Angeles Mastretta: Textual Multiplicity (Monografias A)

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Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 217

ÁNGELES MASTRETTA TEXTUAL MULTIPLICITY This work seeks to demonstrate the rich complexity and range of the fiction and essays of the Mexican novelist Ángeles Mastretta (1949–). In the tradition of Post-Boom Latin American women’s writing, Mastretta’s texts are motivated by a desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women. Two of her novels, referential and testimonial in style, can be placed within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition and explore the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives. The hitherto unexplored themes of female sexuality and bodily erotics in Mastretta’s texts are also considered. Her feminist works avoid facile simplifications; heterogeneous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic. The originality of Mastretta’s writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities: shimmering surfaces are often interrupted by unexpected depths and proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis. JANE ELIZABETH LAVERY is Head of the Spanish Section and lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Kent.

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JANE ELIZABETH LAVERY

ÁNGELES MASTRETTA TEXTUAL MULTIPLICITY

TAMESIS

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© Jane Elizabeth Lavery 2005 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Jane Elizabeth Lavery to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2005 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 1 85566 117 9

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lavery, Jane Elizabeth, 1975– Ángeles Mastretta: textual multiplicity / Jane Elizabeth Lavery. p. cm. – (Colección Támesis. Serie A, Monografías; v. 217) Summary: “The first major study on the works of the Mexican novelist, Ángeles Mastretta, demonstrating the rich complexity and range of the authors’s fiction and essays” – Provided by publisher. Includes biblographical references and index. ISBN 1–85566–117–9 (hardback: alk. paper) 1. Mastretta, Ángeles, 1949 – Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PQ7298.23.A795Z74 2005 863⬘.64 – dc22 2005005398

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshed, Tyne & Wear

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii List of Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2. Contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3. Arráncame la vida: The Borders of Fiction and Reality . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4. Mal de amores: History from a Feminist Perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5. Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 6. Literary Intimacies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162 7. Shimmering Surfaces, Immeasurable Depths . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 8. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book could not have been written on my own and I would therefore like to express my deepest gratitude to those who have helped me in this arduous project. This project began as a doctoral thesis at the University of Swansea Wales under the supervision of Dr Lloyd Hughes Davies. I feel a special debt of gratitude to my academic supervisor and friend, who patiently guided me and inspired me with his wealth of knowledge. I am especially grateful to Professor Peter Beardsell, former Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Hull, whose decisive encouragement, careful reading and constructive comments helped me transform my thesis into a book. I would also like to thank Peter for having led me to a sense of renewal by helping me to rediscover the pleasures of research and writing. I extend my thanks to both Professor Derek Gagen and Mr John Hall for their invaluable help and also to Dr Irma López who generously offered her expert advice. I am grateful to Dr John Morgan for his assistance with specific etymological information. Special thanks to my colleagues from the Spanish Section at the University of Kent for their support, and to Dr Montserrat Roser-i-Puig for her valuable contribution. I thank Professor Stephen M. Hart for believing in my work. I also wish to thank both Girton College at Cambridge University where I graduated in 1997, and the School of European Culture and Languages at the University of Kent, for their financial contribution towards the production costs of this book. A heartfelt thanks to my beloved mother, Dr Claire Firth, who unselfishly offered her invaluable time and knowledge, and, of course, to all the members of my family who helped enormously with their untiring encouragement. I am forever grateful to my husband, Dr Simon D. Cox, for his loving support, encouragement and constant interest in this project. I am indebted to Ángeles Mastretta whose generosity, passion and writing have provided the basic ingredients for this study.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BHS

Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’

Jane Lavery, ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta: La escritura como juego erótico y multiplicidad texual’, Anales de Literatura Hispanoamericana, 29 (2001), 313–40

LAP

Latin American Perspectives

MLN

Modern Languages Notes

NRM, I/II

Luis Castro Leal, La novela de la Revolución Mexicana, Vol. I, 7th edn (1967) and Vol II 5th edn (1964) (Mexico City: Aguilar)

PMLA

Publications of the Modern Language Association of America

RI

Revista Iberoamericana

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To Simon, family and friends

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Introduction Biographical aspects Ángeles Mastretta was born in 1949 in the state of Puebla, which is located on Mexico’s plateau, surrounded by rugged mountains and volcanoes to which the author makes frequent reference in her works. She moved to Mexico City, following the death of her father Carlos Mastretta in 1971. His passing left a lasting effect on her and his influence on her writing emerged in her portrayal of strong paternal figures, as will be seen in this study. Mastretta graduated in journalism at the Universidad Autónoma de México (Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales) and subsequently contributed to newspapers and magazines such as Excelsior and Unomásuno. She had a regular column, Del absurdo cotidiano, in the cultural review, Ovaciones, to which she contributed articles on politics and feminism. Following the award of a scholarship from the Centro Mexicano de Escritores in 1974, she published La pájara pinta (1975), her only collection of poetry. For three years, from 1975 to 1977, Mastretta was director of both Difusión Cultural of the ENEP-Acatlán and from 1982 to 1985, she formed part of the editorial council of the feminist magazine, Fem, to which she has also contributed several articles.1 All Mastretta’s major works have been translated into English as well as into many other international languages and she now enjoys a worldwide reputation as a leading feminist writer. However, Mastretta’s writing may give an impression of being rather conservative in style and structure. Certainly her work has the advantage of being more accessible than that of her literary predecessors of the Boom generation and its engagement and warmth appeal to a wide variety of readers. Mastretta’s first book, Arráncame la vida, which won the Premio Mazatlán, was published in 1985 and has been translated into over ten languages. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of Catalina Guzmán, the wife of a powerful and corrupt politician who becomes the governor of Puebla. 1 According to Carlos M. Coria Sánchez the feminist movement of the seventies and eighties exercised considerable influence on the literary sphere. Its main mouthpiece was the feminist magazine Fem, founded in 1976. Though she is not a militant feminist – indeed she often gives the impression of ambivalence where feminism is concerned – Mastretta is genuinely committed to promoting active female participation in social change, as emerges clearly in Mal de amores. See Carlos M. Coria-Sánchez: ‘Contextualización del feminismo en México en la narrativa de Angeles Mastretta’. (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Georgia U, 1999. Ann Arbor: UMI, 2000. 9949490.

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The novel traces Catalina’s fight to define her own sense of identity in a male and politically oppressive society, and offers incisive comment on postrevolutionary Mexico. Catalina’s first-person narrative conveys the concrete daily reality of patriarchal repression with vivid and often theatrical immediacy. Mastretta’s second work Mujeres de ojos grandes, followed in 1990. At three generations removed from the contemporary reader, the world of this text is populated by a series of aunts who appear to lead normal lives and to fulfil stereotypical roles and social norms of behaviour as expected in their milieu, but who are in fact sexually subversive. These stories, or vignettes, are notable for their lightness and frivolity: Mastretta uses laughter as a strategy for both criticism and liberation.2 Here Mastretta’s poetic, sensuous prose emerges clearly. Mastretta’s versatile narrative comes to light with the publication of Puerto libre 1993, a book of literary and journalistic vignettes reflecting today’s festive postmodern world of multiple surfaces: ‘he querido llamar Puerto libre a la región impertinente y ávida desde la que escribí los textos que hacen este libro, como un homenaje menor a esas zonas de la euforia y el desafuero que languidecen sin remedio a la orilla del mar’ (Puerto libre, ‘Abrir un puerto’, p. 15).3 Mastretta’s most accomplished work to date is Mal de amores, published in 1996 and awarded the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos in 1997. Significantly, Mastretta was the first female writer to receive this award. The time frame of the novel overlaps the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, extending from the last years of Porfirio Díaz’s presidency to the outbreak of the Revolution of 1911 and beyond. But the novel is not merely – or even mainly – historical since the plot centres on personal passion and disillusionment in the revolutionary period. The protagonist is Emilia Sauri, whose upbringing, no less warm and indulgent for being unconventional and liberal, prepares her for her positive feminist contribution to the revolutionary struggle. The plot traces her relationships with two men – based on passionate attachment for the first, and grateful affection for the other. Mal de amores is very much written in the style of nineteenth-century realist novels and like Arráncame la vida, has a close affinity with the novelists of the Mexican (post)-Revolution such as Martín Luis Guzmán, Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro and Rosario Castellanos. El mundo iluminado, similar in tone, style and thematic concern to Puerto libre, was published in 1998. This work comprises a collection of short stories and essays that reflects Mastretta’s own personality and literary priorities more closely than Puerto libre. It offers an impressionistic account of love, death and nostalgia for the past written in a hybrid style combining the literary and the journalistic. Mastretta’s most recent publications include Ninguna eternidad como la mía (1999), Cuentos de encuentros y desencuentros amorosos and El cielo de los 2 See Dianna Niebylski, ‘Transgression in the Comic Mode: Ángeles Mastretta and Her Cast of Liberated Aunts’, in The Other Mirror: Women’s Narrative in Mexico 1980–1995 (ed.) Kristine Ibsen, Contributions to the Study of World Literature, 80 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 29–40 (p. 37). 3 For details of first editions and of later editions used here, see Bibliography, p. 235.

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leones, both published in 2003. Isabel Arango from Ninguna eternidad como la mía is the protagonist of this short story and is another of Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes. Set in Mexico City in the early twentieth century, the plot centres on the frustrated love of a ballet dancer, Isabel, for Javier Corzas, a poet and telegraphist. The sensuous movement of Isabel’s body inspired by the rhythm of the music is reflected in the sensuous flow of Mastretta’s prose.4 Cuentos de encuentros y desencuentros amorosos comprises a collection of thirteen short stories by Julio Cortázar, Anton Chekhov, Marcelo Birmajer, Marco Denevi and Katherine Mansfield, among others. These short narratives centre on individual passion and romance, loyalty and friendship, unrequited love and loss, frequently arousing in the various characters an array of contradictory emotions. The prologue, written by Mastretta, describes these zealous texts as a celebration of life and love and as ‘un testimonio audaz de cuan bello es lo efímero, lo casual, lo que resulta inexorable’ (p. 12). El cielo de los leones is another collection of short stories and essays in which passion and desire, the hallmarks of Mastretta’s writing, are used to narrate the world and celebrate the quotidian. Mastretta delves into her private thoughts about a variety of subjects that excite, interest, trouble and amuse the author: in the style of El mundo iluminado, many of the texts are autobiographical, the central focii being the daily events of the author’s life, the role of memory and nostalgia for the past, and her celebration of love and the anguish caused by death; but the work also provides some useful insights into Mastretta’s strong family relationships, her views on feminism and politics, and particularly her ideas about writing. Some of the essays and short stories in Puerto libre, El mundo iluminado and El cielo de los leones have been published in the Mexican literary magazine, Nexos. Within Mexico, Mastretta is a well-known and popular figure, particularly in literary circles, but also with the general public. She has made various appearances on Spanish and Latin American television as well as participating in the chat show La almohada in 1988. Mastretta currently sits on the editorial board of Nexos which was edited by her partner, the writer and essayist, Héctor Aguilar Camín, from 1983 to 1995. They live with their children in Mexico City. A proud and caring mother, Mastretta often refers to her children in her publications. As well as contributing a regular column (Puerto libre) to Nexos she frequently writes for international journals such as Die Welt and The Country.

Chapter Contents The work of Ángeles Mastretta has only recently received significant critical attention, partly because her work has been seen as ‘popular’ and therefore inappropriate for serious academic study. The aim of the present study is to

4 For further comments on Ninguna eternidad como la mía, see my ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 338–9.

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demonstrate the rich complexity and range of Mastretta’s narratives. Although their ‘light’ content may be subject to criticism (as I shall explain), Mastretta’s major works are underpinned by serious intent, fulfilling social and documentary functions, by showing particular sensitivity towards the position of women within Mexican history. The critical period of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) left a deep impression on Mexican literature, and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel has clearly influenced Mastretta particularly in her use of neorealist, testimonial and journalistic techniques. Mastretta’s two main literary works, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, restore some of the lost voices of the past, especially those of women. These novels offer a radical revisionist history of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, in the light of female experiences and perspectives, challenging patriarchal ideologies and seeking to redress gender imbalance. Within the narrative structure of these novels the creative memory works to reshape the historic past, transcribing and re-transcribing the peculiar processes of female self-discovery. To understand the historical context of both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, Chapter Two will provide an outline of Mexican history from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. Mastretta’s revision of Mexican history from a non-official perspective provides a direct link with New Historical writing. Chapter Two also offers a brief survey of twentieth-century Mexican literature, analysing in particular the canonical texts of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel. I then go on to examine the works of Mexican female writers who have both developed the themes explored by the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and moved beyond this tradition by engaging with issues such as history and gender from a feminist/female perspective.5 Although writers like Mastretta acknowledge the cultural and political importance of the Mexican Revolutionary tradition, their main aim is to enable the hitherto silent voices of Mexican history, particularly those of women, to find expression and to be heard. Mastretta’s feminization of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores is her most notable achievement. Chapter Three analyses Arráncame la vida and Chapter Four, Mal de amores. Throughout these two chapters, a comparative analysis of both works will be offered, for while both (particularly the former) have drawn

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Showalter identifies three major phases in the historical development of women: 1. The ‘feminine’ denotes imitation of the male tradition and the internalization of its standards of art; 2. The ‘Feminist’ represents a protest against these standards and the promotion of minority rights and values; 3. The ‘Female’ – the most advanced phase – relates to self-discovery and a search for identity. All three stages are found in the works of Mastretta. I follow Showalter’s use of the terms ‘feminist’ and ‘female’. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brönte to Lessing (new revd edn) (London: Virago, 1982), p. 13.

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critical attention, there has been little sustained critical analysis of their interrelationship. Here the close parallels which emerge between Catalina (Arráncame la vida) and Emilia (Mal de amores) shed new and often ambiguous light on Mastretta’s postmodern feminism. Here the theme of female power and emancipation is frequently concomitant with sociohistorical and cultural change. Ultimately, Mastretta’s personal statement that the political is personal and the personal political emerges powerfully in these two texts. Arráncame la vida falls broadly into the category of testimonial narrative. The final section of Chapter Three will also seek to establish the links between the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and Testimonial narrative as represented by the work of Ángeles Mastretta and that of Mexican female writer Elena Poniatowska. The peculiar nature of testimonial narrative as borderland discourse between the documentary and the fictional will be analysed in conjunction with the two main critical approaches to the Testimonial tradition (associated with John Beverley and Elzbieta Sklodowska). The last few paragraphs of Chapter Four will focus on the diverse styles and techniques developed in Mal de amores. Mastretta’s ability to incorporate apparently incongruous narrative modes – the social realist and the historical are combined with the magical realist and the folletinesque – is a further aspect of her literary individuality and complexity. Chapter Five focuses almost exclusively on Mal de amores, which has not been analysed as extensively by critics as Arráncame la vida. I examine the hitherto unexplored themes of Myth, Magical Realism and Carnival, highlighting the multiplicity of Mastretta’s work. The ambiguous treatment of the carnivalesque, the mythical and the magical – which appear both positively and negatively – contribute to the reader’s sense of instability and uncertainty. A major aspect of Mastretta’s fiction is her emphasis on the textual and sexual body of her narratives. My focus in Chapter Six is on those private spaces, and my treatment of ‘physical’ reality leads to a consideration of the ‘body’ of the text, highlighting the links and parallels between these literal and metaphorical spheres. Chapter Six examines Mastretta’s emphasis on the importance of female loss of power and empowerment through bodily erotics. In the last section of this text our consideration of the ‘body’ of the text will lead us into a treatment of the erotics of the text, demonstrating Mastretta’s self-conscious indulgence in linguistic play and her versatile style and technique. From this extended account, Ángeles Mastretta emerges as a serious and stimulating novelist. Her work bears comparison with other Latin American female writers who share an interest in female sexuality such as Mastretta’s more politically-engaged compatriot, Elena Poniatowska, who has arguably received the most fulsome critical acclaim in recent years. Chapter Seven analyses Mastretta’s works with specific reference to Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998) and El cielo de los leones (2003) within the context of postmodernist writing giving particular emphasis to her intricate style which interweaves the biographical and the fictional, the ‘high’ discourse of authority and the ‘low’ discourse of the street, the ‘lightness’ of being and the burden of survival. It may be argued that the apparent spirit of

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frivolity expressed in Puerto libre (1993), El mundo iluminado (1998), and El cielo de los leones (2003) does not do justice to Mastretta as a socially committed author. This emerges in her main texts Arráncame la vida, Mujeres de ojos grandes and Mal de amores which have helped her to gain the status as a writer of international standing. The conclusion, draws attention to Mastretta’s plural writing and to her position within the Mexican literary canon.

Light Writer Although Mexican women’s writing and publishing has a long and prestigious history, only a few Mexican women writers – Rosario Castellanos (1925–74), Elena Garro (1920–98), Elena Poniatowska (1933–) – have been taken seriously by the critics. Not until the late 1980s with the commercially successful novels of Ángeles Mastretta and Laura Esquivel (1950–), were women accorded the serious critical attention they deserve. Despite the commercial and critical success of her best-selling testimonial novel, Arráncame la vida, Mastretta is still considered a popular writer whose literary credentials remain unproven. Mastretta is accorded only a fleeting reference in Verity Smith’s Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (1997) and is not even mentioned in Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction.6 Her experience in this respect parallels that of the young Manuel Puig and is clearly reminiscent of Isabel Allende’s critical reception in Chile in the 1980s. As Mastretta has herself observed, the bestseller status of her works has led to their dismissal as ‘easy literature’ by many high-brow critics.7 In one interview, Mastretta explains that someone said about her writing that ‘esta señora es simple, hace literatura light, es fácil, no le cuesta trabajo, escribe deliberadamente para vender’ or ‘se entienden y se venden mucho, deben ser una porquería’.8 Aralia López González, for example, finds little to commend Arráncame la vida: ‘here everything is linear: the life, the story, and the course of events. There is no surprise or poetry, no original character or situation’.9 It is true that Mastretta has little knowledge of critical practice and is often self-deprecatory, thus reinforcing,

6 See Verity Smith’s Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), p. 550, and Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998). 7 See Gabriela de Beer, ‘Interview with Ángeles Mastretta’, Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, 48 (Spring 1994), 14–17 (p. 15). 8 See Arturo G. Hernández, ‘Galardón a Mastretta’, La Jornada, 5 July 1997 http://www.jornada.unam.mx/1997/jul97/970705, (Last accessed: 8 pm, 19 Dec. 2004). 9 This is taken from Kay S. García’s translation of a quotation from Aralia López González’s ‘La huella de lo reprimido: fisuras y suturas’, Signos: Anuario de humanidades, 5:1 (1991), 239–48 (p. 323). See Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 67.

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perhaps, critical prejudice against her writing with its supposedly emotional rather than intellectual appeal. Mastretta’s reliance on traditional story-telling techniques, on ‘light’ entertainment and ‘marriage plots’, coupled with her scant interest in formal experimentation, has led critics to classify her as a popular writer.

Mastretta and the Post-Boom/Postmodern Unlike some of her contemporaries such as Damiela Eltit (Chile, b.1949), Mastretta is a traditional writer who is not known for her flamboyant experimentation. Nonetheless she has developed a unique style notable for its diversity which ranges from staid literary description reminiscent of the realist novel to racey fast-flowing narrative peppered with the colloquial and the obscene, typical of popular genres. The mythical, the magical and the carnivalesque also feature prominently in Mastretta’s work, often in counterpoint to authoritative historical discourse. In both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida, Mastretta divides her attention between the real and the fictitious as Allende does in La casa de los espíritus:10 historical characters such as Porfirio Díaz and José Olmos y Contreras share the same fictional world as Emilia Sauri and Catalina Guzmán. Despite its stylistic and thematic playfulness, Mastretta’s writing does not conform to the central ‘illusion-breaking’ orientation of postmodernist fiction as identified by Brian McHale.11 She does not purposefully allude to the artificiality of her textual world nor to the elusive character of language, even though these features are suggested in all of her works. In Mastretta’s texts ‘what happens’ is of prime significance: Mastretta takes pride in belonging to a family of storytellers. As a fervent feminist she is keen to make her books accessible and, far from indulging in philosophical and technical game-playing, often relies on first-hand experiences (as in Arráncame la vida). In this sense her writing can be associated with the Post-Boom narratives which straddle generic boundaries, treading an ‘uneasy path between the Barthes-Tel-Quel-Sarduyan notion that the text can have no exterior referent and the old-fashioned idea that the relationship between signifier and signified is completely unproblematic’.12 According to Aníbal González, documentary narratives concentrate on key polar opposites: fact and fiction, justice and injustice, society and the individual.13

10 See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000), p. 40. 11 Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 221. 12 See Donald Shaw, The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, Suny Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 57. 13 See Aníbal González, Journalism and the Development of Spanish American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 24.

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Mastretta often resorts in Mal de amores (as in Arráncame la vida) to journalistic matter-of-fact documentation: ‘El azaroso año de 1920 vio levantarse contra el gobierno a una mayoría de generales inconformes con la calma restauradora del carrancismo, liderados por Álvaro Obregón’ (Mal de amores, p. 381). However, while Mal de amores is a notable example of resistance writing (like Arráncame la vida), dedicated to the disclosure of lo no dicho, to the ‘unofficial’ history,14 it also revels in the frivolous and the ludic. As we will see in Chapters Six and Seven, the excesses of the female body, which is fluid and multiple, become a metaphor for the excesses of the textual body. Mastretta has often spoken of her passion for words and their sounds, which enable her not only to express the suffering of a nation in political turmoil, but also permit her to engage in carnivalesque discourse. Just as Arráncame la vida is notable for its self-referential playfulness which blurs the boundaries between the fictive and the factual through Catalina’s ‘real’ narrative, so Mal de amores indulges in a carnivalesque play of discourses combining the neorealist and the neoromantic on the one hand and magical-realist features reminiscent of García Márquez’s narrative on the other. Moreover, Mal de amores is punctuated by an often chaotic proliferation of references to other texts, ranging from medical works, encyclopaedias, fashion magazines to popular children’s songs, verse and ‘corridos’. Although her style is perhaps less innovative and experimental than some of her female contemporaries such as Elena Poniatowska, Mastretta clearly belongs to the tradition of the Latin-American Post-Boom writing.15 In its accessibility and less flamboyant experimentation, Post-Boom writing may be seen as a counter-project to the Boom. Shaw (The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction, 1998) suggests that many Boom writers have gravitated towards the Post-Boom. Typical of Mastretta and of Post-Boom writing in general is the gravitation towards the anecdotal, and towards plot-centredness and chronological structure, which provide for greater accessibility than did the typical Boom novel. In comparison with their Boom predecessors, the new generation of writers such as Ángeles Mastretta, Laura Esquivel or Guadalupe Loaeza are more concerned with the everyday issues than with complex philosophizing. As Antonio Skármeta puts it: ‘nosotros nos acercamos a la cotidianidad con la obsesión de un miope’ (Shaw, p. 138). The most salient feature of Mastretta’s writing is, without doubt, its accessibility because all of her works can be appreciated by the ordinary reader. Indeed, the remarkable popular success of Mastretta’s novels can be attributed in part precisely to her engagement with the mundane, the presence of popular references (romance, novela rosa elements, boleros) and of certain traditional characteristics such as uncomplicated story-lines. The appreciation of her writing does not depend upon that sophisticated literary competence 14 For an insightful analysis on such writing, see Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (London: Methuen, 1987). 15 For a discussion of the Boom and Post-Boom see Donald Shaw’s The Post-Boom in Spanish American Fiction (1998) and Phillip Swanson, Landmarks in Modern Latin American Fiction (London: Routledge, 1990).

