‘Te conozco de cuando eras árbol’: Gender, Utopianism, and the Border in Cristina Rivera Garza's La cresta de Ilión

Abstract

La cresta de Ilión (2002) by Cristina Rivera Garza (Mexico, 1964) suggests a utopian project that employs gender to confront homogenizing forces. Judith Butler's and Lucy Sargisson's theories on gender and utopianism inform this reading of the novel as it relates to new forms of utopia as an alternative to patriarchal order. La cresta de Ilión, which takes place along a blurry U.S./Mexico border, creates a utopian space where marginal figures move freely across both national and gender divides. Certain aspects of this text characterize it as a gender utopia: fluid identitary praxes that reject fixed notions of identity; an exploration of adjacencies of the masculine and the feminine; and the development of alternative language and power structures that deconstruct patriarchal notions and traditional national identities. This text suggests a broader project for reconfiguring geographic and cultural boundaries in a way that would permit a utopia of gender.

Acknowledgments

Lila McDowell Carlsen is an assistant professor of Spanish at Pepperdine University. She holds a doctorate in Spanish from University of California-Riverside and master's and bachelor's degrees in Spanish from Baylor University. Her research interests include utopian thought, gender studies, and the detective genre in contemporary Latin American fiction.

Notes

1. Cristina Rivera Garza (born 1964 in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico) studied sociology at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and holds a doctorate in Latin American history from the University of Houston. Her literary texts include the volumes of short stories La guerra no importa (1991), Ningún reloj cuenta esto (2002), and La frontera más distante (2008); a book of poetry La más mía (1998); and the novels Desconocer (1994), Nadie me verá llorar (2000), Cruzar el Atlántico con los ojos vendados (2001), La cresta de Ilión (2002), Lo anterior (2004), and La muerte me da (2007). As a historian, her academic work focuses on the construction of mental illness and asylums in Mexico in the early twentieth century. Her novel Nadie me verá llorar is set during this time period in such an institution.

2. Although little critical attention has been devoted to Rivera Garza's narrative in comparison with more established authors, her novels have been recognized in Raymond L. Williams's encyclopedic work The Columbia Guide to the Latin American Novel since 1945. John Brushwood's Mexico in Its Novel and Raymond L. Williams's The Twentieth-Century Spanish American Novel and The Postmodern Novel in Latin America are among the most comprehensive in dealing with the Mexican novel in general. In Plotting Women, Jean Franco explores the discursive representation of women in Mexico through various literary genres. Debra Castillo's Easy Women highlights the complexities of the sexualized role of the woman in Mexican culture as represented by the country's modern fiction. Criticism of Rivera Garza's narrative notes the presence of themes such as feminism, identity, and nationhood. Traci Roberts-Camps explains that the novel Nadie me verá llorar is an investigation of the concept of the body within a nation-building project. Carlos Castellanos highlights postmodern techniques and elements of the fantastic in La cresta de Ilión. Verónica Saunero-Ward probes the concept of a search for identity complicated by ambiguity in that novel. Gabriela Mercado analyzes problems of gender and feminism as they relate to intertextual aspects in La cresta de Ilión.

3. The Crack writers' “Manifiesto” reflects the desire to establish a distinct identity that contrasts with their literary predecessors of the Boom and Post-Boom at the same time that it reflects a time and place in which the term identity itself is called into question.

4. I will employ the term gender utopia instead of Sargisson's feminist utopia to emphasize the social constructions of gender and the limitations of a masculine/feminine dichotomy as reflected in Rivera Garza's fiction. Sargisson explains that most feminist utopian writing (both fictional and theoretical, done 1970–1990) either repeats or ignores the concept of perfection, or leaves the utopian vision open ended (Contemporary 3). She cites Shulamith Firestone's theoretical text The Dialectic of Sex (1971) and Marge Piercy's novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1979) as exceptions. Even though they do offer some sort of pragmatic feminist political framework, all the while, they prioritize the problem of the networkings of sexual power before offering concrete solutions to redistributing the balance of such power (17).

5. The themes of identity, especially with regard to history, are not new concepts, as it is evident in Mexican and Latin American literature in general since the days of conquest and colonization and through the era of independence and nation-building. Brushwood's Mexico in Its Novel examines Mexican identity and history through the lens of the novel from the Colonial era, beginning with José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi's Don Catrín de la Fachenda (1832) through 1971. The end of the time period Brushwood selects marks an era where the concept of nation itself changes, calling on the critic to review “the antecedents of the present” in Mexico through its narrative fiction (113).

6. Said describes the ongoing process of group and cultural identity construction as well as the “rhetoric of identity” in “The Clash of Definitions” (575).

7. The concept of gender not defined as either man or woman, but something beyond, resonates with Herdt's Third Sex, Third Gender. Herdt explores the emergence of a “third” gender and traces the origin and function of this in-between gender throughout history and within various Western and non-Western cultures.

8. Gabriela Mercado has meticulously described pervasive intertextualities between the novel La cresta de Ilión and the narrative work of Amparo Dávila, which, she argues, defends her interpretation of the majority of the novel's events as an imagined or dreamt experience on the part of the doctor/narrator. Mercado affirms that “la protagonista de La cresta de Ilión es una figura llevada a los extremos, una mujer que reniega de su sexualidad al punto de alucinar ser hombre” (69).