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Rasquache Baroque in the Chicana/o Borderlands
Katherine Austin
The Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
McGill University, Montreal
April 2012
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the
Der wünderkammer: baroque knowledge in the works of Amalia Mesa-Bains 152
Vanitas: Evidence, Ruin, Regeneration 153
The Library of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz 161
The Curandera’s Botánica 167
The mirror 174
Venus Envy I: First Holy Communion before the End 176
Sor Juana’s Mirror 186
The Cihuateotl’s Mirror 194
The fold 203
Fold #1 First Holy Communion before the End 204
Venus Envy II: The Harem and Other Enclosures 207
The Study of Sor Juana 212
Venus Envy III: Cihuatlampa: Land of the Giant Women 213
Conclusion 215
Conclusion 220
The future 239
Bibliography 242
Appendix 1: Copyright Release 257
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ABSTRACT
The Chicana/o borderlands have generated their own barroquismo which, having
thrived on the fruits of a colonial Mexican heritage, intensified within the unique cultural
climate of the Southwest US. As second-class citizens, Mexican-Americans have been
excluded from the metanarratives of the nation. However, this position as outsiders has
granted them a unique vantage point from which to see a multifaceted and contradictory
reality. Living in the socio-cultural margins, a certain way of thinking emerged which
allowed for contradictions, ambiguity, and plurality: essentially, a baroque way of
thinking. This particular consciousness combined with a colonial baroque cultural
foundation produced rasquachismo, a sensibility which mirrors the baroque in many
ways. Operating on a constant interrelating of the baroque with Chicana/o thought and
aesthetics, this dissertation will create points of suture so that the two may inform and
enrich each other.
All the works treated in this dissertation participate thoroughly in rasquache
baroque sensibilities, citing baroque history and summoning the ghosts of the colonial
past while generating inclusive structures, impure hybridities and juxtapositions,
flamboyance, excess, bold transformations, and critical humour for the purpose of
negotiating an adverse and complex reality and for culturally arming oneself against
hegemony, in an attempt to ensure cultural survival and resistance.
The first chapter, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography, and
the Supernatural in So Far from God,” explores how this novel continues the colonial
baroque traditions of allegory, hagiography, and miracles. The second chapter, “Robo-
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baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra,”
investigates the colonial baroque legacy which saturates the performances of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and his performance group, La Pocha Nostra. This legacy is demonstrated
by a layering of baroque conventions—allegory, hagiography, and the wünderkammer—,
as well as by an intensely baroque spatial and temporal ordering which harnesses the
powers of decentralization, pluralism, coextensive space, and seriality. The third chapter,
“Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque,” looks at the installation works of Amalia
Mesa-Bains, investigating how these installations use the conventions of the
wünderkammer and vanitas along with the concepts of the mirror and the fold to speak of
baroque knowledge systems, female and non-Western identities, and feminine interior
spaces. Finally, the conclusion relates the works studied in this thesis and elaborates on
the benefits of Chicana/o baroque thought.
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RÉSUMÉ
Les frontières chicanas ont généré leurs propres barroquismos qui, ayant fait
pousser les fruits de l’héritage colonial mexicain, se sont intensifiés dans le climat
culturel unique du sud-ouest des États-Unis. En tant que citoyens de seconde classe, les
Mexico-Américains ont été exclus des méta-récits de la nation. Cependant, cette position
extérieure leur a accordé un point de vue unique, d’où l’on pouvait percevoir une réalité
multiforme et contradictoire. De l’habitation des marges socio-culturelles, une certaine
façon de penser a émergé, permettant la coexistence de contradictions, l'ambiguïté et la
pluralité: une manière de penser essentiellement baroque. Cette thèse se base sur une
constante interrelation du baroque avec la pensée et l’esthétique chicanas, créant des
points de suture entre ces derniers de manière à ce qu’ils puissent s’éclairer et s’enrichir
mutuellement.
Toutes les œuvres traitées dans cette thèse participent profondément aux
sensibilités baroque-rasquaches, en citant l'histoire baroque et en évoquant les fantômes
du passé colonial tout en générant des structures inclusives, des hybridités impures et des
juxtapositions, de la flamboyance, de l’excès, des transformations audacieuses, et un
humour critique afin de négocier les termes d’une réalité complexe et défavorable et de
s’armer culturellement contre l’hégémonie de manière à assurer la survie culturelle et la
résistance.
Le premier chapitre, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography,
and the Supernatural in So Far from God,” explore la manière dont ce roman poursuit les
traditions baroques coloniales de l'allégorie, de l'hagiographie, et des miracles. Le
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deuxième chapitre, “Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his
Pocha Nostra,” examine les legs colonial-baroques qui saturent les performances de
Guillermo Gómez-Peña et de son groupe de performance, La Pocha Nostra. Ce legs se
traduit par une superposition de conventions baroques —l’allégorie, l’hagiographie, et le
wünderkammer— ainsi que par une organisation spatiale et temporelle intensément
baroque, qui exploite les pouvoirs de la décentralisation, du pluralisme, de l’espace
coextensif et de la sérialité. Le troisième chapitre, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana
Baroque,” se penche sur les œuvres d’installation d'Amalia Mesa-Bains, enquêtant sur la
manière dont ces installations utilisent des conventions du wünderkammer et du vanitas,
à travers les concepts du miroir et du pli, afin de parler des systèmes de connaissances
baroques, des identités féminines non-occidentales et des espaces intérieurs féminins.
Finalement, la conclusion relie les œuvres étudiées dans la thèse et explique les avantages
de la pensée chicana-baroque.
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RESUMEN
Las tierras fronterizas chicanas han generado su propio barroquismo que, después
de haberse nutrido de los frutos provinientes de la herencia colonial, se intensificó dentro
del clima cultural único del suroeste de los EE.UU. Como ciudadanos de segunda clase,
los mexicano-americanos han sido excluidos de los metarrelatos de la nación. Sin
embargo, esta posición exterior les ha otorgado una posición ventajosa desde la que
pueden ver una realidad multifacética y contradictoria. Al vivir en los márgenes
socioculturales, emergió cierta manera de pensar que aceptó la convivencia de
contradicciones, de ambigüedades y de pluralidades: en esencia, una forma de pensar
barroca. Esta conciencia combinada con una base barroca colonial produjo el
rasquachismo, una sensibilidad que se parece mucho al barroco. Funcionando en una
constante interrelación entre el barroco y el pensamiento y la estética chicanos, esta tesis
doctoral creará puntos de sutura para que los dos puedan informarse y enriquecerse
mutuamente.
Todas las obras tratadas en esta tesis participan profundamente de las
sensibilidades barroco-rasquaches, ya que citan la historia barroca y convocan a los
fantasmas del pasado colonial, a la vez que generan estructuras inclusivas, hibridaciones
impuras, yuxtaposiciones, formas extravagantes, excesos, transformaciones audaces y un
humor crítico. El propósito de estas prácticas es negociar una realidad adversa y compleja,
armarse culturalmente contra la hegemonía e intentar asegurar la supervivencia cultural y
la resistencia.
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El primer capítulo, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: Allegory, Hagiography,
and the Supernatural in So Far from God,” explora cómo esta novela continúa la tradición
barroca colonial de la alegoría, de la hagiografía y de los milagros. El segundo capítulo,
“Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra,”
indaga la herencia colonial barroca que satura las performances de Guillermo Gómez-
Peña y su grupo, La Pocha Nostra. Este legado se demuestra por su uso de convenciones
barrocas—la alegoría, la hagiografía, y el wünderkammer—, así como por una
ordenación espacial y temporal intensamente barroca que se apodera de la
descentralización, del pluralismo, del espacio coextensivo y de la serialidad. El tercer
capítulo, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque,” contempla las instalaciones de
Amalia Mesa-Bains, investigando cómo éstas utilizan las convenciones del
wünderkammer y de las vanitas junto con los conceptos del espejo y del pliegue para
hablar de los sistemas del conocimiento barroco, de las identidades femeninas y no
occidentales, y de los espacios interiores femeninos. Finalmente, la conclusión relaciona
las obras estudiadas en esta tesis y explica en detalle los beneficios del pensamiento
chicano-barroco.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor, Dr. Jesús Pérez-
Magallón, for all of his support. As an academic figure and as a human being, his life is
nothing short of inspirational.
I would also like to extend my gratitude to Dr. Juan Luis Suárez from the
University of Western Ontario who, through the brilliance and determination befitting of
an evil genius, won a Major Collaborative Research Initiatives grant from SSHRC and
established the Hispanic Baroque research project. The Hispanic Baroque has financed
the Conflicting Identities research stream headed by Dr. Jesús Pérez-Magallón, who has
generously supported me through his MCRI grant.
To the examiners and the defence committee, I would like to express my
appreciation for the time, effort, and feedback that they contributed in the final stages of
this venture. Their generous comments have warmed and envigorated my spirit,
encouraging me to continue my academic pursuits despite the current foreboding job
makret.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge the support received through my partner,
Pejman Salehi. Together, we navigated through our doctoral experiences with the help of
the wine and laughter we shared.
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Rasquache Baroque in the Chicana/o Borderlands
Glossy surfaces, sumptuous forms evoking movement, down-cast eyes lost in
semi-mystical contemplation: the figures from Amalia Mesa-Bains’ Guadalupe exude a
baroque religiosity (fig. 1). At first glance the viewer can easily mistake this 17th
-century
anatomical model for a religious statue, and rightly so, seeing as the original sculptor
decided that the body of Eve would best serve as the vessel for representing the inner-
working of the female body. In this anatomical statue we can see how baroque scientific
rationality seamlessly fuses not only with the plastic arts, but with an emotive religious
sensibility. The opening of the abdomen to reveal the woman’s organs is analogous to the
statues of saints in which glass windows allow the viewer to see the heart inside the
hagiographic body. Fusing the morbidity of the reliquary with the curiosity of the
wünderkammer, this anatomical statue provokes a response in the viewer which is both
intellectual and emotional. Amalia Mesa-Bains plays with the idea of a spiritual
physiology in her print, Guadalupe. The artist has taken the image of the original 17th
-
Fig. 1. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Guadalupe. (Chicana
Badgirls, Las Hociconas 22)
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century anatomical manikin and has mirrored it, producing a second image whose organs
have been replaced with the Virgin of Guadalupe. The work makes evident four
intertwined subjects: the body, gender, spirituality, and identity. Though the
interpretations of this piece could be multifold, I will attempt to limit myself to only one.
The anatomical manikin is an artefact which visually demonstrates man’s struggle to
understand the hidden mechanics of the (female) body, especially those concerning the
miraculous reproduction of human life. Her double has been opened to reveal la
Guadalupe, an icon denoting not only a spiritual understanding of the female reproductive
experience but also, considering la Guadalupe’s role as a symbiotic mediator between
Spanish and indigenous cultures, a deep mestiza core identity and consciousness.1 The
print affirms both a universal womanhood represented by reproductive organs as well as a
racially and culturally-defined female identity represented by an internal Guadalupe. The
two figures are joined at the wrist, reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s Las dos Fridas,
indicating that these women are two parts of the same person. Chicana/o firsthand
experience effects the realization that identities are multiple and, as much as Mesa-Bains
is a woman, she is also a Chicana woman, carrying within her a legacy beginning in
colonial times and continuing into the present.
Guadalupe by Mesa-Bains serves as an emblematic entrance into this dissertation
as the piece references the 17th
century, colonial hybridity, identity, the Mexican past and
1 Alma López notes how scholars view Guadalupe as a syncretisation between the Mesoamerican Goddess,
Tonantzin, and the Virgin Mary. Though these scholars see this syncretisation of the indigenous and the
European as a European stratagem for accelerating the conversion to Christianity, López instead sees
Guadalupe as an indigenous symbol of masked rebellion which promoted cultural preservation. According
to López, Guadalupe functions as disfrasismo: an icon which presented the image of Catholic devotion and
obedience, while hiding referents to a pre-Conquest spiritual past which resisted against European
colonization (256-258). The Virgin of Guadalupe is not only a symbol for negotiating between cultures, but
is also a representation of a covert oppositional identity.
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a Chicana/o present all the while exuding a baroque sensibility. The purpose of this
introductory chapter is to first, present a summary of baroque thinking in the Americas;
second, to provide a summary of Chicana/o theory and aesthetics; and finally, to create
points of suture between the two, in an attempt to relate the baroque with Chicana/o
thought so that the two may inform and enrich each other.
Chicana/o culture has continued the sensibilities and practices of the colonial
baroque. Given the mid 19th
-century American expansion into Mexico and the subsequent
racial and class-based oppression endured by the Mexicans who had suddenly found
themselves in US territory, US Mexicans underwent a second colonization. While the
labour of a 17th
-century indigenous miner in San Luis Potosí benefitted a white,
criollo/Spanish upper class, the labour of 20th
-century mestizo farm workers in the
Southwest profited a white, Anglo ruling class who delegitimized Mexican/Chicana/o
culture, language, and human rights. As second-class citizens in a land where their
people’s history has been excluded from the national narrative the case for the
Chicanas/os as well as the colonized of the Americas, a consciousness begins to form
which can only be granted to the inhabitant of this interstitial space. When excluded from
the center, one has the distance necessary to better perceive a world full of contradictory
truths and realities. This vision, incapable of presenting any fixed or stable conception of
the world, produces ambiguities and perpetual uncertainties. For Gloria Anzaldúa, this
consciousness involves a flexible, divergent, and inclusive way of thinking which allows
for the entrance of plurality, the coexistence of contradictions, and ambivalence (101). A
third element emerges out of this ambivalence: a mestiza consciousness, whose creative
dynamism “keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each paradigm” (Anzaldúa 101-
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02). Similarly, in the Spanish colonies, the encounter and collision between Occidental
and indigenous worldviews produced instability and ambiguity for both parties. Walter
Moser associates the ideological instability resulting from this cultural contact with the
weakening of a paradigm and has connected this period of weakness with a resurgence of
baroque power (110).
However, despite the similarities in the cultural dynamics of colonial Latin
America and the Chicana/o homeland, the cultural environment of the Southwest has
changed significantly in the past few decades. Instead of being limited to the colonial
relations between Spanish, Native, and African peoples, the Southwest of today is also
home to Filipinos, Koreans, Armenians, Chinese, Iranians, as well as nationals of various
Latin American countries. The coexistence of so many competing worldviews constitutes
a recipe for border consciousness and for the weakening of any paradigm lacking the
strength and complexity necessary for supporting such an environment. This is where the
baroque comes in: as a robust paradigm capable of accommodating the ambiguities and
heterodoxies of this brave new world. However, Chicana/o culture offers its own baroque
paradigm which, unlike the baroque historically defined by 17th
and 18th
-century
phenomena, is alive and active at this very minute. Chicanas/os have documented their
experiences in this climate of rupture, providing insight into the border consciousness and
strategies used for surviving a difficult reality. Moreover, the Chicana/o experience
provides insight for surviving our current socio-political ordering: a capitalist model
running on an empty rhetoric of equality while ignoring problems related to race, class,
gender, and religion. Living in a multicultural society in which ethnic fragmentation
threatens to divide people into small balkanized communities lacking the agency to resist
5
subjugation, Chicana/o scholars have had to adapt their theoretical models to include
those outside their community. In this way, Chicana/o studies, though rooted in a specific
ethnic historical experience, can serve any marginalized peoples who wish to better
understand and survive a fragmented and unjust reality. Laura E. Pérez sees this tradition
of resistance and survival as spanning five centuries:
Chicana badgirls, hociconas, big mouths, loud mouths, women who talk
back. They’re the ones who won’t stay quiet, who won’t make nice, won’t
pretend everything’s okay when it’s not. Badgirl hociconas don’t behave
in a world of double-standards, whether these be men over women,
heterosexuals over queer folk, haves over have nots, “white” people over
those “of color,” and so on. They shouldn’t.
Con o sin permiso, they speak out on behalf of the hidden strengths that
have allowed women, and Chicana/Latina women in particular ways, to
survive and even thrive against adverse conditions of racist, classist
sexism rooted in the historic misogyny that accompanied the European
invasion and settling of the Americas. ("Con O Sin Permiso" 3)
While Bolívar Echeverría sees the baroque paradigm as a way of surviving an
inescapable and unbearable capitalist modernity (20-21), this paradigm could benefit
from some vibrant Chicana/o hocicona attitude. Baroque badgirls from Sor Juana to
Gloria Anzaldúa: incapable of accepting the master narratives governing their socio-
cultural surroundings, they wrote in a resistant, vibrant, and creative ink. May the legacy
of this spirit continue.
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Introducing the baroque
Exuberance, extravagance, ostentation, excess, the extraordinary, the bizarre,
deformity, exaggeration, drama, chiaroscuro, allegory, the visual, the physical, the
overwhelming of the senses, the moving of emotions, religiosity, the transcendental made
flesh, transformation, movement, the transgression of boundaries, the open form,
dynamism, instability, the ephemeral, vanitas, illusion, artifice, self-reflexivity, criticism,
citation, parody, satire, bold and unexpected metaphors, witty conceits, inclusivity,
heterogeneity, complexity, contradiction, oxymoron, ambiguity: Given an interminable
list of the defining characteristics of baroque style, perhaps it is best not to ask “What is
baroque?” but rather, “Why baroque?” or more importantly, in the words of Walter
Moser, “Que fait le baroque?” (102, emphasis mine).
So, why baroque? Why do people express themselves using baroque forms?
Baroque cultural production issues from a certain consciousness. This baroque way of
thinking and seeing is preceded by the self-conscious realization that, in this world,
nothing is as it seems and everything is subject to transformation. Once conscious of
illusions of the human world, the illusion of order—the narratives and paradigms that
seem to structure the universe—begins to weaken or disintegrate, allowing for heterodox
and complex alternatives. The baroque enters upon the weakening of a paradigm, says
Walter Moser, which accounts for its resurgence following the Post-Renaissance
weakening of classical culture, the collisions of Spanish and indigenous cultures, and the
decay of the paradigm of modernity2 (110). In all three cases, logocentric and
2 By modernity, I am referring to the socio-cultural project emerging originally during the Renaissance
which bases its principles on the Enlightenment values of rationality, universalism, order and progress and
came to incorporate capitalism into its paradigmatic body.
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universalizing orders came into question and baroque strategies had the power to not only
articulate this malaise but provide its own alternative models. The realization that the
world is in motion, in constant transformation, also denies any paradigm which seeks
stability in the closed-concepts of unchanging universalisms. The baroque’s power lies in
this movement; in its ability to change and adapt. It is therefore not coincidental that now,
in a time where change has become rapid in both cultural and technological spheres, the
baroque paradigm has gathered so much interest.
What does the baroque do? Such a cosmovision comes with its own unique set of
practices. Among the many processes carried out by the baroque; however, four practices
show particular prominence: persuasion, engagement, appropriation, and transformation.
