Abstract
This article examines connections between US third world feminism (Chela Sandoval) and recent developments in transnational feminisms. A focal emphasis of the article is the notion of oppositional consciousness, which, as postulated by Chicana critic Chela Sandoval, constitutes a mobile strategy whereby the trans-cultural, trans-gendered, transsexual and transnational are activated in order to defy ideology and equalize power on behalf of the colonized. Ester Hernández’ visual art is used to illustrate the goals of the movement and the method of oppositional consciousness. The analysis demonstrates that, through the tactics implemented by Chicana mestizaje, Hernández is able to grasp the local in a dialectical relation with the global, destabilizing universal discourses of class, race, gender and nation. Furthermore, by turning the mestiza body into the site where the material conditions of neocolonial histories are played out, the artist is able to rupture ideology, propelling new strategies for Chicana liberation. In synthesis, through the transnational lens, US third world feminism is viewed as a deviation from the normalized category we call “US feminism,” a movement of its own that provided – as Hernández’ work illustrates – a profound understanding of difference within the United States, and a new and provocative way of articulating marginality.
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Notes
See Chicana critics Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, Laura Pérez and Chela Sandoval, who have theorized about the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Chicana's spirituality and Chicana Mestizaje as a method for liberation.
I explore this issue in “Decentralizing Globalization: Cultural Politics, Transnational Feminisms, and Religious Iconography in Chicana Artistic Productions”, a paper presented at NACCS (annual international meeting Austin, TX, 19–22 March 2008), where I examined works by Ester Hernández, Consuelo Jiménez Underwood, Alma López and Marion C. Martínez.
To mention a few examples, see Castillo (1996); Sandra Cisneros’, short story collection, Women Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991); Yolanda López’ series on the Virgin of Guadalupe ((Victoria F. Franco: Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978); Margaret F. Stewart: Our Lady of Guadalupe (1978); Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe (1978), Nuestra Madre (1985–1988); Madre Mestiza (2002); Virgin at the Crossroads (2002)); and Ester Hernández’ art work, which I address in this study. See also Christian (2005) and Doyle (2004). These works offer new ways of understanding gender, body and spirituality, and challenge an Anglo-European feminist discourse, which has maintained a minimalist and dualistic discourse about Hispanic feminisms with the formula “marianismo/machismo.” See, for example, Stevens (1973). A theoretically important contribution to this new kind spirituality is, of course, Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera (1999).
The images examined here are reproduced with the permission of the artist, Ester Hernández, who holds the copyright. These images cannot be reproduced by any informational system without permission from the artist. I am immensely grateful to Ester Hernández for her permission to reproduce them in this publication, as well as to Mike McCardel, Kenyon College technology consultant, for his help in the manipulation of the images.
On 26 February 2007, I had the opportunity to interview Ester in her house in San Francisco. The interview, still unpublished, is entitled “Cartographies of Resistance: An Interview with Ester Hernández”.
For an excellent account of the formation and development of this movement see Chapter II of Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed, “US Third World Feminism: Differential Social Movement I”.
The Nican Mopohua was written by a Nahuatl scholar, Antonio Valeriano, in Nahuatl, for the Nahuatl people. For a full description of the origins of the Nican Mopohua see Clodomiro L Siller Acuña, Para comprender el mensaje de María Guadalupe (1989, 11–16); and Richard Nebel (1995, 167–269). For an excellent contemporary interpretation of the Guadalupe event see Elizondo (1999).
This citation comes from a lecture Hernández presented at Kenyon College, entitled “Translucent Borders: The Art of Ester Hernández” on 16 April 2009. It is reproduced here with permission of the artist.
According to the Aztec myth, Coatlicue becomes pregnant with Huitzilopochtli, the sun/war god, by swallowing a ball of feathers while sweeping the Serpent Mountain. Huitzilopochtli is born fully armed and slays his sister, Coyolxauqui (the moon), and her 400 brothers (the stars). The importance of the myth, cited by Pat Mora in a note to her poem “Coatlicue's Rules,” becomes apparent when Chicana writers connect myth to history. For example, in “El mito azteca”, Cherrie Moraga explains that her art emerges from the Coatlicue’ wound: “That moment when brother is born and sister is mutilated by his envy”.
For an example of the use of love as oppositional consciousness see my chapter “Queering the Sacred: Love as Oppositional Consciousness in Alma Lopez's Visual Art,” forthcoming in Our Lady of Controversy: Alma Lopez's Irreverent Apparition (UT Press, 2010).
Ometeotl is an Aztec deity, who reunited the feminine and masculine principles of the universe (León-Portilla, 50).
As Virgil Elizondo explains in The Virgin of Guadalupe: A New Creation (1999), the Guadalupe event was truly scandalous, as it alters the social hierarchies of the Spanish colonial regimen. I agree with Elizondo as, from the point of view of the colonizer, it must have been unthinkable, if not absurd, the idea that the Virgin would appear to an Indian, would speak to him in Nahuatl, and would use him as messenger and vehicle to carry out Her desires. It was also scandalous that the Virgin would choose to appear in Tepeyac, the sacred mountain site of the goddess Tonantzin, where she had been venerated from time immemorial. No wonder Archbishop of Tlatelolco, Juan de Zumárraga, refused to believe the Indian's account of the prodigious event, demanding proof of its authenticity.
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Román-Odio, C. Transnational alliances, US third world feminism, and Chicana Mestizaje in Ester Hernández's visual art. Lat Stud 7, 317–335 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2009.25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/lst.2009.25