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demanded of the Boom reader. Mastretta’s fictional worlds reflect – uncomplicatedly – the cultural diversity of Mexican society, together with its social discrimination, patriarchal dominance and feminist rebellion. Mastretta shows little interest in complex issues such as literary theory, philosophy or technical creativity – the hallmarks of ‘serious’ narrative as represented, for example, by writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and, to a lesser extent, by some early Post-Boom writers such as Elena Poniatowska. It is tempting to use such a term as postmodernism when analysing Mastretta’s works. Postmodernism is characterized according to Laura García Moreno by a cognitive shift from modernism and ‘emphasizes the end of philosophical foundationalism and consequently epistemological uncertainty’.16 Language and its difficult relationship with representation, together with the displacement of binary concepts (fact/fiction, mind/body, man/woman, etc) and predetermined sexual identity are a central concern in postmodernism. Postmodern narrative views language as a means of communication by stressing linguistic texture through techniques such as etymological word play. Postmodernism, unlike modernism, undermines monological meaning, and proposes plurivocity in its place. This study will highlight, within a broad postmodern context, the plurality of Mastretta’s literary vision which focuses on the blurring of traditional boundaries between high culture and mass culture, the displacement of binary concepts and monological truths, and the role of language. However, critics should be cautious when applying European and North American critical concepts to Latin American writing. The term ‘postmodernism’ is itself problematic. Attempts at precise definition have usually failed partly because the concept has a kind of in-built elusiveness, embracing as it does such slippery territories as ‘border’, ‘margin’ and ‘hybrid’. Postmodernism, like feminism and magical realism, has lost much of its critical focus through excessive and often indiscriminate use. Latin Americanists such as Santiago Colás, Raymond L. Williams, García Moreno, George Yúdice and Donald Shaw advise against the unguarded use of postmodernism.17 Santiago Colás cautions

16 As García Moreno remarks, this shift towards epistemological ambiguity: ‘coincides with [. . .] the pluralization of “legitimate” knowledges from both within and outside dominant cultures of advanced industrial societies arising from a crisis of legitimization with hybridization, that is, the disruption or “softening” of traditional boundaries between high culture, mass culture, and vernacular culture: and with the intensification of cultural crossings between the first and third world (Yúdice et al.). Most attempts to define postmodernism, which remains an elusive, contradictory term, highlight hybridity, textuality, and ambivalence as some of its most recognizable characteristics’. See Laura García Moreno, ‘Situating Knowledges: Latin American Readings of Postmodernism’, Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 25:1 (Spring 1995), 63–80 (p. 63; pp. 63–4). 17 See Raymond Leslie Williams, The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture and the Crisis of Truth (New York: St Martin’s, 1995). The introductory chapter highlights the influence of European theorists such as Gadamer and Ricoeur on Latin American writing. The exact relationship between the Postmodern and the Post-Boom is not investigated in Williams’ study since the latter term is not employed.

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against the vague assimilations which exclude ‘specific social and political conditions out of which that (Latin American) culture has emerged’.18 Donald Shaw’s reservations about applying Western critical concepts point to the usual framework of debate about postmodernism – socio-political rather than specifically literary. The postmodernist emphasis on the mediated nature of reality and celebration of the disappearance of the ‘real’ world, go counter to the social agenda of some Post-Boom writers such as Allende or Skármeta. In this sense the problem for Shaw of linking postmodernism to the Post-Boom is that ‘the whole notion of postmodernism is in essence a critique of the modernist position and of all-encompassing explanations of the collective social and historical process’ (p. 177). This again is an inadequate representation of the Latin American literary arena for the work of many Post-Boom writers such as Valenzuela, Allende, Poniatowska and Skármenta proves that there is no strict boundary between formal experimentalism and the employment of fantasy and myth on the one hand, and social and political commitment on the other. Significant contributions to Post-Boom writing have been made by Elena Poniatowska (testimonial and autobiographical narrative), Isabel Allende (social commitment and feminism) and more specifically by Ángeles Mastretta herself whose work incorporates many of these diverse elements which alternate between seriousness and frivolity. Some similarities between Skármeta, Allende and Mastretta can be deduced from Shaw’s assessment of Skármeta as devoted to both ‘la aventura de la palabra’ on the one hand and to conventional writing and ‘observed’ reality on the other.19 Shaw suggests that the Latin American context should be seen to ‘enter the postmodern age to some extent on its own terms, and that these include acceptance of the notion of the aesthetic as subversive’ (p. 177). Consequently, Latin American theorists seek to locate alternative responses to current theoretical practices in European and North American academic settings (García Moreno, p. 74).20

18 See Santiago Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), p. xi. Colás explores Latin American manifestations of postmodernism and refers to the work of critics such as Linda Hutcheon and Fredric Jameson. Octavio Paz has affirmed that ‘postmodernism is another imported grand récit’ that does not fit in the Latin American context. See Laura García Moreno (p. 64) and Octavio Paz, ‘El romanticismo en la poesía contemporánea’, Vuelta 11.127 (1987), 26–27. ‘Puede hablarse de Postmodernidad en América Latina?’ Yúdice asks, expressing the reservations shared by many critics who question whether the ‘transfer of European paradigms pertaining to modernity, not to mention the debated postmodern crisis or “overcoming” of modernity’ is relevant within Latin American contexts. See García Moreno (p. 68) and George Yúdice, ‘¿Puede hablarse de posmodernidad en América Latina?’, Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 4:1 (1990), pp. 105–28. 19 See Donald Shaw, Antonio Skármeta and the Post Boom (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1994), pp. 16–17. 20 Opinions, of course, differ considerably on where to locate these alternative responses but according to García Moreno there are two extremes between which Latin American

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Feminisms: ‘lo privado es público y lo personal es político’ Although some may wish to see Mastretta’s texts merely as examples of ‘light’ writing, a major objective of this study is to highlight how her texts are socially engaged narratives, frequently concerned with questions of gender within a broad socio-political context. In the writer’s texts what emerges most powerfully is the desire to construct self-defined images of womanhood, a breaking away from the fixed notions of gender identity and from the feeling of inferiority imposed by a patriarchal society with its accompanying religious and legislative restrictions. Mastretta’s desire to speak primarily of the silenced experiences and voices of women puts her works in direct line with Post-Boom Latin American female writers such as Marta Traba, Isabel Allende, Elena Poniatowska and Carmen Peri Rossi.21 Mastretta may have little formal knowledge of critical theory and her treatment of gender issues seems to remain largely unaffected by the academic theorizing on the subject produced in Europe as well as in Latin America and the United States, but her work nevertheless displays important feminist principles. Postmodern feminism, through its double-edged discourse, postulates a radical critique of master narratives. On the political front, it defies patriarchal logic and society, while at the epistemological level, it queries ‘natural’ systems of representation. It ultimately serves as a powerful discourse for the marginal and repressed. Like postmodern feminists, Mastretta criticizes totalizing structures such as History and celebrates Otherness and those repressed discourses relating to the female body and sexuality. Feminism, the most radical language of postmodernism, assumes a peculiar resonance in the context of Latin America where women have been doubly marginalized, both in terms of class and gender and even today remain largely marooned on the periphery. Postmodern Feminism recognizes the need for radical change and ‘by shifting its gaze from men to women, by taking women’s lives and their writing seriously, feminist critics crack the bedrock of traditional scholarship’.22 Western thought can no longer be at the

perspectives on postmodernism oscillate: (1) ‘wariness towards the continuing role of Eurocentrism in its current disguise of dispersion’; and (2) ‘cautious attraction to the acknowledgement of alternative legitimate knowledges’ (pp. 73–4). Like Shaw, Santiago Colás and George Yúdice are wary of the undiscriminating application of these Western critical concepts to Latin American writing which often downgrades or excludes the sociopolitical and cultural aspects of the Latin American context. Yúdice and Colás seek an alternative Latin American Postmodernism in a common Latin American form of writing: testimonial narrative. As shall be discussed in depth in Chapter Three, Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida falls within the testimonial narrative mode which often excludes the experimental in favour of socio-political purpose, seeking to record the testimonies of the marginal voices of people speaking from the periphery. Typical of testimonial writing and Mastretta’s text are their chronological structure and general accessibility. 21 See Stephen M. Hart’s Companion to Spanish-American Literature (London: Tamesis, 1999), pp. 144–65. 22 See Amy Katz Kaminsky, Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 52. Also see

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centre for ‘we have not simply moved the centre, we are denying its existence’ (Kaminsky, p. 19). Feminists like Mastretta challenge social ideas and injustices as well as the structures upon which they are based, the discourse in which they are thought. As a critical assessment of the master narrative, feminism ‘is a political and epistemological event – political in that it challenges the order of patriarchal society, epistemological in that it questions the structure of its representations’.23 As will be shown later, in the context of Mastretta’s texts, this questioning of the structure of representation is achieved through the dislocation of binary concepts (history/fiction; good/evil; woman/man) and the blurring of fixed gender and sexual identity. Feminism not only questions phallocentric ideologies – particularly those concerning male prejudices about women and their roles – but also male critical evaluations of literature – particularly of women’s writing. Rosika Parker and Griselda Pollack suggest that ‘feminism explores the pleasures of resistance, of deconstruction, of discovery, of defining, of fragmenting, of redefining’.24 Such a discourse has led to numerous and complex debates in contemporary postmodern feminist criticism. It began in 1975 when feminist criticism took two theoretical directions: two contending positions (to make a crude but clear distinction) as represented by the ‘essentialists’ or French feminists;25 and the ‘relativists’, the Anglo-American feminist critics.26

Anny Brooksbank Jones, ‘Latin American Feminist Criticism Revisited’, in Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 201–37. 23 Hal Foster (ed. and intro.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (New York: The New York Press, 1998), p. xiii. 24 See Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender Politics and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 199. 25 According to Alice Jardine, Anglo-Americans focus on the specificity of women’s writing (‘gynocritics’) and French criticism explores the textual consequences and representations of sexual difference (‘gynesis’). See Alice A. Jardine, ‘Gynesis’, Diacritics, 12 (Summer 1982), 54–65. See also her Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity, 4th edn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). According to Elaine Showalter, Gynesis repossesses ‘as a field of inquiry all the space of the Other, the gaps, silences, and absences of discourse and representation, to which the feminine has traditionally been relegated’. See Elaine Showalter, ‘Women’s Time, Women’s Space: Writing the History of Feminist Criticism’, in Feminist Issues in Literary Scholarship (1987) ed. Shari Benstock, pp. 30–44 (p. 37), and ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm 1979), pp. 22–41 (p. 28). For Alice Jardine (Diacritics, p. 59) ‘the space “outside” of the conscious subject has always connoted the feminine in Western thought’. Based on socioeconomic, psychological and to a certain extent biological determinism, French feminism maintains that there is an écriture féminine, that is, a peculiarly female mode of expression independent of male language and discourse. French feminists criticize totalizing structures such as language and knowledge and celebrate woman’s Otherness – of being marginalized and excluded – by exploring its advantages. For further details on French feminism and écriture féminine in the context of Mastretta’s writing, see Chapter Six, pp. 162–96. 26 Whereas French feminist critics are almost entirely concerned with écriture féminine, Anglo-American critics have a purely woman-centred approach to the work of women writers. Unlike French feminism, they do not see any essential differences separating male from female

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Critical reservations about the unreflecting application of postmodernisms to Latin American literature considered earlier in this chapter extends to feminism.27 For Nelly Richard the downside of postmodernism, from a Latin American angle, is its ability to co-opt the margins and include diversity – political, racial, cultural, sexual – in a ‘new, sophisticated economy of “sameness”, thereby neutralizing the “other” ’.28 This perception of postmodernism also applies to postmodern feminism within the Latin American context. In her pioneering Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (1992), Debra Castillo uses diverse literary and theoretical texts to highlight the ongoing process of constructing a Latin American feminist criticism that can embrace the multiple, and often contradictory perspectives offered by Latin American feminist writers.29 Castillo makes reference to Victoria Ocampo’s letter to Virginia Woolf in which the Latin American writer and critic celebrates

writing although they acknowledge persistent male underestimation of women’s writing. Anglo-American critics go beyond pure literary analysis to examine the oppressed socioeconomic status of women as well as women’s economic position as authors and the problems they frequently encounter in the world of publishing. See Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brönte to Lessing (new revd edn) (London: Virago, 1982). See n. 5, p 4, above for Elaine Showalter’s definition of ‘feminist’ and ‘female’. Also see Feminist Literary Criticism, ed. and intro. Terry Eagleton (London: Longman, 1991). Eagleton provides a coherent overview of feminist literary criticism and its developments in the previous 20 years. 27 In Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), Toril Moi’s provocative analysis of the strengths and limitations of the Anglo-American and French feminist perspectives have contributed to the construction of a Latin American feminist theory. In her discussion of Elaine Showalter’s feminist criticism, Moi highlights one of the problems with Anglo-American theory in general. Moi objects that Showalter’s exclusivity, like that of Gilbert and Gubar in Madwoman in the Attic and other Anglo-American critics, mirrors the patriarchal values she opposes: ‘all forms of radical thought inevitably remain mortgaged to the very historical categories they seek to transcend’ (p. 88). She notes on the other hand, however, that ‘our understanding of this historically necessary paradox should not lead us complacently to perpetuate patriarchal practices’ (p. 88). Rosalind Jones strikes a similar, cautionary note in relation to French feminism which she sees as apolitical, essentialist and, like Anglo-American theory, tied down by the very system it claims to undermine: ‘A monolithic vision of shared female sexuality, rather than defeating phallocentrism as doctrine and practice, is more likely to blind us to our varied and immediate needs and to the specific struggles we must coordinate in order to meet them’. Such criticism of AngloAmerican and French feminist theories has some point and has influenced Latin American feminists in the construction of an alternative theory of feminism within a Latin American context. See Ann Rosalind Jones, ‘Writing the Body: Toward an Understanding of l’écriture féminine’, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds Robyn R Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991), pp. 357–70 (p. 365). 28 Nelly Richard comments perceptively on this element of postmodernism. See ‘Postmodernism and the Periphery’, in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (Hemel Hampstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), pp. 463–70 (p. 468). 29 See Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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Woolf’s discovery and unlocking of a private ‘room of her own’, but acknowledges the fact that the key will not necessarily fit a Latin American keyhole.30 In her response to the British writer Ocampo suggests that it would be a grave mistake to appropriate Woolf (and implicitly, we might add, de Beauvoir or Julia Kristeva or Hélène Cixous or Showalter or any other theorist) uncritically for a Latin American practice, for her theories and her conclusions derive from specific conditions that may not be duplicated in Latin America, where circumstances of race, gender, class, and cultural relationships exist which may not obtain in the Anglo-French sphere. (Castillo, p. xvii)

Castillo reinforces the view that Latin American feminists should be cautious when applying academic feminist theories produced in Europe and the United States to a Latin American context by drawing from Elaine Showalter’s ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’. It offers a highly appealing schematic summary of several major trends in recent feminist criticism: ‘English feminist criticism, essentially Marxist, stresses oppression; French feminist criticism, essentially psychoanalytic, stresses repression; American feminist criticism, essentially textual, stresses expression.’31 Castillo considers that Latin American feminist criticism resists such simple categorization, for Latin American feminisms are developing in various directions which are ‘not always compatible with the directions taken by Anglo-European feminisms and frequently discord with one another’ (p. xxii). Latin American feminist critics are seeking to locate alternative responses to contemporary European and North American feminist theoretical practices. Characteristically antihegemonic, Latin American writing contests a totalizing view of literature and assumes a polyphonic function, operating ‘within a field of sinuous and shifting positionalities rather than from a single, fixed position’ (p. xxii). For Castillo, the focus on specific strategic interventions in fictional texts seems to offer the most productive mode of reading Latin American literature without the reductionism underlying much of the overarching academic theorizing of European and North American feminist practitioners (p. xxii). Jean Franco, Anny Brooksbank Jones, Amy Kaminsky and other specialists in Latin American feminism have all made useful suggestions as to what must be appropriated and discarded from European and North American feminist criticism in the construction of a valid and practical theory of feminism. Amy Kaminsky calls for a Latin American theory which combines Latin American materialist criticism, which is representative of an oppositional politics, and feminist criticism,

30

See Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back (p. xv), and Victoria Ocampo, Testimonios, 10 vols (Buenos Aires: Sur, 1935–77). 31 See Debra A. Castillo, Talking Back (p. 1) and Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 381–402.

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which locates the female body at the centre of its analysis. In doing so, Kaminsky is able to construct a Latin American feminist discourse which is regionally and politically motivated in its commitment to eradicate gender oppression (p. 21) but also is in current dialogue with North American and European feminist practices. By employing different practices and extracting whatever is useful from them, Kaminsky proposes to achieve ‘the feminist demetaphorization of the language of sexuality for Latin Americanists and Latin American derhetoricization of the language of politics for feminists’ (p. 135). Kaminsky’s project is significant because of her insistence on the connection between feminist practice and the social context that produced it. For this latter objective Kaminsky borrows the term presence from the Latin American rhetoric of oppositional politics – ‘a notion that posits the sense of self in the quest for transformation’ resulting in a ‘conscious positioning, enabling choice and agency’ (p. 25). For Kaminsky, Latin American feminist criticism is a return to the concrete. Language is an important feature in our reading of Latin American texts by women, where we understand Latin American feminist scholarship ‘needs to keep women firmly at the centre of its analysis [. . .]’ (p. 135), retaining the notion of sexuality as a key to gender hierarchy and consequently as a site of oppression ‘without pushing women back into the little corner in which they are nothing but sex and have nothing to say about anything but sex [. . .]’ (Kaminsky, p. xiii). Unlike French psychoanalytical feminist criticism which focuses purely on women’s bodies and their pleasure, Latin American writers/ critics offer the reinsertion of that body into the political arena, which after all it can never avoid (Kaminsky, p. 20). Kaminsky sums up what she believes to be the Latin American alternative to American feminist criticism: When North American Feminists made the extraordinary theoretical discovery that the personal was the political – that the intimate lives of individuals responded to cultural structures of hierarchy and dominance, they did not stop to consider to what extent the political might also be the personal: that the public institutions housing and channelling and deploying state power express themselves in our individual lives. In much of Latin America, the official and unofficial policies of the state are played out on the bodies of the citizens, thus becoming the intimate personal experience and shaping the unique vision of the individual that gets expressed in what we recognize as the writer’s particular voice. Just as Latin American feminist criticism needs to make room for readings of sexuality that go beyond labelling and dismissal, it must take the political, in all its complexity, into account. (pp. xv–vi)32 32 Brooksbank Jones claims that, in Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers, Kaminsky is guilty of ‘untheorized distinctions between theory, practice, pure theory, and material reality’ and of treating ‘experience, race, class, and gender as givens’ (p. 212). However she acknowledges the tension between micro-political and macro-political issues as a fundamental concern in contemporary Latin American feminist debates. See Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 212–13.

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As will be investigated throughout this study, Ángeles Mastretta’s works are also a powerful representation of these converging practices proposed by Kaminsky: ‘Yo creo que soy una feminista en tanto que sí acepto y promuevo [. . .] que lo privado es público y lo personal es político’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 333). Her texts are multiple and linguistically supple, offering ‘readings of sexuality that go beyond labelling and dismissal’ but also ‘take the political, in all its complexity, into account’ (Kaminsky, p. xvi). In Mastretta’s texts the personal is the political: the intimate lives of individuals, particularly of women, respond to cultural structures of hierarchy and dominance and public institutions ‘housing and channelling and deploying state power (which) express themselves in (their) individual lives’. Writing is a revolutionary practice particularly for female writers, and ‘to write in Latin America is for them more than verb, transitive or intransitive – it is a revolutionary act’ (Castillo, p. 20). Mastretta facilitates a form of self-representation for those women and marginalized groups that challenges patriarchal discourses. Following the French tradition, she examines the words, the syntax and the genres that traditional (male) language and representation use to regulate women’s self-knowledge. Her work offers glimpses of new unspoken spaces unclouded by phallagocentric constraints.

Critical Reception of Mastretta’s Texts Mastretta’s literary stock has grown following her award of two major literary prizes: in 1985 she was awarded the Premio Mazatlán for Arráncame la vida and in 1997 she became the first woman to receive the prestigious Premio Rómulo Gallegos for Mal de amores. Interest in Mastretta has increased of late, but much critical investigation remains to be done. Critical work on Mastretta is to be found in the form of articles and Ph.D. theses, most of which relate to her first novel, Arráncame la vida. Kay García’s book, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (1994) includes an interview with Mastretta and a chapter on Arráncame la vida which explores the implicit intertextual relationship between Mastretta’s account and the official record of Mexican history. Diane Braun’s thesis, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, María Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’ (1994), also includes a useful chapter on Arráncame la vida and explores silence and dream as textual strategies with transgressive and feminist potentialities. Mastretta’s other works, notably Mal de amores, have received relatively little attention. One of the few comprehensive studies available is Lee Ann Sheryl Laffey’s ‘Power and Rebellion in the Narratives of Ángeles Mastretta’ (1998) which analyses the ways in which Mastretta’s protagonists redefine their identities in response to their repressive patriarchal society.33 33 For details of critical studies on Mastretta referred to here, see Bibliography (pp. 235–47).

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This work aims to fill the obvious gaps in the critical appreciation of Mastretta’s work. Although I will concentrate on Mastretta’s most important works, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, I also hope to shed new light on her other fictions. I have found that some of the critical works published on Mastretta unthinkingly accept those institutionalized gender norms which Mastretta herself is at such pains to challenge – though without committing herself unambiguously to the feminist cause. I have also sought to place Mastretta’s work within the Mexican Revolutionary Novel tradition by focusing on her referential and testimonial style. A further aim is to explore the significance of the female body and sexuality in Mastretta’s work. What I also hope to convey is the view that Mastretta’s feminist works avoid facile simplifications: heterogenous and dialogical, they interweave the historical and the fictional, the everyday and the fantastic, the frivolous and the serious. The originality of Mastretta’s writing lies in its elusive postmodern ambiguities whose shimmering surfaces are often interrupted by unexpected depths and whose proliferating meanings cannot be fully circumscribed by critical analysis.

Interview with Ángeles Mastretta34 My analysis of Mastretta’s texts has been guided by several new insights gained from a wide-ranging, extensive interview with Mastretta in December 1999, one of the few to cover in depth her œuvre. That interview represents a key feature of this project since it offers new insights into Mastretta’s postmodern multiple narratives: ‘Creo que esa multiplicidad en mí es inevitable [. . .] Yo soy muy desordenada y atisbo la vida en fragmentos’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 320). On 2 December 1999 I arrived in Mexico City where Mastretta had agreed to meet me for our interview. Mastretta also asked me if I wanted to accompany her to a live radio programme in which she was to participate the day after my arrival. I agreed and the next day I went to her home. I waited in her beautiful guest room. It was spacious and the wide French windows looked onto a sunny patio surrounded by thick foliage and overhanging creepers. The strains of a bolero – a Romance sung by Mexico’s Rey de los boleros, Luis Miguel – filled the house. Bolero singers – and the bolero itself – play an important role in Mastretta’s fiction.35

34 See Jane Lavery, ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta: La escritura como juego erótico y multiplicidad textual’, Anales de literatura hispanoamericana, 30 (2001), 313–40. In references to the interview I use the shortened title ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’. 35 There are many references throughout Mastretta’s narratives to boleros – Temor, La noche de anoche (Arráncame la vida, pp. 148–9) – and to singers such as Luis Miguel (El mundo iluminado, pp. 59–63). As Arráncame la vida indicates, its title is inspired by Agustín Lara’s bolero which Catalina Guzmán cites in the novel: ‘Arráncame la vida, y si acaso te hiere el dolor [. . .] ha de ser de no verme porque al fin tus ojos me los llevo yo’ (p. 149).

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As I sat there absorbing the setting, Ángeles swiftly entered the room followed by her rather stuck-up grey and white poodle. ‘Este Gioco siempre me está siguiendo, ¡es un encanto!’, she remarked airily. Her sensuous diction reminded me of the poetic rhythm of her prose. I immediately realized that this playful grey and white ball of fluff was one of her fictional personages: ‘¡Ah! éste es el “Perro de Quevedo” en El mundo iluminado ¿verdad?’ Ángeles nodded in amusement. Dressed in a dark green suit and impeccably made up, Ángeles flurried around the room in half-hearted pursuit of her dog. Her big, dark eyes, so full of life and laughter are her most striking feature. She is a whirlwind of charm. It is easy to picture this intelligent and attractive woman as the host of a television talk show or as a famous Italian screen star. There is much about her that still suggests her Italian heritage (her paternal grandfather arrived in Mexico in 1910): the cheekbones, the rich chestnut hair, the animated gestures, the husky sensual voice. She is at the same time avowedly Mexican.36

Kay S. García remarks that, during her second encounter with Ángeles, she saw a different and more personal side: suffering from an ulcer and wearing no make-up, Mastretta proceeded to paint herself ‘para no agredirte’ (p. 66). According to García: ‘I recognized in this statement an explanation of her fictional strategies, as well as the creation of her public image. Hard edges were softened and reality was safely covered up with a playful yet dramatic mask’ (p. 66). The next chapter provides a brief synopsis of Mexican history and Mastretta’s historical portrayal of Puebla, the setting of Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, within the national process of change prompted by the Mexican Revolution. It also considers the importance of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel represented by key male writers as well as those female writers whose narratives explore the Revolutionary period and its aftermath from a radical revisionist feminist/female perspective.