Persuasion and engagement
The baroque is characterized by its affinity for persuasion—the rhetorical
strategies employed with the object of touching the psyches of its audiences and thus
awakening the emotional, psychological, and intellectual fires within them. However,
considering that the art of persuasion has existed since the times of the Sophists, it falls
on us to inquire how exactly baroque persuasion operates differently from its
predecessors. Regardless of the end goal for which a work of art may strive —e.g., to
instruct, to delight, to move—, the baroque work focuses on effect, firmly centring itself
on the reception and response of its audience. While, on one hand, the purpose of post-
Tridentine art was, according to Bishop Gabriele Paleotti in 1582, “to persuade piety and
bring people to God” (Levy 49); Giulio Carlo Argan emphasizes the pervasive 17th
-
century practice of “persuasione senza oggetto” in which the techniques of persuasion
became independent of any underlying goal, being valued in their own right by the
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bourgeois spectator who had recently emerged as a relatively powerful and wealthy
consumer of art (Levy 52). From these two opposing aims of baroque art—to affirm
Catholic ideology and to utilize persuasive techniques to fulfill the demands of new
tastes—two divergent tendencies of the Baroque come into view: 1) art as a
propagandistic tool for controlling the masses and 2) art as a vehicle for satisfying the
emotional and intellectual desires of an audience who had developed an affinity for the
stimulating and engaging strategies of baroque persuasion. This is not to say that the
Baroque’s opposing tendencies of producing conservative propaganda and intellectually-
demanding art need to be reconciled: they merely present two polarities existing within
the same time and space. Moreover, while the goals of these tendencies may differ, their
techniques are often similar. As previously mentioned, the Baroque focuses on the effects
of the work, effects which are ultimately produced by persuasion. However, baroque
persuasion is unique in the sense that it demands the engagement of its audience; an
engagement that is realized through the emotional, experiential, and intellectual
participation of the spectator.
Emotional engagement is a defining feature of baroque persuasive strategies,
whether serving as a tool for affirming the subject’s faith in the supremacy of the
Catholic Church or as a means of achieving a non-rational understanding by way of the
sentiments. Evonne Levy asserts that the Counter-Reformation’s precision of the end goal
of art—to persuade devotion and unite Christians with God—created a shift in artistic
practices (50). Hence, artists began to explore the ways to best represent the emotional
states which would, in turn, effectively touch the emotive faculties of the viewer, thus
moving the spirit of the spectator (Levy 50). On the other hand, drawing on the thought
9
of Giulio Carlo Argan, Vernon Hyde Minor argues that baroque art does not attempt to
convince the viewer of the supremacy of the Catholic Church, but fulfills a larger, more
open-ended function, which is to “move the viewer, touch his or her desires, uncover and
reveal fundamental human reactions, and, in assuming the religious and moral base of
existence, go beyond them to reveal in larger terms the whole scope of public and private
life” (8). Whether baroque techniques serve the agenda of the post-Tridentine Church or
whether they operate for the purpose of instigating a profound reflection and
understanding of the self and the world, it is clear that the baroque elicits the emotional
engagement of its audience.
Experiential engagement constitutes a key aspect of baroque persuasive strategies,
whether functioning in the service of the promotion of Catholic ideology or simply for
the fulfilment of the public’s taste for persuasive techniques: a persuasion without an
object. José Antonio Maravall sees the experience of participation as being an essential
component in the conservative cultural machine which guides the masses. For Maravall,
“a difference exists [...] between mandate and persuasion; with persuasion demanding a
greater participation on the side of the guided, requiring that he or she be taken into
account and thus be given an active role” (Culture of the Baroque 74). In the same vein,
baroque art facilitates participation by effecting an expansion of the space of the art into
the space of the viewer and vice versa, a concept defined by John Rupert Martin as
“coextensive space” (155, 161). This coextension of space between the world of art and
the world of the living integrates the viewer into the work, demanding her/his active
participation in “the spatial-psychological field created by the work of art” (Martin 14).
For Vernon Hyde Minor, for example, a work such as Luca Giordano’s Ecce Homo
10
(1659-60) not only skilfully represents the various auditory, tactile, and visual sensations
implicit in the scene’s content, but excites these same sensations in the viewer (24). This
virtual experience generates a different mode of perception which elicits an alternative
psychological state:
We grasp at objects as if in a dream. Things shift and are in flux. Whereas
some forms rise in sharp relief, others sink into shadow. We have no
cognitive or aesthetic distance. Like phantasmagoria, the events exist in our
minds as if we hallucinated them or were subject to autosuggestion. We are,
as a result, primed exercitants. (Minor 24)
Although the techniques described by Maravall, Martin, and Minor were used by the
Catholic Church as a way of inducing a desired psychological state, the purposes of these
works are not limited to the upholding of Tridentine ideology. Coextensive space
pervades secular baroque art as well, a striking example of which can be found in
Velázquez’s Las meninas: a piece that has no ulterior motive besides playfully
questioning the nature of sight, the concept of the image, and the boundaries separating
art and life. Furthermore, it is worth noting that the primed psychological state described
by Minor can be utilized for generating transgressive ideas as well as conservative
thought. The spectator, having achieved an alternative psychological state through
coextensive and participatory art, is potentially capable of non-quotidian imagining which
can result in the formation of new ideas and practices. This concept will be explored in
more detail in the second chapter which deals with contemporary performance art.
11
Intellectual engagement is another important component of baroque persuasion,
operating both in the affirmation of conservative ideology as well as in the exercising of
the intellect for its own sake. On one hand, conceits, emblems, and allegory were used to
promote Catholic values, presenting enigmas which required deciphering on the part of
the viewer/reader, thereby engaging the intellect. For example, the autos sacramentales
of Calderón which served to affirm the ideology of the Church—specifically in
reinforcing the concept of the transubstantiation of the host—functioned based on
allegorical representations which demanded the intellectual engagement of their audience
to decode their messages. On the other hand, secular baroque works ignite the intellect in
a similar fashion. Vernon Hyde Minor speaks of how in metaphysical and Marinesque
conceits “extended metaphors compare objects, experience, and sensations so distant
from one another—and yet always connected by a slender if tenacious thread—that they
create a sense of surprise and intellectual excitement” (9). Similar to the decoding of the
allegory, the appreciation of the conceit lies in the intellectual process of making a
connection between two different elements, which ignites an intellectual spark in the
mind of the reader. However, the baroque goes beyond the simple production of mental
pleasure through the use of enigmatic tropes. Rather, 17th
-century thinkers explored
profoundly sophisticated concepts which still hold currency in today’s world, perhaps
explaining one of the many reasons as to why the Baroque continues to fascinate the
contemporary mind. Notably, these concepts include the interrogation of the reality and
illusion, as evidenced in Calderón’s La vida es sueño, as well as the pervasiveness of the
trompe l’oeil, extended to its limits in Andrea Pozzo’s Worldwide Mission of the Society
of Jesus (1691-94) in the Church of St. Ignatius. Of perhaps greater intellectual
12
sophistication is the baroque’s self-referentiality which interrogates the process of
representation itself, generating art that speaks of art. In this tradition, we again find
Velázquez’s Las meninas as well as the works of Flemish masters, such as Reverse Side
of a Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, works which undeniably participate in
the incitement of the viewer’s intellectual faculties. Based on the given examples, we can
conclude that baroque persuasion was not limited to affirming conservative ideology;
rather, the Baroque hosted a full spectrum of works ranging from the closed form of
propaganda to the intellectually sophisticated open work which generated a mode of
thinking capable of diverging in multiple directions and generating an intellectual fervour
in the spectator which would ultimately affect her/his conception of life and the world.
We can see how, like the emblem and the allegorical autos sacramentales, these works
utilize the persuasive technique of the enigma, albeit with a more open-ended purpose:
not to convince or affirm a particular message but to induce thought for its own sake.
Appropriation and transformation
The baroque does not invent new and revolutionary concepts and forms but, rather,
practices the techniques of appropriation and transformation. While the Baroque’s
appropriation of Renaissance themes and concepts can be seen as a continuance of this
tradition, the Baroque transforms the Renaissance to the point of rupture. Dámaso Alonso
asserts that the Baroque continued Renaissance tradition, demonstrating how poets, such
as Góngora, appropriated 16th
-century imagery, content, and structure (312, 323, 348).
However, a new spirit emerged during the 17th
century, a spirit which had until then been
bubbling and flowering under the surface of Renaissance cultural life, and this baroque
spirit transformed Seicento ideas and forms using a force which opposed this tradition,
13
and yet did not break away from it: “la doblega y aun la retuerce, pero no la logra romper”
(Alonso 388). Gonzalo Celorio, however, despite affirming the baroque’s capacity for
appropriation and transformation, highlights the baroque’s “desire for rupture” (80).
Examining the Renaissance-Baroque transition, Celorio posits that the Baroque was only
able to break with its Renaissance past by first appropriating its classical structures (79).
However, in spite of the radical transformation realized by the baroque spirit, the baroque
is not a revolutionary spirit desirous of a complete rupture with the past, but it instead
reimagines the cultural legacy granted by history in critical and creative ways. In essence,
the Baroque does not break with Renaissance tradition so much as it surges with a new
spirit which stands in opposition to Seicento impulses and values.
This spirit, capable of appropriating and radically transforming cultural and
historical legacies, was not limited to the place and time of the 17th
-century Iberian
Peninsula. Rather, the affinity for reshaping histories and imposed cultures also emerged
in the art and architecture of the New World. For Ángel Guido and Lezama Lima, the
peoples of the Americas were able to appropriate and adapt the Iberian baroque,
transforming it into the defiant art of the Counter-Conquest. Mabel Moraña expresses a
similar notion by saying that the baroque culture of New Spain involved an appropriation
of hegemonic baroque codes which were artfully transformed to articulate a criollo
subjectivity and to question the hegemonic order (14-15, 47, 60). In addition, this spirit
was not limited to the chronological confines of the colonial Hispanic world, but re-
emerged in the 20th
century’s neobaroque3 forms and practices. For Celorio, the
3 The term neobaroque refers to baroque forms and practices belonging to a contemporary context.
Neobaroque does not imply a return to a Baroque past, but rather, a revisiting, revisioning, or recycling of a
14
neobaroque involves an appropriation of the past in an attempt to recover it and to
“possess culture” (102) and results in parodical transformations and, more specifically, in
the aesthetics of camp which have the power criticize through means of reflection, play
and humour (104-05).
Nearly 100 years of baroque modernity
The title of this section refers to the publication date of Heinrich Wölfflin’s
“Principles of Art History” (1915), which not only developed the first aesthetic
interpretation of 17th
-century art and architecture but also granted this period with a name,
coining the term, Baroque. Within the last 100 years, baroque studies have served various
purposes including the revalorization of baroque style and spirit, the investigation of the
New World Baroque as a response to imperialism, the articulation of a Criollo or Latin
American identity, the deconstruction and rearticulation of history and identity, the
criticism of the established order –specifically that of modernity–, and the imagining
necessary for inventing new orders.
Baroque revalorization
The last 100 years witnessed a surge of hunger for the baroque tastes capable of
relating to a world in which the illusory principles of rationality, harmony, homogeneity,
continuity, coherence, order, and progress were dissolving. A new perspective of the
world required a corresponding artistic sensibility and the baroque came to elicit
newfound interest. The Swiss art critic, Heinrich Wölfflin, rescued the Baroque from the
obscure depths of ill repute by defining it in aesthetic terms. His monumental Principles
historical legacy. Irlemar Chiampi sees this as “an extreme aesthetic exercise articulating the contents of the
historical baroque in the present” (521).
15
of Art History (1915) contrasted Renaissance classicism with the 17th
-century style
capable of creating a new painterly limitlessness which emphasized depth, openness, the
total effect of a unified whole, and the evasion of objective clarity (50-52). The transition
from classical to baroque, according to Wölfflin, remains inevitable, as the development
from the human psychology’s one way of seeing to another follows an almost natural law
of periodicity (54).
In Spain, the Generation of '27 also developed a taste for the baroque, reanimating
the corpse of Góngora who was able to speak to these poets in ways thought
unimaginable before this time for, while Góngora had fallen into disfavour during the 18th
and 19th
centuries, his poetry garnered new admiration in the 20th
century. Alexander
Parker notes that, although Ruben Darío was responsible for reintroducing Góngora to
Spanish poets, García Lorca’s promotion of Gongorine poetry generated a wider interest
and admiration for these 17th
-century works (18). Dámaso Alonso also remarks on how
the 17th
century’s strange aptitude for “la plasmación de ponderosas o ágiles imágenes
poéticas,” reappeared between 1920 and 1936 (565-66). The bold unexpectedness of the
Gongorine metaphor which unified dissimilar elements within the poetic image was
inspiring for avant-garde poetics of a time in which art was beginning to be conceived as
a way of not reproducing the world in a realist sense, but of exploring the artifice of
language. It was in this climate that Eugenio d’Ors, Catalan homme de lettres, in his “The
Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny” (1935), uprooted the Baroque from its seventeenth-
century European grounding and transplanted it into an ahistorical concept of reappearing
eras, or eons, maintaining that both the Baroque and the classical were opposing spirits
which re-emerged repeatedly in different epochs and in various parts of the world (83).
16
Like Wölfflin, d’Ors contrasts the classical style and spirit with those of its baroque
counterpart, elaborating on the latter with an unleashed, revolutionary fervour. For d’Ors,
the baroque spirit implies a return to pantheism, nature, the unconscious, and to a way of
thinking not bound to the arbitrary constraints of reason. This spirit involves a dissolution
of the classical center, instead opting for “multinuclear patterns,” ellipses, and infinity
(82-87). Perhaps the “freedom-loving...self-abandon” (82) mentioned in this seminar was
responsible for the intoxicated liberality and inclusivity with which d’Ors formulated his
concept of the baroque. A theory which defies all limits of time and space, limited only
by that fact that it is exclusive to human beings, can easily slide into meaninglessness.
Nonetheless, with his revolutionary candour, this man unfastened the temporal-spatial
moorings of this baroque bateau ivre, allowing its passage to the New World.
The New World Baroque as a response to European dominance
Across the Atlantic, the Argentine Ángel Guido was formulating his own New
World Baroque. Guido’s Redescubrimiento de América en el arte asserted that the art of
the Baroque Americas contained barely-hidden messages of insurrection against
European hegemony, subversive practices that he termed the Reconquista. Using the
examples of the Bolivian indigenous sculptor, El Quechua Kondori, and his mulatto
Brazilian counterpart, Aleijadinho; Guido recounted how these artists expressed their
insubordination by purposefully and obstinately deviating from Spanish aesthetic norms,
instead replacing European signs with indigenous ones and insolently “throwing all
classical proportion to hell” (169, translation mine). Redescubrimiento de América en el
arte articulates the anti-imperialist aesthetics of the Reconquista, an artistic expression of
an authentic Latin American identity, constituting one stage of a cyclical cultural
17
phenomenon fluctuating between periods of European dominance and American
Reconquest. Though a second period Eurocentric aesthetic dominance lasted throughout
19th
-century and well into the 20th
, Guido contends that a (then) new era of iconoclasm
had emerged, a “collectivist renaissance” (192) bolstered by the mystical forces of the
spirit and the imagination. For Guido, in a time where Europeans lay exhausted of
inspiration, Latin America offered an undiscovered, primordial landscape populated with
peoples of a visceral sensibility who lived closely with the earth. His book is a hope-filled
prophecy of another Reconquista, an oncoming movement of authentic American art.
Lezama Lima pays homage to Guido, building upon the Argentine’s idea of a
Latin American artistic Reconquest and formulating his own broader concept of Counter-
Conquest: a transformative syncretism articulating a uniquely Latin American identity
which, in its culmination, achieves a superior form of expression than that of its European
predecessor, providing a resistance against European cultural dominance. Like Guido,
Lezama Lima refers to el Quechua Kondori and Aleijadinho as examples of this
culminating New World Baroque expression, though Lezama also contends that these
early sparks of rebellion were premonitory of the future revolutions and wars of
independence. Like his predecessors, Lezama Lima refuses to contrast periods marked by
classical or Baroque tendencies, contending that Latin American reality has been baroque
since its inception. Fundamental to this transhistorical conception of the Latin American
baroque is “plutonismo” (213), the force that melds together a variety of cultural
fragments, daring to create a bold synthesis of styles from both sides of the Atlantic and
Pacific Oceans, fusing disparate parts into a robust alloy of forms belonging to the
American identity.
18
The New World Baroque as an expression of Latin American identity
As mentioned in the previous section, Lezama Lima’s counter-conquest process
of transformative syncretism articulates a uniquely Latin American identity which owes
its character to the Baroque. However, while Lezama followed Guido’s current of ink, his
compatriot, Alejo Carpentier, emulated the wide-angled kaleidoscopic vision of Eugeni
d’Ors. “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso” (1975), presents an unrestrained, exorbitant
baroque, encompassing everything from Rabelais, the Popol Vuh, the Boom, Hindu
sculpture, Nôtre Dame de Paris, and Ferdowsi to the horror vacui of Aztec art. Following
d’Ors, Carpentier also envisions the baroque as not a historic style, but a spirit: a "suerte
de pulsión creadora" (69) common to humanity which re-emerges in cycles throughout
history in moments of societal culmination and cultural metamorphosis and innovation
(69, 77). However, despite this baroque’s habit of resurfacing in various places and times,
for Carpentier, Latin America is the chosen land for the baroque, due to its history of
cultural symbiosis and its consciousness of being criollo, of being something new (79).
Furthermore, this inherent baroque is inextricably linked to a latent real maravilloso,
seeing as the extraordinary is and has always been a quotidian occurrence in Latin
America (81-83). In this way, the real maravilloso and the baroque, an inseparable dense
foliage of intertwined plants from a vast and voracious jungle, are seen as constituting the
essential Latin American identity.
Like Carpentier, Mabel Moraña also sees the relation between the American
Baroque and the formation of criollo subjectivities. This process involved the criollos’
appropriation of the dominant codes in order to criticize hegemony as well as to articulate
the criollo identities that would lead to the formation of new nations. For Moraña,
19
baroque culture offered a flexible and transformative paradigm capable of including
American elements as well as moulding itself to suit the agenda of the criollo population
which found itself culturally and politically marginalized (14). The baroque model
facilitated the articulation of a marginalized criollo culture in the process of survival (47),
creating a criollo identity and providing the means to effect rupture.
Deconstruction and reconstruction of identity and culture
Haroldo de Campos’ essay, “O sequestro do barroco...o caso Gregório de Matos”
(1989), brought to light the fact that the official accounts of the history of Brazilian
national literature, particularly that of Antonio Candido´s Formação da Literatura
Brasileira, had excluded the Baroque from its positivist trajectory due to the Baroque’s
incongruity with this imagined nationalist literary progression. As de Campos affirms, the
Baroque cannot fit into an evolutionally-perceived literary course because of its
precocity: the genesis of Latin American colonial literatures occurred within a
sophisticated and complex baroque code (325). “O sequestro do barroco...o caso Gregório
de Matos” serves to deconstruct an incomplete and erroneous national history and to
reconstruct the history in a more inclusive and accurate way. In “The Rule of
Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration,” de Campos locates the origin of
the anthropophagous cultural practices of the Americas as first theorized by Oswald de
Andrade in his “Manifiesto antropófago” within the Baroque. For de Campos, the
colonial writers of the New World Baroque in particular, the Brazilian Gregório de
Matos were writers of difference who dismantled logocentric European discourses
through cannibalization, which is to say, the devouring and “re-chewing” (337) of a
cultural heritage to create a new polycultural synthesis involving parodic desacralizations.
20
These “new barbarians” (338), or cultural cannibals, have begun to invade the centre in a
way similar to Lezama’s Contra-Conquista, in which the art of the peripheral other comes
to affect the cultural centre. In a nutshell, what de Campos is proposing is that
anthropophagic cultural practices, founded in baroque colonial difference and
deconstruction, can serve to destroy the established narratives of a logocentric culture and
rechew/rebuild them in more dynamically inclusive ways.
