modernizing State, and to reframe resistance to power. The “Revolution” with its embedded ideologies of masculinity and armed protest, cannot serve as either the script for resistance, nor even as the object of rejection at this point. Instead, emerging gender identities which integrate multiple (and at times opposing) features of gender performance, and a hyper-sensitized awareness of political strategies for resisting the State—which might in some cases mean abandoning public protest, as Beto argues—are required in the context of new forms of power in the modern state. The family’s breakfast table discussion, a recognizable cinematic trope of generational conflict and resolution, functions, then, as a kind of internal negotiating table, echoing and alluding to the deliberations taking place between student protestors and the government in the “outside” world. And on a level once removed from the referential, it functions allegorically as the space where competing ideological claims to modernity and revolutionary national identity—beyond Mexico and beyond masculinity—are debated. If modernity’s cultural, ideological, and political scripts are explored at the breakfast table through debates centered on national identities and masculinities, the film further interrogates a “cosmopolitics” of women’s rights and youth liberation through an allegorical construction of feminized space. It is precisely in this space that the film explores the conflicts between varieties of youth identities and feminisms in a national and international context. A group of university-age protestors fleeing the government’s attack in the Plaza take refuge in Sergio and Jorge’s apartment, and among them is a young woman from the outer suburbs of Mexico City. The young woman, whose name is never revealed, interrupts a discourse of the neat, linear progression of women’s rights and liberation (as tracked, generationally, from Alicia to Graciela) by interrogating the limits of an upwardly-mobile, urban class identity: she travels from the margins of the city to its center to study at the University, she has no way of contacting her parents because they have no telephone, and she resists Alicia’s entreaties to get rid of the donations she has collected for the movement (and which represent a threat to her and others’ safety in the apartment) principally because “el dinero no es mío, es del movimiento.” Feministas Unidas 32 Ite Submit all all materia copy on di Joffroy Pr Vi M The young woman’s presence in the group establishes a stark counterpoint to Sergio and Jorge’s young Un sister Graciela, a girl of about thirteen years who spends the earlier part of the film performing a kind of feminist, Ro post-revolutionary youth identity rooted in the modernist discourses of capitalism, consumption and middle-class Bu professionalism. As Graciela informs Alicia early in the film, “cuando yo sea grande voy a tener dos Eteléfonos…sirvientas…y voy a ser dentista o psicóloga para ganar más.” Graciela moves easily between home and school, handily navigates the uneasy coexistence of the pre-modern and the modern—she uses a metate to Visit our w make salsa when the blender doesn’t work—and playfully performs a form of cultural and linguistic cosmopolitanism as she listens to the Beatles and runs out the front door calling “¡ciao, hasta luego, au revoir, bye!” When Graciela and the young woman encounter each other in the bathroom—in a visually claustrophobic scene that super-imposes the young women’s faces in mirrored reflections—there is a literal and allegorical clash of emerging modern identities of women’s liberation and youth identity. In conflict are the ideological underpinnings of an internationalized, feminist youth identity rooted in discourses of class struggle and armed resistance to state power, as represented by the young woman, and Graciela’s version of a cosmopolitan youth identity, rooted in women’s professional equality and economic advancement within the boundaries of national political identity, and “Mexican-ness.” Graciela angrily blames the young woman for putting herself and Graciela’s family at risk because of her participation in the student movement, shouting “No tienes por qué meterte en estas cosas. No es tu lugar.” Graciela clearly experiences the young woman’s feminism as a threat to her own security. The young woman, nevertheless, insists that not only is she entitled to a place in the public sphere, but that Graciela too bears the responsibility of transgressing class and nationalist boundaries to identify in solidarity with liberational struggles that transcend gender and nation. In the same way that the breakfast table discussion only posited potential “resolutions” to the competing discourses of modernity and gender in the context of armed protest, Graciela and the young woman’s encounter merely performs possibilities of affiliation without resolving the debates involved in defining modern identities in a time of cultural and political conflict and violence. As an allegorical text, then, Rojo amanecer visualizes and interrogates the debates within and beyond the nation and functions as a site for exploring and theorizing the practice of varied and competing forms of citizenship and resistance grounded in a politics of peace, internationalism and trans-nationalism. 1. This essay is a work in progress that is part of a broader, book-length project on feminism and the fictionalization of 1968 in Mexican literary and visual arts. Due to space restrictions I will limit my discussion in this essay to the allegorical mapping of gender roles and the "cosmopolitics" of women's rights and youth liberation, through a close reading of the configuration and use of space in the film. 2. Again, due to space limitations, I will focus on two specific spaces represented in the film. . 33 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Ann Sittig, Metropolitan Community College Omaha, Nebraska Contemporary Mayan Women Speak of Peace, Resistance and Citizenship Contemporary Guatemalan Mayan women are searching out the published page to voice their message, following a path similar to that of Latina writers in the United States who began publishing approximately twenty years after their Latino counterparts. While conducting research under the auspices of a Title VIA grant comparing Mayan and Winnebago cultures, I found there are few published Mayan Guatemalan women, although the Internet provides a more accessible site for women to voice their concerns. The results of this research can be seen at http://www.mccneb.edu/ mayanliterature which includes bilingual excerpts for classroom use, as well as a bibliography. Mayan writers Rigoberta Menchú, Maya Cu, Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Juana Batzibal Tujal and Emma Delfina Chirix García from the Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla weave texts around the topics of feminism, resistance, peace and identity. Their works facilitate classroom discussions of a nature different from those in existing academic texts. Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas, 1988, reminds readers that Mayan cultural beliefs embody a “cosmovision” for living in peace. Menchú points out respect as the main vehicle for mutual understanding and acceptance. Her comparison of humanity to an ear of corn emphasizes the need for a global sensitivity and awareness: Nosotros siempre nos consideramos como una mazorca. Si a la mazorca le falta un grano, siempre se notará una ausencia, un espacio vacío, porque ese grano ocupa un lugar especial. Somos, a la vez, individuos y actores sociales. El actor social no puede confundir su papel con su importancia y su grandeza sólo por los títulos que posee, sino más bien por la sencillez, la humildad frente a los acontecimientos de una sociedad entera. Cuando se debe entender una herida en esa hermosa tierra quiché, la siento como una herida en el corazón de la humanidad. El mundo perdió esa sensibilidad y por eso ha permitido impunidad y por eso ha permitido miles de muertos y por eso ha permitido que la vida sea tan despreciada en ese corazón del quiché…La humanidad tiene que retomar esa sensibilidad para evitar guerras o conflictos. La cosmovisión indígena debe ser una aportación al pensamiento sagrado de la humanidad (Menchú 163). The concept of interconnectedness and compassion shines through this metaphor of the ear of corn. Corn as a symbol of existence and subsistence often emerges in the Spanish classroom, emphasizing the importance of daily sustenance. Many American students don’t experience the deep appreciation for food that occurs when food isn’t always readily available. Juxtaposing corn with the planet leads students to a deeper sense of being one small part of the planet, as Menchú questions “First World” politics and materialism, and urges all cultures to share the gifts the planet provides. She defines the dualistic Mayan belief system that consists of Grandfather Sun and Grandmother Moon, a pattern reflected in her own upbringing. Her mother’s spirituality was centered in Mother Nature while her father’s was in Catholicism. Growing up in this two-sided environment leads her to encourage a horizontal belief system, rather than a vertical one. Religious beliefs in the United States, and especially in the Midwest, are varied, but strongly held. It’s difficult for students to consider a Feministas Unidas 34 Sittig horizontal belief system in terms of religion, but it is the only way we can grow together as a class and community. In his prologue to Novísimos, 1997, Marco Antonio Flores points out the lack of opportunities available for developing a literary vocation in Guatemala, combined with the overwhelming fear that leads to self-censorship. Maya Cu was included in this collection of the latest Guatemalan poets, and her poems flip back and forth between a deep inner sadness that needs to be mourned and a hope for rebirth and purity. It seems to reflect the violent past in her country and the desire to begin anew. In “Poesía de lo propio”, Cu defines herself: “Nací mujer / predestinada / al llanto” (Novísimos, 71). As the poem continues she speaks of her two countries in which Ladinos represent the conquest and war, and Mayans represent the pueblo or her people. She expresses her desire to break with a past that entailed subjugation and oppression and to presently focus on learning to love others. She cries tears freely, in an effort to release the sadness and complete the healing process: No siento vergüenza de mis lágrimas ellas son la rabia por el dolor de mis hermanas con ellas lavo el abuso de calles, cines y salas en claroscuro… con ellas condeno las cadenas de mi casa, mi ciudad mi país (Cu, Novísimos 72). She speaks of abuse in a somber and mysterious way, without actually describing it, distancing herself from such a terrible reality, but stating at the end of the poem, “ESTOY RENACIENDO” (Cu, Novísimos 73). The chains holding her down refer to the pain experienced and the widespread fear of speaking out against injustice. Throughout the collection she conjures up all the pain from the past, and in her culminating poem, “Canción por la vida”, the eighth part of “Poesía de este mundo”, Maya Cu chooses to focus on the life surging forth from within the earth. Maya Cu’s first compilation of poems, La rueda, 2001, explores sentiments of love, identity and the need to circle back to origin, as reflected in the title of her work, The Wheel. Searching for self she sees her double identity, passed down by her mother and bred from her country’s history. She describes stripping away the layers and recognizing herself at the center of the circle she weaves on the written page of her loom: te debo la necesidad de repasar los nombres en la rueca donde tejí óvulos y piel a una raíz: el círculo donde me reconozco (Cu, Rueda 47). Weaving the womb and skin refers to this process of rebirth and re-identification, a process as repetitive as weaving cloth. In her poem “HISTORIA”, Maya Cu deconstructs religion, subverting men to confessors and discovering God is a woman, healer and mother. Her final poems explore the internal pain and suffering she experiences being a child born during Guatemalan armed conflict. She tells readers not to expect her to be joyful: “a tu pedido de / bondad / alegría y olvido / respondo / 35 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Sittig justicia” (Cu, Rueda 58). She wants justice and implores the reader to LISTEN, to hear the tiny brook still flowing, and to join the course of her hope. Having fled to the United States in 1981 after three of her brothers had been killed, Calixta Gabriel Xiquín is more explicit in her demands that Guatemala’s history be remembered. Tejiendo los sucesos en el tiempo/Weaving Events in Time, 2002, is divided into seven sections entitled: Roots, Uprooting, Quest, Speaking Out, Refuge, Testimony, and Coming Home. She attacks tourism, research, genocidal governments, torture, false elections and wars that turn brothers into soldiers. Her poem “Comunismo, capitalismo, socialismo” openly opposes United States foreign policy in Guatemala. Xiquín becries, “Nos acusan de comunistas / mientras apoyan a gobiernos genocidas / en nuestros países” (Xiquín 34). She tells how indigenous people interpret foreign intervention: “Los indios de América sabemos: / La idea del exterminio es la solución de países / <<desarrollados>>, / y desconocen nuestra resistencia por muchos siglos” (Xiquín 34). Statements like these provide the voice of opposition from within the