36 See Kay. S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), p. 65, and Margaret Sayers Peden, Out of the Volcano (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), p. 87.

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Contexts Historical Background: The Mexican Revolution and its Aftermath It may appear surprising that an author born in 1949 – over 30 years after the end of the ‘military’ phase of the Revolution – should set Arráncame la vida in the 1930s and 1940s and Mal de amores between the 1890s and 1965. But such retrogression is not uncommon in contemporary Mexican writing – indeed it is almost the norm – since the Revolution was to provide the central point of reference for the remainder of twentieth-century Mexican history and fiction.1 It is in the revolutionary period that the roots of the country’s current malaise are to be found.2 The Mexican Revolution and its aftermath provide Mastretta with the historical backdrop to her two novels. Mastretta offers a feminist revision of the historical record, giving voice to suppressed marginal perspectives – particularly of women. The author considers the often unacknowledged function of women during and after the Revolution, a role which was to undermine entrenched patriarchal attitudes and machista domination of women in Mexican society. It is important to consider Mexican history and politics as both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores offer a faithful representation of the historical circumstances of women in Mexico and of the nation’s political machinations. Her critical examination of the past has clear relevance for the present. As many have observed, Mexico’s tumultuous history is marked by an almost cyclic pattern of growth and decline, hope and disappointment, life 1 For a further analysis of Mexican history, see Brian R. Hamnett, A Concise History of Mexico (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000); D. C Hodges and R. Gandy, Mexico 1910–1982: Reform or Revolution (London: Zed Press, 1983); D. Villegas Cosío et al. (eds), Historia mínima de México, 6th edn (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1981); Wil Pansters, Politics and Power in Puebla: The Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–87, Latin American Studies (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990); and David G. LaFrance, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: the Maderista Movement and the Failure of Liberal Reform (Wilmington: SR Books, 1989). 2 In the 1990s with the revelations about large-scale pilfering from the public coffers during the administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94), the PRI, which had been the party of government since 1940, came to an end. Its stronghold was finally broken in 2000 with the democratic election of Vicente Fox Quesada of the conservative Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), instilling new hopes in the nation that the violence and corruption instigated by the Mexican Revolution might finally come to an end. Nevertheless, corruption and violence continues to be entrenched in Mexico’s traditions and structures, as it has become an unchallenged feature, accepted by everyone.

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and death, peace and violence.3 Mastretta’s fictions reflect in many ways the political and social mood of Mastretta’s own era, in the last twenty-five years, which also express this pattern.

The Historical Setting of ‘Arráncame la vida’ and ‘Mal de amores’ The action of both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida takes place primarily in the city and state of Puebla which lies to the south-east of Mexico City. Mastretta mentions the names of surrounding districts in the State of Puebla such as Izúcar de Matamorros and Cholula, but the city of Puebla is the location of most relevance to both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida. Puebla has played an important role in Mexican history. The city of Puebla, where Ángeles Mastretta herself was born in 1949, developed an important agricultural and industrial base in the late nineteenth century. As in Arráncame la vida, the historical credentials of Mal de amores are enhanced by ample references to historical figures such as Benito Juárez, Francisco I. Madero, Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza, Governor Mucio P. Martínez, Porfirio Díaz and Aquiles Serdán. The historical context is also enhanced in both novels by the frequent references to geographical locations both Mexican (Isla Mujeres, Mexico City, Quintana Roo, Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez, Zacatlán, Tlaxcalantongo, Puebla) and foreign (New York, Israel, Paris, Madrid). There are references to Mexican historical sites – ‘estatua de Colón’ (Mal de amores, p. 223), names of real streets – ‘Avenida Reforma’ (Mal de amores, p. 223; Arráncame la vida, p. 81), ‘calle de Alcalcería’ (Mal de amores, p. 148) ‘Portal de Mercaderes’ (Mal de amores, p. 148); shops – ‘Sanborns’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 130); city districts – ‘barrio de Xonaca’ (Mal de amores, p. 234), and other urban locations – ‘Puente Iturbide’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 35), ‘parque de la concordia’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 75). The aura of historicity found in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida is further enhanced by references to journals such as Avante run by Juan Soriano (Arráncame la vida, p. 55) and the director of La voz de la verdad, José Olmos y Contreras (Mal de amores, p. 81). References to political parties such as CTM and PRM (Arráncame la vida) reinforce this effect.

‘Mal de amores’ The time frame of Mal de amores extends from the late nineteenth century to 1965, although its primary focus is the events leading up to the Mexican Revolution and the revolutionary period in Puebla and its environs. Nineteenth-century 3 Caciquismo y poder político en el México rural, eds Roger Bartra et al., 1st edn, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de UNAM (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975).

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Mexico is marked by a national struggle against occupation by foreign powers and a desire for political and economic independence. In Mexico, as elsewhere in Spanish America, the War of Independence began as a form of political subversion against the Spanish monopoly of power which had prevailed for more than three hundred years. Having lost almost half of Mexico’s territory to the US during the Mexican-American War (1846–48), the Liberals, who had gained a measure of ascendancy over the Conservatives during the earlier independence period, recognized the need to provide Mexico with the stability and productivity which its northern neighbour, the United States, enjoyed.4 Without these measures, the future of Mexico as an independent nation-state would remain in the balance (Katz, p. 49). Under the leadership of Mexican Liberal Benito Juárez, the Constitution of 1857 was instituted as a means of attacking the power of the Church and creating a different governmental structure. This reform was part of the underlying political capitalist-democratic ideology of Juárez’s followers whose main aim was to make Mexico a progressive nation. The conservatives, whose personal interests were threatened, reacted violently. Following the victory of the liberals in the War of the Reform (1857–60), Napoleon III seized the opportunity to establish an empire in the New World by conspiring with Mexican conservatives to place Archduke Maximilian of Austria on the throne of Mexico.5 But the incursion by the French unleashed popular resistance throughout the country which ensured that Maximilian’s ascendancy was short lived (1864–67). The Mexican Liberals regained the political initiative and Benito Juárez resumed as president in August 1867. In spite of the newly awakened sense of nationalism brought about by the military triumph over the French (Katz, p. 4), Mexico faced economic chaos and was far from being the stable and integrated nation Juárez had dreamt of. Porfirio Díaz, who became president in 1876, continued the efforts of the Reforma, instigated by the political initiatives of Juárez, to construct a bourgeois society but the dominant ideology was now positivism – which placed order and progress above personal freedom. Díaz adopted an export-based economic policy and endorsed foreign investment, particularly from the US.6 During Díaz’s

4

See Friedrich Katz, ‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.), Mexico Since Independence, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 49–124 (p. 49). 5 During the first year of his term, Juárez was forced to suspend debt payments to Mexico’s chief European creditors France, Britain and Spain as a result of the financial toll incurred by the Reform War. In London on 31 October 1861, these powers signed a Tripartite Convention in favour of military intervention in order to seek redress. Although military intervention soon ensued, both Spain and Britain withdrew their forces when they learned that the occupation of Mexico represented for the French a desire to establish a Mexican empire under French rule. See Jan Bazant, ‘From Independence to the Liberal Republic, 1821–1867’, in Leslie Bethell (ed.) Mexico Since Independence, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 1–48 (p. 43). 6 Ironically during the first two years of his regime Díaz carried out a series of antiAmerican propaganda campaigns in light of the border land disputes between Mexio and the

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regime Mexico underwent a huge increase in foreign political and economic control as a result of the government’s foreign policies. Under Porfirio Díaz, foreigners had a privileged role, for Mexico had increasingly come to depend on other countries for her products and economic growth.7 Many rich Mexicans actively embraced foreign dependency by ‘aping nearly all things foreign at the same time as they deprecated their own nation’s history and culture’.8 The porfiriato had also benefited the Mexican middle classes and the rich, and in both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida the powerful and affluent sectors of society are conspicuous consumers of foreign goods. The economic growth and relative political stability maintained by the Porfirian regime is evidenced in the wealth of Puebla and specifically in the middle-class Cuenca and Sauri families of Mal de amores who are certainly portrayed as a product of Porfirian prosperity. Emilia, the main protagonist, is brought up in a comfortable middle-class family which flaunts its wealth. The poet Rivadaneira is rather bohemian and is committed to the anti-porfiriato movement even if it is only because of his fervent love for Milagros, a woman who is active in the revolutionary cause (p. 146). But Rivadeneira’s political stance is ironic in that he is a rich hacendado with an expensive taste for foreignmade clothes and cars. He dresses like a French dandy (p. 148) and drives an imported 1904 Oldsmobile: un auto verde oscuro que en lugar de volante tenía una dirección a la cual Rivadeneira llamaba correctamente manubrio de tiller steering [. . .] Para 1910 esos autos ya no eran la última palabra, existían automóviles más caros y modernos, sin embargo aquel pequeño curved dash hacía las delicias de Milagros Veytia. (p. 146)

US. But faced with the possibility of yet another Mexican-American war, Díaz had to keep political stability at all costs. What eventually placated the crisis was Díaz’s persistent encouragement of US American investors. See Friedrich Katz, ‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, pp. 68–69. 7 The US would become the country with the greatest foreign domination of the economy in Mexico, its preponderance overshadowing previously important shareholders in the Mexican economy such as Great Britain, France and Germany. Nevertheless Díaz’s foreign policies with its generous economic concessions extended not only to Americans but also to European investors and promoters. The Mexican government was keen to restore its diplomatic relations with Europe in order to balance American influence in Mexico. Until around 1900, the application of such policies resulted in economic growth, relative political stability and strengthening of the Mexican State. But they would also represent the undoing of his regime culminating in the Mexican Revolution. See Friedrich Katz, ‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, pp. 69–70. 8 See David G. LaFrance The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, 1908–1913: The Maderista Movement and the Failure of the Liberal Reform (Wilmington: SR, 1989), p. xxvi. Friedrich Katz (‘The Liberal Republic and the Porfiriato, 1867–1910’, pp. 49–124) explains that Porfirio Díaz had re-established diplomatic relations with France and that both during and after the Porfiriato: ‘France was to become more than just ‘another’ European country in the eyes of Mexico’s elite. French fashion, culture and architecture were models they sought to imitate’ (p. 71).

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Emilia, the protagonist in Mal de amores, herself does not escape similar ironic treatment: she wears ‘un traje de seda clara, idéntico al que ilustraba la penúltima portada de La Moda Elegante’ (p. 85) and is described elsewhere as being adorned ‘como una muñeca de magazine’ (p. 148). Mastretta also uses irony in her treatment of the rich elite. The hacendados, or rich landowners had been protected by Porfirio Díaz’s agrarian policies and were determined to retain as much land as they could. While their prosperity increased, Indian and peasant groups became even poorer, and more marginalized. In Mal de amores, Milagros, the liberal activist, is critical of the García couple who have married off their daughter, Sol, Emilia’s best friend, to the richest hacendado family in Puebla. Sol’s mother talks with a false sense of modesty of her daughter’s newly acquired wealth: ‘Van a tener dos haciendas, una casa en la capital, un atelier en Paris y otros lugarcitos. Les harán falta, no creas – dijo la madre de Sol, fingiendo bañarse de sencillez cuando no cabía en su piel’ (p. 169). Milagros reflects that the money spent on lavish wedding presents could have been better used to feed an entire regiment (p. 168), or to help revolutionaries to be freed from prison (pp. 169–70). Milagros predicts that there will be much famine in the coming years and attacks the capitalist mentality of this hacendado family and its blindness to the consequences of the Revolution. Her ironic sense of humour emerges when she tells Josefa to urge Sol’s mother to marry off her daughter quickly (p. 119). Despite substantial growth in Puebla, all is not well, owing to over-expansion, increased competition, the deterioration of worker’s living standards and political corruption leading to economic depression (LaFrance, pp. xxx–xxxii). The process of modernization seemed to heighten the contrast between excessive wealth and dire poverty, a feature that marks twentiethcentury Mexico. The starkness of this situation emerges forcefully in Mal de amores. Accustomed to relative political stability, the Sauri family are shaken by these ever-growing problems. Resguardados por la costumbre de la paz, habían llegado al país más novedades de las que Diego Sauri hubiera podido imaginar. Veinte mil kilómetros de vías ferrocarrileras cruzaban frente a las minas y los campos sembrados de henequen, hortalizas y granos para la exportación. Yacimientos de oro, plata, cobre y zinc creaban pueblos de la noche a la mañana. Compañías inglesas y norteamericanas contendían por la fertilidad endemoniada de los pozos petroleros. Se multiplicaron las plantas de textiles [. . .] Todo esto a una velocidad incontenible que iba convocando catástrofes al tiempo que florecía [. . .]. (p. 78)

Although the middle classes in Mexico gained materially, they also started to resent the closed political and social systems of the porfiriato. Several key factors led to the outbreak of the Revolution of 1910. Although the age of Díaz was one of relative stability and economic prosperity based on increased foreign investment, Díaz permitted the Church to regain power and the bourgeoisie to prosper at the expense of the poor. Dissatisfaction grew among the poor, who

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were prepared to act on such issues as social injustice. In spite of rapid economic growth, Mexico faced growing food shortage and famine as production of agricultural exports increased and urban and rural labour protests were crushed by the military. Whereas Mexico had to deal with increasing backwardness, other Latin American countries had made greater advances in social reform, particularly in education. During the final decade of the porfiriato, the rich became richer in Puebla but the majority found themselves more and more marginalized (LaFrance, p. xxx). Much of the underlying discontent in Puebla can be attributed to the impact of modernization on traditional patterns of life and institutions. Foreign involvement in the modernization of Mexico provoked a nationalistic reaction against outsiders (LaFrance, p. 240). Eager to attract foreign capital, Díaz adopted the abhorrent policy of paying foreign employees more than Mexicans for the same work. This move was one of the principle reasons for the Mexican miners’ strike at the Cananea Mining Company in Sonora, ruthlessly suppressed by the US military, resulting in the death of many Mexicans. In Mal de amores (p. 79), Mastretta alludes to political opposition to the Díaz regime with his foreign policies following the death of the miners at Cananea. Despite the fruits of success for many during the regime, the riches almost invariably ended up in the hands of foreigners. Railroads, petroleum, banking, mining, communications and commercial farming were primarily foreign-dominated, frequently resulting in the displacement of local businesses.9 The desire for change among Mexicans of all classes took on anti-capitalistic and nationalistic characteristics, resulting in attacks against the wealthy and against foreigners. Antiyanquismo and antiespañolismo are represented in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores (as they are in many Mexican Revolutionary novels). Mastretta’s writing often seeks to express lo mexicano and to recapture the nation’s authentic past and autochthonous history by making frequent references to Mexico’s indigenous past: Diego, for example, is obsessed with his Aztec origins (Mal de amores). Anti-Spanish feelings crop up on occasions in Mal de amores (p. 67 and p. 173). Mastretta’s antiyanquismo places her alongside many novelists of the Mexican Revolution (Muñoz, Guzmán, Fuentes) whose project was to express strong nationalistic views by drawing on indigenous symbolism

9 According to John Mason Hart the unequal economic relationship Díaz had formed between American investors and Mexicans laid the basis for the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 (p. 5). While displaced peasants and unemployed workers faced utter depravity, the pequeña burguesía and the provincial elites saw their economic opportunities ever more threatened and their federalist-democratic principles undermined by a government that was reluctant to curb foreign competition (p. 2). See John Mason Hart, ‘Introduction’, in Revolutionary Mexico: The Coming and Process of the Mexican Revolution, 10th edn (Berkley: University of California Press, 1997). For further comments on European and US foreign political influence and economic control in Mexico during the porfiriato age see ‘The Crisis of the Porfirian Economy and the American Intrusion’, pp. 177–86.

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and rejecting all things foreign.10 Despite the exploitation of Mexican raw materials by the US, it failed to give any real military help during the Revolutionary period. The US was quick to urge its citizens to leave the country in the face of the coming Revolution and its lack of interest in Mexican affairs is subtly highlighted in Mal de amores. Anti-American sentiment is expressed when Daniel, the protagonist’s lover, becomes a journalist for a US journal, writing a column on the Revolution in 1912. To Daniel’s surprise, the chief editor, Howard Gardner, does not conform to his preconceptions: ‘no esperaba encontrarse con alguien así, había previsto dar con un gringo de ánimo indiferente’ (p. 276). But despite Howard’s keen interest in the Revolution he remains ignorant of its real meaning: ‘Howard resultó ser un apasionado de los artículos escritos por Daniel, le contó entre risas el modo en que había llegado a necesitar la llegada de una de sus historias cuando el tedio quería comerse las tardes, le preguntó más de siete veces cómo estaban las cosas down there’ (p. 276). Mastretta ironizes the American’s naive enthusiasm for the Revolution emphasizing his paternalism and ignorance. In many ways the tragedy of war and violence is trivialized by Howard’s remark that news from Mexico serves to alleviate his boredom. The historical has become almost a form of fictional entertainment delivered to the editor in the form of entregas. His insensitivity is highlighted in his complete failure to understand that the Revolution has been a harrowing event for Daniel and the Mexican nation in general. Anti-US sentiment is also implicit in Arráncame la vida. Following the expropriation of the foreign oil companies, Catalina is surprised to see two American ladies donating cash to charitable causes: ‘hasta unas señoras gringas hablaron en contra de las compañías petroleras’ (p. 56). Gringos, a term of disrespect, is applied to Heiss, the businessman who has shady business dealings with Andrés Ascencio (pp. 64–5). The stereotyped Mexican idea that American women are superficial and ‘easy’ is expressed by Catalina: ‘Las gringas estaban bien para un rato, pero nadie les entraba para todos los días’ (p. 71). The US and other countries such as Britain have always been considered superior. Andrés feels strongly that the expropriation of the foreign oil companies will only serve to alienate them: ‘Andrés estaba furioso, le parecía una necedad eso de meterse en pleitos con países tan poderosos nada más para expropiarles lo que él llamaba un montón de chatarra’ (p. 56). Andrés is well aware, however, of the dangers of US materialism – which he expresses with eloquence and humour in a tirade against a political opponent. Ese cabrón hasta las esperanzas va a subastar. En un ratito enlata el suspiro de tres mil desempleados y se los vende a los gringos para cuando quieran sentirse deprimidos. Va a vender el Ángel de la Independencia [. . .] y si se descuidan hasta la Villa de Guadalupe. Mexican souvenirs: las olas de Acapulco, pedacitos de La Quebrada en relicarios y nalgas de vieja Buena en papel celofán. Todo 10 See Marta Portal, ‘Nacionalismo’, in Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (Madrid: Cultura Hispánica, 1977), pp. 269–78.

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muy moderno y muy nais, que no se nos note lo rancheros, lo puercos, lo necios, lo arisco. Otro Mexsicou. (p. 228)

Anti-foreign sentiment is also explicit in Catalina’s reference to her friend’s marriage: ‘total se casó con el español, que resultó ser un celoso enloquecido. Tanto, que a su casa le mandó quitar el piso de los balcones para que ella no pudiera asomarse’ (p. 29). But Mastretta avoids falling into the trap that many Realist writers and particularly Mexican Revolutionary Novel writers did by their excessive and biased nationalism. She trivializes the issue of colonisers versus colonised by frequent recourse to humour (Mal de amores, p. 67, and Arráncame la vida, p. 85) or by showing that the gringos are not so bad after all (p. 276). Indeed, as we shall see later on, Emilia travels to the US to study medicine and meets many generous Americans who will give her emotional support. Middle-class disillusionment with the ageing Díaz is evident through the Sunday tertulias held at the home of the Cuencas in Mal de amores: cedieron los espacios de inocencia musical y literaria que tuvieron alguna vez, a la discusión sin tregua de los desperfectos acarreados por la bonanza modernizadora y el autoritarismo del régimen que la prohijaba: los salarios compraban cada vez menos, el país se liaba sin remedio a los ires y venires de la economía estadounidense, el ferrocarril socorría el enriquecimiento de los más ricos, los mineros discriminaban la mano de obra de los mexicanos, el progreso de la república se daba en desorden y las reglas de la política estaban regidas por la improvisación y el capricho. (p. 79)

Revolutionary stirrings in Mexico occurred well before the outbreak of the Revolution itself.11 Towards 1910, many of Puebla’s discontented inhabitants sought to change the political and socio-economic structure of the state. They joined the opposition to Díaz led by Francisco I. Madero, whose publication, ‘La sucesión presidencial en 1910’, set out a series of political reforms based on liberal principles, including universal freedom of suffrage and the restriction of the presidency to one term.12 The Revolution was an uprising against the old order, promising to fulfill hopes of change: to bring about political and economic reform 11 LaFrance explains that since the 1900s the ‘cumulative effect of capitalistic modernization, population pressure, governmental policies (on land, labour, taxes, and personnel), and the post-1907 depression had been to squeeze the populace and stimulate its activist tendencies’, The Mexican Revolution in Puebla, p. xxxv. 12 One of the major factors contributing to Díaz’s defeat was not a popular revolution but the dispute between two ruling elites over whom Díaz had previously exercised a successful policy of divide and conquer. On the one hand there were the científicos, a circle of Europeaneducated intellectuals in Mexico City. The other comprised a provincial coalition of businessmen, landowners and generals. The latter thought that the científicos, with their predisposition to all things European, were overly acquiescent to foreign entrepreneurs at the expense of Mexican businesses. The provincial power structure was bolstered when a significant middle-class sector comprised of businessmen and professionals joined Madero in

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by introducing a system of party politics, dismantling the ‘hacienda’ system and limiting the level of foreign, in particular US intervention. Madero was an astute tactician and his ability to play upon the general discontent of Mexicans of all classes was one of the keys to his success (LaFrance, p. 2). His manifesto, which promoted the formation of Anti-re-electionist clubs in Puebla, is mentioned in Mal de amores (p. 114). In Puebla opposition was coordinated by Madero’s ally, the radical Aquiles Serdán (see Mal de amores, p. 79). The Cuencas and Sauris are involved from a very early stage in the anti-re-electionist movement: Milagros engages in furtive escapades at night to distribute pamphlets and to aid prisoners escape while the twenty-year-old law graduate, Daniel Cuenca, organizes liberal opposition to the Díaz regime (p. 82) and becomes Madero’s right-hand man. Emilia also defies the government during the curfew which followed the elections of 1910. She helps a family to find their son who is in danger of imprisonment and death (p. 205). The Porfirian regime sought to suppress revolutionary activities by imprisoning journalists, closing down newspapers and silencing or killing people through systematic terror. In both Mal de amores and Arráncame la vida, there are references to actual newspapers such as El Universal, El Demócrata and La Regeneración. Some journalists were killed such as the director and pro-Maderista José Olmos y Contreras of La voz de la verdad (Mal de amores, p. 81). In Mal de amores, there are allusions to the Puebla State Governor, Mucio P. Martínez, who had served as a military officer to Díaz during the recapture of Puebla from the French in 1867. Martínez was governor during the last decade of the porfiriato and was notorious for the severity and corruption of his rule: ‘llevaba muchos años haciendo su voluntad sobre la gente y las tierras’ (Mal de amores, p. 80). The death of the editor José Olmos y Contreras (Mal de amores, p. 81), was attributed to him (LaFrance, p. xxxiii). Martínez asked Díaz to ensure that prisoners were sent to remote prisons such as Yucatán (Mal de amores, p. 170). Even the 1910 elections were manipulated by the government to ensure that Madero did not triumph: ‘desde antes de las elecciones ya estaba claro que serían un fraude’ (Mal de amores, p. 204). In Puebla many anti-re-electionist sympathizers did not register to vote because they were fearful for their lives. Those who did register discovered that their names were missing from the voting lists. Others never received the documents which entitled them to vote (LaFrance, p. 36). This situation is reflected in Mal de amores: ‘ni Diego, ni Josefa, ni Milagros, aparecieron en las listas que por ley se publicaban en los periódicos ocho días antes de las votaciones primarias. Como ellos, muchos otros nunca recibieron las tarjetas que los autorizarían a votar’ (p. 204). Following the elections, police patrolled the streets of Puebla and many people were arrested. But the movement against the Porfirio political machine was impossible to suppress as Mastretta indicates: ‘entre semana, los tambores

the anti-Díaz cause. Madero himself came from one of Mexico’s richest families typifying the provincial elite that the old dictator had alienated towards the end of his career.