Like de Campos, Walter Moser sees the baroque as a paradigm with the flexible
capacity to “défaire des identités” (113). Citing the works of Severo Sarduy and Raul
Ruiz, Moser posits that the baroque “ne soutient pas la construction d'identités. Bien au
contraire, ils s'attaquent aux moules identitaires dans le domaine culturel” (114). To
support his claim, Moser takes up the case of Gregorio de Matos as presented by Haroldo
de Campos. As the rescuing of the baroque Gregorio de Matos from a nationalist
sequestro (kidnapping) ruptures the linear path of a progressive national literary history,
the baroque presents itself as “une pratique culturelle capable de défaire le schéma
moderne de la ‘formation nationale’” (116). Moser lists three processes achieved by
reappropriating the Baroque: the dehistorization of poetry, thus allowing baroque poetry a
contemporary status; the denationalization of literature by linking de Matos’ barroquism
to an international cultural anthropophagy; and a de-ideologization of literature which,
“en activant la ludicité, la dépense sémiotique et la jouissance du corps signifiant dans la
poésie baroque,” goes against any singular, teleological vision of an national identitary
project (116).
21
Criticism of the established order and the invention of alternatives
Unlike the authors preceding him in the baroque Cuban trinity (Lezama Lima and
Carpentier), Severo Sarduy’s baroque theorizing was of a non-national character, never
explicitly upholding any concept of a baroque Latin American identity. Contrary to his
compatriots, Sarduy sought to limit his baroque conceptualizing to semiotic and linguistic
formalizations, owing much of his theorizing to the Parisian poststructuralist climate
which enveloped him. The formalizations developed by Sarduy substitution,
proliferation, condensation, parody, and intertextuality all serve to achieve a core
baroque process: artificialization. For Sarduy, the baroque was neither the pantheist,
natural spirit of d’Ors nor the marvellous-real essence of Latin America’s natural world.
For Sarduy, the baroque instead made a mockery of nature, revelling in its playful,
carnivalesque, wasteful, erotic artificiality. While Sarduy sees 17th
-century baroque
structures as retaining a certain sense of meaning and harmony despite destabilizing
practices, he sees in the neobaroque as an intensification of the 17th
-century Baroque,
resulting in disharmony and the loss of the object, “a necessarily pulverized reflection of
a knowledge that knows it is no longer ‘calmly’ closed on itself. An art of dethronement
and dispute” ("The Baroque and the Neobaroque" 271-90). This idea of a lost equilibrium
and the dispute of the established order is echoed in Barroco in which Sarduy studies the
dethronement of the heliocentric Renaissance order and the decentred cosmology of
Kepler and his elliptical orbits. Sarduy translates the ellipse of Kepler’s cosmology into
the decentring rhetoric of 17th
-century art and literature, linking changes in the scientific
ordering of the universe to corresponding changes in the cosmovisions of Western culture.
For Sarduy, the cultural production of the baroque 17th
century and the neobaroque 20th
22
century reflect the dethronement of an illusory stable, self-contained knowledge system
("The Baroque and the Neobaroque" 183) and an emerging new order.
In her book Barroco y modernidad (2000), Irlemar Chiampi brings to light a
baroque that serves as an alternate modernity to the one imposed by the hegemonic centre.
Lezama Lima’s concept of an uninterrupted baroque continuity in the Americas
constitutes what Chiampi sees as an alternative modernity, “the other modernity, outside
linear history’s myth of progress...our metahistory” (513). For Chiampi, the neobaroque
that would be heralded in by Sarduy is an “intensification and expansion of the
experimental potential of the historical Baroque recycled by Lezama and Carpentier, now
accompanied by a powerfully revisionist inflexion of the ideological values of modernity”
(517). She champions the neobaroque over postmodern meaninglessness, claiming that,
though both the neobaroque and postmodernism function within the same aestheticthe
death of the subject, fragmented discourse lacking a progressive narrative, etc., the
neobaroque has too much ideological content to be equated with postmodernism. Going
beyond merely piecing together senseless agglomerations of fragments, the neobaroque
“unleashes figures of a new form of tension” (520). For Chiampi, the neobaroque is
epitomized by its spatiality, physicality, and sensuality, focusing on “spaces, figures, and
bodies” (520). She defines the neobaroque as the “aesthetic of countermodernity,” noting
how modernity was incapable of incorporating “the ‘non-Western’ (Indians, mestizos,
Blacks, urban proletariat, rural immigrants, etc.) [into] a national project of consensual
democracy” (522). Chiampi fosters a link between this exclusion and the attractive pull of
the Baroque, which predated modernity. The neobaroque, in its reclaiming of pre-
Enlightenment aesthetics, “revert[s] the historicist canon of what is modern” (522).
23
Of course, this was not the first time that a progressive conception of the canon
was subverted. The German Romanticists, for whom neo-classicism constituted a breach
in the continuity of medieval, Christian, and Romantic literature and thought, also
subverted any progressive conceptualizing of the canon, esteeming the works of Calderón
so highly as to see in them the zenith of Romanticism, indicative of what they perceived
to be the deep-seated Romantic character of the Iberian Peninsula (Sullivan 177). For
Friedrich Schlegel, “Calderón’s excellence—the achievements in Christian tragedy and
drama of ‘this great and divine master’—should shine, rather, from a distance like that of
an almost unattainable exemplar” (Sullivan 215). Locating the unattainable apex of
literary and dramatic achievements in the past subverts the notion of cultural progress, a
viewpoint which stands in opposition to enlightened modernity’s faith in the continuous
advancement of thinking and cultural expression. Romanticism, therefore, carries out the
first articulation of counter-modernity. However, unlike the Romanticists who perceived
18th
-century neoclassicism as an interruption in a Romantic continuity spanning several
centuries, the baroque of Latin America maintained its baroque continuity, never fully
assimilating the values and thought of the Enlightenment. According to Mariano Picón-
Salas, “in spite of nearly two centuries of rationalism and modern criticism, we Spanish
Americans have not yet emerged fully from [the baroque’s] labyrinth” (87). Thus,
isolated from the rationalist modernity of Europe, Latin America’s baroque developed
independently, producing its own alternate modernity.
In “El ethos barroco” Bolívar Echeverría proposes the baroque ethos as a possible
model for an alternative modernity in the wake of a “civilizing crisis” (15). Echeverría
articulates four different ways of living modernity: the realist ethos, the romantic ethos,
24
the classical ethos, and the baroque ethos. Each one of these ethoses represents a way of
being or a characteristic behaviour which organizes the living world according to its own
distinct cosmovision and practices, trying to harmonize the contradictions of human life
and attempting to make “the unliveable, liveable” (18, translation mine). Echeverría
focuses on the baroque ethos and its connection to the legacy of mestizaje, to the baroque
aesthetic, and to modernity in general. He posits that there lies a deep “civilizing crisis”
(15, translation mine) at the root of all other crises, be they political, social, or
economical. This civilizing crisis is rooted in the modernity project whose Protestant-
influenced capitalist modernity has prevailed over all other potential modernities. The
type of capitalism evoked by Echeverría is constructed in such a way that it contradicts its
very own ideology, resulting in crisis. One of the founding principles of this
capitalisminvolving the satisfying exchange of human work for desired goodshas not
resulted in human satisfaction, rather, this value associated with the mutual relationship
of work and pleasure has been sacrificed to an abstract value involving the reproduction
of wealth (19). What is more, this form of capitalism takes advantage of the Protestant
work ethic to provide the semi-spiritual self-discipline necessary to maintain capitalist
production which demands “the sacrificing of use value’s now for the benefit of the
valorization of commercial value’s tomorrow ” (22, translation mine). In a nutshell,
Western capitalism has fooled workers into forgoing the satisfaction of the present in the
hope of receiving future satisfaction. Conscious of these problems and wishing for an
attainable post-capitalist utopia, Echeverría has investigated the baroque ethos as a
possible model of an alternative modernity capable of resolving this civilizing crisis.
25
Given that capitalism cannot be escaped, Echeverría posits that it must be
incorporated into whichever ethos emerges (19). Echeverría argues that the baroque ethos
is superior to the other three ethoses because of its capacity to simultaneously accept and
reject (27). Furthermore, he demonstrates how colonial Latin America best illustrates the
processes of the baroque ethos, given its legacy of mestizaje (28). In the colonial world
where an inadequate, dilapidated Euro-centric order was imposed on the indigenous and
African peoples (the others of the Americas), these others were faced with the necessity
of supporting the European model for the sake of maintaining some sort of social order
(34-35). In the process, however, mestizo cultural forms emerged in an effort to defend
the Euro-centric order while simultaneously, and often clandestinely, rejecting it in an
effort to permit the survival of both indigenous and European forms (34-35). In a way
similar to this practice of acceptance/rejection, the baroque ethos is capable of accepting
the inevitability of a capitalist modernity, while rejecting this modernity as it has been
imposed, seeking instead to transform it.
In his “El norte, el sur, la utopía y el ethos barroco,” Boaventura de Sousa Santos
takes up the same issue of the baroque ethos as a means of dealing with the fundamental
problems of our capitalist modernity. De Sousa Santos sees the crisis of our civilization
as stemming from an imbalance in the founding principles of modernity. He explains that
modernity was founded on two contradictory principles: social regulation and social
liberation, or “order and progress” (315). An ideal modernity would achieve a balance
between regulation and liberation; however, when the modernity project combined with
capitalism, the balance changed (316). Within the sphere of regulation, Rousseau’s
concept of vertical community-based regulation has been ignored, allowing other
26
elements of modernity’s regulation involving the State and the market to carry more
weight (316). Following the principles of the market and the hierarchical order of the
State has led to a polarization between the North (Europe, Anglo-America, and other
dominant regions) and the South (Latin America, Africa, South-East Asia, and other
subordinate regions). Though the capitalist modernity project is universal in vision, it
never distributed itself properly around the world and has only served to universalize
inequality (316-17). Faced with the crisis of an inept model of civilization, we find
ourselves in a paradigmatic shift which forces us to think of alternatives (320). For
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, it is not coincidental that the 17th
century is in vogue,
considering that in this period of paradigmatic transition, such as in the Baroque, we are
engaged in epistemological battles and looking for knowledge everywhere (320-21).
However, differentiating himself from Echeverría, who would look to the baroque as a
model for survival, de Sousa Santos instead asks for creative and utopic imaginings of
new possibilities (321), for the invention of a new psychology and subjectivity, and for
the invention of a baroque ethos based on what history has given us, taking what is useful
from this legacy for the construction of a new utopia (326). For de Sousa Santos, the
subjectivity of the baroque ethos is particularly important because it is
una subjetividad capaz de retórica, de visualización, de sensualidad , de
inmediatez, capaz de inventar y combinar conocimientos aparentemente
incombinables, de distinguir la vocación de las alternativas y, al mismo
tiempo, capaz de sorprenderse, de rebelarse, de distanciarse, de reírse.
(330)
27
This baroque ethos comes from the south and, in this paradigmatic transition, the north
needs to learn from the south (330) in order to facilitate the passing from modernity to
postmodernity (324).
Conclusion
The North does need to learn from the South. The North, wading knee-deep in a
sludge of postmodern meaninglessness has much to learn from the adaptable inclusive
system of the baroque. While the baroque expresses the same rupture with modernity that
postmodernism does, the baroque explodes with meaning. Unlike postmodernism, which
entails a denial of any meaning, the baroque constitutes an acceptance of multiple, albeit
contradictory, meanings. It offers a paradigm capable of integrating various knowledges,
ideologies, and worldviews which has become invaluable in a world where concepts of
universalism, monocultures and singular identities are dead. Encoded within it are the
mechanisms to survive despite the hegemonic impositions attributed to the neo-
colonialism of globalization and the persistence of capitalism. The case of the Chicana/os
is an interesting one because of their status of being, to use de Sousa Santos’ terminology,
the south within the north. What is more, the people of the Chicana/o borderlands have
been living and breathing the paradigm that we know as the baroque ethos, which for
them has been the experience of everyday life and the strategies used for surviving in it.
The Chicana/o borderlands
California is becoming a third world state. With a government drowning in debt,
massive unemployment, a disintegrating infrastructure and education system and
underfunded healthcare and social assistance programs, many Third World countries put
28
California to shame. Even before the financial crisis of 2007-2010, Los Angeles exhibited
an increasing gap between a marginalized working class and an elite and wealthy class.
Los Angeles presents a model of a reality which could potentially resemble the future
realities of most Euroamerican urban centres. On one hand, as a centre of transnational
corporations with established industries of commerce and technology and infused with a
large investment of foreign capital, Los Angeles is home to a large population of affluent
professionals. On the other hand, this elite society stands in stark contrast to a growing
blue-collar population, who are largely immigrants working in the service industry which
sustains the middle and upper classes. As Raymond Rocco explains,
Because of its linkage to...the processes of the internationalization of
production, Los Angeles is thus now a city that is characterized by a sense
of social fragmentation, a lack of center, multiple communities with little
or no sense of identification with one another, extremes of affluence and
poverty, ambition and despair. (407)
However, this social fragmentation based on class, ethnicity, and racial difference is not
unique to Los Angeles; but rather, this phenomenon is becoming the reality of the urban
centres of many first world nations. The lack of identification between the myriad of
different segments of the population points to the need for mutual identifications which
transcend differences, finding points of commonality capable of uniting communities.
Despite the struggles and political reforms, the current paradigms employed to
conceptually structure the diversity within the nation have not enjoyed any success.
German chancellor Angela Merkel recently pointed out how the multicultural approach or,
“saying that we simply live side by side and are happy about each other [...] has failed,
29
utterly failed” ("Merkel Says"). Neo-national and nativist movements are on the risein
France, Germany, and the USA in particularand anti-immigrant and racialized policies
are being established, the case of Arizona SB 1070 being of particular note. Chancellor
Merkel is correct: the multicultural paradigm has failed. As Chicana intellectual Rosaura
Sánchez explains, “The notion of pluralism, of a multicultural society, points [...] to a
type of heterogeneous cohesive whole while suppressing the reality of social
fragmentation” (381). Deceptively marketed as a concept which celebrated differences
and promoted egalitarianism by employing the inherently just system of the democratic
state, multiculturalism focused on a superficial layer of culture while brushing aside
crucial notions of class, gender and race. Moreover, the democratic apparatus of liberal
democracies are only egalitarian in theory. As Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita point
out,
many have traded in socialism for neo-Liberal calls for redemocratization
[...] forgetting that liberal democracy is the handmaiden of modernization;
that is, the consolidation of bourgeois democracy, which tends, if anything,
to preclude social transformation, much as been historically the case in the
United States, with its increasing polarized class and racially divided
society. (505)
The post-1965 period in the US has been a period where group rights have lost to
conservative egalitarianism (Omi and Winant 14) and has only treated individuals while
ignoring the issues of class, race, and gender, causing a disempowerment of group
movements and a fragmentation of any potential resistance to the status quo.
30
However, Chicana/o intellectuals have already investigated the problematics of
forming mobilized and resistant social groups capable of combining the seemingly
contrary concepts of diversity and a cohesive totality. Until the 1980’s, el Movimiento
(the Chicana/o movement) had been rooted in a mythically-generated nationalism which
silenced any difference from within. El Movimiento borrowed extensively from José
Vasconcelos’ mythically-conceived concept of the Mexican nation, which was rooted in a
glorious Aztec past and celebrated the concept of la raza cósmica, a mestizo race with
which every Mexican was to identify. The Chicana/o nationalist ideology created the
mythical foundation of Aztlán, the legendary home of the Mexica (Aztec) peoples before
their migration to Tenochtitlán. Aztlán became an imagined home in the Southwest US
and symbolized the Chicana/os’ historical legitimacy to the Southwest, which had been
lost due to US expansion through Texas Annexation, the Mexican-American War, and
the Gadsen Purchase. Like Vasconcelos’ mexicanidad, el Movimiento celebrated a
uniform mestizo race, la raza. However, as Barthes affirms in his Mythologies,
mythologies are not formed based on a historical reality, but are created to maintain the
ideologies of the ruling class.4 The homogenizing and mythicizing narratives which
glorified a shared uni-racial Mexica past and served to support a patriarchal and
heteronormative discourse in the end proved limited, as these paradigms occluded
differences of gender, race, and sexuality.
The metanarrative of el Movimiento was, however, later dismantled by Chicana
feminists in the 1980’s who instead began formulating new concepts of multiple
4 “The oppressed makes the world, he has only an active, transitive (political) language; the
oppressor conserves it, his language in plenary, intransitive, gestural, theatrical: it is Myth”
(Barthes 149).
31
subjectivity (Yarbro-Bejarano 83). Notably, Gloria Anzaldúa proposed the theory of
mestiza consciousness, “a consciousness that emerges from an awareness of multiple
subjectivity structured by multiple determinants-gender, class, sexuality, and
contradictory membership in competing cultures and racial identities” (Yarbro-Bejarano
86), as a postnational project rooted in the racial, historical, cultural, and spatial reality of
the border. Producing a new mestiza consciousness required
developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity [...]
[and turning] the ambivalence into something, else [...] That third element
is a new consciousness [...] and though it is a source of intense Pain, its
energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down
the unitary aspect of each new paradigm. (Anzaldúa 101-02)
Anzaldúa reconceptualizes mestizaje as a border consciousness, the realization that
subjectivity is multiple, conflicting, constructed, and shifting. With this new perception
comes its corresponding practices, linking inner struggle, self-(trans)formation and social
reform (Anzaldúa 100-10). The mestiza border consciousness proposed by Anzaldúa is
paralleled by Chela Sandoval’s “Methodology of the Oppressed” which posits that people
who have suffered marginalization because of class, race, or genderin particular,
women of colourhave developed a consciousness of the constructed, plural, and
shifting character of identities. The methodology of the oppressed is the strategy of
shifting identities in order to negotiate dominant discourses of meaning and power (62-
64). The goal of the methodologies of both the nueva mestiza and of the oppressed is to
put into theory a subjectivity rooted in reality which could integrate various strata of
difference without having to sacrifice coherence, having the possibility of fomenting
32
political linkages with enlightened others—anti-sexists, anti-racists, anti-classists—and
resisting oppressive hegemonic structures.
There are some limitations in respect to border theories, however. Pablo Vila
writes that 1) the US-Mexican border described and theorized by most border
intellectuals bears little resemblance to the reality of the lands south of the border, 2)
border theory essentializes the cultures in question, 3) border theory does not account for
the fact that borders could become reinforced by experiential fragmentation, 4) many
theorists often present the new mestiza/o border-crosser as “a new privileged subject of
history,” a privileging that excludes people who, though marginal, cannot claim to be
hybrid nor to be border crossers, 5) border theory has been uprooted from its historical
and geographic specificity and has been used in very different contexts, resulting in a
homogenization of borders, 6) border theory tends to confuse identity with culture,
ignoring the fact that, while border norteños and Mexican Americans may share the same
culture, they carry vastly different identities, and 7) border theory assumes the existence
of a common brotherhood which unites Chicana/os, Mexican-American immigrants, and
norteños, while hiding the reality of fragmentation and antagonism between these
communities (307-08).
In other words, for border theory to sustain its claim of being rooted in a spatial,
cultural, and historical reality, it must take into account the multiple realities present for
the various groups that inhabit the borderlands. For a migrant farm worker, the
experience of border crossing is very different from that of the highly-educated and
successful Guillermo Gómez Peña. Likewise, the experience of being a maquila worker
in Ciudad Juárez is much different from being a Chicana feminist intellectual in San
33
Francisco. Border theory must either account for these realities or exclude those which do
not fit. The issue involving the fragmentation of experience is a difficult one which
produces multiple outcomes. While a consciousness of multiple constructed selves can
produce subjects capable of negotiating hegemonic structures or uniting with others from
different socio-cultural groups “unities in difference” (Hall 118), it can also result in
myopic individualism and a loss of any sense of community, or in a backlash of neo-
nationalist movements. In order to avoid the slippery nature of border theory, this
dissertation will focus on the experience particular to the Chicano/a environs which,
though influenced and informed by the concept of borders, presents a specific case rooted
in a continued historical and geographic reality.