country where the armed conflict has taken place, giving students an additional perspective on United States intervention. Xiquín provides a stage for the passive observer of injustice, placing them in the spotlight in her poem “¡Entras tú!”, and challenging the reader to act out for justice for all. In “Ausencia de Madre” she prays to the absent Mother: Madre, los de California tienen corazón; son buena gente, pero no entienden nuestra historia. Me hace falta el calor de tus brazos. Ellos sufren, pero no sufren como el sufrimiento nuestro. Tienen hijos pero no son desnutridos ni descalzos. Tienen oídos, pero no tienen tiempo para escuchar (Xiquín 56). Talking about what hunger can lead people to do gives students an opportunity to consider an existence without the luxury of three meals a day, thus reevaluating their personal notion of problem. The reference to a lack of time for listening is also a common topic in class. As society spins into chaos, producing over-stimulated and overscheduled individuals, who will sit quietly and take the time to listen? Her poems echo Guatemala’s tragic past and implore others not to forget the suffering that accompanies such injustice. Juana Batzibal Tujal discusses gender roles as delineated by Mayan “cosmovision” in Mujer maya: Rectora de nuestra cultura. She points out the origin of the word “man” in Greek, omoan, which means “bond, relationship, connection”, and in Mayan, Winaq also means “what is complete, or unity”. For her, all of life’s activities revolve around relationships and anything men and women share deals with our interconnectedness. The Popol Vuh, The Mayan book of creation, details this constant interplay between elements, and the importance of these interactions is passed down through oral tradition in Mayan culture. Batzibal Tujal points out our connection to the cosmos; we are a microcosm of the great macrocosm. This is a theme United States students and citizens desperately need to explore. She feels that the long enduring war has deprived people of the time they need to reflect upon their spiritual roots, thus revealing the masculine and feminine duality of each person. Batzibal Tujal conjures up the masks worn during Mayan dancing to remind us: La mujer y el varón no son actores. Sin embargo, vivimos en una sociedad que está llena de papeles. Necesitamos ponernos la máscara para actuar dentro de estos papeles. En los bailes mayas que se realizan en Guatemala, nos recuerda que detrás de la máscara está la verdadera identidad y que por eso es importante quitarse la máscara para actuar de acuerdo con el sentimiento, de acuerdo con el corazón (37). Studying the mask as metaphor in many Spanish speaking countries ignites interest. Most of us need to shed our masks and open our hearts to the love and peace that each individual is born with, regardless of race, creed or sex. What is our original state? According to Batzibal Tujal, her Mayan ancestors held the answer: Nuestros antepasados lograron llegar al punto de origen, al cero, por eso crearon sociedades justas. En los negocios, en el trabajo, en las relaciones interpersonales existía la justicia. Era una sociedad donde imperaba el amor, Feministas Unidas 36 Delfina Chirix García has interviewed Mayan women in the Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla as they come together to re-examine the past and re-define themselves. From the start they state that academic research is not what Mayan women are known for; rather they draw from their daily experiences to analyze life. They do this work in an effort to provide more information about their culture, so Mayans and non-Mayans, and men and women from all social stratum Sittig can work together to construct a more just, equal and united society (Chirix García 7-8). Their approach moves deeper than the academic and technical research that seeks to define them, as they focus on afectividad, (translated as love, affection or sensitivity) as a significant social experience that leads to an understanding of the subjectivity involved donde sentimiento humano era el fundamento de todas las relaciones in el ethnic differences in Guatemala. permitiendo la creación estructura deof la its conciencia forma an identity true to their Kaqla is unweaving the pastde anduna analyzing each threads inestética. an effortEsta to reweave de vida, pensar,free aúnofdentro deand la adversidad que noswhich ha tocado original nature beforeesta the forma war, andeidentity societal family oppression have triggered feelings of guilt, vivir durante loshatred. últimosThey 5 siglos, pervive lack of self esteem and self re-explore the(35). past and look to a healthier future. The women of Kaqla go isConquest this “puntoand cero” that Juana speaks of?legitimized In Alas y Raíces: Afectividad de las Mujeres Mayas, Emma backWhat to the state that the Spaniards violence towards the Indigenous, and women have been Delfina Chirix García has interviewed Mayan women in the Grupo de Mujeres Kaqla becoming as they come together victimized on ethnic-racial, gender and class levels individually and thenMayas collectively, social practice. The to re-examine the past and re-define themselves. From the start they state that academic research is not what Mayan women have discovered: women are known for; rather they draw from their daily experiences to analyze life. They do this work in an effort to provide more information about their culture, so Mayans and non-Mayans, and men and women from all social stratum can work together to construct a more just, equal and united society (Chirix García 7-8). Their approach moves deeperThe than the academic technical that and seeks to define them, ashas they focus oninafectividad, women of Kaqlaand recognize theresearch pain ethnic gender oppression fomented them, and now (translated as love, affection that or sensitivity) a significant that leadsof to the an understanding of theof they work to transform realizationasinto self-love. social In theexperience “Final Reflections” book, their process subjectivity involved differences in Guatemala. exploring reality in onethnic a deeper level to incite transformation into something more positive requires will, reflection is unweaving theurge pastall and analyzing eachtogether, of its threads in an of effort to reweave identity true to andKaqla political action. They women to work regardless nationality: “Esanpensar juntas, hacer theirtrabajo originalcon nature before the war, identity freecon of societal and family oppression which have feelings de otras mujeres, conan otras etnias, otros pueblos. Es aunar esfuerzos a los detriggered las organizaciones of guilt, lack de of self and self hatred. They the past and look to a healthier future. women mayas, mujeres otrosesteem continentes e incorporar