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escondidos el domingo llamaban a guerra de boca en boca y de carta en carta’ (Mal de amores, p. 82).13

The Failure of the Maderista Movement Although Mal de amores echoes the historical fervour of the nation in the grip of political revolution, it also portrays the strong disillusionment which followed early euphoria and triumphalism. Mastretta’s often ironic account succeeds in placing the revolution in perspective. Madero became president in 1911. Madero’s initial progress was promising but the movement failed to maintain and consolidate its power (LaFrance, p. xxxvi). Madero is sometimes depicted as a victim of circumstances beyond his control, as a sincere democrat who was unsuccessful because of conservative and foreign plotting, press opposition, the impatience of the Left and because of his own flawed idealism (LaFrance, p. 241). The empty rhetoric of maderismo was keenly resented in Puebla. Madero supported the Club Central at the expense of the anti-re-electionist Executive Electoral Committee; he tolerated the jailing of rebel officers and the deportation of labour activists; he interfered in various state and local affairs, including elections. He even tried to distort the history of his movement in order to justify the persecution of his followers in the state. The first fissures within the maderista movement in Puebla occurred when Madero formed an alliance with the moderate liberals from Puebla. This bypassed the radical groups represented by Aquiles Serdán. Serdán’s death at the hands of federal troops on 18 November 1910 (Mal de amores, pp. 211–15) triggered more internal divisions.14 Madero had won the election in May 1911 thanks to a combination of lower-class and radical middle-class support. But in government, Madero abandoned his natural

13 Garner, in Porfirio Díaz (London: Longman, 2001), identifies three broad categories in Porfirian historiography: Porfirismo, anti-Porfirismo and neo-Porfirismo. While Porfirismo can be understood as the representation of both Díaz and his regime in a positive light (p. 2), anti-Porfirismo emphasizes the authoritarianism and tyranny of a regime which distorted Mexico’s nineteenth-century liberal traditions (p. 6). For Garner the latter interpretation contributed to the mythification of the Revolution (p. 5). Neo-Porfirismo, the latest trend in historiographical orthodoxy, refers to the benevolent reinterpretation of the Díaz era. This re-evaluation coincides with current social and political trends in Mexico with its neoliberal endorsement of foreign investment, and an economy policy based on exports, hallmarks of Porfirian policy before 1910. Díaz did in fact achieve many things for his country such as great material development and national consolidation by maintaining order and stability in a nation defined by its dual political culture of authoritarianism and liberalism (pp. 222–9). The immediate demise of the porfiriato can be attributed to its own internal contradictions and tyrannical strategies seen by many as undemocratic and detrimental to the nation’s interest (p. 229). 14 See Wil Pansters, ‘Mexico and Puebla: a Historical Introduction’, in Politics and Power in Puebla: the Political History of a Mexican State, 1937–1987, Latin American Studies (Amsterdam: CEDLA, 1990), p. 39.

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supporters and sought to establish an outdated concept of democracy in a country which was experiencing the unsettling impact of socio-economic modernization (LaFrance, p. 242). The seeds of the Revolution’s own destructive impulse were evident before its actual outbreak (LaFrance, p. 237). In Mal de amores, both Milagros and Diego are sceptical about the prospects of meaningful change under the leadership of Madero. Diego wonders whether the candidacy of Madero with his ‘sueños espiritistas’ (p. 114) will ever succeed. For her part, Josefa believes – rather naively – that he will succeed because he looks like a man of peace: ‘porque tiene cara y actitud de paz’ (p. 114). Diego is appalled that his wife can be deceived by appearance and links her superficial approach to history with her superficial second-guessing of literary plots: ‘yo he reconocido siempre el talento con que puedes adivinar la trama de una novela, pero esto es distinto, no lo rige la lógica de la literatura en que tú eres experta: Madero va a perder’ (p. 115). It is rather ironic that he too is anticipating Madero’s failure. Diego expresses the view that the course of history can be manipulated and believes that the old dictator might intervene as he had in the past when General Reyes posed a threat to his power: porque Díaz quiso impresionar a un periodista gringo diciéndole cosas como que él acogería como un signo del cielo el hecho de que en su país surgiera un partido de oposición. [. . .] les duró poco el gusto [. . .] Díaz llamó a Reyes, Reyes [. . .] Negó su candidatura [. . .] Como premio le quitaron el gobierno de Nuevo León y lo mandaron a Europa a aprender nuevas técnicas de guerra. Es un zorro el famoso presidente Díaz. (pp. 115–16)

Madero quickly gained the reputation of being a poor leader. Mastretta describes his electoral campaign in Mal de amores as an ‘espectáculo’ (p. 221) where ‘los vivas a Madero corrían como un jolgorio y todo era un bullicio sin orden y sin tregua’ (p. 223). Mastretta subordinates his visit – ‘Madero cruzó el aire unos minutos’ (p. 225) – to the melodramatic encounter between Emilia and Daniel which she describes with some irony: hasta Rivadeneira y su cámara quedaron envueltos en la euforia de tanta gente celebrando una esperanza. Nada era cierto todavía, más que el futuro. De ahí para adelante estaban solo los límites de un sueño, y por entonces pocos imaginaban que nada es tan limitado como un sueño que se cumple. (pp. 225–26)

Despite his landslide triumph, Madero was soon faced with revolt. Daniel, ‘harto de representar la tibieza maderista’ (p. 263) joins the opposition to a government which was not fulfilling its promises of change: No querían una paz de a mentiras, no podían salirle a su gente con que tras tanto muerto y tanto grito, los peones seguirían siendo peones y las haciendas tendrían los mismos dueños. No había palabra, ni mensaje, ni orden con los que convencer a los campesinos de quedarse conformes y en las mismas. (p. 263)

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These groups contributed to the continuation of the violent struggle in Mexico until the end of the Revolution in 1917, leaving the nation exhausted and disillusioned.

‘Arráncame la vida’ Arráncame la vida is set in Puebla in the 1930s and 1940s.15 Following the demise of Francisco Madero in 1913, Mexico became embroiled in a bloody power struggle marked by shifting alliances and competing ideologies under the leadership of Lascuráin, Huerta, Carbajal, Carranza and others. During the early and late twenties there was an atmosphere of instability caused by the fact that the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 failed to satisfy the needs of the majority of Mexicans. The late 1920s through to the 1940s is marked by widespread disillusion with the institutionalization of the Revolution. Some reforms were implemented which complied with the rules of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917 such as those concerning land reform, but there remained much public cynicism about the revolution and its capacity to achieve meaningful social changes. Towards the end of the 1920s tensions between regional and federal power groups increased (Pansters, p. 41). The Cárdenas presidency (1934–40) implemented far-reaching social and political reforms but was itself not immune to corruption. President Cárdenas’s large-scale political reforms facilitated significant changes in agricultural policy. In the early 1940s Mexico was experiencing the process of modernization and industrialization. According to Pansters, the ‘sociopolitical transformations of the 1930s laid the foundation for the succeeding economic “miracle”, which in turn contributed to the consolidation and stability of the political system during the post-war period’ (p. 77).16 Nevertheless under Cárdenas, organized labour was manipulated by the government whose expropri15 It is of no surprise that Mastretta has chosen the mythification of the institutional Revolution of the 1930s and 1940s as a central point of reference for Arráncame la vida. Although the novel was published almost 45 years after the events described in the text, the legacy of the Mexican Revolution was still felt in the 1980s in Mexico. In the 1980s land redistribution programmes were planned as a result of the Revolution but still were not fully enacted. Living standards in Mexico were falling and social inequality was increasing. Under President de la Madrid (1982–1988), attempts to liberalize the economy were sincere but ineffective and his promise to promote political reform and to open up the prevalent authoritarian system came to nothing. The year 1987 was the last year of de la Madrid’s sexenio and in both political and economic terms, his last months in office were tumultuous. By the end of the 1980s the PRI had been in power for over 60 years and undemocratic practices such as vote rigging continued unchecked. The military remained a powerful institution, but political leadership was transferred to lawyers and professional politicians. Corruption and murder were an intrinsic part of the political machine. 16 Decisions taken at that time affected the future direction and orientation of Mexico’s economic and social development – as Héctor Aguilar Camín has pointed out: ‘Lo que llamamos hoy el Milagro Mexicano fue una mezcla eficaz de dominación política tradicional —-clientelar, paternal, centralizada, autoritaria– puesto al servicio de un proyecto económico particularmente exitoso——modernizador, industrial, urbano, capitalista.’ Aguilar Camín quoted

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ation of the foreign oil companies had resulted in damaging repercussions. Many foreign countries broke off diplomatic links with Mexico. But Cárdenas managed to pay his debts – thanks to the contributions of the masses in Mexico which included workers giving away part of their modest wages and women donating jewellery. Even the Church, with its history of hostility towards the government, approved of this national fund-raising effort. This event is powerfully depicted in Arráncame la vida (p. 56). There was much resentment towards foreigners at this time and antiyanquismo became an important literary theme. The socio-political commotion at national level between 1920 and 1940 was reflected in the regions. Maximino Ávila Camacho’s governorship heralded a new period of Puebla history in the mid-1930s which came to be known as the era of the cacicazgo avilacamachismo. In 1935, following the deportation of Calles, Cárdenas’s reorganization of jefes militares in order to fortify his position in Mexico led to Maximino Ávila Camacho’s position as the new jefe militar in Puebla in 1935 (Pansters, p. 47). Once Maximino assumed this post he started to reorganize the first layers of what would become a long-lasting power structure. Maximino restructured the military organization and was able to form a rural para-military force which would support him for many years to come. The mid-1930s were marked by many clashes between two political factions, one led by Maximino Ávila Camacho and Gonzalo Bautista Castillo and the other by Gilberto Bosques and Leonides Andrew Almazán, who fought for the nomination of a new governor and senator in the state of Puebla. But the Ávila Camacho clan resorted to questionable practices to remain in power by using the support of various local newspapers and congresses and resorting to violence – a wave of violence against the opposition which resulted in various deaths. Maximino’s nomination as the governor of Puebla was seen by Cárdenas as a powerful strategy for his political stronghold. This of course is connected with the fact that Cárdenas and Maximino’s brother Manuel, who in 1933 had become Official Mayor of the Secretariat of National Defense, had a close relationship. According to Pansters, the personalist relations between avilacamachistas and Cárdenas ironically contradicted the ideals of cardenismo which favoured full-scale institutionalization and bureaucratization. In this respect, Ávila Camacho’s governorship exemplifies some of the excesses of caciquismo since it was marked by continual violence against political adversaries.17

in Claudia Schaefer, Textured Lives: Women, Art, and Representation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992), p. 89. 17 According to Pansters (p. 74) avilacamachismo was marked by ‘a predilection for informal clientelistic networks through the appointment of family members and friends on crucial political positions; the shrewd manipulation of meanings in the avilacamachista discourse and the performance of a mediating role on dealing with the national powerholder (Cárdenas) and the local populace’. Maximino’s governorship represented contradictory ideals and was riddled with nepotism and corruption, but it formed the first stable post-revolutionary power bloc in Puebla. Indeed, following the nomination of Maximino, avilacamachismo would dominate Puebla for the next 35 years.

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Towards the end of the Cárdenas régime in 1940 political power became centralized in Mexico City but the caudillo system survived, as demonstrated by the Ávila Camacho brothers. Like many soldiers, they were looking for power. Both Maximino and Manuel had used their military profession as a steppingstone to political office – a pattern frequently repeated in the post-Cárdenas era. Once in power, Maximino soon started to appoint family and friends to key positions in Puebla and within the party bureaucracy. Maximino abused his power – unlike his brother Manuel who was considered an affable man. He was a womanizer (as was Andrés in Arráncame la vida) who dispensed public funds at will. Maximino prevented many collaborators from building their own clientele so that he might become the most important figure within the clientelistic network. (Pansters, p. 74). His hold on power was consolidated by political control freakery and careful cultivation of his links with the bourgeoisie which were further strengthened by his daughter’s marriage (Pansters, p. 61 and p. 63). In Arráncame la vida, Andrés forces his daughter, Lilia, to marry into an affluent family (Ch. XX). Like many corrupt men in positions of power, Maximino remained immune to journalistic and judicial pressures. Maximino Ávila Camacho helped his brother Manuel to become president of Mexico in 1940. Any semblance of democracy was extinguished by authoritarian, nepotistic rule. Under Ávila Camacho, inflation grew and the affluent bourgeoisie increased their wealth by questionable practices, but the nation moved forward. Mastretta attacks Maximino Ávila Camacho. His unprincipled practices are represented in Arráncame la vida, notably through her portrayal of his fictional counterpart, the unprincipled Andrés Ascencio, who allows no moral consideration to interfere with his ruthless pursuit of power. This will be examined in depth in Chapter Three.

Literary Fathers: The Mexican Revolutionary Novel The critical period of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath runs deeply through the literature of Mexico. The unrest of the Revolutionary period itself deeply influenced writers who tried to capture the great social changes that were taking place around them, and this influence can be felt even today. The novel relating to Mexico’s history often offers an alternative vision to official history as well as being a receptacle for the uncertainties of Mexican consciousness, the testing ground for questions about the identity of Mexican culture. Nowhere is the male domination of Mexican society portrayed more vividly than in the literature, particularly the Revolutionary literature, of the nation. Yet Mastretta’s novels, Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores – similarly to the novels of other contemporary Mexican female writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Silvia Molina – are central to a living literary tradition, drawing their inspiration from the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and from Testimonial writing. Although their feminist perspective is distinctive, their

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work can still be seen as part of this tradition.18 A brief survey of the canonical texts of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel will enable us to contextualize the work of Ángeles Mastretta, whose writing has been heavily influenced by such literary currents as costumbrismo, Romanticism, the Mexican Revolutionary Novel (with its neorealist, testimonial and journalistic techniques) and the New Historical novel. When critics talk about the ‘novel of the Mexican Revolution’ – as John Rutherford points out – their interpretation is usually significantly different from that of other critics.19 For some critics, such as F. Rand Morton, the term Mexican Revolutionary Novel can be applied to any text that embodies the rather vague notion of ‘espíritu de lo mexicano’;20 John Rutherford, on the other hand, gives the term concrete significance, relating it to ‘those basically artistic wideranging prose narratives written by Mexicans which deal in their entirety or in a part of considerable importance with events which took place in Mexico between November 1910 and February 1917’ although they need not ‘necessarily deal with military actions’ (p. 46). Ángeles Mastretta’s novel Mal de amores clearly pertains to this last category, for she focuses almost entirely on the events of the upheaval and although she makes passing historical references to the actual military action, she does not deal with it directly apart from, for example, the assassination of the historical figure Aquiles Serdán (Mal de amores, pp. 209–15). The Mexican Revolution marked the start of new attitudes among novelists which extended far beyond the ‘creolism’ of an earlier generation and helped shape a tradition which would culminate with the great regionalist novels of the 1920s. The Mexican Revolutionary Novel, which dominated the first half of the twentieth century, engages with the question of identity – which is paramount in Mexico, as it is elsewhere in Spanish America (Portal, p. 12). Its focus remains firmly fixed on social injustice while racial, linguistic and geographical diversity

18 In Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (1977), Marta Portal points to the importance of the impact of the Revolution on twentieth-century Mexican fiction: ‘La Revolución Mexicana dio el ser a la novela mexicana del presente siglo, sea ésta revolucionaria o no.’ Marta Portal, Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1977), pp. 15–16. 19 See John Rutherford, Mexican Society During the Revolution: A Literary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 45–6, and ‘The Novel of the Mexican Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: the Twentieth Century, eds R. González Echevarría and E. P. Walker, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), II, 213–26. The Mexican Revolution itself is susceptible to many interpretations, for it was at once an anticlerical, bourgeois, proletarian, social and cultural movement, a power struggle in which ideologies differ. The fact that there were shifting alliances adds to the complexity of the Revolution. As a result of this ambiguity and instability, the Revolution offered writers a wealth of material which could be exploited from different perspectives, which in turn, offer critics the possibility to interpret their works from various angles. 20 See F. R. Morton, Los novelistas de la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Cultura, 1949), pp. 13–25.

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were celebrated as an expression of difference.21 The Revolution changed the social and intellectual climate of the country and the literary response, though often technically limited, was remarkable for drawing inspiration from lived experience rather than exclusively from European sources. In keeping with the style of testimonial narrative, much of the writing is non-literary and therefore confined to the literary margins: documentary modes of writing such as documentation and (occasionally) autobiography leave little room for mythical allusion or for stylistic experimentation. None the less the diversity of the discourses it employs places the Mexican Revolutionary Novel directly in line with postmodern testimonial narratives such as those of Poniatowska and Mastretta. Mastretta’s interest in the Mexican Revolution, in the implications of its institutionalization and in indigenous cultures on the one hand, and her use of both stark dialogue and lyrical description on the other, indicate her broad affinity with the writers of the Mexican Revolution.22 Most critics point to the dominance of ethical questions over aesthetic considerations in pre-1925 texts. It is true that the vast majority of these early novels show little technical awareness but there are, as always, exceptions to the rule such as the pioneering testimonial novel, Los de abajo (1915) by Mariano Azuela (1873–1952). Mexican Modernism offered a strong social message but was also notable for its experimentation, and its use of ambiguity and fantasy. Mariano Azuela’s employment of such techniques foreshadows the works of later Mexican writers, including Ángeles Mastretta.23 After 1925, literature following the Revolution was generally defective in technique. Structure and writers in the main showed little concern with social problems. Indeed, escapist

21

See Jean Franco, ‘Regionalism in the Novel and Short Story’, in An Introduction to Spanish-American literature, 3rd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 193–4. 22 While acknowledging continuities between the various currents of twentieth-century writing, contemporary critics make a clear distinction between the representatives of the Regionalist novel and those authors writing after the 1940s, the decade which marked the emergence of the New Novel. Earlier commentators took the view that the Regionalist novels bore little or no influence on later writing and some critics remain openly dismissive of pre1940 texts. D. P Gallagher, for example, states that the reader is no longer treated like an ‘incompetent simpleton for whom the aim of a novel had to be spelt out on every page. The new novelists rather trust the reader’s intelligence and invite his active participation. He must disentangle the novel’s complexities [. . .] life is puzzling, so why should not a novel be?’ Modern Latin American Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1973), p. 92. Also see Mario Vargas Llosa’s ‘Primitives and Creators’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1968, pp. 1287–8, and Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, eds John Dunkerley et al., Critical Studies in Latin American Culture (London: Verso, 1989), p. 38. For a survey of works up to the late 1940s see J. F. Arias Campoamor, Novelistas de Méjico: esquema de la historia de la novela mejicana (de Lizardi al 1950) (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1952). 23 Although Los de abajo was first published in serial form in El Paso, Texas, Azuela’s subsequent revisions show that, in its final form, it is a carefully planned narrative and anticipates later postmodern writing.

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fiction of the novela rosa variety was soon in the ascendant; perhaps the Revolution was too recent and stirred memories too poignant to be confronted directly. But Mexican writers gradually saw a need to come to terms with social change through a reassessment of the past. With the growing awareness of the importance of ‘the meaning of being Mexican’, sociocultural reassessment began in earnest in 1925 when attention focused on the meaning of lo revolucionario and the concept of a modern literature was seriously debated.24 The ‘afeminamiento’ of literature was linked with the demand to create ‘una literatura “viril” y “mexicana” ’ (Díaz Arciniega, p. 16) representative of Mexico’s immediate sociohistorical and political realities. A deep sense of social responsibility, conditioned by Marxist ideology, had developed in Mexican writing and prevails to this day in Mexican fiction.25 One of the most significant novels in the development of this genre is El águila y la serpiente (1928) (NRM, I, pp. 209–423) by Martín Luis Guzmán (1887–1976). It is an account of revolutionary activity and could best be described as a literary documentary in that Guzmán does not fictionalize his narration and uses the journalistic technique of recording more or less directly the testimonies of various people he encountered. Guzmán’s sustained aesthetic distance permits him to have a clearer vision of recent history, which anticipates the central thrust of testimonial narratives. A direct link between the work of Guzmán and Mastretta’s narrative may be seen in the way in which grand historical events are often subordinated to the personal and private. Mastretta acknowledges her affinity with Guzmán: ‘Yo tengo gran admiración por él por el modo en que cuenta, por el modo en que trivializa la política, y el modo en que la vuelve crucial también, en que sabe que es crucial’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 330). Guzmán is not concerned with actual battles but offers a series of often humorous anecdotes of personal experience of the Revolution. However, as a middle-class writer Guzmán was somewhat removed from the popular feelings and expectations generated by the Revolution.26

24 See V. Díaz Arciniega, Querella por la cultura “revolucionaria” (1925) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1989), p. 16. 25 Brushwood sees social realism as a response to the dissipation of Revolutionary ideals by successive governments which showed greater enthusiasm for political power than for the welfare of the people – at least until the Cárdenas era. This naturally led to the disenchantment of Revolutionaries and writers who increasingly turned to introspection and social analysis. See J. S Brushwood, Mexico in its Novel: A Nation’s Search for Identity (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), p. 202. 26 Another important author of the Mexican Revolutionary tradition is Rafael F. Muñoz (1899–1972) whose employment of journalistic, biographical and Bildungsroman techniques (Se llevaron el cañón para Bachimba (NRM, II, pp. 781–856) (1941)), his linear chronological account of events, his use of popular discourse and the collective perspective (¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (NRM, II, pp. 691–778)) and the greater psychological depth he gives his characters all foreshadow the techniques employed by testimonial writers such as Elena Poniatowska and Ángeles Mastretta.

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Many authors of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel questioned the relevance of a Revolution which had had little impact on a corrupt society in which disadvantage and depravation appeared to be worse than ever (Rutherford 1971, p. 67). Mastretta, as we have already seen, is also concerned with portraying a less than idealistic picture of the Mexican Revolution and its frequently devastating effect on the middle- and lower-classes. According to John Rutherford, the negative vision offered by the novelists of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel could be attributed to the exhaustion of the Revolution as a viable literary topic in the 1940s (1996, p. 225). However, the prevalence of the Revolution in subsequent prose fiction indicates otherwise. Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (1947) signals a continuing interest in the topic of the Mexican Revolution.27 Critics have drawn attention to its innovative techniques in the style of Faulkner, Joyce and Dos Passos, which foreshadow the experimentation of the Boom generation. Sexuality versus religion, temptation versus chastity, basic human instincts versus social taboo are relatively fresh thematic configurations all treated by Yáñez. Foreshadowing a recurrent theme found in Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores, Yáñez portrays the quest for sexual freedom and the desire to adopt an uninhibited life style linked to the yearning for political change.28 In this sense Yáñez might be seen as setting the standard in the literary depiction of the revolution: short-term pessimism is not allowed to obscure the more positive long-term prospects. As we shall see in Chapters Four and Five, though manifestly judicious of the Revolution, the optimism in Mal de amores derives from the hopes for change that the Revolution will bring. Later writers who have enriched the Mexican Revolutionary Novel include Juan Rulfo (1918–86) and Carlos Fuentes (1928). Rulfo’s El llano en llamas (1953) and Pedro Páramo (1955) together with Carlos Fuentes’ La región más trasparente (1958) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) introduce greater experimentation, including archetypal patterning and stream of consciousness.29 27 See A. Yáñez, Al filo del agua, 15th edn (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1978). Marta Portal has classified Yáñez’s work as ‘la otra novela de la Revolución’ (1977, p. 165) since it reflects ‘un nuevo aspecto del nacionalismo [. . .] es una respuesta histórica, acaso inconsciente, a la religión del señor, del conquistador, impuesta a la fuerza, como lo fue la lengua’ (1977, p. 173). Yáñez’s novel is representative of the so-called New Novel which – according to Vargas Llosa – was inaugurated in 1939 with the publication of Juan Carlos Onetti’s El Pozo. See ‘Primitives and Creators’, The Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1968, 1287–8 (p. 1287). The experimental New Novel can be seen as essentially a literary movement which reacted against traditional Realism and conventional representations of reality that were found, for example, in the early Mexican Revolutionary Novel. 28 Indeed, although the Revolution seems to play only a peripheral role, the title – meaning ‘just before the rain’ – suggests the contrary: rain brings more fertile times. See John Hall, ‘A Fuenteovejuna for the Sandinistas?: Some Thoughts on Antonio Skármeta’s La insurrección’, Tesserae, 1: 3 (1995), 337–45 (p. 338). 29 Juan Rulfo: El llano en llamas (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1953) and Pedro Páramo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1955). Carlos Fuentes: La región más transparente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958) and La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1962).