Chicana/o culture has always presented a threat to US narratives of nation which
fixed their origins in an Anglo, white, puritan, settler genesis. However, this is not to say
that Chicana/os are “privileged subjects” for dismantling the hegemonic discourse of the
state: First Nations peoples can lay a first claim on their legitimacy to the Americas and
African-Americans supported (unwillingly, albeit) the development of the nation, along
with indentured labourers from Asia. Any immigrant to the US who has suffered
oppression at the hand of the state can refute the Statue of Liberty’s welcoming voice,
“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” In reality
there exist various differencesethnicity, race, language, gender, sexuality, classwhich
can serve to dissolve the meta-narratives of nation. However, we cannot pretend that all
of these groups have an inherent bond uniting them as much as we cannot deny the fact
that antagonisms exist between them. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-immigration
sentiments exist as much in minority groups as in the mainstream US population. The one
34
element that does unite a diverse group of marginalized people is the fact that they have
all suffered from the oppression generated by neoconservative state policy structured
within a capitalist nation. Hence, by making the new mestiza realization that all identity is
constructed, these disenfranchised groups would consequently realize that, for the
purpose of allying to effect social change, a new group identity would have to be
constructed by finding a “unity-in-difference” (Hall 118), a unity of the oppressed. At the
beginnings of Chicanismo, the movement united itself around the concept of struggle as a
way to return home to Aztlán. Now that the nationalist mythology of Aztlán has lost its
currency, “it is the struggle that matters most” (Mariscal 70). Perhaps, instead of a unity
of the oppressed, which resonates with victimization and defeat, struggle remains the best
concept for uniting such a diverse group of people.
Chicana/o studies struggles with these very issues: how to create a complex,
multilayered, shifting subjectivity which integrates differential notions of race, ethnicity,
class, gender, sexuality, and generation while avoiding the fragmentation of a collective
consciousness. While practicing a baroque convivencia of heterogeneous and
contradictory worldviews, Chicana/o studies goes beyond these survival strategies to
construct a utopian new imagining of a community as a way of confronting unjust
societal structuring. The beauty of Chicana/o studies rests on its insistence on praxis, as
well as theory. Within Chicana/o studies are encoded the practices of struggle and
resistance with the aim of causing potential reform to the subjugating and silencing forces
of the state and, by association, transnational capitalism. Furthermore, this socio-political
theorizing does not limit itself to a purely academic space, but rather, goes hand-in-hand
with the production of culture.
35
Chicana/o cultural production: six observations
The following section will attempt to circumscribe some of the main processes
involved in Chicana/o cultural production. This is by no means an exhaustive list and,
like any attempt to define a vast and diverse subject, suffers from generalizations. George
Vargas states that “Chicana/o art is more about a state of shared consciousness rather than
a style” (117). However, it is also true that a certain consciousness demands
corresponding artistic practices. The consciousness of having a long history constantly
threatened with dissolution by the leviathan mainstream US, the consciousness of having
been excluded from the cultural and political centre, “the consciousness of being some
other thing, of being a new thing” (Carpentier 79, translation mine), the consciousness of
belonging one of many ethnicities holding varying worldviews and yet sharing the same
space, and the consciousness of the constructed nature of nation and of any singular
identity surely must translate into a distinct set of literary and artistic practices. The
following points seek to highlight these differences.
Chicana/o cultural production takes a political stance.
To begin, to be Chicana/o in the first place implies a politically-motivated attitude.
While being a Mexican-American indicates a heritage or a nationality, a person of
Mexican descent is Chicana/o by choice. According to Fregoso and Chabram,
Chicano was ultimately a term we had coined for ourselves and which “we”
invested with a new meaning: Chicano signified the affirmation of
working-class and indigenous origins, and the rejection of assimilation,
acculturation, and the myth of the American melting pot. Implicit in the
term Chicano was a strategic relation and a strategy of struggle that
36
thematized the Chicano community and called for social struggle and
reform. (28)
As the term Chicana/o by itself is invested with ideological and political struggle, this
struggle constitutes a large part of the process and content of Chicana/o art. Originally
borrowing from the philosophy of the Mexican muralists, whose works voiced overtly
political messages, the Movimiento of the 60’s and 70’s also promoted politically-
engaged public art. Cultural production presented itself as an integral part of the
promotion of a desired collective consciousness which would lead to social and political
reform. As artist Ester Hernández affirms, “As a Xicana-Azteca, I feel we must continue
our creative skills to give strength to our political, cultural, and spiritual struggle. We
must make visible our resistance to deception and the celebration of genocide” (in Social
and Public Arts 19). Though George Vargas asserts that the themes of Chicana/o art have
become more humanist, displaying a universal consciousness (14-15), the act of creating
art in a world in which Chicana/o art has been excluded, or “marginalized behind the
tortilla curtain” (Vargas 7), constitutes a political act in itself.5 To produce art within a
larger space of non-acceptance and to bring it into the public sphere serves to highlight
the official culture’s politics of exclusion. While the Chicana/o community has moved
away from the programmatic nationalist art of the Movimiento, opting for more complex
and inclusive modes of expression, the concept of cultural and intellectual production as
socio-political praxis has remained strong. Though Chicana/o works are diverse in
5 Chicana/o artists have been largely ignored, “especially from the powerful art centers in New York. The
2010 Whitney Biennial did not include a single Chicana/o artist in its survey of American art. (For that
matter, it didn't include a single Latino artist either.) The same goes for the New Museum, which didn't
include any Chicana/os or Latinos in its 2009 triennial, ‘The Generational: Younger Than Jesus’” (Miranda,
no pagination).
37
subject matter, complex, open-ended, and offer multiple perspectives, the political side is
either implicitly or explicitly omnipresent.
Chicana/o cultural production addresses and produces subjectivities and identities.
The articulation of subjectivities and identities in Chicana/o cultural production
involves two main processes: negotiation and creation. First, art not only presents a
testimony and a representation of the complex Chicana/o experience, but the act of
creating art in itself constitutes a process in which the author/artist can negotiate this
experience, giving a concrete form to her/his multiple and conflicting subjectivities. As
Anzaldúa notes, the deep interior of the mestiza self is a space in which a collision of
separate phenomena can become united into a new synthesis, which though not
necessarily implying a harmonious fusion coincides with the birth of a mestiza
consciousness (101-02). This is to say that a certain subjectivity emerges from the
process of the profoundly internal negotiation of the Chicana/o experience. Likewise, the
negotiation processes involved in the act of creating art articulate new subjectivities
which can then be communicated to and internalized by the Chicana/o community,
partially contributing to a collective sense of identity. Secondly, in the interstitial space of
the Chicana/o borderlands, the Chicana/o subject makes the realization that all identities
are constructed, especially in the realms of discursive practice: “When I write, it feels like
I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart” (Anzaldúa 95).
This realization implies that it rests on thinkers, writers, artists, and musicians to
construct new identities. Chicana/o cultural production plays the role of creating
identities through the praxis of the arts. As subjectivity is liable to shift and change, this
creation involves a never-ending process. The exploration and construction of identities
38
are crucial for uniting a diverse community for the purpose of resistance against
hegemony as “identity is a major weapon in the struggles of the oppressed” (Yúdice 221).
Chicana/o cultural production privileges public and quotidian spaces.
The Chicana/o Southwest has a strong tradition of public art. While the
Movimiento of the 60’s and 70’s favoured murals, poster art, and el teatro campesino, the
popular culture which preceded the Movimiento included many dynamic public displays
including fantastically elaborate low-rider cars and exorbitant pachuco styles. In
Chicana/o history, there has been no noticeable differentiation between high and low art,
due to the fact that a Chicana/o upper class capable of culturally isolating themselves
from the masses has never existed. Chicana/o cultural production is for the public,
denying the bourgeois practice of constructing esoteric and difficult works with the
purpose of exclusion. Chicana/o intellectuals run parallel with Cultural Studies scholars
in the sense that “they [Cultural Studies scholars] provide sophisticated and convincing
arguments about the ways in which the commonplace and ordinary practices of everyday
life often encode larger social and ideological meaning” (Lipsitz 51). Hence, art can be
found everywhere: from murals, T-shirts, and tattoos, to cars, corridos, and altares.
Chicana/o culture dissolves the borders between life and art. Denied space in museums
and galleries, artists’ works hang in cafés and community centres. Public artists take
culture to the streets such as in ASCO’s street performance pieces; Luis Jiménez’s
monolithic fibreglass statues; the controversial San Diego art/bus advertisement titled,
Welcome America’s Finest Tourist Plantation; and the continuing mural tradition,
including Barbara Carrasco’s computer animated mural, Pesticides! According to Ýbarra-
Frausto, the idea of public art goes beyond the art itself and transforms space and
39
consciousness ("The Chicano Movement" 178). Public art constitutes a visible
manifestation which challenges the excluding and silencing practices of the dominant
centres of culture and power. Perhaps this is why public art in the US continues to be “the
object of hot debate and institutional censorship” (Vargas 259). For a population which
has been rendered invisible within the narrative of the US nation, Chicana/o public art
demonstrates the refusal to be invisible.
Chicana/o cultural production employs rasquache techniques
Rasquache is a term in Mexican Spanish which originally denoted a low class
sensibility, similar to the term naco. Rasquache techniques developed from the living
conditions of the Chicana/os who, due to limited resources, sought out alternate
(rasquache) materials for cultural production. The term was reappropriated by Chicana/os
and came to be valued as a style, an attitude, a sensibility, and a way of life. Tomás
Ýbarra-Frausto first defined the rasquache style and practices as belonging to a
“pervasive attitude or taste” coming from a marginalized perspective which, in its core, is
both resourceful and adaptable ("The Chicano Movement" 171). According to Ýbarra-
Frausto, rasquachismo attempts to hold everything together while employing syncretism,
juxtapositions, integrations, and impure communions (171). It exudes flamboyance,
sensuous textures, suffers from horror vacui (172), and employs aesthetics of what is
apparently bad taste. Beyond its loud and extravagant forms, rasquachismo presents a
“bawdy, irreverent, satiric, and ironic worldview” (173).
Ramón García, however, refutes Ýbarra-Frausto´s concept of rasquache which he
sees as a patronizing view of working class culture seen from the position of a
middleclass intellectual (214). García points out that what seems rasquache to Ýbarra-
40
Frausto would not necessarily seem rasquache to the people producing these cultural
artefacts (214). García instead promotes his new terminology, Chicano Camp, to
differentiate the genuine appreciation of the positive images affirming Chicana/o popular
culture rasquache images, according to García from the ironic, critical, flamboyant,
exaggerated attitude of Chicano Camp (214-16). For García, rasquache supports the
maintaining of the status quo while Chicano Camp provides survival strategies for
Chicana/os marginalized by both mainstream American and Chicana/o cultures (211). He
explains that Chicano Camp is
A way of negotiating and confronting a bordered marginalization [...] a
way of existing in a disenfranchised social space that is unfixed and
indefinite. Camp style ironizes, parodies, and satirizes the very cultural
forms that marginalize and exclude. By so doing, Chicano Camp
deconstructs the ideologies that constitute this marginalized perspective.
(211)
However, García’s description of Chicano Camp runs completely parallel with Ýbarra-
Frausto’s rasquachismo: they are birds of the same extravagant feather. García simply
objects to Ýbarra-Frausto´s use of rasquache because the term carries a negative
resonance. García relocates the term rasquache to another form of culture: the non-
critical popular images which affirm Chicana/o nationality and its conservation. However,
these images do not constitute original or thought-provoking forms of art but are instead
first-degree kitsch. According to Celeste Olalquiaga, first degree kitsch is an “honest art”
in which “the relationship between the user and the object is immediate and based on
genuine belief.” The object has been cheaply produced and tends to be folkloric or gaudy
41
("Holy Kitschen" 277). In this category I would place iconic mass-produced images: Che
Guevara T-shirts, Virgin of Guadalupe keychains, Frida Kahlo shopping bags, etc. For
most of the people who consume these items, they do so out of genuine appreciation for
these icons. This is not to say that these images are naco kitsch, but their mass
propagation mixed with uncritical devotion makes them susceptible to ironic viewpoints.
These images lose their meaning through the processes of mass-production, overuse, or
loss of currency with the contemporary world. They become emptied of meaning or
“second-degree kitsch” which, according to Olalquiaga, requires a consciousness of the
object’s kitschness which consequently changes the object into “an empty icon, or rather
an icon whose value lies precisely in its iconicity, its quality as a sign rather than an
object” ("Holy Kitschen” 279). When an image becomes emptied, it is not garbage-
rasquache so much as an article with the potential to be recycled. For example, while a
devotional candle of the Virgin of Guadalupe constitutes first-degree kitsch, The Virgin of
Guadalupe Defending the Rights of Chicanos by Ester Hernández (fig. 2) demonstrates a
recycling of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, transforming it into an irreverent and
invigorating symbol of ethnic and gender-based power. This process of ironic, parodic,
critical, and playful transformation is what constitutes rasquache mechanics.
Fig. 2. Ester Hernández, La Virgen de Guadalupe
defendiendo los derechos de los Xicanos, 1974.
(Baxandall and Gordon 209)
42
This is where Ýbarra-Frausto and Ramón García differ. Ýbarra-Frausto’s rasquache
denotes a process, using available materials to create something new. García’s rasquache
is descriptive of already existing cultural artefacts, which is perhaps why he finds the
term to be pejorative. The rasquache process denotes, however, a creative baroque
recycling which reinvents cultural artefacts and detritus to make something new and
provocative.
Moreover, Rasquachismo is specific to a type of relationship between the artefact and
the individual. For example, while both rasquache and kitsch artefacts may appear
superficially similar, the motives of their authors are quite different. Differentiating
between kitsch and rasquache, Amalia Mesa-Bains affirms that
Kitsch as a material expression is recuperated by artists who stand outside
the lived reality of its genesis. Conversely, rasquachismo for Chicano
artists is instrumental from its shared barrio sensibility. One can say that
kitsch is appropriated while rasquachismo is acclaimed or affirmed.
Rasquachismo is consequently an integral world view that serves as a
basis for cultural identity and a socio-political movement. (no pagination)
For Amalia Mesa-Bains, rasquachismo is a collective sensibility and subjectivity which
is fundamental to a Chicana/o collective identity and for survival and resistance. This
view of rasquachismo combines the conservatism of García’s rasquache with the defiant
and critical sauciness of Ýbarra-Frausto’s rasquache. Rasquachismo is capable of both
affirming and rebelling and, like the baroque ethos, it seeks cultural preservation
(Echeverría 34-35), but not without “rebelling and laughing” (de Sousa Santos 330).
43
Chicana/o cultural production articulates hybrid processes.
Chicanos are like antennas. . . . We have all this information. We pick up all these
different stations, and its blurs into one thing, and that’s the Chicano experience.
(Louie Pérez in G. García H27)
From living a pluricultural experience, Chicana/o cultural production cannot
avoid articulating the variety of cultural referents found in daily living. As Ýbarra-
Frausto sees it, Chicana/o art presents a visual narration of cultural negotiation (180).
Without the (false) stability of a singular and unquestionable national narrative, the mind
is continuously negotiating various, disparate, or conflicting messages. As noted earlier,
Anzaldúa sees this negotiation as the self “attempting to work out a synthesis” which
involves the formation of “a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness” (101-02).
Chicana/o cultural production, through its use of hybrid forms, shows the process
of the mind trying to create a synthesis based on a heterogeneous reality. However, the
term hybrid does not always convey a finished product in which disparate elements have
fused into one homogenizing entity. Ideally, the Chicana/o work remains open and
adaptive to a world continually in flux just as the mestiza consciousness stays in
“continual creative motion” (Anzaldúa 80). The goal is not so much to convey an already
formed subjectivity, which would result in a static representation, but rather, to show the
process of forming a subjectivity, to show to process of dealing with an experiential space
of cultural collisions, a convivencia of fragments, fusions and confusions, and the
resulting consciousness that comes out of such a reality.
However, there is another reason for employing hybridity, apart from the cultural
negotiations achieved by artists/writers and shared with their public. The objective of this
44
hybridity is cultural conservation, similar to that practiced by the colonial subjects of the
Spanish Empire. This strategy comes from the realization that, excluded from the master
narrative, one must introduce elements of the threatened culture into the structures of the
dominant code, and thus ensure cultural preservation, however limited this preservation
may be. Speaking of hybridity in Chicano hip-hop, Rafael Pérez-Torres states that
mestizaje articulates “a cultural strategy for agency and change while at the same time
evoking a sense of historical place and connection by naming a racialized subjectivity.
The idea of mestizaje at once suggests change and permanence” (325). Mestizaje, in this
case, anchors itself in a historical and/or racial reality while appropriating the elements
and media of the surrounding socio-cultural landscape, creatively imbuing the work with
a sense of history and an ethnically/racially-derived identity as well as articulating
something completely new in the process.
Chicana/o cultural production appropriates and transforms.
George Mariscal remarks that Chicana/os have a very strong “transformative
sense,” providing the example of Luis Valdez’s 20th
century adaptation of a medieval
Spanish nativity play, La Pastorela, in which “hell becomes a toxic waste site, and Christ
the son of a migrant worker” (Mariscal 65-66). This transformative sense is somewhat
related to hybridity as a strategy for cultural survival, as mentioned in the previous
section. However, instead of crafting a mestizaje of diverse elements, this transformative
practice takes traditional forms and reinvents them to suit contemporary contexts. For
example, as Ýbarra-Frausto states, Chicana/o artists have fused socio-political elements,
such as AIDS, gang violence, and pesticide use, into traditional practices such as el Día
de Muertos ("Notes from Losaida" xvi). Recent Chicana/o literature also rearticulates and
45
modernizes tradition. This is the case of Ana Castillo’s So far from God in which one
character, La Loca, experiences a type of Immaculate Conception, only instead of
mysteriously becoming filled with the seed of God, this modern virgin suffers an
immaculate infection of AIDS. Likewise, in Ramón García’s short story: “Amor Indio:
Juan Diego of San Diego,” the Juan Diego of the Virgin of Guadalupe story “is Indio like
the Nahuatl original, but he is also a cholo addicted to drugs who meets what appears to
be an apparition of La Virgen de Guadalupe on a San Diego barrio corner” (Estrada 49).
The purpose of these transformations could be various. One such objective
parallels the intentions of parody. Gonzalo Celorio writes that the aim of parody in Latin
America is to possess a culture and to show this possession though criticism, reflection,
play, etc. (102). He also claims that parody involves a return to the past for the purpose of
preserving, recuperating, or enriching it (101). When accused of not being “real Mexicans”
by Mexican nationals while struggling to avoid assimilation into the mainstream US
melting pot, displaying knowledge of traditional culture becomes a defensive mechanism
in response to antagonism from both nations. At the same time, however, the
transformative practices of these Chicana/os are a veiled assault on static Mexican
sacrosanct cultural artefacts. They are showing that, though they are well-versed in
Mexican traditional culture, they reject many of its narratives as being insufficient for
communicating within their current American reality. While invoking elements of
traditional culture lovingly pays homage to Mexican roots, the transformation performed
on these traditions involves both a humorous rebellion and a revitalization of petrified
cultural artefacts.