en re-explore los planteamientos las necesidades específicas de The las mujeres of Kaqla back to para the Conquest state that the Spaniards legitimized violence(Chirix towards the Indigenous, and comogorequisito fortalecerand y enriquecer el mensaje diverso y de unidad” García 209). women have been victimized on ethnic-racial, gender and class levelsJuana individually thenand collectively, becoming Rigoberta Menchú, Maya Cu, Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Batzibaland Tujal Emma Delfina Chirix García socialreiterate practice. havemost discovered: "Al verbalizar la experiencia fenómeno social, otra my,The andwomen I hope our fervent belief, that educating for peace iscomo not an external task, buttoma rather an internal dimensión. es lo mismo hablar racionalmente sobre la mujerdesire maya,for quepeace hablar la subjetividad one thatPorque beginsno within each individual, as based upon a common indesde our homes, cities andde countries. ser mujer Hablar laand experiencia humana enfocar al ser como sujeto como actor en Seeingmaya. the pain causeddesde by war recognizing Mayanesduality in ourselves and our livesactivo, could lead students to consider resistencia. Hablar de las necesidades reales de afecto noof han sidoreadings satisfechas surge awareness como necesidad porquein others, the value of individual and international peace. A que study these provides of suffering las mujeres mayas siguenabout padeciendo malestares y complejos sentimientos negativo"s (Chirix Garcíahuman 130). rights. They provokes discussion the history of Guatemala, the injustices of war and the need to protect women of Kaqla the pain ethnic and oppression has fomented and now alsoThe provide a format forrecognize a comparison of gender rolesgender as practiced in Guatemala and ininthem, the United States. The they Guatemalan work to transform realization into self-love. the “Final Reflections” of the book, process of to early Mayanthat female voice attacks violenceIn and provides a more peaceful vision fortheir the future. Similar exploring on writings a deeperseeking level toout incite transformation intothey something moreMayan positive requires Latinareality feminist a self-defined identity, look to their roots for an will, identity that resonates reflection political They urge womena to work together, pensar more and clearly withinaction. themselves. Theyallextract dualistic nature ofregardless humanityof in nationality: which both “Es sexes work together in juntas, hacer trabajo con reject otras mujeres, con otras etnias, con otros pueblos. Es aunar esfuerzos a losand de las harmony. They also social phenomena that discriminate against them on the basis of race gender, looking organizaciones de mujeres de finding otros continentes e incorporar en and los planteamientos necesidades específicas to their original state and the love necessary to heal induce societal las change. These readings complement de lastraditional mujeres mayas, como para fortalecer y enriquecer el mensaje diverso yand de unidad” (Chirix texts well andrequisito encourage students to think from a different perspective to consider different societal García and209). gender roles, an activity which increases their capacity to be more effective global citizens. Rigoberta Menchú, Maya Cu, Calixta Gabriel Xiquín, Juana Batzibal Tujal and Emma Delfina Chirix García reiterate my, and I hope our most fervent belief, that educating for peace is not an external task, but rather an internal one that begins within each individual, as based upon a common desire for peace in our homes, cities and countries. Seeing the pain caused by war and recognizing Mayan duality in ourselves and our lives could lead students to consider the value of individual and international peace. A study of these readings provides awareness of suffering in others, provokes discussion about the history of Guatemala, the injustices of war and the need to protect human rights. They also provide a format for a comparison of gender roles as practiced in Guatemala and in the United States. The Guatemalan Mayan female voice attacks violence and provides a more peaceful vision for the future. Similar to early Latina feminist writings seeking out a self-defined identity, they look to their Mayan roots for an identity that resonates more clearly within themselves. They extract a dualistic nature of humanity in which both sexes work together in harmony. They also reject social phenomena that discriminate against them on the basis of race and gender, looking to their original state and finding the love necessary to heal and induce societal change. These readings complement traditional texts well and encourage students to think from a different perspective and to consider different societal and gender roles, an activity which increases their capacity to be more effective global citizens. 37 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Sittig Works Cited Batzibal Tujal, Juana. “Mujer maya, rectora de nuestra Cultura.” Identidad: Rostros sin máscara. Reflexiones sobre Cosmovisión, Género y Etnicidad. Ed. M. Luisa Cabrera Pérez-Armiñan. Guatemala: Oxfam-Australia, 2000. Chirix García, Emma Delfina and Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla. Alas y Raíces: Afectividad de las mujeres mayas. Rik’in ruxik’ y ruxe’il: Ronojel kajowab’ al ri mayab’ taq ixoqi’. Guatemala: Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, 2003. Cu, Maya. La rueda. Guatemala: Editorial Cultura, 2002. —, Juan Carlos Lemus, Alfonso Porres, Fernando Ramos and Emilio Solano. Novísimos. Guatemala: Editorial Cultura, 1996. Gabriel Xiquín, Calixta. Tejiendo los sucesos en el tiempo. Weaving Events in Time. California: Yax Te’ Foundation, 2002. Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla. La palabra y el sentir de las Mujeres Mayas de Kaqla. Guatemala: Grupo de Mujeres Mayas Kaqla, 2004. Menchú, Rigoberta. Rigoberta: La nieta de los mayas. 1998. Madrid, Grupo Santillana de Ediciones S.A., 1998. Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life. Trans. Dennis Tedlock. New York: Touchstone, 1996. Feministas Unidas 38 Roselyn Costantino Pennsylvania State University Altoona Transformative Pedagogies for Peace and Social Justice Pedagogy is simultaneously about the knowledge and practices that teachers, cultural workers, and students might engage in together and the cultural politics of such practice. […T]o propose a pedagogy is at the same time to construct a political vision. Henry Giroux Each one teach one. Paolo Freire A culture of peace is a mosaic of identities, attitudes, values, beliefs, and institutional patterns that lead people to live nurturantly [sic] with one another and the earth itself without the aid of structured power differentials, to deal creatively with their differences, and to share their resources. Elise Boulding Every culture, as it develops over time, establishes reproductive mechanisms to ensure the dominance of its selected values and beliefs, narratives designed to circumscribe individual and social behavior. Culture reaffirms and reproduces itself through communicative, performative, and aesthetic norms. In various models of education, these narratives either produce compliant social subjects or become objects of analysis and resistance. In that way, educational institutions constitute sites of struggle over meaning, sites of political and cultural acts: formulating philosophies that dictate architectural as well as programmatic design, constructing the institutional infrastructure, establishing curriculum and knowledge bases, and influencing methods and praxis of educational theory. As contemporary social and political conditions and events clearly demonstrate, the ongoing battle for power through the control of meaning puts at risk our most profound beliefs of justice, democracy, fairness, and integrity, the effects of which are felt locally, nationally, and globally. In our search for pedagogies of social justice and peace, the education system is both our best bet and part of the problem. Early 20th century education pioneer, Maria Montessori, developed and promoted a philosophy and methodology built on the belief that world peace began in the classroom, a vision which became available in the U.S. when Harvard published a translation of her work in English in 1911. In 1930s, Montessori spoke out against competition and self-gratification as aims of education, increasing mechanization of all aspects of life, a diminished sense of community, and a distancing from nature. She called for “a new education” that would support evolution toward spirituality, community, and peace” (Torrence, Martha). Many of her goals remain unfulfilled. At this historical juncture, classroom, halls of academia, and local communities constitute the spaces from which we educators and activists can confront the major obstacles which permeate all aspects of daily life: the increasing corporatization of the U.S. university and the conservative pressure on public and private life, popular anti-intellectualism’s assault on critical thought, increased normalization of violence, racism and sexism—all profitably exportable, the conflation of democracy and capitalism/neo-liberalism by economic and political elites, the belief that democracy’s rights, goals, and means include access to goods no matter what the impact on other humans or the environment, the economic formula, growth or die, the absence of equal rights for minoritized groups that still lack equal participation in policy making and public life. What are the prospects of success in our stated goals as educators? In what may appear to some overly pessimistic or cynical terms, William Griffen offers: Schools are deeply embedded in the present story, i.e., industrialism—materialism and never-ending high technological means to disrupt and destroy (unintentionally or otherwise) nature for economic ends. Schools’ major cultural function is the preparation of the next generation for the workforce and support of U.S. control of the global market. This basic school role comes with an unquestioned commitment to never-ending generations of an expanding, consumer-driven, ecocidal culture. The belief that this cultural direction, completely orchestrated by corporatism, is capable of responding to the accelerating crises of modernity is a dangerous myth. In fact, the present cultural devotion to economic growth and 39 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Costantino development—almost universally accepted political-economic goal of the major political forces in most of the world—guarantees human and environmental crises. Only the precise timetables of inevitable disasters remain debatable.1 Unable to surrender to a perceived growing fundamentalist view of or approach to contemporary world issues, I look to feminist, cultural and performance studies, among others, which have provided theories which make visible, interrogate, and critique the structures, systems, ideologies, processes and relations of power that produce this generalized dominance and violence. The framing question? How do we formulate and engage in a politics of hope and transformation? This short paper is part of an ongoing project—somewhat frustrated after November 2 and all the more urgent, through which I begin the search for pedagogies for social justice and peace. I began by exploring the issues confronting feminist educators and other committed social agents dedicated to aiding future participants in the democratic process—in this case, undergraduate students in a public university—to think critically and achieve the critical understanding and engagement democracy requires. I will continue to employ strategies provided by numerous disciplines that interrogate the power/knowledge relationship between educator and student, and individual citizens and institutions. I maintain in focus the role of language and discourse in shaping perceptions of reality, particularly relating to students in the process of developing their sense of identity and value, of subjectivity and agency. These efforts must, however, begin with the formulation of pedagogies which generate in students a sense of empowerment and, perhaps most important, of personal investment in creating more equitable and just societies in which peaceful resolution is the only option and violence is not accepted as ‘natural’, where a secure and humane existence for the individual and for the Other is truly a basic human right, and discourses of critique motivate the transformation of those practices and institutions that propagate obstacles to these goals. Obviously, this is not the 1960s or 70s, and my personal formative experiences are foreign to my students. Employing in classroom discussions the words Freedom, Civil/Human Rights, Social Welfare, War, Liberty, Security, Freedom, or even the Draft does not evoke the intellectual or visceral reaction in traditional-aged college students (or in much of the general public, obviously) that motivated an earlier generation’s radical attempts to reshape the world. Even though, like them, I come from a working-class family, first-generation college grad born and raised in a rural area (I, NJ, they, PA), our generational and experiential differences vary so as to notably alter the contexts in which the lexicon of issues of power, domination, and resistance circulate and in each of us exists. For my students and me, my attempts to engage them in critical analysis of the personal and political often result in a feeling that we speak different languages. This