La Gloriosa Travesura de la Musa Que Cruza/The Misbehaving Glory(a) of the Border-Crossing Muse: Transgression in Anzaldúa’s Children’s Stories

Abstract

Prietita, a young Chicana, is the main character of Gloria Anzaldúa’s children’s stories Friends From the Other Side/Amigos del Otro Lado and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/Prietita y la Llorona. Prietita is a brave and daring girl whose misbehavior works to improve the lives of others. The developing expression of her identity mirrors wider aesthetic and political consequences and occurs in tandem with aesthetic and political progressions. Although juvenile voices convey a sentience and range of human experience in narratives, literary scholars rarely explore them. Juvenile perspectives communicate dramatically and with a stark perspicacity across a range of themes.¹ The child narrator generally performs in unlimited contexts for adult audiences, but child narration does not equate with child readership. I stress this point because I believe it can provide a fresher understanding of what Anzaldúa attempts in her stories, which are directed to a child audience yet incorporate serious themes and outcomes.

¿Mi musa? Es un diablillo con alas de ángel. Ah, musilla traviesa, ¡qué vuelo trae!

—José Martí

Perhaps trouble need not carry such a negative valence. To make trouble was, within the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble. The rebellion and its reprimand seemed to be caught up in the same terms, a phenomenon that gave rise to my first critical insight into the subtle ruse of power: the prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence, I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it.

—Judith Butler