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The baroque border
While many baroque theorists, specifically Bolívar Echeverría, attribute the
colonial mestizaje resulting from the Iberian occupation of the Americas as best
illustrating the baroque ethos (Echeverría 28), there is a more recent example of a climate
in which a baroque ethos has been emerging, a place which has been mostly ignored by
baroque researchers: the Chicana/o Southwest.
A colonial baroque historical foundation
The cultural landscape of the Chicana/o borderlands was not formed from a tabula
rasa; rather, the Southwest has a persistent Mexican and colonial legacy which continues
into the present day. As Amalia Mesa-Bains explains,
I think it’s hard for people to understand that all the time California has
been California, it’s always been Mexico. There is a Mexico within the
memory, the practices, the politics, the economy, the spirituality of
California. It’s invisible to everyone but Mexicans. We’ve known it, we
see it, we live it, but Californians don’t know it. (cited in Isenberg 152)
California, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and half of Colorado can be
considered the other Mexico, the Mexico that was colonized by the US between 1845 and
1854 and incorporated into their national body. This other Mexico experienced much of
the same phenomena as did the rest of Mexico: conquest, proselytism of the indigenous
peoples, mestizaje, the colonia, and independence. The cathedrals and missions that
remain in the Southwest are witnesses to this legacy, shouting out the baroque in every
winding and rippling curlicue and echoing a mestizo legacy with every indigenous
insertion. This Mexico, like Bolívar Echeverría’s Mexico, also sits on a foundation of
47
mestizaje, the same cultural mestizaje that Echeverría links to the baroque ethos (36).
However, what most contributes lifeblood and continuity to the Mexican cultural
presence in the Southwest is the constant influx of Mexican immigrants, bringing their
own sensibilities cultivated on the soil of a rich baroque legacy.
Living in the crack between two worlds: the Chicana/o baroque experience
Maravall speaks of the picaresque phenomena of the 17th
century as only being
possible in “sociedades que habían traspasado históricamente un considerable grado de
dinamismo y movilidad, que, por ello, habían entrado en confrontación con otras
sociedades y era en ellas experiencia relativamente frecuente la de los choques de
culturas” (La literatura picaresca 258). The Baroque was a time of movement, dynamism,
culture shock, and crisis: “Crisis económica, social, e histórica” (762). It was an age of
uncertainty and confusion (11) in which the old paradigms of Renaissance classicism had
lost their vigour and people were looking for new ways to see and organize their world. It
was an age in which identities started to shift and slide, where people were beginning to
change professions, ascend in social class, and, in the case of the colonies, shift between
racial categories. The colonies became an environment of clashing cultures and
worldviews, as well as a crucible for hybridity and the formation of new identities.
Anzaldúa describes the US-Mexican border as “a vague and undetermined place”
that is always in the process of transforming itself (25), that is characterized by its
restlessness and its ambivalent state (26) and that has created a third country of “shock
culture” (33). Not coincidentally, her description runs parallel with Maravall’s
description of a Baroque society characterized by movement, dynamism and culture
shock (La literatura picaresca 258). Both the 17th
-century Hispanic world as much as the
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Chicana/o borderlands of recent years have been spaces of cultural collisions and
confusions. The criollos, the mestizos, and the mulattos fell into the crack between
Imperial Spain, the nearly destroyed world of the First Nations peoples, and Africa.
Likewise, border dwellers “live in the interval, ‘in the crack between two worlds’”
(García Canclini 238). Anzaldúa describes this experience as being “sandwiched between
two cultures, straddling all three cultures and their value systems” in which “the coming
together of two habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural
collision” (100). Like the Baroque of the Hispanic world, the Chicana/o borderlands
encompass a climate of uncertainty, ambiguity, dynamism, and hybridity. In the words of
Guillermo Gómez-Peña,
Cities like Tijuana and Los Angeles [...] are becoming models of new
hybrid culture, full of uncertainty and vitality. And border youth—the
fearsome ‘cholo-punks,’ children of the chasm that is opening between the
‘First’ and ‘Third’ worlds, become indisputable heirs to a new mestizaje
[...] Like it or not, we are attending the funeral of modernity and the birth
of a new culture. (Warrior for Gringostroika 39)
From this confrontation of two realities, new phenomena emerge: a new mestiza
consciousness and a mestiza culture, or rather, el ethos mestizo. For Anzaldúa, this
consciousness can “[break] down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm” (102) and, for
Echeverría, el ethos barroco, interrelated to the cultural mestizaje of the Americas, can
serve as both a refuge and a weapon against the paradigm of modernity (18). Either case
involves the decay of old orders and the birth of something new. As Carpentier states, the
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baroque “suele presentarse precisamente en expansión en el momento culminante de una
civilización o cuando va a nacer un orden nuevo en la sociedad” (77).
Rasquache baroque
Chicana/o culture, like baroque culture, is intensely visual. The core aesthetic of
Chicana/o culture, rasquachismo, like the baroque, is defined as an aesthetic practice, a
sensibility, a world-view, and a strategy for survival and resistance. As an aesthetic,
rasquachismo’s definition is completely congruent with that of the baroque:
To be rasquache is to be unfettered and unrestrained, to favour the
elaborate over the simple, the flamboyant over the severe [...] The
rasquache inclination piles pattern on pattern, filling all available space
with bold display. Ornamentation and elaboration prevail and are joined
with a delight in texture and sensuous surfaces. (Ýbarra-Frausto, "The
Chicano Movement" 172)
As a visual aesthetic which captivates the senses, rasquachismo invokes the pratices of
Góngora and the exuberant mestiza profusion of the Mexican colonial baroque; as an
“irreverent, satiric, and ironic worldview” (Ýbarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement”
173), rasquachismo shows the face of Quevedo or of Sor Juana writing her Respuesta a
Sor Filotea. As a “sensibility attuned to mixtures and confluence” which creates
“syncretism, juxtaposition and integration” (Ýbarra-Frausto, "The Chicano Movement"
171), rasquachismo parallels the Barroco de Indias where “La hibridez, la mixtura, la
simbiosis hacen del barroco americano un arte bizarro, fantasioso, colorido, popular, [...]
es signo vigoroso de la originalidad Americana” (Celorio 88). And it is this originality, a
differentiating code which seeks to articulate an identity separate and in opposition to the
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dominant culture, which is common to both rasquachismo and the New World Baroque.
In the words of Amalia Mesa-Bains:
The sensibility of rasquachismo is an obvious and internally defined tool
of artist-activists. The intention was to provoke the accepted “superior”
norms of the Anglo-American with the everyday reality of Chicano
cultural practices [...] rasquachismo is a world view that provides an
oppositional identity. (no pagination)
Similarly, in the Barroco de Indias, a sensibility and style emerged as a way of providing
an identity in opposition to superior Old World norms. In the spirit of Ángel Guido’s
reconquista and Lezama Lima´s contraconquista, el Quechua Kondori
expressed his insubordination in his sculpture seeing that each palm of
sculpted stone was made with the obstinate intent to not imitate the
Spanish [...] With creole insolence, when he throws all classical proportion
to hell. With creole heresy when he replaces the Catholic cross with the
Incan sun. (Guido 168, translation mine)
It is this identity articulated through art which created resistance to the dominant
cultural norms and, by proxy, the dominant culture itself. The need to produce differential
culture comes from the lived experience of trying to survive physically,
psychologically, and culturallya marginalized existence in a difficult and adverse
environment. It is a way of “[making] the most from the least [...], a combination of
resistant and resilient attitudes devised to allow the Chicano to survive and persevere with
a sense of dignity” (Mesa-Bains, no pagination). This continued existence involves
cultural survival within a larger dominant Anglo society. Just as the artists and artisans of
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the colonies ensured the survival of their traditions by incorporating their signs into the
baroque framework of religious art and architecture, Chicana/os practice similar syncretic
practices to promote cultural survival and negotiations. These practices involve
“sustaining elements of Mexican tradition and lived encounters” by recombining
“disparate elements such as corridos, images of Walt Disney, Mexican cinema, and mass
media advertising, and even Mexican calendario graphics and American Pop art” (Mesa-
Bains, no pagination). Like the shock culture which resulted from the clashing of Spanish
and indigenous worlds which required a new, flexible, hybrid, baroque ethos for
articulating and negotiating this reality, the cultural collision between Chicana/o and US
mainstream cultures “could only be negotiated through the sensibility of rasquachismo, a
survivalist irreverence that functioned as a vehicle of cultural continuity” (Mesa-Bains,
no pagination). This combinatory strategy facilitated not only cultural continuity but also
served as a way of articulating a shared history excluded from official culture.
Reclaiming this history, like de Campos reclaiming Gregorio de Matos, highlights the
limited and inaccurate historical narrative of the nation and the how Chicana/os, like the
barrocos in Brazil, have been excluded from official history.
It is within this rasquache baroque that I situate the performative, literary, and
artistic works which will provide the subject matter for the following three chapters. All
the works treated in this dissertation participate thoroughly in rasquache baroque
sensibilities, citing baroque history and summoning the ghosts of the colonial past while
generating inclusive structures, impure hybridities and juxtapositions, flamboyance,
excess, bold transformations, and critical humour for the purpose of negotiating an
adverse and complex reality and for culturally arming oneself against hegemony and its
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metanarratives, in an attempt to ensure cultural survival and resistance. The first chapter,
“Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra,”
investigates the colonial baroque legacy which saturates the performances of Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and his performance group, La Pocha Nostra. This legacy is demonstrated
by a layering of baroque conventions—allegory, hagiography, and the wünderkammer—
as well as by an intensely baroque spatial and temporal ordering which harnesses the
powers of decentralization, pluralism, coextensive space, and seriality. The second
chapter, “Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque: allegory, hagiography, and the supernatural
in So Far from God,” explores how the Ana Castillo continues the colonial baroque
traditions of allegory, hagiography, and miracles in her novel, So Far from God. The
third chapter, “Amalia Mesa-Bains’s Domesticana Baroque,” looks at the heavy baroque
citation which permeates the installation works of Amalia Mesa-Bains, investigating how
these installations use the conventions of the wünderkammer and vanitas along with the
concept of the mirror and the fold to speak of baroque knowledge systems, female and
non-Western identities, and feminine interior spaces.
Strategies for entering into the future
The strategy of mestizaje is a baroque strategy, involving the assimilation of the
dominant European code and its transformation into a combination of fragments from the
subordinate code which had been previously destroyed during conquest and colonization
(Echeverría 36). As much as this process partially accepts and assimilates the dominant
culture, it also resists the dominant culture in an indirect, elaborate, and exaggerated way
as well as by means of understated and clever play; rousing and questioning the value
structures of society and demanding that they transcend to a level where they would be
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able to incorporate values contrary to the system’s very order (Echeverría 36). The
concept of an open and flexible value system is echoed in Chicanismo’s rasquache,
where “communion is preferred over purity” (Ýbarra-Frausto, "The Chicano Movement"
171) as well as in Anzaldúa’s mestiza border consciousness which affirms multiplicity
and denies any singular and exclusive subjectivity determined by race, culture, gender,
class, and/or sexuality. The emphasis on heterogeneity in the accounts of the baroque
ethos and the mestiza consciousness denies the existence of any singular paradigm which
would seek to dominate and silence the others. As Bolívar Echeverría’s baroque ethos
serves as a way to survive and resist capitalist modernity, the Chicana/o ethos serves as a
way to survive and resist erroneous monocultural neo-nationalist narratives as well as the
multiculturalist paradigm that ignores group rights pertaining to class, race, gender, and
sexuality. However, beyond surviving and contesting the established order, the baroque
and the Chicana/o ethoses are encoded with an element of creative utopic imaginings. De
Sousa Santos speaks of creating a new subjectivity, based on the baroque ethos, which
could foment the basis of a new, utopic epistemology (322) and help us out of the current
impasse of capitalist modernity. Anzaldúa has already created a new subjectivity, the
mestiza consciousness, “a new mythosthat is, a change in the way we perceive reality,
the way we see ourselves, and the way we behave” (102). Just as De Sousa Santos
suggests that we construct a baroque ethos based on what history has given us by taking
what is useful from it (326), Anzaldúa takes what is useful from her people’s history and
lived reality and uses this legacy to construct a mestiza ethos. “I am participating in the
creation of another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a
new value system” (103), Anzaldúa affirms. The open, inclusive, multivocal, complex,
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and shifting quality of both baroque and Chicana/o ethoses shows promise of providing
more effective ways of navigating the heterogeneous and complicated world of today and
the future.
Conclusion
Socio-cultural phenomena which have emerged from a space involving 1) a
baroque historical precedent, 2) multiple and conflicting cultural referents and practices,
3) the disintegration of the narratives of singular identities and of the nation, and 4) a
subordinate culture threatened with dissolution within a dominant one are in need of a
strategy for cultural preservation, for holding the universe together, and for “rebelling and
laughing” (de Sousa Santos 330). Rasquache, mestiza, baroque: whatever name you wish
to call it, this is the ethos of choice in the Chicana/o borderlands.
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Chapter 1
Ana Castillo’s Xicanista Baroque:
Allegory, Hagiography, and the Supernatural in So Far from God
Misión Dolores, San Francisco. The 18th
century mission exhibits a distinctly New World
Baroque bravura, with beams painted in indigenous
arrow patterns and a façade styled in a convoluted
unfurling of flourishes and curlicues. A frontispiece
painted with trompe l’oeil architecture covers the
main retablo during Lent, in which three
allegorical figures dominate the fictional space: Fe,
Esperanza, and Caridad.
These allegorical figures have come to inhabit the imagination of Ana Castillo,
whose novel, So Far from God, continues and reshapes the New World baroque traditions
which persist in Nuevo México as much as in México Viejo. The novel encompasses the
multiple realities and histories which have collided together within the space of New
Mexico. Fe, Esperanza, and Caridad are the daughters of a single mother, Sofia, all of
whom live in the town of Tomé, a region described by its colonial legacy of penitentes,
curanderismo, and miracles. A fourth daughter, La Loca, adds another allegorical figure
to this family, beginning the novel with her mysterious death; her journey through hell,
purgatory, and heaven; her resurrection, and her levitation. Resembling modern day
saints, all four daughters undergo martyrdoms: Caridad is viciously assaulted by the
Fig. 3. Frontispiece, Misión Dolores, San
Francisco
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malogra6, Fe’s body is consumed by cancer, Esperanza is tortured and killed in Saudi
Arabia, and La Loca mysteriously contracts AIDS (an immaculate contraction) and
slowly wastes away. Their mother, Sofia, is inspired into political engagement following
the breakdown of her washing machine, deciding to run for mayor and to begin a farming
and wool weaving cooperative. She and her only living daughter, La Loca, participate in
a Viernes Santo procession which has been radically transformed to include speeches
from activists speaking in favour of environmental protection and Native rights and
against meaningless wars. This utopic world quickly falls into pessimistic irony when
Sofia becomes president of MOMAS (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints), a gynocratic
institution based on the valorization of the suffering of sons and daughters which is more
concerned with maintaining its elite hierarchy and selling products than with promoting
social justice.
As evidenced by the plotline, So Far from God carries strong political overtones,
a politicization which corresponds to neobaroque strategies of resistance. As outlined in
the introduction to this dissertation, the baroque of the Americas articulated thinly
disguised expressions of insubordination which generated a spirit of resistance against the
colonizer (Guido, Lezama Lima). The neobaroque of Sarduy, however, contains the
potential for more than just resistance as the neobaroque pulses with a revolutionary
quality, practicing the art of dethronement which ushers in a new order ("The Baroque
and the Neobaroque" 183). Compared to Sarduy’s revolutionary neobaroque, Gonzalo
Celorio’s neobaroque is slightly less extreme, relying on the complementary processes of
recovering and transforming the legacy of the past through reflective, critical, and
6 The malogra is a legendary otherworldly creature from New Mexico which is made of wool and frequents
crossroads during the night, waiting to asphyxiate those who pass by.
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humorous play (104-05). Castillo is participating in neobaroque resistance in a similar
way to Guido and Lezama Lima’s colonial subject as well as Sarduy and Celorio’s
neobaroque subject: Not only does her novel demonstrate rebellion against US hegemony
and capitalism, albeit thinly veiled through fiction, but she also recovers a Mexican and
Mexican-American past for the purpose of saving it from the effacement of official
history, investing value in it, and critically transforming it in reflective ways which often
bring laughter.
One of the traditions that Castillo recovers from the colonial past is allegory. The
full development of allegory began in the Baroque where it achieved a privileged form in
emblem books and in the post-Tridentine autos sacramentales of Calderón de la Barca.
The mode allowed for profane mixings, for anachronistic analogies, and for multiple
layers of meaning. It appealed to Counter-Reformist sensibilities which favoured physical
representation as a vessel for communicating metaphysical concepts, compelling the
active involvement of both the senses and the mind. For this reason, the playwright was
“atento a la necesidad de hacer palpable por medio de los sentidos lo inteligible y
espiritual” (Regalado 2: 156). However, as much as it was a didactic technique used to
clearly illustrate abstract ideas, allegory was also an enigmatic technique which required
the mental engagement of its audience in order to decipher its meaning:
El arte de los autos […] no es reducible a un mundo cerrado, sino que es
más bien un paradigma artístico abierto, capaz de despertar motivos
olvidados, entre los que se destaca nuestra necesidad de orientarnos por
medio de un orden simbólico que nos haga presente una imagen dramática
de la existencia. (Regalado 2: 32)
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Considering these qualities, allegory provides Castillo with an appropriate mode for
expressing abstractions in understandable and yet mysterious ways: “Calderón llevó a
cabo una difícil síntesis de dos tendencias en la literatura alegórica: una esotérica,
fundamentada en la representación de los misterios a un público de iniciados en el culto,
y otra exotérica, dirigida al pueblo” (Regalado 2: 121). Perhaps, like Calderón, Castillo
owes much of the success of her novel to her use of allegory, through which she is able to
reach a broad audience, though on varying levels of understanding.
The taste for allegory permeates the lives of the saints as well. The saints are
allegorical, representing archetypes of idealized human behaviour. Their physical
suffering directly correlates to their sanctity and their bodies which, when martyred,
become prepared “for emblematic purposes” (Benjamin, The Origin 217). The suffering
of martyrs, despite the emotion-inducing physicality of their hyperbolic wounds and tears,
is “always accompanied by an allegorical distillation of passions in the form of ideas, a
combination of sensuousness and sobriety” (Parkinson Zamora 178). The purpose of the
lives of saints is a didactic one: to inspire Christians to follow prescribed models of
behaviour and to impress the connection between suffering and sanctity deep into their
consciousness. This didacticism is realised not only with baroque strategies of emotional
persuasion achieved through witnessing extreme acts of corporeal violence, but also with
the wonder incited by miracles.
New Spain’s Baroque imaginary was populated with miracles which challenged
the dichotomy of the real and the supernatural. “Miracles, visions, and hallucinations
became commonplace in colonial Mexican society” and “visits to hell or to paradise
became common currency among believers of every type” (Gruzinski 83). La Loca’s
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journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven, as well as her resurrection and her levitation
can be seen as a continuation of this New World Baroque tradition of collapsing real and
fictitious worlds, producing a “chronic hallucinatory state” (83). Supernatural events run
throughout So Far from God. La Loca and Caridad sometimes exercise their clairvoyant
powers; the family is frequented by spirits, including La Llorona; and La Loca performs
miraculous healings through prayer. What is deemed to be a “chronic hallucinatory state”
in la Nueva España has endured to the present day with the continued documentation of
fantastical miracles. The apotheosis of the surreal miracle finds its narrative form in the
ex-voto. Ex-votos are folk paintings which, along with a written inscription, give
testimony to how prayer to a saint or to the Virgin Mary was miraculously granted. Ex-
votos transcend the boundaries of everyday reality, documenting marvellous occurrences
involving supernatural phenomena. Figure 4 shows a contemporary rendering of how a
giant squid saved a fisherman who was lost in the mists of the sea. The wife of the
fisherman attributes this miracle to the Virgin Mary who, in answer to her prayers, sent
the giant squid to save the woman’s husband. Through the tradition of ex-votos, one can
see how the supernatural entwines itself deeply within the New World Catholic
understanding of the universe and how Ana Castillo’s marriage of allegorical
hagiographic traditions with hallucinatory otherworldliness is not arbitrarily invented, but
continues a cultural history beginning in colonial New Spain and enduring into the
present day.