perception is neither accidental nor inevitable, but the result, I contend, of the appropriation of language and discourses, of concepts like ‘diversity’ and ‘difference’ for commodification and consumption. Power seeks increasingly to curb access to certain knowledges, devalue others (at least until they can serve capitalist ends), while promoting others invested in the production of capitalistic desire, materialism, and an adequately prepared service-labor force. But analysis of language and the unmediated access to knowledge do not guarantee the integration of newly discovered truths, attitudes, and ways of seeing and being in the world into already existing personal identities and worldviews—the very processes we strive to create the conditions and spaces for in our roles as educators. An anti-intellectualism permeates our public sphere and political discourse. Public discourse is infused with contradictory and conflictive connotations of loaded, yet seemingly neutral terms and concepts, such as faith /moral values/ truth in such a way as to devalue scientific inquiry, critical analysis, verifiable facts, and confuse cost with value. It is a discourse that represents, with some obvious success, the interests and values of the ‘few’ as those of many, even as they negatively affect the daily existence most. Most, if not all, of my students belong to the class of ‘the many.’ So, why, in my language, culture, and literature classes dedicated to critical analysis of systems and discourses of power and domination does the discovery of the relativity of truth and the role of discourses, institutions, and people in the perpetuation of unequal, unjust conditions, cause such substantial cognitive dissonance and emotional distress, most especially if the perpetrator of such injustice is the U.S.? What role do I—my ideas, teaching styles, embodied knowledges and experience—play in this cognitive dissonance? This dissonance interferes with the effectiveness—and hopefulness—of the methodology of delivering to students Feministas Unidas 40 Costantino the “truth,” “facts,” “unmediated” knowledge basic to making informed decisions, developing open minds, “seeing the light,” and acting instead of reacting. It disenables learned interpretative strategies by creating an internal, personal confusion that impedes critical thinking. So what is missing from the equation? As a Latin Americanist, I’ve learned that it’s not enough to only present reliable information from sources offering the highest degree of objectivity available or whose aesthetic languages my students speak, be they official documents, testimonies or popular representations (music, indy or commercial film, animation, theatre, performance). Success has been limited when presenting canonical and alternative sites of knowledge that represent as they critique the repression and brutal suppression in Latin America by the local and foreign elites (U.S.); students have difficulty convincing themselves of the selfinterest that has guided and continues to shape U.S. foreign policy. Re-creating historical memory is, in itself, not enough, since, Chomsky asserts, historical amnesia is “necessitated for the populace because they would not allow politicians to do what they are doing. They would not want to know.”2 Today, on a level that has been shaped as simultaneously personal and national, the memories are fresh and the facts are on the table. Nonetheless, somehow, for many, the constructive nature of those memories remains obscured even in the face of the “facts.” Begin with the responses to 9/11: a general, seemingly spontaneous, call for the protection of the “American Way of Life,” at all costs. Move to the continued support of an illegal preemptive war in which massive civilian loss becomes “collateral damage,” and dead and maimed U.S. soldiers, invisible. The 2004 presidential election evidenced that abundant information on political, social, economic, environmental, judicial, and human rights issues did not, ultimately, weigh on the democratic selection process as many expected. In this climate, in the classroom my students part from the ‘terrorist’ mindset and reason that U.S. intervention in Latin America, and the repression and brutality it facilitated or directly caused, has been “necessitated by circumstances”, since, they postulate, much of it coincided with the Cold War and the older terrorist threat, “communism.” So where does that leave educators? In a position, I suggest, with a mandate to analyze and strategize around the role and structures of students’ affective realm as these intersect with their intellectual and performative processes. Performance pedagogies offer the possibility of locating the issues beyond the realm of the intellectual onto the body, so as to generate a visceral reaction to the operations of making visible the, at times, invisible and naturalized processes of discrimination, domination and violence generated by a sense of superiority, privilege and, albeit, unreflective power. Ideally, as they ‘know’ and experience power played on their bodies, and feel and understand how power structures perform exclusion on their bodies, they will discover the power they (the majority of them white) levy on the bodies of the Other through mostly unreflective, reiterative practices inherited from their dominant culture. And then? What tools can feminist theory provide in the struggle to replace endemic fear and self-interest to re-value critical thinking, to create a safe space in which students will be able and willing to make themselves vulnerable, to display their contradictions and prejudices as they analyze critically their inherited worldview? What pedagogies and practices can we develop to be responsive to their intellectual as well as affective realms while enabling or empowering them to develop what Diana Tietjen Meyers calls “autonomy competency”–– that is, a repertoire of “well-developed, wellcoordinated agenic skills” on which they can call “routinely as they reflect on themselves and their lives and as they reach decisions about how best to go on.” Tietjen Meyers posits that “childrearing and educational practices should be geared to developing autonomy competency and providing opportunities to practice using it.”3 Useful here is scholar and performance artist Charles Garoin’s template for a “performance art pedagogy,” comprising a three-layer process: objectification which “enables students to see the culture that they embody and to expose and problematize its hidden circumstances”; subjectification which “enables them to see themselves within culture by critiquing it from the perspective of personal memory and cultural history, and self-observation which “provides them an opportunity to see their performances within