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The works of both these writers concentrate on the historical issues of the Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary years and represent a more pessimistic view than the earlier Mexican Revolutionary novels. They offer a deconstruction of the national myth of Revolution and a critique of post-revolutionary Mexico and are much preoccupied with the theme of Mexican identity, which had been theorized by Octavio Paz (1914–1998) in his El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Texts which continue the Mexican Revolution tradition in the sixties include Los relámpagos de agosto (1964) by Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1928–1983)30 and José Trigo (1966) by Fernando del Paso (1935–).31 Ibargüengoitia introduces an element of originality and ‘freshness’ to the theme of Revolution. Rather than depicting the failure of Revolution in the mode of Fuentes and his predecessors, Ibargüengoitia adopts a more playful Post-Boom approach in his caricature of the Mexican Revolution. The novel is described as ‘el reverso humorístico de la novela de la Revolución’ in the introductory note to the 1964 edition of Los relámpagos de agosto which questions the heroic status which many of the revolutionary leaders have since acquired. Ibargüengoitia’s carnivalesque exaggeration and his trivialization of politics foreshadow the often playful PostBoom approach of Ángeles Mastretta as seen in Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores. As we shall see further on (pp. 78–83), female testimonial novels such as Arráncame la vida and Elena Poniatowska’s Hasta no verte Jesús mío may have emerged partly in response to Ibargüengoitia’s sardonic views of the possible ideas and causes behind the Revolution.

Literary Mothers and Daughters: Dissonant Women Disrupt Male History The corpus of Mexican Revolutionary texts has been produced in the main by male writers. Nevertheless, there are many female writers who have also written, and continue to write, on such wide-ranging issues as the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Many of the texts produced by Mexican female writers manifest broad similarities with the Mexican Revolutionary Novel, particularly in its

30

Jorge Ibargüengoitia, Los relámpagos de agosto (Barcelona: Argos Vergara, 1964). For an analysis of Del Paso’s work see Marta Portal’s Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (1977, pp. 237–47) and Robin W. Fiddian’s The Novels of Fernando del Paso (Gainesville: University of Florida, 2000). Del Paso’s novels are particularly interesting since they exemplify various New Historical features which can be seen as a possible influence on Mastretta’s own works. Mastretta clearly shows a strong interest in Del Paso’s work as indicated in her interwiew with the author in ‘Ecos del imperio: Una conversación de Fernando del Paso y Ángeles Mastretta’ in 1989 published in Nexos. See http://www.nexos.com.mx/archivo_nexos, Nexos Virtual, July 1989: no. 138. (accessed 4:30 pm, 23 Dec. 2001). In addition to crime fiction, testimonial narrative and women’s writing, the New Historical novel emerged in Latin America as an important feature in the 1980s, represented by Fernando del Paso’s monumental Noticias del imperio (1987). Among the novels written in the same tradition are El general en su laberinto (1989) by García Márquez (b.1928) and Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores (1996). 31

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ideological and historical outlook. However they differ in the way they feminize the historical space. Adriana Litwin applies this term specifically to Mal de amores, but it can be applied to the vast majority, if not to all, of the texts written by Mexican female writers to be discussed in this section. Mal de amores feminizes the national historical space which, according to Rivera Villegas, ‘ha sido construido, representado y sacralizado por sus respectivas sociedades patriarcales’.32 Rivera Villegas uses the term feminizar as a means of demonstrating that writers such as Mastretta, Poniatowska and others ‘privilegian la psicología, las experiencias y la conducta del ser femenino para representar literariamente un aspecto histórico, cuya representación ha sido reservada exclusivamente para la supuesta seriedad y profesionalismo crítico de la cultura masculina’ (p. 9). Villegas refers to an interview with Adriana Litwin where Mastretta considers the issue concerning female power: ‘Yo creo que lo que pasa es que hay que impregnar de algo femenino el espacio público. Se van volviendo mejores cuando esto sucede a tanto mujeres como hombres.’33 Later in the same interview, Mastretta echoes the views she expressed to me about the feminist dictum that the private is the public and the personal the political: hay que llevar lo privado al mundo público; los hombres no expresan con facilidad sus emociones, no dudan en voz alta, no temen en voz alta, no lloran ostensiblemente. Yo creo que a la vida pública le hace falta eso, nos hace falta que quienes gobiernen duden, así serían más democráticos los gobiernos. (Villegas, p. 46, n. 1)

History has typically been the sphere appropriated by male writing where women ‘sólo aparecen representando un papel ínfimo y desfigurado por estereotipos y arquetipos que difuminan su realidad histórica’ (Villegas, p. 37). But female culture remains pivotal in the construction and reconstruction of history. From this perspective: la mujer, como agente socializadora, es manipulada por las fuerzas progresistas y liberales de su nación para transmitir los esquemas y los programas ideológicos que adelantan la causa política de la cultura patriarcal en cuestión. De ahí [. . .] se convierten (las mujeres) en historiadoras comunales y nacionales, no privilegiadas por la oficialidad masculina pero sumamente necesarias para la formación cultural de los ciudadanos. Sin embargo, además de llevar a cabo la tarea de criar patriotas, muchas mujeres han dedicado su vida a causas políticas, que las han llevado a cruzar la frontera de lo privado hacia lo público. Es aquí cuando se inicia el conflicto que enfrenta contra la cultura patriarcal

32 Carmen M. Rivera Villegas, ‘Las mujeres y la Revolución Mexicana en Mal de amores de Ángeles Mastretta’, Letras Femeninas, 24: 1–2 (1998), 37–48 (p. 37). 33 Rivera Villegas (p. 46, note 1) and Adriana Litwin’s interview with Mastretta entitled ‘Lo privado y lo público según Ángeles Mastretta’. La feria del Libro de Buenos Aires, May 10, 1997, http//www.bigital.com (Last accessed: 20 Dec. 2004).

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nacionalista ya que para ésta la mujer tiene que hacer patria pero desde la casa. (Villegas, p. 38)

As Villegas indicates, the Mexican Revolutionary Novel is representative of lo mexicano and employs the stereotypical concept of woman as the vehicle for the transmission of ideological discourse. The central characters of these male writers are habitually male and very few writers – with the exception of Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Elena Poniatowska, Laura Esquivel and now Ángeles Mastretta – have focused on women’s experience in revolutionary and post revolutionary Mexico. In the past, historical narratives have focused solely on the exploits of men and ignored the female contribution. However, recent publications have gone some way towards correcting this imbalance, as will be seen. Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho: Relatos de la lucha en el norte de México (1931, NRM, I, p. 929) is the best-known female revolutionary novel of the 1930s.34 Campobello (1909–1986) narrates from the perspective of an innocent child (as does Rafael F. Muñoz) the events of the upheaval. Nellie Campobello can be seen as the outstanding precursor of testimonial writers such as Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Ángeles Mastretta. Cartucho has strong testimonial features – oral narrative based on lived experience of the Mexican Revolution told from a first-person perspective (a child). The prominence accorded to a marginal figure anticipates the New Historical practice. As Rutherford remarks (‘The Novel of the Mexican Revolution’, p. 223) the artistic power of the novel lies in the juxtaposition of the violence of the Revolution and innocence which is achieved through brief, matter-of-fact descriptions of the war and the memories of the female narrator as a child. Furthermore, the fragmented voices in Cartucho, which Campobello recorded from the testimonies of people who lived through the upheaval, foreshadows the testimonial techniques employed by Castellanos in Balún Canán (1957). Cartucho’s employment of the first-person narrative not only represents the individual ‘I’, the child Nellie, but as Doris Meyer points out, the Mexican pueblo.35 An important aspect of Cartucho (as of Muñoz’s ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! and Se llevaron el cañón para 34 Nellie Campobello is the only woman writer of the Mexican Revolutionary tradition to be included in official volumes such as J. Rutherford’s ‘The Novel of the Mexican Revolution’, in The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature: The Twentieth Century, 3. vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), II, 213–26. 35 Doris Meyer, ‘The Dialogics of Testimony: Autobiography as Shared Experience in Nellie Campobello’s Cartucho’, in Latin American Women’s Writing: Feminist Readings in Theory and Crisis, eds Anny Brooksbank Jones and Catherine Davies, Oxford Hispanic Studies (Oxford: Calderon Press, 1996), pp. 46–65 (p. 53). Meyer observes that through the work’s multiple perspectives, Campobello ‘colectivizes her testimony and shares the narrative function with others. The true protagonist thus becomes the pueblo’ (p. 53). Such collectivization of the narrative voice is not found in Arráncame la vida nor indeed in Mal de amores, although the latter work does represent the voice of the pueblo, notably in its treatment of the soldaderas.

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Bachimba) is that it often diverts attention from ‘official’ history, dominated by great historical figures such as Villa or Madero, to the story of ‘ordinary’ people. In her narrative, Campobello repeatedly refers to alternative versions of historical events, and her emphasis on the multifaceted nature of reality anticipates postmodern writing. Her personalization of history links Campobello to Mastretta. Texts produced by female writers on the topic of Revolution prior to Campobello’s pioneering work are limited.36 Their texts, like Campobello’s, show little interest in feminist issues. Rather, like many of the early Mexican Revolution novelists, these female authors were intent on portraying the Mexican Revolution as they had experienced it and portraying the psychological impact of the upheaval on the pueblo rather than on the individual. Their lack of interest in feminist matters may be linked to the fact that between 1850 and 1950 Mexican feminism had little impact on traditional attitudes towards women.37 Until very recently Mexican feminists had to fight against severe odds in order to modify the role of women, and enable them to contribute more significantly to society and politics. Previously their influence was limited to the ‘narrow yet crucial sphere of the home’ (Macías, p. xiii). Various factors explain the limited impact of Mexican feminism on women and writers. Machismo is of course one of the main problems (Macías, p. xiii). Mexican sociologist, María Elvira Bermúdez, states that ‘if Spain has her Don Juan, and England her Othello, Mexico has her machos. And these, without a doubt, are more punctilious than Othello and less suitable than Don Juan’.38 Women, have accepted their role as ‘champions of suffering’, passively allowing their men to play a dominant and domineering role.39 Although women in Mexico started at the beginning of the twentieth century to fight for suffrage approximately at the same time as their North American and European counterparts, they encountered various events and obstacles which frustrated the accomplishment of feminist objectives and the development of a strong feminist movement.40 During the porfiriato regime, women had few

36 Other women who have written on the subject of Revolution include: María Enriqueta Camarillo de Pereyra, Rosa de Castaño and Magdalena Mondragón. De Castaño’s work is notable for its costumbrista description of regional customs. 37 See Anna Macías, Against All Odds: The Feminist Movement in Mexico to 1940, Contributions in Women’s Studies (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. xiii. 38 Anna Macías (p. 3) and María Elvira Bermúdez, La vida familiar del mexicano, México y lo mexicano, 20 (México: Antigua Librería Robredo, 1955), p. 86. 39 Anna Macías (p. 3) and Juana Armanda Alegría, Psicología de las mexicanas (México: Editorial Samo, 1974), p. 180. In the 1880s the Mexican church discouraged feminism for it was seen as destructive of traditional values. Between 1900 and 1930 women received almost no support from the government and the national leaders were indifferent to feminism or suspicious of it because of prevailing machismo (Macías, p. xiv). 40 In 1904 women started to organize themselves. The publication of feminist journals such as Mujer Mexicana (1904) which demanded greater educational opportunities for women and an end to the sexual double standards, also helped raise female consciousness. Although

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political rights. Male opponents assumed politics would continue to be an exclusively male preserve and saw women as too emotional and therefore too politically unreliable. Political activity would corrupt women and impede their duties as wives and mothers (Macías, p. 153).41 The Mexican Revolution, however, was to have a significant impact on the growing feminist cause.42 In ‘Women and the Mexican Revolution: 1910–20’, Macías alludes to a Mexican census in 1910 indicating that females made up only 8.8 per cent of the economically active population (p. 60).43 The Revolution however gave women the incentive to participate actively in the economic development of the country. The vital role women played in the Revolution contributed to the emergent feminist cause which started to take shape towards the end of the nineteenth century. A large number of peasant and lower urban class women became soldaderas, and participated in the military struggle. Even middle- and upper-class women became involved in the anti-porfirista movement. Turner explains the impact of female participation: ‘la técnica militar permitió que la mujer portara armas sin dificultad y es así como las soldaderas vinieron a pelear al lado de los hombres en los ejércitos revolucionarios’ (p. 603). Other women who were not in the front line also contributed indirectly. They worked as doctors, journalists, teachers, secretaries, spies, weapon smugglers and businesswomen proving themselves to be as strong as any man: ‘los avances asociados con la Revolución Industrial le proporcionaron un sinnúmero de empleos detrás de las líneas, y en ellos probó ser tan capaz como el hombre’ (p. 603). Emilia (Mal de amores) contributes to the revolutionary cause through her work as a doctor. Her contribution to the struggle often overshadows that of her novio, Daniel, as will be shown in Chapter Four. In spite of the predominance of machismo, some revolutionary leaders encouraged women’s participation in the Revolution. In their desire to abolish

there was considerable support for feminist ideals and some legislative effort to improve women’s position in Mexican society, the full recognition of women as equal citizens proved elusive. According to Accettola, one of the prime reasons that Mexican women were denied the right to vote was the belief, or rather excuse, of the strong anti-clerical Revolutionary leaders that the Catholic Church would control the government through its female support (p. 1). It was not until 1927, however, that women achieved legal equality with men. See Jennifer. R. Accettola, ‘La flor de un sexenio: Women in Contemporary Politics’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Tulane, 1995; Dissertation Abstracts, 1995, 1376436, http://www.planetx.org, (Last accessed: 10 Sept. 2004), p. 1. 41 But many women themselves were not in favour of female enfranchisement. The press ridiculed feminism and feminist activities were virtually ignored. Most Mexican feminists were middle-class and had to work for a living. They neither had the means nor the time to devote themselves to organizing a feminist movement or raising female consciousness (Macías, Against All Odds, p. xv). 42 According to Turner, the Revolution changed the whole social structure and the nature of nationalism. See Frederic C. Turner: ‘Los efectos de la participación femenina en la revolución de 1910’, Historia Mexicana, 16: 61–4 (1966–67), 603–20. 43 See Anna Macías, ‘Women and the Mexican Revolution, 1910–1920’, Americas, 37:1 (1981), 53–82 (p. 60).

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Porfirismo and incorporate liberal values in Mexican society, the revolutionary leaders promised women equal rights and privileges in recognition of their important participation in the upheaval (Turner, p. 608). They also promulgated laws which would support women by eradicating practices such as prostitution. As depicted in Mal de amores, the effects of the Revolution on women were not always positive: hundreds of women of every class were among the rape and casualty victims of the upheaval (Turner, p. 617). After the Mexican Revolution, the Constitution of 1917 gave little consideration to political rights of women but Carranza’s divorce decree of 1915 had at least improved women’s legal status (Accettola, p. 8). In practice, however, women remained dependent on their husbands, as the case of Catalina (Arráncame la vida) indicates. In the 1920s and 1930s several Mexican states allowed women to vote and hold office at municipal level. During the Lázaro Cárdenas régime (1934–40), women played important roles in national political life (Accettola, p. 9). In Arráncame la vida, Mastretta talks about about women who are depicted as having little say in public life. It offers quite a faithful representation of the historical circumstances of women in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s. Nevertheless Mastretta alludes briefly in Arráncame la vida to women’s right to vote at municipal level: ‘En casi todos los estados las mujeres no tenían ni el pendejo derecho al voto que Carmen Serdán había ganado en Puebla. Por primera vez éramos la avanzada, así que el 7 de julio amanecí más elegante que nunca’ (p. 107). Although in this instance Catalina knows that her husband’s associate Fito will win the elections, she votes for the opposition, as a means of opposing her husband and expressing her independence (p. 107). It is only in the past forty years or so that women’s participation in the Revolution has become recognized as an important factor contributing to social change. According to Turner the origins of Mexican feminism have been traced – belatedly – to women’s participation in the revolutionary struggle. Mujeres de todas las clases sociales en México de hoy consideran a la Revolución de 1910 como la iniciadora de sus derechos políticos y de su emancipación social. [. . .] Estudios sobre la psicología de la mujer mexicana que enfatizan su pasividad, sumisión y obediencia familiar, describen no obstante su osadía y encuentran en la Adelita y la Valentina, heroínas legendarias de la lucha revolucionaria, la esencia de la feminidad mexicana. (p. 616)

The incorporation of women in the military campaign helped them assume positions of responsibility in many fields traditionally reserved for men (Turner, p. 616). Since 1953 – when they were granted equal rights and privileges of citizenship – women have been making their mark on Mexican politics (Accettola, p. 1). Today, women enjoy the right to vote and to divorce and their presence in the workforce has encouraged changes in social attitudes. There are growing numbers of women with degrees in politics and law who are playing a full part in the professional life of the nation. However the cult of machismo, which has hindered social change and renewal throughout Latin America, persists in Mexico.

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Even today, women who do not marry suffer social stigma. Gender prejudices have proved resistant to change and domestic violence is still commonplace, particularly in working class households. While male involvement in extra marital affairs is tolerated, no such indulgence is shown to women who transgress in the same way. Nevertheless, patriarchy’s configuration of Mexican history has been disturbed, changed by a recent awareness of women’s presence and recognition of their contributions. This recognition can be attributed in part to Mexican feminist writers who are at pains to write women into history and to celebrate women’s emancipation during and after the Revolution. The work of Elena Garro (1920–1998) Mexican novelist, journalist and dramatist, and an established Boom writer, continues the main thrust of the Mexican revolutionary novel. Garro’s influence on writers such as Poniatowska, Mastretta, Molina and Esquivel runs deep, particularly her playful and parodic inversion of gender roles. Like Rosario Castellanos, Garro has signalled new directions in women’s writing by offering female alternatives to history. In the vein of many of the Mexican Revolutionary novels, Garro’s work offers a poignant social focus by highlighting the failure of the Revolution and exposing the opportunism of political power. Garro’s masterpiece, Los recuerdos del porvenir (1963), can be seen as an important precursor of the feminist and New Historical currents as exemplified in the work of Poniatowska, Molina and Mastretta.44 In Los recuerdos del porvenir, historical event often takes second place to more personal situations such as Julia’s unrequited love for General Francisco Rosas. Other examples are seen in the way Calles’ desire for re-election is mentioned ‘casi con frivolidad’ (p. 98). This technique is frequently exploited by Mastretta in Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores, where the political is relegated to the margins in favour of depicting the private lives of the characters. Garro’s female characters keep alive the individual and collective memory of the past – as do Mastretta’s women in Mujeres de ojos grandes (p. 186) and Mal de amores (p. 261) – although their scant contribution to female emancipation, aligns them rather with Castellanos’s ineffectual female characters.45

44 Los recuerdos del porvenir is an intricate novel which tells the story of reality and unreality surrounding the town of Ixtepec which speaks of itself in the first-person. The protagonist in Los recuerdos del porvenir is not an individual but rather the town and the novel can be seen as an early example of ‘feminine magical realism’ – to be developed later by writers such as Isabel Allende. Garro’s work enriches the Mexican Revolutionary Novel as well as magical realism. The villagers of Itxtepec are anti-revolutionary and are literally caught in a time warp: Garro uses fantasy to make serious historical points. For an examination of the magical realist and New Historical techniques employed by Garro, see Daniel Balderston, ‘The New Historical Novel: History and Fantasy in Los recuerdos del porvenir’, BHS, 66 (1989), 41–46, (p. 42). Balderston argues that the novel is groundbreaking in its use of the fantastic to undermine historicity. 45 Stephen Hart also sees Garro’s novel, like the short stories of Rosario Castellanos, as holding out little hope for the female cause. In Los recuerdos del porvenir, women seem to be destined to be the losers in the gender conflict. See White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century

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Rosario Castellanos (1925–74) also continues the tradition of the Mexican revolutionary novel in her pessimistic views regarding the institutionalized Revolution and her concern with social issues such as indigenismo as we see in Balún Canán (1957).46 Balún Canán provides the link between earlier writing and the work of the Boom generation. Its social preoccupations anticipate the works of Garro, Poniatowska, Mastretta and Esquivel. She records the voices of the marginalized and the injustices they suffer as a result of the betrayal of revolutionary values. Castellanos’s direct experience of life in the indigenous communities makes her testimony more ‘authentic’, although her vision is enriched by her own brand of magical realism reminiscent of Juan Rulfo.47 Castellanos, whose literary influence extended well beyond the frontiers of Mexico, stressed that the role of literature should not be purely aesthetic, but should have an important social and moral dimension. It should contribute, for example, to the liberation of women whose ways of life were often ‘forms of death’.48 The writing of Castellanos can be seen as a riposte to the female stereotypes found in both the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950), foreshadowing the concerns of writers such as Laura Esquivel and Ángeles Mastretta. According to Furnival: ‘if Octavio Paz was one of the first to draw attention to the masked nature of the Mexican character, then Castellanos was one of the first to show in her fiction and nonfiction alike that those masks were very suffocating indeed for women’ (p. 54).49

Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America, Támesis, Serie A: Monografías, 156 (London and Madrid: Támesis, 1993), and Cary Nelson, ‘Men, Feminism: The Materiality of Discourse’, in Men in Feminism, eds Alice Jardine and Paul Julian Smith (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 153–72 (p. 162). 46 Balún Canán focuses primarily on the lives of women, especially of Indians and mestizas. The focus on the marginalized indigenous Other is an important link between Castellanos and Mastretta. In Balún Canán, women transmit oral Indian history from generation to generation. The Indian nana’s stories transmit indigenous cultural knowledge and memory which serve as a counterpoint to the ‘official’ authoritative versions of history inculcated in the young Castellanos by her parents and teachers. In Ángeles Mastretta’s Mal de amores, Emilia Sauri’s mother and aunt, Milagros, pass on indigenous popular knowledge to their daughter which counters the ‘masculine’ (political and medical) knowledge Emilia’s father transmits to her (Mal de amores, p. 27). In Mastretta’s Mujeres de ojos grandes, the bigeyed aunts transmit female values and memories which permit the next generation of women to survive oppressive behavioural norms and to see beyond patriarchal restrictions (p. 187). 47 Other works by Castellanos, where the focus continues to be centred on the Mexican Revolution seen in the short stories of Album de familia, expose the sexism, racism and opportunism that persisted in Mexico’s post-Revolutionary ‘utopia’ (Furnival, p. 53). 48 See See Joanna O’Connell, Prospero’s Daughter: The Prose of Rosario Castellanos, Texas Pan American Series (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 81. 49 See Chloe Furnival, ‘Confronting Myths of Oppression: the Short Stories of Rosario Castellanos’, in Knives and Angels: Women Writers in Latin America, ed. Susan Bassnett (London: Zed Books, 1990), pp. 52–73 (p. 53). Castellanos’s collection of essays, entitled Mujer que sabe latín (1973), constitutes a powerful indictment of female inequality: history has been exclusively reserved for the male voice – what lies beyond is consigned to the sphere of the mythical and the unknown – (wo)man. However, Mujer que sabe latín is more than a

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Castellanos does not attack the territory of masculinist culture from the outside but smuggles into that very space her own body, her gendered gaze and voice. According to O’Connell, she is a ‘contrabandista’ (p. 35), which recalls Mastretta’s ambivalent portrayal of Catalina Ascencio in Arráncame la vida: Catalina exposes the vulgar superficiality and prejudice of masculine values by incorporating them (with irony) into her own discourse. Castellanos’s women are often complicitous with male power structure as is Catalina in Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida. For Castellanos, as for Mastretta, the male plays the part of the ‘rey de la creación [. . .] El es quien lleva a cabo las empresas comerciales, las conquistas, las exploraciones y las guerras.’50 In spite of the prevalent ironies in Castellanos’s texts, women are passive and content in the domestic sphere and rarely look beyond their horizons. We encounter women in Album de familia (1971) chatting indiscriminately about both serious and frivolous subjects – from the menopause, the pill and food to the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and social justice. The effect is to trivialize the more serious issues, a procedure also used frequently by Mastretta. Women in Castellanos’s books are complicitous in their own misfortune (O’Connell, p. 151).51 Furthermore, in Castellanos’s fiction female sexual consciousness is portrayed fleetingly and is confined to sensual experience.52 Treated like Sor Juana as one of the ‘great exceptions’ – ‘a woman who was a great writer in spite of her gender’ – Rosario Castellanos is a ‘key figure’ in Latin American feminist discourse which re-emerged in the 1970s.53 She may be seen as the founding figure of more recent feminist work by women writers born after

critique: it emphasizes the possibility of women forging an alternative system of values (O’Connell, p. 220). In short, Castellanos’s works raise the reader’s social consciousness by confronting those demeaning myths which reduce Indian women to the level of exotic creatures and represent Mexican women generally as passive beings who are typically content with their subservient position in a male-dominated society. 50 See O’Connell (p. 37) and Rosario Castellanos’s Sobre Cultura Femenina (Mexico City: Ediciones de América, Revista Antológica, 1950), p. 79. 51 In Oficio de tinieblas, Isabel is completely dependent on Cifuentes. He enjoys humiliating her but she is an accomplice in his murder of his foster brother (this again reminds us of Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida and Catalina Guzman’s complicity with her husband who has murdered various rivals including Catalina’s lover Carlos Vives). Isabel’s daughter Idolina senses that the model of female identity offered by her mother depends on female betrayal and humiliation. 52 In ‘Los convidados de agosto’, Emelina takes pleasure in her body, abandoning herself ‘al peligro y al placer’ (O’Connell, p. 184) as she takes a bath. The links with Mastretta’s sexually liberated female characters are evident. But while Mastretta’s female characters escape retribution for their corporeal ‘sins’, all the young female protagonists of ‘los convidados de agosto’ are punished whenever their transfer from the paternal to the marital home is not accomplished smoothly (O’Connell, p. 175). 53 See Joanna O’Connell (Prospero’s Daughter), p. 23; p. 1. For a discussion of Castellanos’s work and her desire for women to construct their own image beyond the terms of patriarchy, see Aurora Ocampo, ‘Rosario Castellanos and the Mexican Woman’, La Palabra y el Hombre, 53 (1985), 101–08 (p. 210).