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Fig. 4. Ex voto Pulpo, Janus Museum, Washington Grove, Maryland
It is within the closely related traditions of allegory, hagiography, and miracles
that Ana Castillo writes her novel. In So Far from God allegory, hagiography, and
popular narratives involving the supernatural slide seamlessly together into a polysemous
genre. Coming from a Mexican-American cultural standpoint, writing in an allegorical
mode about present-day saints, martyrs, and miracles seems only appropriate. Allegory is
the baroque mode, the mode of a baroque Catholicism whose worldview runs is deeply
embedded in the minds and spirits of Chicanas/os. Ana Castillo has stated that, despite
the fact that many Chicanas/os opted for indigenista ideologies as a way of rejecting
Western culture, they could not completely eliminate Catholicism from their lives
“because Christian symbols and beliefs have infiltrated many indigenous practices,
family and community ties remained Catholic, and many Mexican customs are tied to
Catholicism” (Massacre 95). She recognizes that there is still an underlying part of the
Chicana’s identity which beats with a latent Catholic religiosity (Massacre 95). This
permanent Catholic subjectivity echoes in the character of Esperanza who “in high school,
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although a rebel, she was Catholic heart and soul. In college, she had a romance with
Marxism, but was still a Catholic” (38). Writing about a people who, from the bottom of
their hearts, palpitate with a deep baroque Catholic sensibility requires an equally
appropriate narrative form. This allegorical miraculous hagiography is the form Castillo
has constructed as an effective means of telling her story and the story of her people.
Allegory in So Far from God
In its most basic sense, allegory is a non-literal mode of representation in which
meaning is conveyed by means of figures and their actions. It is a dynamic mode capable
of drawing analogies between diverse and contrary subjects. It is deeply rooted in history,
using aspects of a historical reality to speak of abstract concepts or using figurative
abstractions to speak of historical realities. It denies realism: characters become either
exaggerated archetypes or faceless abstractions, the ordering of events seems illogical,
and supernatural occurrences easily enter the narrative. There are no details for the sake
of details: everything exudes meaning and “‘mere’ ornament no longer exists, in this
view” (Fletcher 125). It is a mode which, through its complexity and contradiction,
approaches a more faithful representation of the truth (Hunter 269). For Fredric Jameson,
the allegorical spirit allows for discontinuities and heterogeneity, rendering its
representation polysemous and dreamlike (146). It is a “successively progressing,
dramatically mobile, dynamic representation of ideas which has acquired the very fluidity
of time” (Görres in Benjamin, The Origin 165). Allegory is “a way of seeing” (Benjamin,
The Origin 166). It is a baroque way of seeing.
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So Far from God explicitly reveals its allegorical mode by the naming of its
characters: Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, La Loca, Sofia (Wisdom), Felicia, Francisco el
Penitente, etc. The names indicate that the characters are embodiments of abstract
qualities rather than realist representations of individuals. It is tempting to simplify the
allegorical figures in So Far from God by directly correlating the characters’ names to
their corresponding personified virtues. For Laura Gillman, Fe has faith in the American
Dream, Esperanza employs her hope for social justice, and Caridad “exercises her
‘charity’ by giving her body to anyone closely resembling her husband Memo” (179-80).
However, assigning names fails to fully describe the polysemous quality of each
character. La Loca speaks of the limitations of naming in the novel when her father asks
her why she called her horse “Gato Negro,” given that he was a horse, not a cat. She
responds to her father, “I’m not calling Gato Negro a cat [...] I named it Gato Negro. I
never said it was a cat” (152-53). Loca’s logic reveals how signifiers do not necessarily
reflect the signified. The narrator continues the discussion, explaining how Gato Negro’s
eyes looked like a cat’s eyes when it prepares for an attack, though qualifying that
“calling it Gato Negro didn’t mean nothing more than that, obviously, because horses are
not attack animals. Everyone knew that” (153). Castillo shows us how naming only
captures a partial and contradictory semblance of the signified. Following this logic, the
names of Fe, Esperanza, Caridad, and Loca do not necessarily correlate to their
corresponding virtues, but at best to a partial and contradictory semblance of these virtues.
Instead, each figurative character houses a multiplicity of abstract concepts,
creating ambiguous allegorical figures. In So Far from God, as in most modern allegory,
there is no pure and direct correlation between the character and her abstract quality, as in
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the medieval sense of allegory, but rather, there is an ambiguous, polysemic, and
composite quality to Ana Castillo’s characters. In this sense, Castillo’s allegorization is
an extension and an intensification of baroque allegory, which was capable of uniting
multiple meanings within the allegorical figure. In Calderón de la Barca’s auto
sacramental, El verdadero Dios Pan (1670), one allegorical figure represents the Moon,
Diana, Proserpina, and the human soul, while another character, el Dios Pan, personifies
the Greek god Pan, the Good Shepherd, and the Eucharistic body of Christ (Kurtz 24).
Likewise, So Far from God’s Caridad allegorizes a morally lost abandonada; the
confusion between caritas and cupiditas; the neglect of the heart, as demonstrated by her
carelessness towards her horse, Corazón; the healer, both through her profession as a
nurse and as an apprentice curandera; and the awakening of mestiza and indigenous
understanding. As Angus Fletcher explains, allegorical protagonists have a “segmented
character,” generating new personalities as each event occurs, “secondary personalities
which are partial aspects of himself” (35). These multiplying identities also recall the
baroque concept of proliferation in the sense that they deny the existence of any singular
signifier, invoking instead “a chain of [signifiers] which progresses metonymically and
which circumscribes the absent [signifier], tracing an orbit around it […] a radial reading”
(Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” 118). In a similar understanding, Lois
Parkinson Zamora speaks of the instability of the baroque self as expressed by shifting
fragments which are incapable of defining the whole. As examples, she cites the Pensées
of Pascal and the multiple self-portraits of Frida Kahlo as examples of fragments
expressing “the vagaries of the self” while never achieving a total comprehensive vision
of that self (186). Though allegory flattens, stylizes, and creates abstractions which deny
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the complex psychologies found in realist depictions of human characters, any
predilection for essentializing or simplifying is avoided by the creation of multiple and
shifting selves. This constitutes an appropriate baroque choice as much as an appropriate
choice for the Chicana/o borderlands where, as Gloria Anzaldúa has expressed, the new
mestiza subject is composed of multiple, conflicting, and shifting selves (100-01).
The composite nature of each character is often contradictory, indicative of the
baroque taste for impurities achieved through the combining of disparate aspects. Mary
Magdalene became popularized during the Baroque due to her ambivalent position
between prostitute and saint and Caridad follows in this tradition, living a drunken and
highly sexualized lifestyle which, after her brutal attack by the malogra and her “Holy
Restoration,” becomes ascetic and saintly. Her composite allegorical character is further
complicated by fragments from both Catholic and indigenous cultures. As Gail Pérez
notes, Caridad has been partly modelled on the life of Saint Clare (63), who also
experienced a radically austere lifestyle apart from society. In other ways, Caridad begins
to embody indigenousness: she worships the earth and is mistaken for the spirit of Lozen,
the Apache warrior (So Far 88). Finally, she is united with the beloved Acoma Esmeralda,
who is her sister on a mythological plane, according to the Acoma genesis myth which
places Caridad and Esmeralda in the roles of the first two women, whom the deity
Tsichtinako calls back to the earth which had originally formed them (211). Esperanza’s
personification of hope is also contradictory. Whatever hope she embodied in her La
Raza politics has turned into a hopeless impasse in which she cannot advance the
interests of the Chicana/o community, having been relegated to a feminine symbol in a
patriarchal and mythologized Chicano nationalist movement. During El Movimiento of
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the 1970s, Esperanza organized protests which led to the establishment of Chicano
studies classes. She was the voice that fomented on-campus participation in support of
the United Farm Workers and spoke of the injustices suffered by Salvador Allende and
Victor Jara (So Far 239-40). However, what had once represented the embodiment of
hope through struggle and resistance became “an unsuspecting symbol, like a staff or a
rattle or medicine” in a phallocentric indigenist Chicano ritual (So Far 36). Esperanza
could no longer offer hope because she had lost all agency as a female within in a male-
centred world lost in mythic escapism. Her only choice was to become a journalist
covering the Gulf War, a war waged by a country which ignored the interests of her own
community; a war in which she disappears and is tortured, not unlike a desaparecida
from the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970’s. In short, if Esperanza in any way
personifies the virtue of hope, it is a misplaced and dysfunctional hope.
Walter Benjamin states that the use of allegory denotes the incapacity of
representing ideals, as the baroque allegorical way of seeing only exists in spaces
signifying the decline of the world (The origin 166). Incapable of representing the pure
ideal virtues belonging to Western tradition, Castillo has adulterated them, demonstrating
the desperate situation facing her people. Fe, Esperanza, and Caridad do not represent the
virtues implied by their names, but rather, they point to the crises within Chicana/o
communities: the betrayal of the Chicana/o community in favour of the American Dream
(Fe), the loss of momentum within el Movimiento (Esperanza), and the persistence of
racial and gender-based oppression (Caridad). These crises eventually lead to the deaths
of all three daughters. In pursuit of the perfect home and appliances, Fe accepts a well-
paying job at a factory where she uses toxic substances to clean weapon parts and
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consequently dies from cancer. Esperanza had “little left to keep her locally” (So Far 46)
and, since her relationship with Rubén/Cuahtémoc (a personification of the mythically-
conceived male-centred Movimiento) was doomed to fatality, she went where she was
needed: Saudi Arabia (So Far 46). Women’s exclusion from the narrative of the
Movimiento meant that Esperanza could not exercise her fighting spirit in local politics,
compelling her to go abroad where she was killed. Caridad was raped and nearly killed
by the malogra, a monstrous composite representing the continuing legacy of conquest
and colonization, “a thing, both tangible and amorphous. A thing [...] made of sharp
metal and splintered wood, of limestone, gold, and brittle parchment. It held the weight of
a continent and was indelible as ink, centuries old and yet as strong as a young wolf” (So
Far 77). The description of the malogra conjures images of violence and civilization: the
metal and wood of swords and lances, the limestone constituting the foundation of the
Church, the gold which lined Spanish coffers, and the parchment on which laws were
written, land divided, and Western culture propagated. The narrative of the malogra is
one in which the female body comes to represent conquered territory. Caridad was not the
victim of an individual attacker, but of an intangible systemic misogynist force: “it wasn’t
a man with a face and a name […] Nor two or three men. That was why she had never
been able to give no information to the police” (77). The realisation of this brutal attack
within present time indicates a continued presence of systemic racial and gender-based
oppression. This oppression is repeated by Francisco el Penitente who personifies the
ascetic European Catholicism of the Franciscan school. Francisco experiences a profound
attraction to Caridad, seeing her as his female counterpart: the St. Clare to his St. Francis
(Gail Pérez 69). He becomes vulture-like, stalking Caridad, blind to her shift away from
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Eurocentric Catholicism and towards a mestiza worldview which focused more and more
on Native feminine principles. Simultaneously fascinated and abhorrent of her
relationship with the indigenous Esmeralda, Francisco chases the lovers off a cliff at Sky
City, enacting a Eurocentrically envisioned Catholicism’s continued persecution of the
indigenous and the female.
In its totality, this collection of polysemous characters creates yet another
composite: the multiple subjectivities to be found in the Chicana mind. If, as Ana Castillo
says, her characters were based on different parts of herself (Saeta and Castillo 145), So
Far from God puts these subjectivities into action, staging the allegorical performance of
her internal conflicts and negotiations. As fragments of an undefined whole, the
characters perform their subjectivities, allegorizing their fragmentary selves through their
actions. While Caridad embodies the need to understand local knowledge and to heal the
community, Esperanza does not content herself with matters of healing or survival, rather,
she represents the need to go out into the world and promote social transformation. While
Fe represents the ambition to leave behind the heavy yoke of her despised marginality
and its corresponding poverty, La Loca personifies the creative feminine spiritual impulse
which remains independent of society (the irrational―craziness―has long been
associated with the feminine). Western tradition, beginning with Plato, has sustained the
idea that the rational is inherently masculine, while the irrational is inherently feminine.7
Within this tradition we can also locate thinkers such as Karl Jung, whose theory of the
unconscious anima and animus sees the non-rational anima as feminine. Marie-Luise von
7 Plato’s Timaeus holds that, at first creation, all souls were given male bodies. Thereafter, the men who
had conquered their emotions continued to inhabit their male bodies, whereas those that had not became
women (no pagination). Adam Weitzenfeld notes that Plato’s assertion that the rational immortal soul is
male infers that the mortal faculties, i.e. emotions, are feminine (25). Based on this logic, Weitzenfeld
concludes that “by behaving like a woman (i.e. feminine), one will become a woman” (25).
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Franz, one of several authors whose writings were included in Jung’s Man and His
Symbols, defines the anima as “a personification of all feminine psychological tendencies
in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to
the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and […] his relation to the
unconscious” (186). It is hardly coincidental that the characteristics of the anima
correspond with those of La Loca. In fact, Marie-Luise von Franz highlights the prophetic
power of the feminine anima, saying that not only were the Greek oracles female
priestesses but also that Inuit shamans wore female clothing to connect them to the spirit
world (186). La Loca’s premonitions and soothsaying would make her equivalent to an
oracle or shaman figure. From these correlations, we can see how La Loca is an allegory
of the female anima and its associated non-rational faculties as well as its cultural and
historical manifestations.8 La Loca, thus, represents the anima of the Chicana mind, a
vital part of the psyche which serves as a spiritual guide.9 Last but not least, Sofia
embodies the subjectivity of la dolorosa, the suffering mother. For most of her life Sofia
remained trapped in traditional patterns of thinking which inhibit her empowerment.
However, her transformation into mayor, entrepreneur, and activist seems to collect the
best characteristics of her daughters and to put them into action, taking Esperanza’s
activist impulses, Caridad’s will to heal, Fe’s ambition, and Loca’s creative spirituality. If
8 Interestingly, Marie-Luise von Franz points out that the anima can carry both positive and negative
aspects, the latter of which is seen in mythological female spirits such as in the Lorelei or Rusalka, who
frequented rivers and other bodies of water attempting to lure and drown men (188). The figures of the
Lorelei and the Rusalka closely approximate La Llorona, with whom La Loca has a close relationship. 9 “Whenever a man’s logical mind is incapable of discerning facts that are hidden in his unconscious, the
anima helps him to dig them out. Even more vital is the role that the anima plays in putting a man’s mind in
tune with the right inner values and thereby opening the way into more profound inner depths. It is as if an
inner “radio” becomes tuned to a certain wave length […]. In establishing this inner “radio” reception, the
anima takes on the role of guide, or mediator, to the world within and the Self. […] this is the role of
Beatrice in Dante’s Paradiso, and also of the goddess Isis when she appeared in a dream to Apuleius […] in
order to initiate him into a higher, more spiritual form of life” (von Franz 193).
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“the instability…in the Baroque self and its representations may be understood as a
struggle with unanchored parts” (Parkinson Zamora 186), the drama in So Far from God
may be understood as a struggle with fragmented selves performed by means of allegory.
Given that the women in So Far from God represent various Chicana
subjectivities, these women along with the townspeople of Tomé represent the greater
Mexican-American world and, in their totality, they construct an allegorical “group
portraiture.” The baroque fascination with the relation of parts to the whole is
exemplified through group portraiture in which “selves are individualized and yet their
identity is conferred by the group to which they belong. In all cases, these portraits are
designed to suggest a multiple, interconnected corporate self” (Parkinson Zamora 184).
An example of one such painting can be seen in the the colonial Mexican portrait of Don
Manuel Solar and His Family (fig.5). Castillo’s novel achieves a similar rendering of the
concept of baroque group portraiture, using literary allegory instead of visual allegory as
a means of demonstrating the relation between personified Chicana/o subjectivities. This
is where the individual’s story, or the story of a family, comes to constitute the story of
the collective. Just as Fredric Jameson’s conceptualizing of third world allegory
collapses the dichotomy of private and public, making the individual story tell of the
collective experience (141, 158), So Far from God allegorizes the relation of the Chicana
self to Mexican-American society, telling a collective female story situated within a
larger Mexican-American narrative. La Loca’s isolation from the outside world shows
how intuitive feminine wisdom and spirituality remain hidden from the Mexican-
American mainstream; La Loca secretly “curing” her sister by intuitively performing her
abortions at home. Caridad’s run-in with the malogra describes the Chicana’s detrimental
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relationship with the patriarchal attitudes responsible for perpetuating misogyny. Sofi’s
difficulty in convincing her comadre that her inspiration to run for mayor did not stem
from craziness but from a legitimate will to action shows how Mexican-American society
(represented by the comadre) reacts to women who intend to change the status quo.
Esperanza’s relation to Rubén/Cuahtémoc demonstrates the politically-engaged
Chicana’s relation to the masculine-dominated Movimiento. All of these relations form an
interconnected portraiture of a disparate group of subjectivities united within the
framework of the Mexican-American community.
The interaction between allegorical characters comprising this community recalls
the baroque fascination of the relation of parts to the whole and the relation of the self to
Fig. 5. Portrait of the Captain of the Grenadiers, Don Manuel Solar and
His Family (1806). Museo Soumaya, Mexico.
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others (Parkinson Zamora 185). Through the allegorical performance carried out by the
characters in So Far from God, one begins to understand the relational dynamics between
competing subjectivities in the Chicana/o world. Ultimately, what the novel tells us is
that, like Sofi’s wringer washer, the mechanics of these relations are largely
dysfunctional. Esperanza recognizes this fact, having “read everything she could find on
dysfunctional families, certain now that some of her personal sense of displacement in
society had to do with her upbringing” (39). Given that the women in So Far from God
represent fragmented parts of the Chicana self, this fragmentation points to a
dysfunctionality within that self which is translated into community interactions. If the
characters were to collaborate with each other, sharing the strengths inherent to their
diverse subjectivities, perhaps the machine of the self could hold strong and propel itself
into action. Instead, the women seem to be drawn into their own separate paths, helpless
to their fate. Esperanza, the fighter for social justice, never was able to raise political
awareness in her family, except by talking to them after her death. Even then, Caridad
failed to understand politics (163) and, for La Loca, the outside world was so abhorrent
that she could not fight for justice even if she wanted to. Fe constitutes a missing
component in the workings of the family system, having rejected her family for Anglo-
American values. Caridad also exists apart, never informing her family of her mestizo
curanderismo apprenticeship nor of her love of the feminine indigenous sister self,
Esmeralda. La Loca, however, constitutes the strongest connective component in her
family. Although she refuses to touch her sisters, she prays for them, performs abortions
for them, miraculously cures them, and communicates with their spirits. However, despite
this common linkage―a connection to the underlying feminine spirituality to which they
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owe their survival―, Loca remains dysfunctional within society. Her sisters have taught
her from their experiences that entering the outside world only results in tragedy. Home is
the only safe place.
