Abstract
Using one of critical race theory’s tenets, legal storytelling, this essay focuses on the first Chicana mystery-detective writer, Lucha Corpi, her groundbreaking novel Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999), and its unique approach to addressing crimes against women. Corpi’s novel solves the traditional mystery while also providing a secondary narrative on the history and evolution of United States and California laws and their relationship to women’s bodies as well as their intimate (private) and civic (public) lives. The Chicana feminist detective character Gloria Damasco engages in legal storytelling, or the act of challenging traditional and institutional methods, to expose how marital rape, human trafficking, and domestic violence can be viewed as colonial and patriarchal residues. Ruiz argues that the narrative, positioned as a liminal text within conventional American literary studies, challenges institutional and foundational forms of justice by placing a nontraditional character like Gloria Damasco as a turn-of-the-century negotiator and legal storyteller.
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- 1.
Throughout this essay I will be using the term “Chicana/Chicanas” when speaking of US women who identify as Mexican American. In recent years the term has seen as an evolution, using Chican@ when speaking about women and male-identified persons within the community , to Chicanx, a term believed to acknowledge the non-binary or gender -fluid community members by eliminating the “a” and “o” which in Spanish feminize or masculinize subjects. For me, Chicana is a specific term centered on women’s historical experiences within the United States, but does not exclude community members who are woman-identified.
- 2.
Rodríguez’s use of the word “Chicanidad” stems from the Spanish-language term, “mexicanidad.” Often employed when discussing identity and issues of national belonging, I believe Rodríguez is linking some of the issues experienced by Mexicans living in Mexico and how those become transferred and translate into the USA by the Chicana/o community.
- 3.
Corpi’s first detective novel from her series, Eulogy for a Brown Angel (1992), introduces the reader to the first Chicana feminist detective character, Gloria Damasco. Initiating her as a single-mother detective-investigator from San Francisco’s Bay Area, the novel takes place at the height of the Chicano Movement of the 1970s during Los Angeles’ Chicano Moratorium. As has been historically documented, the peacefully intended Moratorium ended in institutional violence enacted by the Los Angeles Police Department, injuring protesters as well as killing popular Mexican American Los Angeles Times journalist, Rubén Salazar. The second novel in the series, Cactus Blood (1995), takes place during the post-Chicano Movement, highlighting the continual struggle among the Chicana/o and Mexican community against environmental injustice and exploitative labor practices, such as abuse towards undocumented workers.
- 4.
Montoya defines the term “outsiders” to “include people of color, women, gays and lesbians, and the poor; in other words, members of groups who have been discriminated against historically” (1, footnote 1).
- 5.
According to Flowers, the process to address marital rape in US courts has been a decades-long battle. Legal challenges began in the 1970s at the height of US second-wave feminism . Nebraska was the first state in 1975 to eliminate marital rape; three years later Oregon prosecuted its first spousal rape. By 1993, marital rape was a crime in all US states, prosecutable under sexual offense penal codes (40).
- 6.
See Paz, Fuentes, and Rendón.
- 7.
“[T]he daughters of the fucked one” (my translation).
- 8.
See Anzaldúa’s essay, “(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces.” In the essay Anzaldúa expands on her nepantla framework and includes a footnote that states “I use the word nepantla to theorize liminality and to talk about those who facilitate passages between worlds, whom I’ve named nepantleras. I associate nepantla with states of mind that question old ideas and beliefs, acquire new perspectives, change worldviews and shift from one world to another” (1).
- 9.
It is important to also note how the Spanish phrase ánima sola is gendered, not only visually but also linguistically; its usage is dually female.
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Ruiz, S. (2018). La mujer en llamas: Legal Storytelling in Lucha Corpi’s Black Widow’s Wardrobe . In: Jacobson, K., Allukian, K., Legleitner, RA., Allison, L. (eds) Liminality, Hybridity, and American Women's Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73851-2_14
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