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the 1930s such as Elena Poniatowska (b. 1933), Brianda Domecq (b. 1942), María Luisa Puga (b. 1944), Silvia Molina (b. 1946), Guadalupe Loaeza (b. 1946) Ángeles Mastretta (b. 1949), Laura Esquivel (b. 1950), and Carmen Boullosa (b. 1954).54 All these writers base their work on strong female protagonists who call into question the female stereotypes identified by Octavio Paz in El laberinto de la soledad (1950). Some of their works also coincide in their radical revisionist history of the Revolution and Post-Revolution seen from the perspective of the marginalized female. Through their female characters, these writers seek to reconstruct history from a feminist perspective and to question how lo mexicano as defined traditionally by male writers has characteristically undervalued female identity: ‘contrario a los novelistas de la revolución, las novelistas centran su trabajo en la cuestión epistemológica, peculiaridad discursiva que distingue a la prosa postmoderna de nuestros días’ (Villegas, p. 39). The feminization of national and revolutionary discourses has led writers such as Poniatowska and Mastretta to speak of the repressed female Other, placing their works in direct line with New Historicism.55 Within this new wave of postmodern writing, Villegas includes ‘la anécdota cotidiana de la mujer en su entorno’ (p. 39) which challenges the traditional ‘fluir histórico que, desde la perspectiva masculina, debe separar el espacio público del privado’ (p. 39). Despite their literary merits, many Mexican women writers born after the 1940s have been classified – to a greater or lesser extent – as ‘popular’ writers of fiction, highlighting their still relatively marginalized position within the Mexican literary establishment.56 In many cases they have received greater recognition abroad.57 54 For an outline of Mexican female writing see Spanish American Women writers: A BioBibliographical Source Book, ed. D. E. Marting (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990) and Gabriela De Beer, ‘Letras mexicanas en su tinta: escritoras mexicanas de hoy’, Nexos Virtual, www.nexos.com.mx/internos/saladelectura, 1994: 199 (Last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004). 55 See Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993). See also Chapter Eight (p. 229, n. 9). 56 Despite their emphasis on ‘light’ issues in their writing, all of the female authors I have mentioned are committed to the social cause of the marginalized Other and some also continue to write on such broad issues as the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. Two relatively recent volumes of the Spanish literary magazine Ínsula devoted to ‘Prosa Mexicana’ (I & II), show little awareness of Mexican female writing. See ‘ “Águila o Sol”: Prosa Mexicana I’, Ínsula, 611 (Nov. 1997) and ‘ “Águila o Sol”: Prosa Mexicana II’, 618–19 (June–July 1998). 57 See Nuala Finnegan’s ‘ “Light” Women/ “Light” Literature: Women and Popular Fiction in Mexico since 1980’, Donaire, 15 (2000), 18–22 (p. 18). Discussing the negative reception of Mexican women writers, Finnegan alludes to Mexican women writers’ rejection by alluding to the disputes between the literary magazines, Macrópolis and Vuelta in 1992. Finnegan believes that the misogynistic views articulated in ‘Defensa de la literatura difícil’ – Vuelta, 16:188 (July 1992), 11 and 14, are a sign of snobbish disregard for women writers of popular fiction. Long established publishers are suspicious of writers such as Ángeles Mastretta, Guadalupe Loaeza and Laura Esquivel, who offer readability rather than complexity. Indeed, women’s writing continues to be perceived as lightweight despite the increased critical attention devoted to it during the last twenty years. However, the fact that women like Mastretta have received prestigious literary prizes indicates a gradual acceptance of women writers within the critical establishment.

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Both Laura Esquivel and Ángeles Mastretta have in common their interest in the Mexican Revolution from a feminist perspective as well as their best seller status. Como agua para chocolate (1989) by Laura Esquivel is another fascinating Mexican feminist work notable for both its penetrating social critique and for its technical sophistication. Set in the revolutionary period, it focuses on the household of a land-owning family, particularly on the romantic attachments of the sisters. The downside of this novel is that the political import of the novel is muted: the Revolution remains firmly in the background and there is no radical feminist message. Tita may give us the impression that she is the heroine who seeks to rebel against repressive family codes, but actually this rebellion comes from her desire to conform to traditional notions of femininity. Her only desire is to marry Pedro, bear his children and provide appetizing Mexican dishes for her family.58 Perhaps of all of the female authors treated here who deal with the subject of the Mexican Revolution from a feminist perspective, it could be argued that Mastretta provides us with the most affirmative view of the female cause, in spite of some underlying ambiguities. Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores offer a critique of those male discourses, of nationalism and machismo which tarnish the male novel of the Mexican Revolution. As will be shown in depth in Chapters Four and Five, in Mal de amores Mastretta takes the struggle beyond the stage of desultory challenge – as represented in Arráncame la vida – by portraying women who are politically and professionally active, spurred by a strong selfdefined concept of womanhood. As we will see in Chapter Three, in Arráncame la vida, Catalina oscillates between the ‘feminine’ (reflection of male values) and the ‘feminist’ (rebellion against them) (see Chapter One, p. 4, n. 5). Her intellectual independence, though frequently compromised by collusion with Andrés, emerges as a countervailing force to her husband’s unreflecting pursuit of personal power and wealth. Her ambivalence disrupts the univocal world of male power and privilege despite her occasional absorption by them. Emilia of Mal de amores provides a far more substantial counterweight and refuses to adopt the tenets of female ‘propriety’. Her dissonance emerges, for example, in her flagrant transgression of patriarchal law (she sleeps with Daniel in her parents’ house) and subsequently fails to comply with Daniel’s own patriarchal expectations of her by refusing to wait passively for his return from revolutionary activities. Her finest contravention of the patriarchal script comes when she outperforms Daniel by making a more impressive contribution to the Revolutionary cause. By refusing to conform, Mastretta’s women challenge male values and leave their personal mark on history thereby renouncing their previous anonymity: as Gerda Lerner states, they begin to perceive themselves to be part of history.59

58 See Deborah A. Shaw, ‘Laura Esquivel: Mexican Novelist’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), pp. 117–18 (p. 118). 59 See Gerda Lerner, Why History Matters: Life and Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 201.

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Ángeles Mastretta in many ways breaks with the traditional female role in twenty-first-century Mexico. She has a longstanding relationship with a man who is not her husband and a successful career in the Mexican publishing world, which is still predominantly male. Few women enjoy such a privileged position which has provided her with a very powerful voice with which to speak from within the patriarchal system.60 This position has allowed Mastretta to speak of women whose desires and aspirations have been repressed in a male-dominated society. It is clear from the above analysis that the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath left an indelible mark on the nation. It also left a deep impression on Mexican literature, and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel has clearly influenced Mastretta. Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores restore the voices of the past, especially those of women. Mastretta’s exploration of the Revolutionary period and its consequences in the light of female experiences and perspectives coincides with the works of other Mexican women writers who provide a radical revisionist history of the Revolution and Post-Revolution from the perspective of the marginalized female. We now turn to the works of Ángeles Mastretta and to her contribution to Mexican and Latin American literature. The next chapter focuses on Arráncame la vida. Despite the somewhat ambivalent feminist message expressed through Catalina who is depicted as both colluding with, and subverting, corrupt male values, the theme of female power and emancipation is often concomitant with political, cultural and ideological change and progress. Here the central message is that the political is the personal and the personal the political. We will also analyse the importance of Arráncame la vida as representative of testimonial writing, a technique frequently used by writers of the Mexican Revolutionary Novel and by Mastretta’s contemporary female writer Elena Poniatowska. Questions of testimonial narrative as borderland discourse between the documentary and the fictional will be considered in the context of the two main critical approaches to the Testimonial tradition (associated with John Beverley and Elzbieta Sklodowska).

60 See Diane Braun, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Maria Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’. Diss. Florida State U, 1994. Ann Arbor: UMI 1995. 9502800, p. 176.

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Arráncame la vida: The Borders of Fiction and Reality This chapter analyses Mastretta’s first major novel, Arráncame la vida, published in 1985. Although some may wish to see it as merely a popular novel, it has received significant critical acclaim, obtaining the literary prize Premio Mazatlán in the same year as its publication. It has been translated into more than eleven languages and has been analysed in a number of doctoral theses (though relatively few have focused exclusively on Mastretta’s work). Chronological in structure and narrated from the perspective of the protagonist, Catalina, Arráncame la vida offers much more than the traditional story of an unequal marriage. Diane Braun points out that the novel has a binary structure consisting of: two simultaneous and tightly interconnected stories: the official, androcentric history, as backdrop, of Andrés Ascencio and his wife, Catalina, in their upward mobilisation made possible by the Mexican Revolution, from peasantry to political elite; and the other story, that one interjected from Catalina’s point of view. The superimposed story is that of the wife of a military authoritarian leader who is at odds with her privileged position knowing that it is afforded by means of marriage with an assassin. It is the story silenced by the official story.1

In Arráncame la vida, Mastretta delves into Mexico’s tumultuous past by exploring both the Revolutionary and in particular Post revolutionary years of the 1930s and 40s. In this regard, Arráncame la vida is consistent with Seymour Menton’s description of the New Historical Novel as being set in a period prior to that of the author (p. 16). Both Mastretta’s interest in Mexico’s historical past from a feminist standpoint and the author’s preoccupation in recovering the voices of the silenced Other, aligns her with various Mexican female authors such as Nellie Campobello, Elena Garro and Laura Esquivel. Arráncame la vida is a confessional novel narrated by Catalina Guzmán. Mastretta reproduces the historical events of Puebla and the conflicts associated

1 See Diane Braun, ‘Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies in Selected Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Maria Luisa Bombal and Ángeles Mastretta’. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of Florida, 1994. Dissertation Abstracts, 1995, 9502800, pp. 132–3.

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with Maximino Ávila Camacho and the early years of his administration as governor of Puebla, the sexenio of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) and the presidential rule of Maximino’s brother, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46).2 History and politics have often been seen as male spheres of activity but it is now evident that women writers, as Mastretta demonstrates in her novel, can tackle the issue of androcentrism with equal competence: ‘las mujeres pueden perfectamente reproducir en sus producciones culturales una perspectiva androcéntrica’ (Diane Braun, p. 133). Recounting the story of Catalina Guzmán, the wife of Andrés Ascencio, a powerful and corrupt cacique who becomes governor of Puebla, the novel offers a penetrating analysis of a woman searching for a sense of personal identity in a stagnant and corrupt society. Critics situate Mastretta’s work within the broad category of feminist resistance writing which challenges traditional gender roles. In this sense, like Mal de amores, Arráncame la vida is both a feminist and female text.3 We are introduced to Catalina Guzmán from the very start of the novel. She is only fifteen when she is wrenched from her innocent childhood and family, and married to the corrupt Andrés Ascensio. Married life is initially a novelty but she soon becomes disenchanted. She hears gossip from the local puebleños about her husband which indicates that he is not only a womanizer but a murderer. Motherhood becomes a burden particularly since Andrés brings to their household children from his previous marriages. Catalina resists her husband’s authority both by investigating his political manoeuvers and by having affairs with other men. She employs subtle and often surreptitious strategies to win a measure of personal freedom. In this chapter the interrelation between the public and private spheres and the inversion of patriarchal nationalist discourses in Arráncame la vida will be examined. Unlike the case of Emilia in Mal de amores, in Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s activities are largely confined to the private sphere, though she is sometimes drawn into the corrupt public domain. However in both novels the development of both female protagonists coincides with the socio-political awakening of a nation and its gradual disillusionment with a corrupt government. The first section of this chapter entitled Fiction and Mexican Reality: The Characters explores the role of the most significant characters and their impact on Catalina’s personality and development. Mastretta treats fact and fiction on an equal footing: thus historical characters share the same reality as fictitious characters. As we have already noted, Andrés Ascencio, the narrator’s husband, is a fictional portrayal of Maximino, governor of Puebla between 1937 and 1941, and his wife Margarita Ricardi may have served to inspire, at least in part, Mastretta’s portrayal of Catalina Guzmán. There are references to other historical figures such as Madero, Huerta and the journalist Juan Soriano. Once again

2 See Chapter Two (pp. 30–32) for details of Maximino Ávila Camacho’s governorship and avilacamachismo in general. 3 See Chapter One, p. 4, n. 5 for Elaine Showalter’s definition of ‘feminist’ and ‘female’.

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Mastretta’s writing can be aligned with New Historical writing which is characterized – as Seymour Menton remarks – by the novelistic interaction of historical and fictional characters.4 In the second section of this chapter entitled Testimonial Narrative, I will continue to explore the often problematic interrelation between fact and fiction by placing the study of Arráncame la vida in the context of testimonial narrative, a unique mode of writing which interweaves historical and fictional discourses, undermining the validity of those binary oppositions (truth/falsehood) upon which the order of patriarchal logic is built.

Fiction and Mexican Reality: The Characters Arráncame la vida centres on two characters, the protagonist, Catalina Guzmán, and her husband Andrés Ascencio. There are frequent references to peripheral characters such as Catalina’s family, but Catalina has little time for them. Her own children, Verania and Checo, are supplemented by Andrés’s progeny from earlier liaisons: Octavio, Adriana, Virginia, Lilia, Marcela and Marta. His unthinking assumption that Catalina will take charge of them causes considerable resentment: quería ser cualquiera sin un marido dedicado a la política, sin siete hijos apellidados como él, salidos de él, suyos mucho antes que míos, pero encargados a mí durante todo el día y todos los días con el único fin de que él apareciera de repente a felicitarse por lo guapa que se estaba poniendo Lilia, lo graciosa que era Marcela, lo bien que iba creciendo Adriana, lo estiloso que se peinaba Marta o el brillo de los Ascencio que Verania tenía en los ojos. (p. 59)

Other characters in Arráncame la vida include Catalina’s egotistical female friends and her various male lovers of whom Carlos Vives, the orchestra director, is the most significant. As in Mal de amores, the most important characters in Catalina’s life influence her development – negatively in the case of Andrés who instils in her his own unprincipled egotism. Catalina’s lack of a positive female role model also accounts for her restricted and masculinized view of the world. In Arráncame la vida the traditional gender divide is more clear-cut, though there are subtle exceptions to the general rule. Men are the breadwinners and have access to power in both the private and public spheres while women are limited to the private sphere of the home. Catalina is also a hybrid combination in the sense that she is both passive and active, independent and dependent; she despises the superficiality of her female friends while emulating their mode of behaviour. Her ‘masculinized’ vision of the world thwarts any real possibility of full self-realization. As we shall see, many of her strategies of survival mimic those unscrupulous techniques used by men in the pursuit of power. Attention 4 See Seymour Menton, Latin America’s New Historical Novel (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 23.

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must now be given to the most important characters in Arráncame la vida – Catalina’s father and husband – who determine Catalina’s outlook on life.

Catalina’s Father The two most influential people in Catalina’s life are Andrés, her father and to a lesser extent Carlos Vives. Her father is mentioned only fleetingly but, in a book of relative lovelessness, the father–daughter relationship provides a solitary example of human love. What is interesting is that her father is portrayed almost invariably within the domestic sphere, breaking with the traditional view that the kitchen is an exclusively female preserve. As a married woman at odds with her husband, Catalina often returns to her humble home which exudes the aroma of strong coffee and a human warmth which is missing in her marital home. Catalina’s strong paternal bond contrasts sharply with her distance from her mother. The myth of motherhood in this sense is completely subverted in Arráncame la vida particularly due to the absence of the mother figure. Whereas the father is known affectionately as papá, the mother is rather coldly referred to as ‘mi madre’. She is a negative presence, a kind of intruder whom Catalina despises for her sense of social correctness. Catalina recalls once when playing with her father: nos pusimos a juguetear y estuve acostada junto a él hasta que llegó mi madre con cara de ya es muy noche para que andes fuera de tu casa. Ella nunca estaba fuera de su casa después de las cinco de la tarde, menos sin su marido. Yo le resultaba un escándalo. (p. 110)

Catalina’s love for her father is particularly enhanced when he dies shortly after this episode. Death is a recurrent event in the life of Catalina. Many of her associates meet violent deaths, which has the effect of de-sensitizing Catalina. Her father’s death, however, causes her genuine grief and leads to behaviour which is less than proper: ‘Yo no me acuerdo qué hice aparte de llorar en público como nunca debió hacerlo la esposa del gobernador. Tampoco sé cómo pasaron los últimos meses de Andrés en el gobierno. Cuando me di cuenta ya vivíamos en México’ ( p. 110). The idealization of the father figure is associated with Mastretta’s own experiences with her father. Mastretta’s recollections of her late father are reflected in her fictional world.5

5 During our interview it was clear to me how close Mastretta had been to her father and how his passing away had deeply affected her. His influence on her writing emerges in her idealization of the father figure in her works: ‘En mi mundo mítico tiene mi papá más importancia que mi mamá pero porque a mi mamá he tenido que mitificarla menos porque es más real. Ha estado más tiempo conmigo desde chica no nada más después de los diecinueve años sino, en general, desde siempre. Era más real y yo creo que uno inventa más lo que necesita más’. See ‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 316.

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Andrés Ascencio It is against the historical background of the avilacamachista era, characterised by relative political stability but also by social injustice and corruption, that the plot of Arráncame la vida develops. Although the title Arráncame la vida – inspired by Agustín Lara’s bolero – might suggest the predominance of popular concerns such as melodramatic love affairs (typical of the bolero raw material), the socio-political forms the backbone of the work. In an interview with Braulio Peralta, Mastretta explains that Catalina is a fictional portrayal of Margarita Ricardi, the wife of Maximino Ávila Camacho, and Andrés Ascencio a fictional portrayal of the historical governor of Puebla.6 Mastretta told me in our interview (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 331) that the book, like the characters, was more fictional than historical. As will be discussed later in this chapter, this poses particular problems in relation to the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction, an important aspect not only of Mastretta’s work but also of that of other historical novelists such as Elena Poniatowska and Silvia Molina. In The Political History of a Mexican State 1937–1987, Wil Pansters points to the close correspondence between the historical Ávila Camacho and the fictional Ascencio. A variety of circumstances – Ascencio’s appointment as military governor of Puebla in 1935, his alliance with Lázaro Cárdenas, the arranged marriage of his daughter to an influential family and his friendship with the North American entrepreneur William Jenkins – recall the life of Ávila Camacho and align the novel with New Historical practice. William Jenkins is known for the fact that he accumulated his wealth from an alleged kidnapping hoax and the expropriation of peasant’s land with the help of Maximino. In Arráncame la vida, Jenkins, the United States honorary consul, Andrés and his business partner Michael Heiss, are often involved in dubious dealings. Pansters remarks that: ‘The image of the “ruthless” macho is excellently described by Ángeles Mastretta in her novel Arráncame la vida [. . .] based on the life of Maximino’s wife Margarita Ricardi.’ When Pansters describes the co-operation between Ávila Camacho and William Jenkins, he again refers the reader to Arráncame la vida.7 Andrés Ascencio is a political soldier who sympathizes with Huerta. Through guile and ruthlessness he becomes a general and thereafter a powerful politician in Puebla. The novel, which shows Andrés’s rise and fall, follows roughly the historical emergence, consolidation and final demise of Maximino’s cacicazgo avilacamachista. A powerful structure of mediation emerged during the Mexican Revolution which allowed the bourgeoisie to consolidate its power

6 See Braulio Peralta, ‘Mi novela es una historia, no un ensayo feminista: Ángeles Mastretta,’ La Jornada, 11 June 1985, http://www.jornada.unam.mx/index.html (Last accessed: 11 Dec. 2004). 7 See Will Pansters, p. 183, n. 9 and p. 184, n. 39 and Kay S. García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), pp. 92, 98.

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thanks to peasant mass movements (p. 3).8 This alliance forced the middle classes to meet the demands of the rural population but ensured their control of the political process (Bartra et al., ‘Introduction’; p. 3). The local political bosses, initially the leaders of the masses, became absorbed into the middle classes. These systems of control, including caciquismo, were soon perceived as a hindrance to capitalist development (Bartra et al., ‘Introduction’; p. 3). Through Andrés we get a fair idea of the corrupt political structure of Mexico whose political stability may well have to do with the constant abuse of power facilitated by the connivance of those in positions of authority. Andrés, as we shall see, will employ a variety of tactics to maintain his position of power. Braun follows González Stephan’s definition of androcentrism to describe Andrés Ascencio: ‘Es una forma específica de sexismo [. . . .] hace referencia al sexo masculino: es más, al hombre de una determinada edad (maduro), de un determinado estatus [casado], y de unas determinadas cualidades y condiciones [tener honor, valentía, fuerza, riqueza económica] viriles’ (Braun, p. 133). Andrés embodies all of these characteristics. This masculine construct defines most of the male characters in the novel and these virile men are usually at the centre of political power (Braun, p. 133). But Andrés also incarnates the corruption of these values: he sets much store by his courage but his rise up the social ladder owes more to extortion and murder than to individual effort and merit. Andrés’s power is felt right from the start. In the first line Catalina remarks that ‘ese año pasaron muchas cosas en este país. Entre otras, Andrés y yo nos casamos’ (p. 7). The presentation of this event anticipates the structure of a novel in which the historical becomes intimately imbricated with the lives of individuals. Catalina narrates that she met him under the portales in Puebla where all sorts of events occur: ‘todo pasaba en los portales: desde los noviazgos hasta los asesinatos, como si no hubiera otro lugar’ (p. 7). This sentence is echoed throughout the novel. It becomes a metaphor of the eternal circle of Mexican violence and corruption which affects both the public and private spheres. The fifteen-year-old Catalina feels instant sexual attraction towards this 30-year-old revolutionary hero. She is overwhelmed by his manly physique: ‘me gustó. Tenía las manos grandes y unos labios que apretados daban miedo y, riéndose, confianza [. . . .] yo nunca había visto unos ojos tan vivos y no conocía a nadie con su expresión de certidumbre’ (p. 7). Andrés is vain and charismatic, to

8 See Caciquismo y poder político en el Mexico rural, eds Roger Bartra et al., 1st edn, Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales de UNAM (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1975). The crisis stemming from these political contradictions may be related to the different goals of distinct middle-class factions: ‘se analiza esta crisis como la contradicción existente entre la fracción de la burguesía que quiere impulsar este desarrollo capitalista en la agricultura para acelerar el proceso de industrialización, aumentar el Mercado interno y a la vez frenar el éxodo rural y la fracción de la burguesía agraria compuesta de terratenientes y comerciantes que, afianzados en un sistema político como es el caciquismo, se enriquece sin promover el desarrollo regional’ (‘Introduction’, p. 3).