Being assigned to a role within the collective, the allegorical character is never
represented as an individual capable of exercising control over her/his destiny. In stark
contrast to mimetic drama, allegory does not “question any case of power that intervenes
from above to control man’s actions arbitrarily” (Fletcher 150). Thus is the case in So Far
from God, where characters are pulled by fate, the persistence of historical patterns, and
the attitudes and practices of their community. The first chapter description refers to the
four sisters as Sofia’s “Four Fated Daughters” (19) and the words “fate” and “destiny”
are repeated ten more times throughout the novel. Lacking the personal psychology
necessary for motivating their behaviour, allegorical characters perform actions without
apparent logic or explanation. After Caridad’s “Holy Restoration,” she inexplicably
leaves home and “it was all very sudden and no one could really explain it, not even
Caridad, but she was beginning to say and do a lot of things that could not be explained”
(43). The individual will is not present in the allegorical mode, as the allegorical
character does not represent a realistic individual, but rather, his/her actions serve to
contribute to a greater narrative. For this reason, events that can appear absurd,
incongruous, and magical can enter into the text as a way of supporting the plot. However,
though these unwilled incongruous actions may contribute to the argumentative plot, they
also present a cosmovision of an incomprehensible world in which the human will to
action is either non-existent or results in naught. The characters inhabit a world in which
their lives are beyond their control; where they are pulled into situations without causality
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or previous reflection. Individual agency is useless within the framework of this
collective. Essentially, the concept of fate corresponds to the forces of entrapment
embedded in the persistent attitudes of the collective which have the power to shape the
destiny of its people. “Unlike their abuelos and vis-abuelos [sic] who thought that
although life was hard in the ‘Land of Enchantment’ it had its rewards, the reality was
that everyone was now caught in what it had become: The Land of Entrapment” (172).
In order to achieve social transformation, one must change the dynamics of The
Land of Entrapment. Breaking the archetypes, changing people’s mentalities, and
revisioning history are presented as effective methods of reshaping this world which
denies agency and change. When Sofi’s washing machine breaks down, she begins to see
the dysfunctional of everything around her. Nothing seems to work in Tomé—even her
comadre broke her sewing machine. The world around her had become an allegorical
representation of her own society. At this point of realization, she breaks her assigned
archetype of the suffering mother and decides to run for Mayor of Tomé, inventing an
office which had until then been non-existent. She incorporates Esperanza’s social justice
politics and creates the Ganados y Lana Cooperative, having faith not in capitalism, as Fe
had, but in a collective enterprise which would favour the wellbeing of her people.
However, the most difficult and important aspect of social transformation involved
changing people’s mentalities in order to convince them that they were capable of
creating a different and better world (So Far 146). Sofi becomes an archaeologist: a
“guerrillera cultural” (Castillo, Massacre 220), performing her own historical revisions.
She uncovers the myths perpetuated as methods of social control, such as the case of La
Llorona. Sofi’s father had indoctrinated her with this tale: “La Llorona was a bad woman
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who had left her husband and home, drowned her babies to run off and have a sinful life,
and God punished her for all eternity” (161). The myth, as Sofi realizes, conceals a
contradictory reality in which women are abandoned by men and left to raise their
children alone, as Sofi had done. Esperanza believes that, before patriarchy-sustaining
values had manipulated the legend for their benefit, La Llorona may have been a “loving
mother goddess” (163). In revisioning her own life history, Sofi breaks out of a long
period of distorted amnesia, in which she believed to have been abandoned by her
husband, Domingo, when she had in fact thrown him out of her house (214). The
community and its traditional thinking had labelled her as “la abandonada” (134) and, in
the fulfillment of this role, she lost the capacity to recognize her own agency and the truth
was deformed to suit the old patterns of female helplessness and abandonment. She
became the archetype of la dolorosa, the suffering mother figure so valued in
Catholicism. The community perpetuates these archetypes that persist despite the
contradictory truth that belies them. The real miracle performed in So Far from God is
Sofi’s will to action, demonstrating her ability to defy her fate and to escape her socially-
defined role, instead seeking a new self-definition capable of leading her community
toward a better future.
Martyrs of unpopular causes: modern day saints on the margins
In Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Mapa/Corpo II: Corpo Divino, performance artists
become “saints and Madonnas of unpopular causes” using the body and its accoutrements
to emblematize marginalized martyrs such as “border crossers, undocumented migrants,
prisoners, the infirmed and displaced invisible others” (Corpo Ilícito). This work mixes
an intensely visual baroque performance, a reinvented Catholic spirituality, and radical
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socio-political commentary in a way which parallels what Ana Castillo has achieved in
So Far from God. Effectively, the women in Castillo’s novel are also martyrs of
unpopular causes: Fe is a martyr of capitalist practices, Esperanza is a martyr of a
meaningless war, Caridad is a martyr of misogyny and colonization, and La Loca is a
martyr of AIDS.
Gómez-Peña and Castillo have harnessed the visual plasticity of the saintly body
as way of expressing testimony to the injustices enacted on marginalized people. Much in
the same way that the saint’s injured and suffering body provides a visual and visceral
representation of the saint’s devotion, the bodies of Castillo’s saints represent phenomena
existing beyond the immediate physicality of the body. In Castillo’s novel, meaning is
inscribed in the body, not as an outward sign of the martyred women’s beliefs, but as an
emblem signifying the injustices which have led to their torture and death. Caridad’s
body, through the violent signs enacted on it, gives testimony to the violent legacy of
colonization and the persistence of machista attitudes. When Caridad is scourged,
branded, stabbed in the trachea, and has her nipples bitten off, this is not meant to
represent an act carried out by individual men, but is meant to signify an idea more
intangible and larger in scale. Every tribulation suffered on the baroque body exudes
meaning: branding points to the treating of women as property, the tracheotomy points to
the silencing of women, and the loss of her nipples points to how she has been deprived
of her ability to sustain life. Fe’s body, her flesh slowly eaten away by cancer, represents
the dangers of unregulated capitalist practices. La Loca’s body becomes emaciated
through her immaculately contracted AIDS. In her blue bathrobe, reminiscent of the blues
robes of the Virgin Mary, the image of La Loca parallels Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s La
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Purísima Inmaculada Concepción (fig. 6). She exhibits a saintly purity, though,
ironically, her body is physically impure, which is to say, diseased. Loca’s body is
opened psychically by Dr. Tolentino, who extracts uterine fibroids and ovarian cysts,
showing a diseased reproductive system deprived of its creative power. Considering
Loca’s isolation from the sins of the world, the disease manifested in her body is
testimony to the fact that AIDS affects innocents as much as those involved in high-risk
activities. Esperanza’s body is never recovered and the injustice enacted against her is
signified through corporeal absence. This absence points to a lack of meaning in
reference to the Gulf War. Seeing as “no one had understood the meaning of the brief war
in the Middle East” (243), Esperanza’s body cannot signify any tangible and meaningful
sign; it can only signify through its absence.
Fig. 6. Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, La Inmaculada
Concepción de El Escorial, 1660-65.
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Castillo has invoked the tradition of hagiography because its narrative of
corporeal suffering provides appropriate allegories for representing the explicit or
implicit violence enacted on people, particularly women. According to Lois Parkinson
Zamora, the prevalent depiction of saintly suffering began during the Baroque which
adulated the saintly body “in all its visceral aberrations” (177). Saints were consequently
recognized by their dismembered signifiers: St. Apollonia’s extracted teeth, St. Lucy’s
detached eyes, and St. Agatha’s amputated breasts (Parkinson Zamora 177). Thus, it is
not by coincidence that during the attack of the malogra Caridad’s nipples are bitten off;
this amputation is simply following in the tradition of gruesome hagiographic martyrdom,
as seen in Sebastiano del Piombo’s Martirio di sant'Agata (fig. 7). This referencing of St.
Agatha by Castillo, however, relates to a painful historical reality: many of the women
murdered outside of Ciudad Juárez were raped and brutalized in the same way as Caridad
was: sometimes with their breasts removed or their left nipple bitten off. Baroque
hagiographic violence is not limited to art, but constitutes a part of a lived reality. Perhaps
Baroque hagiography is the only genre that comes closest to representing a truly violent
reality, a reality so incongruous that it defies any definition that could possibly be
realized by the conventions of realistic depiction, but instead requires the symbolic power
of allegory to mediate the inassimilable experience of living in a harsh world where the
marginalized (female) other is granted so little societal value that her body becomes a
disposable object.10
10
The lack of respect for the integrity of Caridad’s body, denigrated by a latent misogyny, is similar to the
lack of respect for Fe’s body, denigrated by capitalism’s favouring of profit over the wellbeing of workers.
In an interesting parallel, Elvira Arriola links the femicides of Ciudad Juárez to transnational corporations’
lack of respect for the dignity of female workers, which has in turn produced a cultural climate in which
women are devalued; essentially the disposable objects of maquilas and murderers alike.
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And yet, despite their hagiographic-like suffering, neither the murdered women of
Ciudad Juárez nor the women of So Far from God are recognized as martyrs due to
public attitudes. Traditional views towards sanctity remain entrenched in the Mexican-
American society painted by Castillo in her novel, particularly regarding moral behaviour.
Although “for those with charity in their hearts, the mutilation of the lovely young
woman was akin to martyrdom” (So Far 33), due to Caridad’s reputation as a sexually
promiscuous woman, the police never search for her attackers and her brutal assault soon
disappears from the collective memory (33).11
In addition, the community only
recognizes saints who perform miracles or blessings for their benefit. La Loca and
Caridad both performed miracles, becoming known as La Santa Loca and La Santa
Armitaña. However, when the sisters would not perform miracles or blessings for the
citizens of their community, they were quickly forgotten, becoming only La Loca and La
11
Note that a similar situation happened in Ciudad Juárez. Elvira Arriola mentions how the former
governor of Chihuahua criticized the murdered women of Ciudad Juárez “for the way the dressed or for
frequenting nightclubs, thus blaming the victims for their fate and turning the demands for investigation
into a mockery of justice” (27).
Fig. 7. Sebastiano del Piombo, Martirio di sant'Agata, 1520.
Florence, Palazzo Pitti.
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Armitaña (25, 134). La Loca was finally considered a saint―perhaps out of political
reasons―after her mother became president of MOMAS. However, people quickly
forgot the meaning of her life and martyrdom and they “never really could figure out who
La Loca protected and oversaw as a rule […] In general, though, it was considered a good
idea to have a little statue of La Loca in your kitchen and to give one as a good luck gift
to brides and progressive grooms” (248). Because of Fe and Esperanza’s incapacity for
performing miracles, they remained unrecognized as martyrs despite their hagiographic
suffering: Esperanza was tortured and killed in the Middle East and Fe was tortured by
doctors who scraped away her flesh and, after her death, there was so little remaining of
her body that the church condoned her cremation (186). The people lost interest in
Esperanza after the war ended (134) and Fe’s case remained silent: when she returned to
the munitions factory seeking answers, everyone had been partitioned into cubicles where
“nobody and nothing able to know what was going on around them no more. And
everybody, meanwhile was working in silence like usual” (189).
In summary, the greatest obstacles preventing the recognition of these women’s
tribulations are public apathy, amnesia, and silence. Castillo is criticizing the
community’s complicity in perpetuating injustices against women by only focusing on
their individual self-interests while ignoring the concerns of the whole community.
Apathy leads to a collective amnesia and the community’s refusal to seek justice
demonstrates a tacit acceptance of the idea that female bodies are of little value. Without
placing any importance on a women’s right to life and wellbeing, apathy quickly turns
into amnesia. Silence results either from the fragmenting of the community by dominant
forces (as evidenced by the partitioning of Fe’s workplace into cubicles to prevent
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communication) or by the wilful silence of a community which is too fearful or apathetic
to organize any resistance to these injustices. Castillo is therefore highlighting the role
that collective apathy, amnesia, and silence play in the perpetuation a system in which the
marginalized female continues to have few rights and protections.
The community acts uncritically towards its religious views, blinding themselves
to the “saints of unpopular causes” (Corpo Ilícito) who inhabit the world around them,
and preferring the saints that follow the status quo of saintliness. Historical amnesia is the
norm, and popular saints are welcomed without knowing their histories. The curandera,
Doña Felicia, is the exception to this amnesia (perhaps being the personification of local
history itself) as demonstrated by her “falling out” with the Santo Niño de Atocha due to
his nationalistic prejudices. “She no longer entrusted her prayers to the child Jesus who
once saved Christians from the Muslims […] and conquering Catholics from the pagan
Indians” (82). However, unlike Doña Felicia´s historically-derived circumspection, her
nephew, Francisco el Penitente, wilfully ignores the historical reality of his spiritual icon,
Saint Francis, whom he imagines as a remote otherworldly spirit generating miracles
from the heavens, instead of the engaged humanitarian who cared for the vulnerable
people and creatures of his community (101). Castillo signals a need for the historical
investigation of not only religious history, but all histories and traditions that continue
legacies of hatred or do not serve the most disempowered people of society.
Castillo employs parody as a way of criticizing the uncritical acceptance of
religiously-derived social norms embedded in Mexican-American society, constructing a
parodic hagiography as a way of condemning attitudes which prevent social
transformation. Here, parody is not used as the colonized subject’s veiled threat towards
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the colonizer (García Canclini 261) ―the mainstream US in this case―, but as a
challenge to her own people. Challenging the structures of Chicanismo goes against the
grain of El Movimiento which espoused a non-critical solidarity, erasing differences of
gender, race, and sexuality, and instead promoted a heteronormative masculine identity
based racially on Jose Vasconcelos’ raza cósmica. In the 1970’s, Chicanas who contested
male-dominated leadership in the Chicano Movement and rejected the phallocentric
narratives of carnalismo and compadres were often labelled traitors, Malinches, and
vendidas (Chabram-Dernersesian 168-69). Castillo’s novel belongs to a body of Chicana
works which respond to the phallocracy of El Movimiento by examining the inequalities
within the Chicana/o community, especially those which contributed to the oppression of
women. Using inverse hagiography, So Far from God demonstrates how historical
legacies built into the Mexican-American consciousness prevent society from investing
value in women and from taking action to ensure their wellbeing.
In the novel’s divergences from hagiography one can find the author’s criticisms
of the psychological entrapments existing within the Mexican-American consciousness.
For all intents and purposes, Caridad’s character follows the archetype of the saint: a
violent martyrdom, a capacity for healing, supernatural abilities, an ascetic retreat from
the world, and the production of miracles. She diverges from saintliness because of her
sexuality: first with the multiple sexual encounters she has with countless faceless men
and second, because of her lesbian love for Esmeralda. In the eyes of the people, Caridad
loses her value as a saint because of her sexuality, a loss which is criticized by Castillo
who denounces the entrenched Mexican-American Catholic ideals of purity and celibacy.
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Though her saintly status is evidenced by her bridal photo on her mother’s scapular, Fe’s
vita diverges from the hagiographic mould in the sense that her object of devotion has
changed from God to capitalism. Just as the saint must possess an unwavering faith in her
beliefs, Fe does not question the abusive capitalist practices at work at the munitions
factory. The Catholic-derived value of obedience has been transferred from religion to a
much more dangerous sphere. Fe does not question the nature of her work, even as her
health deteriorates. Her plant is filled with women of ethnic and racial minorities, women
who have become the preferred workers in factories and maquiladoras because of their
submissiveness and their acceptance of authority (Fernández-Kelly). Fe, represented in
the white purity of her wedding gown, is yet another submissive Virgin Mary enslaved to
the capitalist faith.
Sofi diverges from the traditional figure of la dolorosa by assuming agency. For
all of the hardships that her daughters endure, she lacks the power to remedy their
underlying problems. During the 20 years that her husband was away gambling, drinking,
and womanizing, Sofi had worked in her butcher shop “hanging rumps of pigs and lambs
and getting arthritis from the freezer and praying to God to give [her] the strength to do
the best by [her] girls alone” (111). She is called la abandonada, assuming an identity
rooted in a historical reality: in 2008 25% of Hispanic families in the US were managed
by one custodial parent (US Census Bureau). However, this disempowering conception of
self metamorphoses through Sofi’s re-remembering: she had been the one who kicked
Domingo out of the family home. The archetype of la dolorosa/la abandonada had been
so deeply embedded into the surrounding culture that it caused Sofi to distort her own
identity. Through this parody of la dolorosa, Castillo criticizes the entrenched social
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structures which place value in identities based on submission and suffering, which, in
their encouragement of attitudes of passive acceptance, impede positive social
transformation.
Conversely, it is due to her refusal of submission that Esperanza diverges from the
hagiographic pattern. Esperanza is a rebel and a mitotera who refuses to stay with her
family and resign herself to a life of misery, choosing instead to go out into the world and
assume an active life. According to Sofi’s comadre―whose chismosa-inspired speech
represents the collective voice of the community―, Esperanza is somehow responsible
for her kidnapping as she was a “mitotera, a troublemaker about politics” who “had got
herself missing in Saudi Arabia” (134). Just as Francisco el Penitente refuses to see the
activist side of Saint Francis, the community refuses to see the saintliness in Esperanza’s
activism. As Esperanza’s hagiographic parody diverges from the norm because of her
active involvement in resistance, Castillo criticizes the community’s incapacity to see the
value in those martyred due to political engagement.
These parodical techniques run in parallel with the baroque, neobaroque, and
Chicana/o practices of appropriation and transformation. As outlined in the introduction,
the Baroque performed a conservative appropriation of Renaissance forms, while
simultaneously rebelling against these traditions (Celorio 78-79), transforming classical
models and instilling them with its own originary fire. Castillo’s literary education,
which was formed outside of the academy, was constructed intentionally from works
existing outside of the North American literary canon. She specifically sought out texts
pertaining to the Latin American literary tradition, including the novels of the Boom and
The Lives of the Saints (Saeta and Castillo 135, 147; Baker 60). From The Lives of the
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Saints, Castillo appropriates the hagiographic tradition, reworking it with her own
originary fire. Gonzalo Celorio insists that the neobaroque technique of appropriation
through parody is elicited in order for the author to demonstrate her/his cultural
knowledge and to show this knowledge through critical play and reflection (102) and this
is absolutely one of Castillo’s goals, as her works involve an archaeological investigation
into traditional culture which unearths Mexican, Catholic, and Mesoamerican roots. It is
essential for Castillo to show her domination of Mexican and Mexican-American culture
in order to affirm her own cultural integrity. As she writes in Massacre of the Dreamers,
certain women indeed had contact early on in their lives with Mexico and
acquired enough identification with its diverse culture and traditions to
battle against the attempts of white, middle class society to usurp all its
citizens into an abstract culture obsessed with material gain. (38)
Cultural knowledge is power, and employing a reinvented hagiography is one way of
demonstrating this power.
However, conserving and understanding cultural forms is not enough; rather, the
author needs to understand the complexities of these traditions so that she/he can skilfully
mould them in thought-provoking ways, thus rendering them relevant to today’s world.
This is where the beauty of transformation enters, in the form of rasquache-style
strategies of resistance. As mentioned in the introduction, rasquache is a Chicana/o
sensibility which takes all available material and cultural forms and incorporates them
into discourses of parody, satire, and resistance (Ýbarra-Frausto, “The Chicano
Movement” 171-73). When Castillo transforms her Santa Loca into La Inmaculada of
AIDS, she is working in an intensely rasquachista mode. Using the Catholic traditions
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which saturate Mexican and Mexican-American culture and creatively transforming them
to speak of contemporary issues is a common practice in Chicana/o cultural production
which frequently combines tradition, religiosity, and activism. These forms communicate
religion’s inextricable ties to ethnic identity, which is equally inextricably tied to politics.