the expanded field of cultural history”4 The goal: to create the conditions to teach peace and social justice by supporting their move from a place of ‘blinding’ self-interest and privilege to one in which they develop a personal stake in the shared responsibility to secure the well41 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Costantino being of all. Incorporated in these practices must be what Chandra T. Mohanty refers to as “feminism without borders”; that is, a framework of solidarity and shared values, based on a vision of “common differences” and equality attentive to power differences within and among various communities.5 Students must be able to access the site-specific life-experiences of those whom they perceive as being further down, in Mohanty’s words, “the ladder of privilege,” in order, first, to comprehend the specific effects of social location, second, to achieve a sense of solidarity, and finally, I suggest, to realize that their own position on that ladder is relative and unstable This short paper serves only as a departure point for this project, but in the time remaining, I would like to draw on my work on women, culture, and performance in Latin America, the objects of my research and course syllabi. I take my lead at this point from both feminist praxis and theory of a politics of performance and difference, two integral aspects of the dynamic processes of individual and group identity construction and representation. I privilege neither praxis nor theory, but understand the two to exist in a dynamic relation, responsive to the specific cultural, social, political, economic and historical context. My study of Latin American women’s individual activism, cultural production, and collective grassroots movements has taught me that theory and praxis feed each other. In each case, the presence of the body and affective realm—of the activist, artist, and/or spectator, remains essential. Whether located in grassroots women’s movements, collective art or theatre, literature or street activism, we find numerous instances of resistant and transformational cultural production that accesses and produces knowledge as it critiques its own form and content. While signaling the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and economic class as central elements in the construction of self-identity and interpretation of ´reality´, these women have long interrogated the constructed nature of truth and the multiplicity of forms and loci of knowledge—often delegitimized or devalued by educational theory and practice (including established hierarchies of categories of knowledge). Like their counterparts conducting research in the social sciences and humanities, these women’s struggles against the structural violence that perpetrates abuse of human rights6 depart from the definition of peace as the absence of structural or institutional discrimination and inegalitarian practices, as well as the containment of war. The task before us is to strategize approaches to our specific (U.S.) classrooms and communities, informed by a broad range of theories and practices that form part of the cultural memory of struggles for peace and justice, and located within processes of self-discovery, identity formation, intellectual, spiritual, and emotional growth. The fear and suspicion fostered by our institutions and the rhetoric of the powerful must be replaced by bold strategies to nourish students’ personal investment in new conceptual maps for peaceful, just, sustainable co-existence on this fragile planet, even when that action, like talking dirty in the classroom, shocks and destabilizes the perverse sense of security and comfort that marks us all as ‘collateral damage.’ William Griffen. “All the World’s a Stage—Time to Change the Plot” Journal of Thought Fall 2003 8792. 2 Noam Chomsky. “Memory Differences North and South of the Border.” Alternative Radio, Part II. Friday, Aug. 13, 2004.. 3 Quoted from seminar handout and discussion with Diana Tietjens Meyers. Rock Ethics Institute, Penn State University, February 28, 2004. 1 Charles R. Garoian. Performing Pedagogy.Towards an Art of Politics. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1999. 9. Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Feminism without Borders. Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham & London: Duke UP: 2003 221-251. 6 In 1964, peace researcher Johann Galtung expanded the definition of peace to extend beyond the absence of war in his editorial in the first volume of the newly founded Journal of Peace Research, titled “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” Journal of Peace Research vo. 1, no. 1, pp. 1-4. 4 5 Feministas Unidas 42 8 New Member/Renewal Form for JANUARY-DECEMBER 2004_____ JANUARY-DECEMBER 2005_____ Check out our website at http://www.asu.edu/languages/femunida/f02/index.htm Feministas Unidas is a Coalition of Feminist Scholars in Spanish, Spanish-American, Luso-Brazilian, AfroLatin American, and U.S. Hispanic Studies. Now in our 24th year, Feministas Unidas publishes a Newsletter in April and December, and as an Allied Organization of MLA sponsors panels at the Annual convention. Please let your colleagues know that our organization is interdisciplinary and includes all fields of studies relating to Hispanic women.
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Please indicate the amount of your donation ______ . Send this form with a check in U.S. funds payable to Feministas Unidas to: Candyce Leonard, Treasurer PO. Box 7332 Wake Forest University Winston-Salem, NC 27104-7332 e-mail: leonaca@wfu.edu 43 IMPORTANT NOTE: In addition to writing your e-mail address on this form for our general database files, please send an e-mail message to the following list request address: femunidasrequest@clio.fiu.edu for all NEW or CORRECTED e-mail addresses. The subject line of the message and the body of the message should have the word <subscribe>, and you should get a message back saying that you have been subscribed. Many thanks for your assistance in keeping our list updated. Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Please veryify your e-mail address as listed below and contact me (leonaca@wfu.edu) for any corrections, as well as our self-service database: femunidas-request@clio.fiu.edu . You should write “subscribe” (or “unsubscribe”)as the subject and body of your message, and you should get a message back saying that you are now subscribed. Thank you, Candyce Leonard, Membership Recorder and Treasurer. Last Name First Name Adair Olga M. 04 olgaadair@aol.com Albada-Jelgersma Jill E. 04 je.albadajelgersma@prodigy.net Alborg Concha 05 calborg@sju.edu Alonso-Almagro M. Nieves 04 malonsoa@ic.sunysb.edu Alvarez-Olarra Silvia 04 sxa188@psu.edu Anderson Blanca 04 bandersn@loyno.edu Andre Maria 05 andre@hope.edu Andrist Debra 04 andrist@stthom.edu Aronson Stacey Parker 05 aronsosp@mrs.umn.edu Barnes-Karol Gwendolyn 04 barnesg@stolaf.edu Baum Robert 05 rbaum@astate.edu Bell Amy 04 amy_bell8@yahoo.com Bellver Catherine G. 04 bellver@unlv.nevada.edu Berardini Susan P. 05 sberardini@fsmail.pace.edu Berg Mary G. 05 mberg@fas.harvard.edu Bergmann Emilie 06 elb@socrates.berkeley.edu Bieder Maryellen 06 bieder@indiana.edu Biron Rebecca 04 r-e-b@miami.edu Boling Becky 04 bboling@carleton.edu Bornstein-Gomez Miriam 04 mbornste@du.edu Breckenridge Janis 04 jbreck@csinet.net 05 browdy@simons-rock.edu Browdy de Hernandez Jennifer Feministas Unidas Dues Expire DEC of E-MAIL Address 44 Brown Joan L. 05 jlbrown@udel.edu Bryan Catherine 04 bryan@uwosh.edu Buhrman Judy 04 judyb311@yahoo.com Carlile Susan 04 scarlile@csulb.edu Castillo Debra 05 dac9@cornell.edu Caulfield Carlota 04 amach@mills.edu Chacon Hilda 04 hxchacon@naz.edu Charnon-Deutsch Lou 05 ldeutsch@notes.sunysb.edu Chavez-Silverman Suzanne 04 scs04747@pomona.edu Chiclana Arleen 04 chiclana@umd.umich.edu Connor Catherine 04 catherine.connor@uvm.edu Cooper Patricia U. 04 pcooper@georgetowncollege.edu Cooper Sara 06 scooper@csuchico.edu Copeland Eva Maria 05 ecopeland-smith@nc.rr.com Corvalan Graciela N. Vico 04 corvalgr@webster.edu Costantino Roselyn 04 rxc19@psu.edu Covarrubias Alicia 04 avc1+@pitt.edu Criado Miryam 05 criado@hanover.edu DiFrancesco Maria C. 04 mdifrancesco@ithaca.edu Dinverno Melissa 05 mdinvern@indiana.edu Doyle Kathleen 04 doyle@rhodes.edu Edwards Alice 04 aedwards@mercyhurst.edu Fernandez Salek Fabiola 04 kfernand@csu.edu Foote Deborah C. 06 dfoote@colum.edu Foster David 04 David.Foster.asu.edu Fox Linda 05 fox@ipfw.edu Frohlich Margaret 04 mfrohlic@ic.sunysb.edu Frouman-Smith Erica 05 efrosmith@aol.com Galvan Delia V. 04 d.galvan@csuohio.edu 45 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Garcia Heidi Ann 04 heidi.garcia@asu.edu Garcia-Serrano Victoria 04 vgs@sas.upenn.edu Geoffrion-Vinci Michelle 05 geoffrim@lafayette.edu Gladhart Amalia 04 gladhart@uoregon.edu Gomez Maria Asuncion 05 gomezm@fiu.edu Gonzalez Flora 04 flora_gonzalez@emerson.edu Gonzalez Arias Francisca 04 fgarias@yahoo.es Gutierrez Jana F. 05 gutiejf@auburn.edu Harper Sandra N. 04 snharper@owu.edu Harris Carolyn 05 harrisc@wmich.edu Heneghan Dorota 04 Dorota.heneghan@yale.edu Henseler Christine 04 henseler@union.edu Hernandez Librada 05 mpower@ucla.edu Hind Emily 04 emilyhind@yahoo.com Hitchcock David 05 dhitchcock@worcester.edu Horan Elizabeth 06 elizabeth.horan@asu.edu Hoult Stacy 04 stacy.hoult@valpo.edu Ibazeta Maria Celina 04 celinaibazeta@hotmail.com Intemann Marguerite D. 05 minteman@temple.edu Jaeger Frances 04 fjaeger@niu.edu Joffroy Michelle 04 mjoffroy@smith.edu Johnson Roberta 04 rjohnson@ku.edu Johnson Elaine Dorough 04 johnsone@mail.uww.edu Jorgensen Beth 04 bjgn@mail.rochester.edu Juzyn Olga 05 ojuzyn@ric.edu Kaminsky Amy 05 kamin001@umn.edu Kingery Sandra 05 Kingery@lycoming.edu Klingenberg Patricia 05 klingepn@muohio.edu Lange Catherine E.W. 04 woodcb@bc.edu Larson Catherine 04 larson@indiana.edu Feministas Unidas 46 Lehman Kathryn 05 k.lehman@auckland.ac.nz Leon Kathy 04 kjleon@uiuc.edu Leonard Candyce 06 leonaca@wfu.edu Lewis Elizabeth Franklin 05 elewis@mwc.edu Llanos Bernardita 05 llanos@denison.edu Lopez Irma 05 irma.lopez@wmich.edu Madurka Zenaida 05 zmadurka@aol.com Magnarelli Sharon 04 magnarelli@quinnipiac.edu Maier Carol 04 cmaier@kent.edu Maiz-Pena Magdalena 05 mapena@davidson.edu Maldonado-DeOliveira Debora 04 deoliveirad@meredith.edu Manas Rita 04 rmanas_64@yahoo.com Mankin Iliana 04 imankin@stetson.edu Martell Maria 04 maria.martell@asu.edu Martin-Armas Dolores 04 martinjd@colorado.edu Martinez Susana S. 04 smartine@depaul.edu Martinez Adelaida 04 amartine@unlnotes.unl.edu Martinez Elizabeth Coonrod 05 elizabeth.martinez@sonoma.edu Marting Diane 04 dianemarting@netscape.net Matthews Irene 04 elizabeht.matthews@nau.edu Mayock Ellen 04 mayocke@wlu.edu McEwen Rosemary 05 mcewen@geneseo.edu McGovern Lynn 05 lmcgovern@sbc.edu McNerney Kathleen 04 kmcnerney@as.wvu.edu Miguel Magro Tania de 04 tmmagro@yahoo.co Mihaly Deanna 04 dmihaly@ehc.edu Mitchell Joanna L. 04 mitchej2@ohio.edu Molinaro Nina 04 nina.molinaro@colorado.edu Nagy-Zekmi Silvia 05 silvia.nagyzekmi@villanova.e 47 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Nichols Geraldine Cleary 06 nichols@rll.ufl.edu Niebylski Dianna 04 dcnieb2@uky.edu Norat Gisela 05 gnorat@agnesscott.edu Ordonez Elizabeth 04 geordonez@att.net Orlicki Mary 04 orlicmar@aquinas.edu Partnoy Alicia 04 apartnoy@lmu.edu Perez Mariola 05 mariola.perez@wmich.edu Perez-Sanchez Gema P. 05 gema@miami.edu Perricone Catherine R. 04 martidl@auburn.edu Persin Margaret 05 mpersin@spanport.rutgers.edu Pinto Bailey Cristina Ferreira- 04 acpinto60@yahoo.com Pobutsky Aldona 04 pobutsky@oakland.edu Pollack Beth 04 bpollack@nmsu.edu Postlewate Marisa Herrera 04 mpostlewate@yahoo.com Powell Amanda 04 apowell@darkwing.uoregon.e Ragan Robin 05 rragan@knox.edu Raventos-Pons Esther 04 raventos@glendon.yorku.ca Rodriguez Mercedes M. 04 RLLMMR@hofstra.edu Rojas-Auda Elizabeth 04 erojas@uta.edu Rutter-Jensen Chloe 04 oaklandchloe@yahoo.com Saar Amy L. 04 asaar@umich.edu Sanabria Ruti 04 Sanchez-Llama Inigo 07 sanchezL@purdue.edu Sandmann Susana 05 smsandmann@stthomas.edu Scarlett Elizabeth 04 scarlett@buffalo.edu Schlau Stacey 04 sschlau@wcupa.edu Schmidt-Cruz Cynthia 06 csc@udel.edu Serra Ana 06 aserra@american.edu Feministas Unidas 48 Sharpe Peggy 04 psharpe@mailer.fsu.edu Sittig Ann 04 asittig@mccneb.edu Slack Dawn 04 slack@kutztown.edu Stos Carol 05 cstos@laurentian.ca Strand Cheryl 04 strandc@wou.edu Sullivan Clare E. 04 clara.sullivan@louisville.edu Sullivan Constance 04 sulli002@umn.edu Talbot Lynn K. 04 talbot@roanoke.edu Thomas Patricia C. 04 pthomas@css.edu Thornton Sally W. 04 swthorn@grove.iup.edu Tilley-Lubbs Gresilda 04 glubbs@vt.edu Tolliver Joyce 05 joycet@uiuc.edu Tompkins Cynthia 05 cynthia.tompkins@asu.edu Torres Rosario 05 RZT1@psu.edu Traverso-Rueda Soledad 04 sxt19@psu.edu Trevisan Graciela 04 latingra@newcollege.edu Ugalde Sharon Keefe 04 su01@txstate.edu Ulland Rebecca 04 rjulland@yahoo.com Umpierre Luz Maria 05 lumpierre@aol.com Urey Diane 05 dfurey@ilstu.edu Urioste-Azcorra Carmen 05 carmen.urioste@asu.edu Valis Noel 05 noel.valis@yale.edu Vallejo Catherine 04 vallejo@alcor.concordia.ca Van Liew Maria 04 mvanliew@wcupa.edu Vargas Margarita 04 mvargas@buffalo.edu Velez-Mitchell Anita 04 rieckehoff@aol.com Villamandos Alberto 04 avillamandos@yahoo.es Vollendorf Lisa 06 lvollendorf@yahoo.com Vosburg Nancy 04 nvosburg@stetson.edu Walas-Mateo Guillermina 04 gwalas@mail.ewu.edu Watson Sonja Stephenson 05 sstephe1@utk.edu 49 Fall 2004 Volume 24.2 Feministas Unidas 50