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be feared as well as admired. This rather ambiguous facet of this military tyrant’s personality comes across powerfully at the start of the novel. We hear rumours about him but nothing is certain. Catalina tries to ignore them at the beginning: ‘tenía muchas mujeres [. . .] Engañaba a las jovencitas, era un criminal, estaba loco, nos íbamos a arrepentir [. . .] Nos arrepentimos, pero años después’ (p. 8). The historical Maximino also had a rather ‘schizophrenic’ personality: he was corrupt and powerful yet rather charming: Except for his most docile admirers and followers, he has been described as a harsh and ruthless caudillo militar who did not hesitate to eradicate any opposition to his policy. As a dedicated admirer of bullfights and [. . .] a man not free of vanity, he responded to the image of the ‘new-self made strong-man’ needed to put the political and social instability in Puebla to an end. (Pansters, p. 48)

Andrés has a penchant for the theatrical and flamboyant: he regularly attends bullfights and offers sumptuous banquets to impress his guests. He flaunts his wealth by buying an entire edifice for his wife, as we shall see. Although Maximino Ávila Camacho took part in the Revolution, very little is known about his military career. Even one of his most faithful followers, a local journalist, was not able to provide any detailed information about him, simply saying that Ávila Camacho seemed to be ‘present at the places of utmost danger and responsibility’ (Pansters, p. 48). This echoes Mastretta’s depiction of Andrés, whom Catalina, initially sees as a hero of the Revolution: ‘Andrés les contaba historias en las que siempre resultaba triunfante. No hubo batalla que él no ganara, ni muerto que no matara por haber traicionado a la revolución o al Jefe Máximo o a quien se ofreciera’ (p. 8). But his involvement in the Revolution turns out to have been treacherous rather than heroic. Shortly after their marriage, Andrés tells Catalina a romantic story about his youth in Mexico City and his contribution to Madero’s cause. Like Catalina, the reader believes this tale until a document is delivered to their home indicating that Andrés fought not on the revolutionary side but rather for Huerta who betrayed the Revolution. In 1913, after two years in power, Madero was defeated by General Victoriano Huerta, who reinstated Díaz’s dictatorial policies. Andrés’s ‘drámatica y enternecedora historia’ (p. 44) about his past and revolutionary ideas are a complete lie and expose his empty rhetoric. As we shall see, Andrés uses the rhetoric of Revolution and democracy to get what he wants – though remaining very much a Porfirista in outlook. The inequalities of Porfirian Mexico emerge in one of Andrés’s remarks: ‘estaba harto de pobreza y rutina. Quería ser rico, quería ser jefe, quería desfilar, no ir a mirar desfiles’ (p. 37). When Andrés becomes governor, his autocratic rule will recall the porfiriato with its centralized power sustained through manipulation and terrorization of opponents, and its stark social inequalities. Andrés represents the institutionalized Revolution and the abandonment of social ideals. Pansters claims that Andrés is just another Artemio Cruz (p. 48). This analogy echoes Aída Apter-Cragnolino’s comparison of Mastretta’s fictional characters, Andrés Ascencio and Catalina Guzmán, with Fuentes’s Artemio Cruz and

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Catalina Cruz/Regina in La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962). Aída ApterCragnolino describes the thematic parallels between Carlos Fuentes’s La muerte de Artemio Cruz and Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida ‘con la cual [. . .] reconoce curiosas (o no tan curiosas) similitudes en los nombres, en la descripción física y en cierto modo psicológica de los personajes y naturalmente, en las acciones de los mismos en el terreno del relato’.9 Such critics seem unconvinced by Mastretta’s claim to have written Arráncame la vida (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 330–31) before reading Fuentes’s work. Apter-Cragnolino draws parallels between Catalina Guzmán and Catalina Cruz/Regina. Like Catalina Guzmán, Regina is raped and, again like Mastretta’s female protagonist, Catalina Cruz is forced into marriage. Similary Artemio might have served as a model for Andrés since both are blustering egotistical individuals who are courageous in their own ways but morally ambivalent and betrayers of the Revolution. However, these are superficial points of contact and the novels differ in important respects, notably in their technique: that used by Mastretta bears little relation to Fuentes’s triple-voiced portrayal of Artemio. Critics such as Kay S. García and Janet Gold see Andrés as a heartless assassin, but Mastretta never depicts her characters in such black and white terms. In fact, she confessed to me that she rather likes Andrés Ascencio: Es que si me descuido Andrés Ascensio me cae bien. Es un pillo espeluznante, pero hay cosas de Andrés Ascensio que a mí me caen en gracia y por eso están contadas como cosas con gracia. De repente, Andrés Ascensio es simpático porque yo no quise crear un personaje totalmente maniquea y crear un hombre malo, malo, malo. Lo que sí sé, es que ese sujeto existió o que existió un sujeto que, a pesar de ser así de arbitrario y de devastador con otros, la gente lo quería y a la gente le gustaba. A una gente le gustaba y le divertía estar con él. O sea, no solamente era odioso sino era como cualquier cacique y como cualquier dictador. Un tipo con matices. Entonces, igual pasa con Catalina. (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 332)

Her sympathy is intermittently discernible throughout the book, which in many ways adds to the ambiguity of this novel and Mastretta’s masterful playfulness. Andrés’s ambiguous character is evoked in Catalina’s first impression of him at the start of the novel (p. 7). Andrés is undoubtedly a materialist and from the start we are made aware of his hypocritical nature seen, for example, in the way he acquires many haciendas – mostly through extortion. He also strives for power in the political, economic and sexual spheres. But Andrés does at times come across as a man with a sense of humour, albeit of a rather sinister and vulgar kind. He often displays an endearing candidness and lack of pretension, complemented by his genuine paternal affection for his wife, whom he treats at

9 See Aída Apter-Cragnolino, ‘Jugando con el melodrama: género literario y mirada femenina en Arráncame la vida de Ángeles Mastretta’, Confluencia, 11:1 (Fall, 1995), 126–33 (p. 128).

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times like his own child, satisfying her capricious needs and reprimanding her for her petulant behaviour. During the Bellas Artes concert where Carlos Vives performs, Andrés makes no attempt to conceal his ignorance yet his low ‘barbaric’ attitude is partly vindicated while the ‘high’ culture of the musical fraternity (p. 136) is treated with irony. Their theatricality amuses him: ‘Por fin apareció Carlos, con su saco de colas y su corbata de moño, con su varita en la mano y la cabeza recién peinada [. . .] cuando estuvo arriba volteó y nos hizo una caravana. – Qué payaso es este Vives – dijo Andrés’ (p. 135). Andrés takes issue with his wife when they discuss Carlos: ‘¿Cómo sabes que es bueno? Yo no tengo la menor idea. Es la primera vez que venimos a esto. A mí se me hace demasiado teatral. Las bandas de los pueblos son más frescas y dan menos sueño.’ Andrés finds it hard not to nod off to sleep during the performance and humorously concludes about Carlos that ‘(a) este señor Mahler le hacía falta coger’ (p. 137). This scene is a prime example of the general’s crude sense of humour, which some readers might find appealing. It does not desert Andrés even when he is on his death bed. Catalina urges him to stop talking about death, to take the pills that doctor Téllez has prescribed for him and to play poker before going to bed. Andrés retorts that he is ‘mal acostado: viendo al techo y sin nadie encima’ (p. 228). That Andrés maintains several lovers is common knowledge but his charm contrives to make his adultery more acceptable. He has great sexual appeal as Catalina remarks at the start of the novel. They both obviously enjoy sex together and often Andrés will compliment Catalina – ‘Qué buena estás’ (p. 26). On another occasion Andrés’s flattery appears to know no bounds: ‘descubrió que me había crecido el pelo y que su brillo era lo mejor que había visto en años, encontró que mis pies eran más lindos que los de cualquier japonesa, mis dientes de niña y mis labios de actriz’ (p. 128). Andrés’s paternal relationship with Catalina emerges explicitly when she describes him as ‘un papá divertido’ (p. 125). Andrés often employs the affectionate language a father would use with his daughter. He uses terms to call Catalina such as ‘m’ija’, ‘muchacha’ and diminutives such as ‘güevoncita’ (p. 18). When she is mischievous he reprimands her with paternal affection ‘–ah, qué muchacha mentirosa’ (p. 125) or ‘babosa’ (p. 114) which evokes the image of a drooling child. In the first years of their marriage, Andrés plays games with Catalina just as her father did. In the first chapter, the adult narrator recalls with nostalgia how: Me gustaba besar a mi papá y sentir que tenía ocho años, un agujero en el calcetín, zapatos rojos y un moño en cada trenza los domingos. Me gustaba pensar que era domingo y que aún era posible subirse en el burro que ese día no cargaba leche, caminar hasta el campo sembrado de alfalfa para quedar bien escondida y desde ahí gritar: ‘A que no me encuentras, papá.’ Oír sus pasos cerca y su voz: ‘¿Dónde estará esta niña? ¿Dónde estará esta niña?’, hasta fingir que se tropezaba conmigo, ‘aquí está la niña’, y tirarse cerca de mí, abrazarme las piernas y reírse: –Ya no puede ir, la niña la tiene atrapada un sapo que quiere que le dé un beso. (p. 9)

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Once married, Catalina and Andrés have a playful ritual: Orale güevoncita, ¿Qué haces ahí pensando como si pensaras? Te espero abajo, cuento a trescientos y me voy [. . .] Después corría por las escaleras con las botas en la mano, abría la puerta y ahí estaba él [. . .] Doscientos noventa y ocho, doscientos noventa y nueve. Otra vez no te dio tiempo de ponerte las botas. Vieja lenta. (p. 18)

A rare instance of Andrés’s sensitivity and paternal affection for Catalina is seen when they go to listen to Carlos Vives’s performance. Catalina becomes upset because the music Vives is playing is the tune her father used to whistle just before his death: ‘toda la orquesta era mi papá [. . .] nada mejor que la terquedad de mi nostalgia, me puse a llorar hipeando y moqueando hasta hacer tanto ruido como la orquesta’ (p.139). Like a slobbering child Catalina sits on the floor to conceal her feelings. Andrés does not know how to react but tries to comfort her: Dejé la butaca y me senté en el suelo para que nadie viera mi escándalo. Andrés, que nunca supo qué hacer en esos casos, me puso la mano sobre la cabeza y me acarició como si fuera un gato. Resultado: cuando la orquesta terminó de tocar yo tenía la cara sucia, los ojos hinchados y la melena revuelta [. . .] – Ya m’ija dijo Andrés –. En mala hora le conté a Vives que tú no sabías de música nada más que eso que tu padre cantaba todo el tiempo. (p. 139)

But Andrés, like Maximino Ávila Camacho, is a deeply divided character whose positive side is overshadowed by negative characteristics. As mentioned earlier, Andrés is a man who strives for power whether it be of a political, economic or sexual kind. He will kill in order to achieve his goals. His humble background – Catalina notes that he did not even inherit a coat (p. 8) – recalls the equally lowly position of Maximino who worked as a muleteer for his father. Andrés’s desire to exert power is as evident in the private sphere as it is in the public domain. According to Aralia López González (1991, p. 7) ‘su cuerpo (de Catalina) es expropriado por Andrés, su marido, de la misma manera que este supermacho [. . . .] se apropria de un Estado y ejerce el poder con fines personales y arbitrarios. Consume a México como consume a Catalina’. He is a macho, and is driven by his most basic sexual instincts. He objectifies women and treats them as inferior beings. Catalina is his wife and he imposes his rules on her. Catalina in this sense has no autonomy in the institution of marriage and no voice in her own destiny (Braun, p. 147). Andrés has many women thoughout Mexico and Catalina knows this but keeps quiet about it. The double irony about it is that his extramarital affairs have produced illegitimate children, some of whom he expects Catalina to care for as part of the ‘family’. Andrés’s killer instincts are even stronger than his sexual drive. Indeed, he kills his political enemies if they are perceived to be jeopardizing his political career – as is the case with the Avante director or the lawyer. Worse still he is prepared to kill women: Catalina is told that Andrés killed a lover who refused to have sex with him. Catalina is at first angered and incredulous but is finally convinced.

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Rivera Villegas draws an important parallel between Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores in relation to the patriarchal discourse embodied in Daniel, Emilia Sauri’s revolutionary lover, and Andrés Ascensio.10 Both these male characters have much in common despite the gap that separates them in the moral sphere: Andrés is corrupt and is prepared to kill others while Daniel is fully committed to the cause of the Revolution and social justice (Villegas, p. 45). Despite these differences they share the belief that the woman’s proper place is the home – not the political arena. Through Catalina and Emilia, Mastretta is able to highlight the division between male principles (or lack of them) and male practice (Rivera Villegas, p. 45). In Arráncame la vida, Catalina becomes weary of Andrés’s oppression and responds with anger to his inconsistent character. Kay S. García sees Catalina as a reliable narrator particularly when she establishes clear differences between what Andrés says and what he does, as we shall see (p. 101). Andrés’s unreliability is seen particularly in instances which reveal a vast gap between what he says and what he does: García offers examples of Andrés’s hypocrisy and duplicitous character, his lies about Eulalia (his first wife) and his deceitful speeches during his campaign for governor (García, p. 98). His public eulogies at the funerals of people whose murders he has arranged are another example of his duplicity. As García puts it (p. 100), Andrés is ‘ironically eloquent’ during Carlos’s funeral whose death he had arranged: Compañeros trabajadores, amigos: Carlos Vives murió víctima de los que no quieren que nuestra sociedad camine por los fructíferos senderos de la paz y la concordia. No sabemos quiénes cortaron su vida, su hermosa vida [. . .] Quisiera hacer cuento de sus cualidades, de las empresas en las que sirvió a la patria, a todos los trabajos con los que enriqueció nuestra Revolución. No puedo, me lo impide la pena, etcétera. (p. 186)

In this speech, the irony is heightened by Andrés’s empty rhetoric which is full of hyperbolic allusions to his ‘dear’ friend Vives and to the Revolution and by the words ‘etcétera’. Cordera, Andrés’s principal enemy, makes a speech in which he insinuates Andrés’s responsibility for Carlos’s death (pp. 186–7). This is the only speech we hear in the public sphere which directly attacks Andrés. After the funeral, Andrés and all his political allies make official statements to the police. The hypocrisy takes on an almost comic dimension when they again try to mask Andrés’s guilt by protesting their determination to see that justice is done. The police chief Pellico is accused of the murder but Andrés makes sure that he is not imprisoned. Pellico subsequently keeps in touch by sending Christmas cards to Andrés and Catalina. When Catalina describes Andrés, he has ‘unos labios que apretados daban miedo y, riéndose, confianza. Como si tuviera dos bocas’ emphasizing his 10 See Carmen M. Rivera Villegas, ‘Las mujeres y la Revolución Mexicana en Mal de amores de Angeles Mastretta’, Letras Femeninas, 24:1–2 (Spring–Fall 1998), 37–48.

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duplicitous character (p. 7). Shortly after their marriage, Andrés tells Catalina the romantic story about his youth in Mexico City when he delivered milk to Eulalia, his first wife, and about his revolutionary efforts under Madero. Madero initiated the Revolution against Porfirio Díaz in 1910. Like Catalina, the reader believes this tale until a document is delivered to their home revealing the fact that Andrés was actually fighting under the anitrevolutionary Huerta. In 1913, after two years of being president, Madero was defeated and subsequently assassinated by General Victoriano Huerta, who reinstated Díaz’s dictatorial policies. Andrés’s ‘drámatica y enternecedora historia’ (p. 44) about his past and revolutionary ideas turns out to be a blatant fabrication. In fact he is very much a Porfirista in his outlook. Indeed, Porfirio’s emphasis on materialism and prosperity is reflected in Andrés’s selfish ambitions (p. 37). Moreover Andrés’s political instincts are authoritarian, as emerges when he quotes Lieutenant Segovia approvingly – ‘Democracia que no es dirigida no es democracia’ (p. 37). This is an ironic statement since Andrés is in fact a covert huertista who will become one of the country’s leaders. Andrés’s autocratic rule will represent political regression to the inequalities and violence of the Porfirio era. During his campaign for governor, Andrés goes to Coetzalan and makes a powerful speech in favour of family unity and values (García, p. 99). Catalina and their children adorn themselves in indigenous costume, so providing an opening for Andrés: ‘Pueblo de Coetzalan, ésta es mi familia, una familia como la de ustedes, sencilla y unida. Nuestras familias son lo más importantes que tenemos, yo les prometo que mi gobierno trabajará para darles el futuro que se merecen’ (p. 48). The reader is, of course, fully aware of Andrés’s hypocrisy: rather than sustaining traditional family values, he is in fact an adulterer who has fathered several illegitimate children. In another speech Andrés urges women to join forces in order to defend the rights of women workers and peasants as well as equal rights in marriage. Catalina confesses that ‘de ahí para adelante no le creí ni un solo discurso’ (p. 46). Even worse is his speech expressing passionate support for communal landholding which is followed by his repossession on the same day of farms expropriated under the ‘Ley de Nacionalización’ (Nationalization Law) (p. 46). To highlight the blatant differences between what Andrés says and does, García draws on a political speech made by Maximino Ávila Camacho on 1 May 1937 in which he claimed to be the ‘guardian of the masses’ (p. 99). Andrés also talks as if he were a ‘guardian of the masses’. Andrés had arranged for more than twenty of his striking workers to be put to death (as Catalina realizes) but he is wholly convincing in feigning outrage at his press conference: ‘Me parece muy lamentable lo que ahí sucedió – dijo. He encargado al señor procurador que investigue a fondo los hechos y puedo asegurarles a ustedes que se hará justicia’ (p.74).11 The murder of journalist José Trinidad Mata, director of Avante, was

11 By establishing a clear difference between what the governor says and does, the narrator’s voice offers his speeches as the official discourse and her unmasking of his words

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thought to have been investigated by Maximino Ávila Camacho. According to Pansters it was generally believed that Maximino was behind the murder (p. 64). Towards the end of the novel Andrés falls ill and dies. Catalina rediscovers some of her old affection as she nurses her husband, who appears to shrink as he approaches death. Catalina is taken aback by Andrés’s descent into dependency on others. She helps him to take off his suit, so divesting him of the last remnants of his power: ‘Empecé a desabrochar aquella cosa dura, a lidiar con los botones dorados que siempre eran más grandes que los ojales. Jalé una manga y di la vuelta por su espalda para jalar la otra. Lo besé en la nuca’ (p. 225). The dying Andrés arouses compassion even as he plots the murder of his opponents (p. 228). In this regard Andrés may be contrasted with Isabel Allende’s Esteban Trueba in La casa de los espíritus who, in old age, becomes a reformed character, regretting his barbaric past as he succumbs to positive feminine influence.

Catalina Guzmán: From Innocence to ‘Cómplice Oficial’? Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores are Bildungsroman novels in the sense that they trace the development of Catalina Guzmán and Emilia Sauri from early childhood to maturity. Mastretta explores through the morally ambiguous Catalina, the ambivalent interrelation between innocence and manipulation. In Arráncame la vida, there are only a few instances of innocence. In the first chapter, Catalina is still innocent, naive and a virgin and under the protection of her family. Although her incorruptibility is short-lived, she remains child-like throughout the novel. She has her first sexual encounter at the age of fifteen and has her first child at seventeen. As we shall see in the next chapter, Emilia in Mal de amores is also very young when she is sexually initiated but she matures rapidly and takes on much greater social responsibilities than Catalina. As mentioned earlier, Andrés’s paternalistic attitude towards Catalina and the way he often spoils her might well be counterproductive to her development. She is much more dependent on material goods than Emilia from Mal de amores, who learns to survive in adverse conditions with very little. Catalina’s passage from the protection of her father to both the protection and control of her husband is a clear example of her subjection to patriarchal laws. Andrés often addresses Catalina as he would a child. Indeed, Catalina also acts and speaks like a child (p. 16). Catalina is young, acts on impulse, and experiences childish tantrums. But she is intelligent and like many intelligent children, she will resort to manipulation if her demands are not met (p. 16). Catalina has learnt how to play by the rules of the game. Following her wedding (p. 19) she is aware of the tension between her father and Andrés and takes full advantage of paternal indulgence to counter her new husband’s blatant possessiveness. as the counterdiscourse. See García, Broken Bars: New Perspectives from Mexican Women Writers, p. 101. García also draws attention to the enormous ‘power exercised by the PRI over the Mexican media, and the official party’s ability to create whitewashed images of their leaders’ (p. 98).

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Elsewhere Catalina’s dependence on father figures including Vives, is further highlighted by Andrés’s demonstrations of paternal affection towards her. As Braun comments (p. 149), Andrés silences his wife by infantilizing her. Catalina cannot communicate with Andrés: ‘por supuesto no le contaba yo nada. Él no quería que yo le contara, por eso se ponía a hablarme como a una niña’ (p. 61). Perhaps the defining aspect of Catalina’s character is her failure to mature and assume responsibilities. She opts for frivolous detachment – ‘los primeros tiempos del gobierno fueron divertidos’ (p. 50) – in preference to adopting a principled stand against her husband’s corrupt practices. Indeed in her personal conduct she seems to have been influenced by them since she seeks gratification in a series of extra-marital affairs. In her relations with Andrés she is not short of guile: determined to deflect him from embroiling her father any deeper in dubious business dealings, Catalina achieves her objective by staging a softer, more deferential attitude: Lo odiaba cuando se portaba como mi patrón. Pero me aguanté y cambié el tono por uno que funcionara mejor: –Andrés te lo pido por lo que más quieras. Te dejo que regales el Mapache a Heiss, pero saca a mi papá de un lío con Amed. (p. 64)

This is a clear example of Catalina’s skilful bilingualism which indicates that she is well-versed in the rules of the game. As Anderson observes: ‘Cati clearly understands the rules of the game: she cannot demand things from Andrés as an equal, and in order to achieve her goal she must shift her tone of voice to one “que funcionara mejor” and implicitly recognizes Andrés’s superiority and “begs” him to help her father.’12 Andrés treats her like a child and she plays on her ‘innocence’ by using the tone and behaviour of a child to get what she wants. As with children who often exchange goods to get what they want, Catalina is prepared to give up her favourite horse for her favourite man.

Sexual and Political Awakening In Arráncame la vida, Catalina’s loss of innocence and psychosexual awakening coincides with the rise of Andrés and avilacamachismo. Catalina is manipulated by a husband who is treacherous, and so too is the Mexican nation manipulated by a corrupt political machine, which may appear to be driven by social justice but which has in fact betrayed Mexicans. Andrés’s dominance over Catalina is clear from the outset, yet already at the beginning of the novel we see her spirit of independence when she asks him why 12 See Danny J. Anderson, ‘Displacement: Strategies of Transformation in Arráncame la vida by Ángeles Mastretta’, Midwest Modern Language Association 21:1 (Spring, 1988), 15–27 (p. 20).

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she should take his name: ‘yo te protejo a ti, no tú a mí. Tú pasas a ser de mi familia, pasas a ser mía’ (p. 15). Catalina resents this unequal relationship: ‘quería ser cualquiera sin un marido dedicado a la política, sin siete hijos apellidados como él’ (p. 59). Gilbert and Gubar point out that, for a woman, a proper name is problematic: even as it ‘inscribes’ her into the present discourse of society by designating her role as her father’s daughter, her patronymic effaces her matrilineage and thus erases her position in the discourse of the future. Her ‘proper’ name, therefore, is always in a way improper because it is not, in the French sense, propre, her own, either to have or to give.13

Nevertheless, although Catalina ‘belongs’ to Andrés in a legal sense, she becomes adept at eluding his grasp in everyday life. Catalina, like Emilia from Mal de amores, is exposed to the world of politics from a very early stage in their lives. The difference is that Catalina’s political conscience develops ‘a escondidas’ while Emilia’s familial liberal environment actively encourages her to express her political opinions. In this sense silence plays a vital role in Arráncame la vida. As Braun remarks (Silence and Dream as Textual Strategies, p. 140), Catalina’s private life, her marriage to Andrés and her upward mobility are a reflection of the political system in the public sphere: She suffers silencing by Andrés in his capacity as husband and as a representative of military power. To voice dissent at home would threaten the comforts she enjoys in her marriage and if she dared publicly to denounce her husband or the military in general she would most likely be killed as are the other political dissenters in the novel.