There are no universalisms here: for every socio-political problem, there exists an
underlying ethnic and racially-determined reality. The universal crises which emerge
from So Far from God ―capitalist abuses, war, misogyny, AIDS―are concentrated in
minority populations where a lack of political agency combined with deep-seated social
attitudes compound their effects: the Mexican-American population provides a large
percentage of the exploited workforce in farms, factories and in the service industry; they
provide a disproportionate number of soldiers to be killed overseas; women continue to
be disempowered, both inside and outside the domestic sphere; and the rate of diagnosed
cases of AIDS in New Mexican Hispanic communities is increasing in a way unequal to
their population (Zummo 1, 3). These socio-political issues demand an aesthetic that
denounces these injustices while affirming the value of traditional forms in a way which
simultaneously rebels against tradition. In So Far from God, a utopic rasquache Viernes
Santo procession is staged, eliminating the traditional aspects of the Way of the Cross and
replacing them with political commentary, effecting a bifocal discontinuous performance:
Jesus fell, and people all over the land were dying from toxic exposure in
factories […] Jesus met his mother, and three Navajo women talked about
uranium contamination on the reservation […] Jesus was helped by Simon
and the number of those without jobs increased every day. (242)
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In this episode, the people of Albuquerque have appropriated the form of the Viernes
Santo procession, emptied it of its original content, and infused it with meaningful
political commentary. The transformative practices carried out by the participants in the
procession reveal the larger mechanics at work within the novel, which also operate on
rasquache parody.
These transformative processes reverberate in synchronicity with Castillo’s theory
of Xicanisma, in which she asserts that “as Xicanistas […] we must simultaneously be
archaeologists and visionaries of our culture” (Massacre 220). To be an archaeologist of
culture is to recuperate the fragments of history and analyze their meaning, leaving
behind that which is useless or harmful, taking that which is valuable and powerful, and
incorporating these selected fragments into one’s own cultural imagining. The
archaeologist’s critical selecting and discarding of cultural fragments combines with the
visionary’s utopic seeing, which recognizes points of connection between the past and an
imagined future, examining how the potent symbols of history could propel a people’s
struggle toward that utopia. This ideal melding of tradition and future imaginings was
carried out in the episode of the politically-engaged Way of the Cross procession.
Strikingly, Jesus was absent from the spectacle, omitting a visualization of suffering in
the flesh. In Tomé, Francisco el Penitente carried the cross every Viernes Santo, his
penitential spirit valorizing anguish and the abnegation of the body as a way of attaining
closeness to God. These symbols of metaphysical anguish have been eradicated from the
procession, replaced instead by the misery experienced by living people in a tangible
socio-political reality. The self-flagellating penitents have been replaced with figures of
action: La Loca rides on her horse like a San Martín Caballero, known for ripping his
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cloak in half to give to a beggar. A woman named “Pastora Somebody or Other” sings
songs of resistance which, despite their secular content, causes the crowds to weep and to
cast their eyes to the heavens (241). Though the original religious content has been
substituted by political messages, there is a strong element of religiosity that still remains,
making the political aspects more emotive and spiritually evocative. Castillo believes that,
while many aspects of Catholicism are detrimental to women, there remains a Chicana
spirituality that has been shaped by Catholicism (Massacre 95). This Catholic-informed
spirituality, when exorcised of the demons of misogyny and social control, constitutes a
powerful force that can be harnessed for activism and social transformation.
Extraordinary events in So Far from God
So Far from God has been described by the Los Angeles Times as being the One
Hundred Years of Solitude of the US (Milligan 19) and the similarities between the two
novels have led critics to associate Ana Castillo’s novel with the magical realist mode
(Aldama; Gillman). Both novels speak of a family living in an isolated town ―so far
from God― where the colonial legacy infiltrates an everyday reality, where people suffer
from amnesia, and where tradition and inheritance reproduce detrimental social and
genetic patterns: Fe’s cousin/husband Casimiro, descending from a lineage of sheep
herders, suffers from congenital bleating, a trait reminiscent of Márquez’s Aureliano III,
who was born with the tail of a pig.
This alternate world in which the real coexists with the surreal or supernatural
could seem at first to be consistent with magic realist writings. However, as Caminero-
Santangelo asserts, it is questionable if So Far from God has been written in a magical
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realist mode, considering that the characters fail to accept magical events as quotidian
happenings (83). The astonishment exhibited by the characters in So Far from God when
witnessing miracles contradicts the reception of magical events in magic realism where
“wonders are recounted largely without comment, in a matter-of-fact way, accepted
presumably as a child would accept them, without undue questioning or reflection” (Faris
177). Though in both novels magical events occur as part of an everyday reality, their
differences rest in how these events are depicted. While the cold, detached narrator of
One Hundred Years of Solitude portrays the ascension of Remedios the Beauty as a
natural event, the ascension of La Loca Santa has been handled quite differently by Ana
Castillo. So Far from God’s characters are very aware of the extraordinariness of the
events surrounding them and miracles are interpreted and analysed by various members
of the community, every one of whom carries a very different opinion towards these
seemingly magical events. According to Ana Castillo, the women in So Far from God
were modelled after holy martyrs and saints. She denies any relation to magical realism,
arguing that her novel is informed by religion, not magic: “We are made to believe in
these miracles [...] it’s not magical fiction; it is faith” (in Miller and Walsh 27). While
there are supernatural aspects to So Far from God, these aspects are not imaginatively
invented by Castillo, but rather, based on a historical reality composed of religion,
miracles, and cuentos. Ana Castillo takes elements of the local culture –curanderismo, la
Llorona, la malogra, etc.― and weaves them into a non-realist narrative that is
nonetheless very much anchored in a geographic and historic reality.
While the veracity of these magical-seeming events is rarely questioned, the
nature of these events always elicits various interpretations, revealing the complexly
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heterogeneous and often contradictory cosmovisions operating within this community.
The first chapter, telling of La Loca’s miracle, boldly displays the discrepancy between
worldviews when the priest, Father Jerome, asks the toddler if her behaviour should be
read as an act of God or one of Satan. Sofi responds by beating the priest and calling him
an hombre necio and a pendejo for not having realized that the child’s resurrection and
levitation were not the work of Satan, but true miracles. La Loca Santa’s resurrection and
levitation are interpreted on various occasions throughout the novel. During the
miraculous event, the townsfolk were not sure if “they were witnessing a miracle or a
mirage of the devil” (24). Afterwards, the legitimacy of Loca’s death comes into question
as it is possible that she had an epileptic seizure and was mistakenly diagnosed as dead by
an inexperienced doctor (25), casting doubt on the authenticity of her resurrection. Nearly
two decades later, Fe “highly suspected that such a thing as her little sister flying up to
the church rooftop had never happened” (28). Of course, Fe’s interpretation of reality is
unreliable seeing as she remembers her own Gritona episode, not a mentally-depraved
period of constant screaming, but as the Asian flu (138). When Father Jerome informs the
bishop of La Loca’s resurrection, he omits the “details” about her flying, an omission
pointing to the fact that he had witnessed her levitation, but was too ashamed or afraid to
admit what he had seen to a church official. The bishop dismisses the resurrection as “an
example of the ignorance of that community” (85). As a child, Francisco el Penitente
remembers La Loca Santa flying up to the rooftop: “What he wouldn’t have given to
know the secret of that trick! To the boy, it was a trick, the way children view the magical,
which to them falls within the realm of possibility” (192). The fact that every
townsperson has a different interpretation of what occurred the day of La Loca’s funeral
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attests to the existence of multiple ways of seeing reality within this community: a
collective fragmentary reception. This is a New World Baroque kaleidoscopic vision of
reality which sees all possible realities simultaneously, accepting all and rejecting none.
By narrating supernatural events―which, due to their inexplicable nature,
demand interpretation through belief systems most integral to one’s vision of the
universe―, the novel shows how there exists no singular way of interpreting the
phenomena of the world. When Esperanza witnesses the miraculous recovery of Fe la
Gritona―who had been screaming nonstop for weeks since she was abandoned by her
fiancé―and of Caridad―barely alive since the malogra’s attack, surgically pieced
together, mute, fed by tubes―, she begins to question all that she had ever believed:
Catholicism, Marxism, Atheism, and Native American Spirituality. However, none of
these belief systems seemed to explain the reality located within her home (38-39). These
belief systems were insufficient for understanding reality. Esperanza is too conscious of
the many ways of seeing the world and realizes that, despite the large quantity of
available interpretive tools, there is not one way of seeing that functions more effectively
than another. Her reality is far too mysterious and complex to be explained.
The multiplicity of knowledges and their corresponding worldviews complicate
interpretation and action. For example, the healing processes detailed in the novel include
modern Western medicine, curanderismo, Filipino psychic surgery, and prayer. The
effectiveness of the first three options seems doubtful. Western medicine can neither heal
Caridad’s brutalized body nor Fe’s cancer. On the contrary, the text depicts Western
medicine as being more detrimental than beneficial: Fe’s intravenous is wrongly inserted,
causing chemotherapeutic drugs to go directly to her head (187). The curanderismo of
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Doña Felicia is effective for minor health problems specific to Mexican and Mexican
American folk culture: empacho, aigres, mal de ojo, suspensión. However, when several
curanderas come from the region to help with La Loca’s AIDS, conflicts arise between
their methods:
tablespoon after tablespoon of this solution and that oil went into Loca’s
mouth […] Aceite de comer cooking oil mixed with hot water and sugar
for La Loca’s sore throat. No, no, said Teresa of Isleta, a drop or two of
kerosene in a teaspoon of sugar for the throat. Poleo water for mouth
sores! (233)
Witnessing psychic surgery performed on her daughter by Dr. Tolentino, Sofi assumes
what she had seen (the doctor’s “spirit” hand entering Loca’s abdomen, removing blood
clots, cystic fibroids, and an ovarian tumour) was a hallucination. The surgery fails to
cure Loca’s AIDS and it is not clear if it relieves her suffering. Out of all these curative
methods, prayer is the only one capable of working miracles when dealing with hopeless
cases. Loca “prayed real hard” (38), undergoing an epileptic seizure which led to the
“Holy Restoration” of her sisters (37-38). If Loca indeed embodies the latent creative
Chicana anima that remains unbounded from the oppressive structures of religion and
society, perhaps by harnessing this force Chicanas can achieve the seemingly impossible.
The multiplicity of knowledge systems used for interpreting the world reveals the
heterogeneous and fragmentary quality of the Chicana/o community. As with the
curanderas, coming to a general consensus for the best course of action is next to
impossible, with the only alternative being to choose all possible options. This allowance
of the coexistence of multiplicities denotes a baroque inclusivity characteristic of fractal
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societies, but it also denotes the lack of a unifying system for understanding the totality of
this polysemous reality. There remains the need to establish points of coherence between
these disparate fragments, coherence which could cement and empower a diverse
community.
Ay, corazón, no sufras más.
The demonstrative, enigmatic, figurative, critical genre of a reinvented
hagiography realised in an allegorical and parodic mode not only represents Castillo’s
understanding of the Chicana self and her world, but also condemns the mechanics of a
society which victimizes women and prevents its people from achieving wellbeing and
happiness. So Far from God criticizes the passive reception of culture, signalling the need
to interrogate traditional conceptions of the world and to understand the historically-
derived nature of reality. The novel highlights the need to transform this reality, both by
re-remembering the historical foundations of culture and by unleashing utopic imaginings
capable of uniting a community through a common cultural sensibility and spirituality so
that they may better confront injustices. In Massacre of the Dreamers, Castillo mentions
how the female workers of the Watsonville Canning and Frozen Food Company not only
started a hunger strike to protest inadequate pay and working conditions, but also how
they “conduct[ed] a Catholic pilgrimage on their knees to a local church where they
prayed for justice” (56). Mexican Catholic spirituality offers an empowering force for
Chicana social movements, as it provides an identitary and emotional element to activist
practices. Castillo asserts that a mestiza’s spirituality constitutes a large part of her
identity, a part that precedes the Conquest and remains “the unspoken key to her strength
and endurance as a female during the ages” (Massacre 95).
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This undercurrent of spiritual force has the potential for uniting and mobilizing a
great number of Chicanas incapable of identifying with Marxist ideologies rooted in
White atheist discourse. The Chicana spirituality instead harnesses the power rooted in
syncretic Mexican Catholic sensibilities while operating outside of Catholic misogynist
doctrine. La Loca embodies this principle, exhibiting a powerfully effective spirituality
which functions outside the norms of society. Using an intuitive knowledge, she “cures”
her sister of her pregnancy, all the while conscious of the fact that her actions go against
the laws of the Church and State (27). The intuitive curative spirituality found in La Loca
exists beneath the surface of Mexican/Mexican-American society. Castillo recalls how
her grandmother, a curandera by vocation, “cured” her teenaged cousin of her unwanted
pregnancy (A Healing Legacy 95). This mestiza spirituality―an obedezco pero no
cumplo spirituality―only takes from Christianity what it finds useful and rejects the rest,
developing organically far from the prying eyes of official culture, much like the
extraordinary hybrid New World Baroque architecture that developed far from the prying
eyes of the vice-regal capital.
The New World Baroque ethos boasts a capacity for powerfully bridging the past
with the future in a way which both preserves culture and rebels against it. As Boaventura
de Sousa Santos argues, the baroque ethos has the capacity for combining disparate
knowledges as well as for invention, rebellion, and laughter. It is capable of realising
utopic imaginings, but this subjectivity must be invented, taking what is useful from
history for the construction of this utopia (326, 330). The messages gleaned from
Castillo’s Xicanista fiction conform to the baroque ethos in the sense that they argue for a
critical archaeology of culture, where figures such as La Llorona become unearthed, re-
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examined, and revisioned to produce symbols which generate power. This same Chicana
baroque subjectivity imagines the utopia of the Ganados y Lana Cooperative, a non-
capitalist system capable of functioning within a capitalist modernity. This subjectivity
reinvents the Viernes Santo procession, unleashing it from the tradition of the cofradías,
and uniting various communities in the effort to produce socio-political transformation.
Nonetheless, it is laughter that constitutes the apotheosis of this utopic imagining.
In the final chapter of So Far from God, women have achieved power and recognition
through MOMAS (Mothers of Martyrs and Saints). However, as their prestige is founded
on the suffering of their children, the Catholic archetype of la dolorosa still remains
embedded in the women’s psychology. When constructing a subjectivity for the purpose
of realising an imagined utopia, happiness must not be overlooked. A utopia is defined by
its happiness. As Castillo says in Massacre of the Dreamers, “survival should not be our
main objective. Our presence shows our will to survive, to overcome every repression
known to humankind. Our goal should be to achieve joy” (146).
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Chapter 2
Robo-baroque: The Performances of Guillermo Gómez-Peña and his Pocha Nostra
Fig. 8. Antonio de Roa
Consumed with the obstinate determination to proselytize the Natives of New
Spain, Fray Antonio de Roa (fig. 8), the Monster of Penitence, endeavoured to translate
his doctrinal sermons into the language of the flesh. During Holy Week, he would
interpret the role of a suffering Christ while his retinue of indigenous companions
physically tormented him, playing the part of the Jews and the Romans. De Roa would
perform acts of public self-flagellation, followed by walking on burning coals after which
the Natives would bathe him in boiling water. They bound the priest to the pillory,
whipped him, scorched him with fire, and finally found themselves moved to tears by de
Roa’s display of humiliation and suffering. Due to these extreme displays of religious
devotion and corporeal resilience, "the Indians thought him to be more than a man"
(Trexler 28). Amazed, frightened and full of wonder, the Natives came to understand the
most important points of the Catholic faith (López Beltrán 89). Communicating through
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the performative body presented a powerful way of promoting belief in a Christian God
and in the superiority of the Catholic Church: it made immediate and sensate that which
was abstract and so far away from the indigenous experience. This baroque aesthetic of
excessive, dramatic, and emotionally spiritual displays pervaded the colonies and
continued throughout the centuries, evolving into various forms including the staged
crucifixions of the Iztapalapa district of Mexico City where spectacles of live crucifixions
still form an integral part of Holy Week festivities (fig. 9).
Given Mexico’s deep-seated tradition of persuasive religious theatricality
baroque par excellence, the birth of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s Cruci-Fiction Project
in 1994 should come as no surprise. Perhaps it was the political climate surrounding the
creation of the project that first impelled Gómez-Peña to develop the intensely
neobaroque aesthetics which had already been lying semi-dormant in his post-Mexican
consciousness. Extreme times call for extreme measures and a strong current of nativist
Fig. 9. The Passion of the Christ re-enacted in
Iztapalapa. (López, “Inicia Jesús de Iztapalapa”)
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and xenophobic sentimentsculminating in California’s Proposition 187, an initiative
which sought to prohibit illegal immigrants from using state servicesnecessitated a
response which could leave a lasting impression in the psyches of state citizens.
Performance artists Gómez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes, presenting themselves as an
illegal charro12
and an exaggerated cholo,13
bound themselves to crosses measuring five
metres andlike their Itzapalapan brethrenstaged their own crucifixions on the wide
expanse of performative space known as Rodeo Beach (fig. 10). Like the public displays
of their predecessor, Antonio de Roa, the Cruci-Fiction Project did not exclude intense
suffering: while tied to their crosses, Sifuentes passed out and Gómez-Peña dislocated his
shoulder (Abolafia et al.). Through rituals of dramatized self-mortification, all three
performance artistsde Roa, Gómez-Peña, and Sifuenteseffected a visual display
which loudly affirmed their devotion to their respective causes: Christian conversion and
the upholding of immigrant rights. Their techniques relied on intense allegorical visuals
which elicited strong emotions, leaving a profound impression in the minds and souls of
their spectators. Reading the trajectory of this style of performancefrom colonial
conversions to the crucifixions in Itzapalapa and, finally, to the Cruci-fiction Project,
one discerns a persistent pattern of baroque and neobaroque techniques. While the
content of these performances may have changed over time, the forms and practices have
not. There remains the same visceral originary fire as seen in previous centuries.
12
Charro refers to the classic figure of the Mexican cowboy. He is recognized by his traditional attire: a
black wide-brimmed hat (sombrero), black pants and a jacket, all of which are often embroidered in silver
thread. 13
Cholo refers to a male social type which pervades Chicano/Mexican-American culture. The term
describes a person involved in local subcultures, such as low-riders, graffiti art, and hip hop. The typical
cholo is characterized by his plaid shirt, his baggy pants, his rolled-up bandana/headband, and his
sleeveless undershirt.
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The baroque echoes throughout the performance repertory of Gómez-Peña and his
troupe, La Pocha Nostra. The performances of La Pocha Nostra are obviously,
unmistakably and, consciously neobaroque. Gómez-Peña has defined the group’s
aesthetic as being both “robo-baroque” and “ethno-techno-cannibal” (Ethno-techno 80)
and it is undeniable that his performances employ a myriad of baroque devices.
Following the Cruci-Fiction Project, The Temple of Confessions (1994-1996) exemplifies
a reworking of baroque Catholic religiosity as it cites “the religious dioramas found in
colonial Mexican churches,” provoking powerfully emotional responses from its
audiences (Abolafia et al.). These colonial Catholic aesthetics resurface in Borderscape
2000 (1998), a spectacle combining a syncretic ritualityevoking Christian, indigenous,
and invented practiceswith an ironically ethnographic dimension. The result of this
Fig. 10. Guillermo Gómez-Peña performs the Cruci-fiction