Abstract
Fernandez examines the significance of Murray’s juxtaposition of a colonial narrative of cross-cultural contact with a contemporary narrative of postcolonial deterritorialized and displaced communities. Focusing on magical indigenous characters, Murray produces a Borderland Narrative that moves across time and between intersecting accounts of oppression. She reinforces the idea of “polyphonic meaning” rather than a singular colonizing narrative; and by utilizing pre-Hispanic mythology as a foundational narrative, she nonviolently critiques and resists the overarching European colonial project.
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- 1.
I would like to thank Anna Palmer, Lilianna Henkel, and Aracely Ruvalcaba for their superb editing and critical input in this chapter.
- 2.
I am using the term “archive” in reference to Michel Foucault’s use in his text The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, (New York: Vintage Books, 2010). For a study of this concept, see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 1–22.
- 3.
Yxta Maya Murray’s novel was well received by the national press. For example, see Salvador Carrasco’s review “The Mestiza Scheherazade,” Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 27, 2002. Salvador Carrasco is director and writer of the film La otra conquista.
- 4.
In reference to Tony Morrison’s Beloved , in an interview entitled “On the Borderlands of U.S. Empire: The Limitations of Geography, Ideology, and Disciplinarity” done by Mónica González García, José David Saldívar speaks of the importance of this type of writings as examples of a language and a discourse that is “uniquely figural expression that would explain its ineffable subaltern mysteries” (195).
- 5.
Yxta Maya Murray, The Conquest (New York: Rayo, 2002), 5.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera (Spinsters/Aunt Lute Books, San Francisco, 1987), 3.
- 8.
The symbolic actions by the narrator’s mother exemplify the studies by James Clifford in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988) where he analyzes the history and exotic values that Western modern art institutions contract with tribal cultural signifiers.
- 9.
I must note that the reappropriation of the amoxtli takes place by a Mexican woman in a territory that was once part of Mexico .
- 10.
For a study on the role that amoxtli play in the formation of a cultural literacy in the Americas, see Walter D. Mignolo , “Signs and Their Transmission: The Question of the Book in the New World,” in A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing, Edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Steven Clay (New York City: Granary Book, 2000), 351–371.
- 11.
Guillermo Gómez Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis: from Columbus to the Border Patrol (Santa Cruz, Calif.: Moving Parts Press, 1998); Please see the study by Damián Baca, “The Chicano Codex: Writing against Historical and Pedagogical Colonization,” College English 71.6 (2009), 564–583.
- 12.
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España . (México , Editorial Porrúa, 1986), 583.
- 13.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America . Translated by Richard Howard (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1984), 78.
- 14.
Anzaldúa , Borderlands, 38.
- 15.
The characterization of Beatrice in certain terms illustrates Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s term of the “effects of the real,” that she postulates in her work In Other Worlds : Essays in the Cultural Politics (New York; Routledge, 1988), where there is a play “between fact (historical event) and fiction (literary event),” 243–244.
- 16.
Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” Nation and Narration, Edited by Homi K. Bhabha, (New York: Routledge, 1990), 299.
- 17.
The use of indigenous subjects to create postcolonial subjects as political allegories also appears in Chicano poetry , such as Juan Felipe Herrera’s text Mayan Drifter: Chicano Poet in the Lowlands of America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997).
- 18.
Laura Esquivel’s novel Malinche (New York: Atria Books, 2006) also exemplifies the importance of orality to contextualize female historical figures.
- 19.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 78.
- 20.
For studies on this colonial relationship see Jean Wyatt, “On Not Being La Malinche : Border Negotiations of Gender in Sandra Cisneros’s ‘Never Marry A Mexican’ and ‘Woman Hollering Creek,’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 14 (1995): 243–71; and Martha J. Cutter, “Malinche ’s Legacy: Translation, Betrayal, and Interlingualism in Chicano/a Literature,” The Arizona Quarterly 66 (2010): 1–33.
- 21.
More recently, the use of intergenerational stories and fables has been read as examples of the contested spaces between the United States and the Americas, as examined by José David Saldívar in Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
- 22.
Arjun Appaduria “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Economy,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, 25–48. Edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 42.
- 23.
The use of the spell parallels the tradition of cultural identifiers that other Chicana/o novelists use to create autochthonous social representations. José David Saldívar in Tans-Americanity reads these uses of cultural identifiers as “decolonial text of métissage, a repository of memory , of colonial semiosis, and Americanity, like the Anden Inca quipu” (171).
- 24.
Miguel León Portilla in his “Apéndice” to Visión de los vencidos credits Tlakaelel as the thinker and leader who establishes the worship of Huichilopochti as the Aztec main deity (202–203).
- 25.
Murray, The Conquest, 56.
- 26.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 31.
- 27.
This reading reflects the notion of transnational feminism as seen in some works by Chicana novelists, for example, Ana Castillo. In her work Chicano Nations : The Hemispheric Origins of Mexican American Literature, (New York: New York University Press, 2011) Marissa K. López states that Castillo’s works “Sapogonia and The Guardians explore the multiplicity of U.S. Latina/o identity while developing a model of chicanismo as global consciousness, a politics that retains geopolitical specificity while also remaining attuned to the world” (170).
- 28.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 21.
- 29.
The characterization of Helen exemplifies Judith Butler ’s philosophical concerns in Gender Trouble : Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). She explores issues dealing with “the articulation of a temporal trope of a subversive sexuality that flourishes prior to the imposition of a law, after its overthrow, or during the reign as a constant challenge to its authority” (29).
- 30.
Anzaldúa , Borderlands, 82.
- 31.
For example, Catalina de Erauso (La Monja Alférez, 1592–1650) dressed as a man and fought in the colonization of the Americans in Chile; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz also exemplifies the theme of cross-dresser; as a man she attends the university in Mexico City. Sor Juana also explores the theme of cross-dressing in her play Los empeños de una casa, when her main character Doña Leonor disguises herself as a man to critic men’s intellectual and cognitive abilities. For a study in Catalina de Erauso, see Sherry M. Velasco, Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire, & Catalina de Erauso. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000).
- 32.
Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 37.
- 33.
Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan in “Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora,” published in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, edited by Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur (Malden: Backwell Publishing, 2003): 120–131, explores these personal and cultural questions “our diasporan gaze” and gives importance to understanding the historical and political crises of the homeland (128).
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Fernández, S.C. (2017). A Search for Colonial Histories: The Conquest by Yxta Maya Murray. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_5
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