En primera persona: Subjectivity in Literary Evocations of Pregnancy and Birth by Contemporary Spanish-American Women Writers

Abstract

The seeming universality of pregnancy is continuously undermined by its concrete historical and local embeddedness (Rapp 1993:66).

Notes

1. In the growing field of analysis of the representation of birth in literature (see, for example, Cosslett 1994 and Adams 1994), these issues are almost totally elided.

2. All further quotations will be from the editions listed in Works Cited. All translations from Valdés's and Puga's texts are the author's; the original Spanish will only be given where it is necessary to illustrate linguistic subtleties that would otherwise be lost in translation. The term ‘Chicana/o’ refers to a US citizen of Mexican ancestry and culture. Unlike the similar term ‘Mexican-American’, the term ‘Chicana/o’ indicates the subject's unwillingness to assimilate fully into US culture.

3. A Bildungsroman is a narrative concerning the transition from childhood to adulthood of the main protagonist. A Künstlerroman focuses specifically on the passage to maturity of an artist.

4. See Ortiz Ceberio 1998 for further analysis of Valdés's feminist reappropriation of the concept of the ‘nation’ through its interplay with the narration of maternity.

5. Though writing in English, Moraga prefers the Spanish ‘familia’ to ‘family’.

6. For an analysis of Chicana feminists’ objections to the ‘Familia Romance’, see Fregoso 2003:84–90. For a more general analysis of Chicana feminism, see Saldívar-Hull 2000; and, for a detailed analysis of Moraga's work and politics, especially with respect to categories of ‘butch’ and ‘femme’ lesbians and how pregnancy for a butch lesbian challenges such categories, see Yarbro-Bejarano 2001:127–58.

7. In Latin America and the United States home birth is associated with extreme poverty and/or, particularly in Latin America, the cultural practices of indigenous peoples (see examples of the practices of Mayan parteras (midwives) in Priya 1992 and Huber and Sandstrom 2001). Furthermore, in the United States independent midwifery and thus, by extension, home birth is still illegal in some states (Kitzinger 2000:138–9). Thus hospital birth and the dominant medical discourse of birth is generally the happily accepted norm for all women from the working classes on up and by extension much higher rates of intervention are also evident (Kitzinger 2000:139).

8. A form of narrative in which the narrator moves almost imperceptibly from the expression of his/her own thoughts and observations to the expression of those of another character. As opposed to the clear demarcations of reported speech, indirect free style can frequently only be noted in the change of idiolects.

9. ‘Una’ is equivalent to ‘one’ in English.

10. In the original Spanish: ‘Y empecé a espiarla.’ Note the use of the direct object pronoun ‘la’. Of this, more later.

11. La Llorona is the ghost of a woman who cries at night near lakes and rivers for her child or children whom she has drowned, although different versions of the tale give different reasons for her actions. Some critics have also discerned resonances of the story of La Malinche in that of La Llorona (La Malinche was the conquistador Hernán Cortés's indigenous lover and translator, and her name has become synonymous in Mexico with betrayal and treachery). Both La Malinche and La Llorona are bad women who betray their people/children. Moraga has also recently incorporated the myth of La Llorona in The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea (first performed 1995).

12. Puga's account of pregnancy, birth and its consequences is quite different from the majority of works of this nature by contemporary Mexican women writers in which, in trying to present pregnancy and motherhood as monstrous in such a way as to indict Mexican patriarchal ideology, most writers end up reinforcing existing power structures (Finnegan 2001). Considered in the same framework, Puga's narrator actively refuses to participate in Mexican patriarchal ideology by refusing to be a mother.

13. For an interesting analysis of the significance of the ‘animal’ facet of Moraga's identity, see Yarbro-Bejarano 2001:153–4.

14. Yarbro-Bejarano also finds a reworking of the story of La Malinche in the narrative of the conception of Moraga's son, in which Moraga accentuates her Hispanic genes in contrast to those of the birth father, described as ‘a man of the race’ (2001:138). The original power structure on which the conquest and subsequent settlement of Mexico was based (the rape of indigenous women by Spanish men) is thus reversed.

15. ‘Creí que la habían traído del cuarto de junto.’

16. She is described on one occasion as experiencing ‘a scatological kind of pleasure’ (Valdés 1995:22) in what is perhaps an oblique reference to Hélène Cixous's use of the term ‘jouissance’.