At first, both Catalina and Emilia are very naïve about politics but they are both intelligent and will soon understand the intricacies of the political world. Catalina’s socio-political awakening coincides with her sexual awakening. Following her rather brutal and unromantic sexual experience with Andrés who fails to give her an orgasm, her senses are awakened and she resolves to learn to ‘sentir’. Independently of Andrés she proceeds to build upon this independence by having affairs with other men. In this aspect of her life Catalina achieves some degree of autonomy. Her desire to learn about sexuality is reflected also in her desire to learn about Andrés’s political affairs. She hears about his corruption and murderous instincts from other people, and she spends four years of married life doing the typical things expected of a Mexican woman of the time (p. 27). She is aware of his crimes and knows that he is a danger to the general public (p. 28) but finds that challenging his activities is futile: ‘me contestaba siempre que no vivía conmigo

13 See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988–94), I: The War of Words (1988), p. 237.

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para hablar de negocios, que si necesitaba dinero que se lo pidiera’ (p. 28). Elsewhere Catalina convinces herself that she can enjoy the comforts her husband has to offer her while remaining oblivious to his misdeeds (p. 28) (Braun, p. 141). Catalina first becomes aware of corruption when Andrés is arrested for murder. She reacts in a childish manner reflecting her selfish individualism: ‘¿Cómo iba a ver a mis amigas? ¿Qué iba a decir a mis papás? ¿Con quién me iba a acostar? ¿Quién iba a despertarme en las mañanas?’ (p. 22). Braun points out that Catalina’s concerns in this respect are equivalent to those of Maria Teresa Bombal’s female characters: ‘how to avoid loneliness without a man’ (Braun, p. 138). At this stage of her development Catalina is more interested in personal relationships than in national affairs, and her need for masculine presence is reflected in her series of love affairs. When Andrés is arrested on suspicion of murder, she runs to church where she prays: ‘Que regrese Andrés, que no le encierren, que no me deje sola’ (p. 23). A friend of Andrés fails to convince Catalina that her husband has not killed anyone (p. 24). Subsequently Catalina becomes aware of the truth about her husband but refuses to accept it (Braun, p. 138). She reveals to her friend at the cooking lesson that evening that she felt very frightened – perhaps a reflection not only of her immaturity but also of her selfish and childish fear of remaining alone. When Andrés finally returns the next day, her first priority is to check that he is still in possession of his penis, which suggests that Catalina’s life is centred exclusively on her sexual relations with Andrés: ‘Metí las manos bajo su camisa, lo jalé hasta el jardín. Ahí comprobé que no le habían cortado el pito’ (p. 26). Here Catalina emerges as a ‘phallic’ woman, more interested in Andrés’s retention of his virility than in the question of his guilt. The occasion of Andrés’s arrest and release reflects his dubious relationship with the press and more generally the corruption of the Mexican political system. The day after his arrest the papers report that Andrés has received an apology for having been wrongly accused of falsifying documents. A priest has been imprisoned for two years. Although Catalina’s attitude exposes her ignorance of sociopolitical affairs, similar incidents will arouse her curiosity about her husband’s activities. Andrés forbids her to read the newspapers but Catalina ignores him and becomes an avid reader (p. 55). She reads allegations that one of Andrés’s men had shot Carranza (p. 55). According to Soriano, the editor of Avante, Andrés ‘había estado en la Ciudadela cuando el golpe de Estado que asesinó a Madero’ (p. 55). Andrés’s response is: ‘Que se dé por muerto este cabrón’ (p. 55). Of course we must remember the narrator’s words of warning: ‘Andrés no decía nada por decir’ (p. 16). Avante publishes another article accusing Andrés and his accomplices, Heiss and Rodolfo, of plundering the state’s funds and of building land designated as ‘ejidos’ (p. 93). Despite the efforts of the press to expose the truth to the nation, the military succeed in silencing their opponents. When Soriano’s body is found shortly after, all the newspapers accuse Andrés of the murder. Andrés promises a full investigation (p. 93) but Catalina does not expect justice to be done (Braun, p. 140). She finds it difficult to confront Andrés and suppresses her suspicions, conforming in this respect to the social expectation that a woman in Catalina’s position remain silent and submissive.

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Silence in a sense has a double function in Arráncame la vida. On the one hand, like Bombal’s characters, Catalina uses silence as a weapon of resistance against male oppression.14 Catalina keeps secrets from Andrés and tries to reveal as little as possible of herself but tells the reader everything. While on the one hand, Catalina (like Bombal’s female characters), outwardly perpetuates ‘meek and powerless images of the self’ and continues to ‘reinforce a view of (women’s) sex that has historically denied women the authority to articulate their own lives’15 her narrative, on the other hand, scores a notable triumph exposing Andrés’s world of violence.16 Catalina’s curiosity about her husband’s conduct is rekindled when Checo, Catalina’s youngest child, tells her that he has heard Andrés admit to murder: ‘Matar es trabajo, dice mi papá’ (p. 69). Catalina is so horrified that she vomits in front of Checo. Selfishly, she decides to spend less time with her children (p. 70) and ‘en cambio me propuse conocer los negocios de Andrés’ (p. 71). Catalina gradually detaches herself from her husband, and engages in a series of activities which challenge Andrés’s authority.

Complicity/Duplicity Patriarchy is a term used to describe ‘the relationship of a dominant (male) group, considered superior, to a subordinate group, considered inferior, in which

14 See Stephen M. Hart, White Ink: Essays on Twentieth-Century Feminine Fiction in Spain and Latin America (Támesis, Serie A: Monografias, 156) (London: Tamesis, 1993), p. 41. 15 See Celeste Kostopulos-Cooperman, The Lyrical Vision of María Luisa Bombal (London: Tamesis, 1988) and Stephen Hart (p. 410). 16 Kostopulos-Cooperman claims that although the reader can – to a certain extent – penetrate the silent worlds of Bombal’s female characters nonetheless ‘their voices are destined to drown in the metaphysical vacuum of their own mute and insular monologues’. Hart contends this view pointing out that in La amortajada, for example, Ana María’s thoughts have got through to the reader on the printed page, in spite of the repression of patriarchy, indicating that the ‘silence of womanhood’s voice has been heard’ (p. 41). The same applies to Catalina in Arráncame la vida. Debra Castillo also sees silence as a subversive tool and quotes Trinh T. Minh-ha (p. 40): ‘Silence is so commonly set in opposition to speech. Silence as a will to say or a will to unsay and as a language of its own has barely been explored.’ But Castillo also points to the limitations of silence, particularly as a political strategy: ‘Silence alone cannot provide an adequate basis for either a theory of literature or concrete political action. Eventually woman must break silence and write, negotiating the tricky domains of the said and the unsaid, the words written down [. . .] between the lines’ (p. 40). Both Arráncame la vida and, in particular, Mal de amores offer diverse possibilities for resistance with the playful shuffling of different levels of hitherto silenced realities (female sexuality and solidarity, the magical and the quotidian, the mythic and historical, the rational and irrational) which imply a powerful feminist questioning of male structures of knowledge and gender. See Trinh T. Minha-ha, ‘Not You/Like You: Post-Colonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference’, Inscriptions, 3:4 (1988), 71–77, and Debra Castillo, Talking Back: Toward a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

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the dominance is mitigated by mutual obligations and reciprocal rights’.17 In Arráncame la vida, women belonging to the subordinate group and men representing the dominant group collude in the creation of this system. In the novel, these divisions also separate the working classes from the ruling elite. Catalina often colludes in her own repression in order to maintain her position of security and wealth. Despite its blatant inequities, the patriarchal system has endured because it represents age-old values bolstered by biblical sanction: the central unit of the patriarchal establishment is the family, where, in the view of Saint Paul, the husband is the authority and the wife’s essential role is that of quiescent and submissive companion (Ephesians 5.23). Patriarchal organization in Arráncame la vida not only sets male against female but also female against female and to a lesser extent class against class (e.g. Catalina’s treatment of the maid, Lucina, pp. 68–70). As will be indicated further on, Catalina is in some respects a contradictory character, often struggling for personal and social improvement but also colluding with Andrés. The author exposes various weaknesses in Catalina, notably her overdependence on material goods and love of a comfortable life style. Furthermore, her commitment to the cause of the downtrodden is less than total. Catalina seldom undertakes positive social action and when she does, her efforts are half-hearted and short-lived, as in her fleeting involvement with the ‘Unión de Padres de Familia’ (p. 114), and her inconsequential role as president of the Charity Board (p. 50). As Mastretta points out, Catalina is not a feminist and her actions are usually impulsive rather than driven by conviction: ‘Ella no es una feminista. Hace las cosas de repente’ (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 332). Indeed, her social conscience is no more than skin deep as emerges in her reaction to Fernando’s gesture of solidarity. When she protests at the killing of twelve Indians by the Army, Andrés retorts that her concerns are typically feminine: ‘ya te salió lo mujer. Está usted hablando de su inteligencia y luego sale lo sensiblera’ (p. 83). Fernando puts his hand on her lap as a gesture of support but Catalina, unaware of Fernando’s homosexuality, interprets it as a sexual pass and her excitement banishes all other feelings: ‘puso su mano en mi pierna. La sentí sobre la seda de mi vestido y me olvidé de los doce campesinos’ (p. 83). According to Gerda Lerner, ‘women are more closely allied to men of their own group than they are to women of other classes and races’.18 This is

17 See Lloyd Davies, Allende: La casa de los espíritus, Critical Guides to Spanish Texts, 66 (London: Grant and Cutler, 2000) p. 43. Also see Gerda Lerner, Women and History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), I: The Creation of Patriarchy, p. 217. Lerner gives a cogent analysis of the rise of the self-preserving patriarchal system and of women’s place within it. 18 Discussing the intractable nature of women Gerda Lerner observes that it is difficult to ‘conceptualize women as a group, since they are dispersed throughout the population. Except for special-interest organizations, they do not combine together. The subject is full of paradoxes which elude precise definitions and defy synthesis. Women at various times and places were a majority of the population, yet their status was that of an oppressed minority,

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completely true of Catalina. Catalina thinks and behaves like Andrés and, in the same way, is ultimately motivated by self-interest. Catalina’s altruism does emerge when she helps a working-class woman Lucina to give birth to a baby, but her generosity is short-term: once the child is born, Catalina reverts to her superior condescending stance and Lucina to her subordinate role (Anderson, 1988, p. 23). When Andrés names Catalina as his private secretary, she is given the opportunity to penetrate the political sphere normally reserved for men. Catalina could have used her position to promote women’s rights but she is more interested in pursuing her affair with Carlos Vives (p. 127). Janet Gold describes Arráncame la vida as a novel which is ‘at once personal and political, private and public, submissive and rebellious’.19 In this sense, Catalina, like Emilia from Mal de amores, is duplicitous by appearing to be complicitous both with her partner and with patriarchal structures. When Catalina claims that she is rebelling she is, in reality, covering up her complicity with Andrés’s power; when she pretends to be complicit with her husband she is rebelling in secret (Gold, p. 39). On the one hand, Catalina is Andrés’s ‘cómplice oficial’ (Arráncame la vida, p. 57), on the other, she flouts his authority by, for instance, learning how to drive behind his back, finding out about his political machinations and reading forbidden newspapers. Gold concludes that this game of duplicity/complicity is a strategy for success: ‘By so successfully entering into the Mexican publishing world, Ángeles Mastretta has, like her fictional protagonist Catalina Guzmán de Ascencio, created a liberated space from which to extend the boundaries of rebellion’ (p. 40). Gold refers to the role of bilingual duplicity as analysed by Jane Miller, who alludes to women’s acquisition of ‘masculine’ language: Bilingualism can be an asset, but its acquisition involves splits and instabilities, impersonation, a stepping out of yourself. We can expect double vision and shifting ground in the novels of women. We shall need to hold the notions of dividedness, even as we consider the more straightforward ways in which women have written about men.20

García points out that Mastretta’s strategy involves the use of the language of men. As Mastretta told me in our interview (‘Entrevista a Ángeles Mastretta’, 322–23), she borrowed the slang expressions utilized by Catalina from a close friend of hers, deprived of the rights men enjoyed. Women have for centuries been excluded from positions of power, both political and economic, yet as members of families, as daughters and wives, they were closer to actual power than many a man’. See The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 170; p. 6. 19 See Janet N. Gold, ‘Arráncame la vida: Textual Complicity and the Boundaries of Rebellion’, Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, 17:2 (November 1988), 35–40 (p. 36). 20 See Janet N. Gold, ‘Arráncame la vida: Textual Complicity and the Boundaries of Rebellion’, Chasqui: Revista de literatura latinoamericana, 17:2 (November 1988), 35–40, and Jane Miller, Women Writing About Men (New York; Pantheon, 1986), p. 17.

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Renato Leduc. Mastretta’s employment of Jane Miller’s ‘secret and coded signals’ are vital in our understanding of Arráncame la vida because she has: appropriated masculine language and the traditional romance plot, and transfomed them in order to transmit a strong criticism of regional and national politicians and a scathing commentary on the Mexican macho’s attitude toward women. Within her ‘masculine’ discourse, she creates an alternative discourse that gives a voice to women and challenges the official story. (García, p. 103)

Catalina’s behaviour of swaying ambiguously between duplicity and complicity can be linked to the Virgen de La Guadalupe/La Malinche paradigm. Traditionally, women’s roles have been restricted to those of Madonna or whore. Although this is a universal phenomenon, it has peculiar resonance in the Mexican context. As Luis Leal points out, these two major archetypes in Mexican Literature are La virgen de la Guadalupe and La Malinche.21 The male ideal of the virgin figure can be traced back to the Aztec era, when women’s virginity, loyalty and her reproductive ability were the most virtuous characteristics a woman could possess.22 Cypess observes that while Malinche represents the flawed woman, the Virgin of Guadalupe incarnates the most virtuous feminine characteristics. Cypess adds that: ‘Veneration of the Virgin transcends pure religiosity and has become equated with a sense of unselfish motherhood and positive national identity. La Malinche, at the opposite pole, embodies both negative national identity and sexuality in its most irrational form, a sexuality without regard for moral laws or cultural values’ (p. 7). Wowoide argues that Mastretta has gone beyond the boundaries of this duality in Arráncame la vida by discovering new paradigms in women’s relationship to themselves and the world in which they live: Usa el bildungsroman para mostrar otras posibilidades para la mujer en la sociedad, en el matrimonio, en la familia y en las relaciones personales. Crea una mujer que rompe con los arquetipos literarios mexicanos de la virgen de Guadalupe y la Malinche, mientras forja su propio destino en la búsqueda de un ‘yo’ femenino.23

Yet it could be argued that Catalina combines qualities of the Virgin Mary and those of the temptress, Eve, reflecting Mastretta’s playful ambiguity in the

21 See Luis Leal, ‘Female Archetypes in Mexican Literature’, in Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, ed. Beth Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), pp. 227–42. 22 See Sandra Messinger Cypess, La Malinche in Mexican Literature from History to Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), p. 25. Cypess examines the multiple meanings, both negative and positive, associated with the figure of La Malinche in Mexican culture. 23 Kristen M Woiwode, ‘El uso del bildungsroman en Arráncame la vida: La desmitificación del estereotipo femenino en la literatura mexicana’. Unpublished Master of Arts, University of Rice, 1998. See MA Abstracts, 1389134, p. 10.

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context of her feminist perspective. Catalina, appears chaste, innocent, dependent on her partner (Arráncame la vida, p. 27). She bears various children, which suggests selfless motherhood and conformity with traditional expectations. But Catalina uses duplicity to achieve her immediate desires. In this sense Catalina is deceitful and embodies in some respects the treacherous Malinche figure – at least from the male point of view. Andrés believes that women are treacherous by nature. When Catalina is going out with Carlos, Andrés remarks that women are hapless: Uno se pasa la vida educándolas, y apenas pasa un loro junto a ellas y lo creen todo [. . .] con tal de estar en contra de su marido [. . .] La hubieran conocido a los dieciséis años, entonces era una cosa linda, una esponja que lo escuchaba todo con atención, era incapaz de juzgar mal a su marido y de no estar en su cama a las tres de la mañana. (Arráncame la vida, p. 170)

Catalina is certainly treacherous. She uses a series of cunning strategies that not only affect other characters but involve the reader whom she manipulates (García, p. 101). Filtered through her ironic vision, society is revealed in its full corruption. She also highlights the inconsistencies between what Andrés says and what he does (García, p. 101). However, she simply fails to acknowledge her own moral shortcomings. Perhaps at the heart of Catalina’s treachery lies her extreme selfishness. She is obsessed with talavera (Mexican ceramics) and in every single house she owns, her crockery is made of this material. Catalina enjoys shopping at the chain store Sanborn’s because: ‘ahí me sentía yo protegida porque las paredes son de talavera. Manías de uno. Donde hubiera talavera me sentía a salvo, por eso a todas mis casas lo primero que meto es la vajilla de talavera’ (p. 122). She is not ashamed of her possessions but she retains an affection for the ‘inferior’, for talavera ceramics which is ‘poblana, tosca y quebradiza’ (p. 122) in contrast with the prized ‘porcelana de Bavaria’. Perhaps Catalina is acknowledging her own secret affinity with the material and is subconsciously aware that like pottery she is being moulded by negative male influences which prevent her from contributing to the task of moulding a new society. Her acceptance of Andrés’s extravagant gift by buying Sanborn’s for her suggests her passive status as a female consumer dependent upon male largesse. Catalina’s covetousness is reflected at the level of her personal relations and her treachery extends to those whom she most loves. If Catalina manages to love anybody, it is Carlos Vives, whose refinement and culture contrasts with Andrés’s barbarism and ignorance. However Vives is one of her many lovers, each of whom embodies, to varying degrees, that capitalist acquisitiveness which has become Catalina’s own defining characteristic. The cultured Vives is quite the antithesis of Andrés Ascencio who regards the director of the national orchestra as effeminate. Andrés had attempted to make a man of him by taking the young flute-playing boy to see men hanged in trees during the Revolution. Vives undermines Andrés’s authority in two ways: first by his affair with

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Andrés’s wife, Catalina, and secondly by feigning admiration for Andrés but in fact supporting Andrés’s political opponents. Vives is openly critical of the social elite and criticizes the manipulations and questionable practices that Andrés and his cronies employ to enrich themselves. Thus when Andrés buys the entire Sanborn’s building for Catalina, Vives overtly criticizes her for being complicit with her husband who has probably paid the bill with illicit funds. Vives might have provided a positive influence on Catalina had she not been, by then, so selfpreoccupied and so deeply implicated in Andrés’s corrupt practices. In any event Andrés’s ascendancy is crushingly asserted when he arranges the kidnap and murder of Vives. Catalina is adulterous and does not scruple to sleep with her husband’s political opponents. Her superficiality is demonstrated when she resumes relations with Andrés almost immediately after Carlos’s death. Her abandonment of her children indicates her dereliction of normal maternal duties. Catalina betrays her own gender in her open disregard for women. She criticizes wealthy women who flaunt their dresses and jewellery but ironically she is herself ‘una consentida’. Catalina’s vision of the world is so masculinized and warped that she has developed a complete lack of respect for her own gender, in many ways replicating Andrés’s own views of women. Her estrangement from her own mother – whom Catalina treats as an inferior being – is significant: ‘Mi mamá se la pasaba presintiendo’ (p. 14). She is contaminated by her husband’s immoral business sense as is evident in the advice she offers her friend, Bibi, who is considering Gómez Soto’s proposal of marriage: ‘Dile que sí pero que ponga la casa a tu nombre– le aconsejé’ (p. 99). Ultimately Catalina’s immoral conduct may even extend to murder for she is possibly implicated in Andrés’s death: has she poisoned him with an excess of lemon tea? Like Andrés, she strives to achieve power and indeed the intensity of her will to power borders on obsession. In the novel, Catalina is seduced by the size of men’s hands, a symbol of domination and strength (p. 7, p. 29). She enjoys her influential social position (‘yo tenía una corte de mujeres esposas de los hombres que trabajan para Andrés’, p. 50) but ironically, when Andrés gives her positions of power – making her director of the board of the ‘Beneficiencia Pública’ (pp. 50–1) and later his personal secretary (p. 127) – she resents the responsibility such positions entail. Catalina is an expert in the art of power relations. She loves power over others and will collaborate with her husband or conspire against him depending on which course of action serves her selfish designs. In Arráncame la vida, the Malinche myth undergoes some modification when applied to the case of Catalina. As with Malinche, Catalina is virtually forced into marriage and raped by Andrés who plays the part of arrogant patriarch, treating women as chattel in a commercial exchange conducted between men. Catalina’s father is suitably compensated and Catalina is expected to transfer her loyalty from him to her new husband. Thus Catalina plays to the ‘rules of the game’ but later she breaks the ‘sexual contract’ as she enters into several extramarital affairs. Her ‘triumph’ over Andrés is twofold: she is an unfaithful wife who breaks her matrimonial contract with impunity and, in addition, having

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survived her husband, she benefits from that financial contract whereby the widow is the main beneficiary of her husband’s estate. Catalina may be ‘sold’ to Andrés and forced into a contract characterized by both duplicity and complicity. She cannot however be resold and far from remaining a pawn in his hands, she flouts her side of the contract while making Andrés keep to his. She contributes – albeit unwittingly – to the enhancement of female power. In this respect she may be seen as a feminist, despite her ‘contamination’ by typically male egotistical principles.24 In spite of her contradictory nature, Catalina, like Emilia in many respects, knows that she must consciously strive to avoid conforming to the masculinized vision of women as passive and compliant. Both women are fighters – in their own different ways – and have achieved their own sexual and personal identity, breaking successfully out of the grip of patriarchy. Andrés is aware that Catalina will never be possessed entirely by him and confesses to her that: ‘Nunca he podido saber qué quieres tú. Tampoco dediqué mucho tiempo a pensar en eso, pero no me creas tan pendejo, sé que te caben muchas mujeres en el cuerpo y que yo sólo conocí a unas cuantas’ (p. 225). He admires her almost ‘manly’ strength and intelligence and has come to terms with her promiscuity: ‘no me equivoqué contigo, eres lista como tú sola, pareces hombre, por eso te perdono que andes de libertinaje. Contigo sí me chingué. Eres mi mejor vieja, y mi mejor viejo, cabrona’ (p. 223).

Testimonial Narrative Mastretta’s Arráncame la vida is, like Hasta no verte Jesús mío (1969) by Elena Poniatowska (born 1933), central to a living tradition: Testimonial narrative and the Mexican Revolutionary Novel.25 Testimonio is seen as an authentic Latin-American 24 According to Jean Franco, malinchismo today still haunts the work of many Mexican and Mexican-American women including Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro, Elena Poniatowska and Cherríe Moraga. But the Malinche they depict no longer embodies a symbol of passive victimization nor represents the ravished indigenous land. Rather than being associated with social and sexual oppression, women are now depicted as freely accepting the sexual contract which, ultimately, also excludes women from true citizenship and identity. See ‘La Malinche: From Gift to Sexual Contract’, in Critical Passions: Selected Essays, eds Mary Louise Pratt and Kathleen Newman, Post-Contemporary Interventions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 66–82 (p. 77). Mastretta’s discursive revolt against the Malinche myth is perhaps best highlighted in her parodic short story (Mujeres de ojos grandes, pp. 175–9) whose protagonist is the tía Amanda Rodoreda (see Chapter Six, pp. 185–86). 25 The Boom generation was inspired by foreign influences. Testimonial narrative, however, has come to be perceived as an authentic, popular, and native form of expression, ‘the gaze from within, from the Latin American I, from the Latin American we’. See Santiago Colás, Postmodernity in Latin America: The Argentine Paradigm (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 25, and Miguel Barnet, ‘La novela testimonio. Socio-literatura’, in Testimonio y literatura, eds René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986), p. 285. Like some novels of the Mexican Revolution,

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form of fiction (unlike magical realism) and can be traced back to the novel of the Mexican Revolution and far beyond that – to the sixteenth-century chronicles of the conquest. Testimonial narrative uses, for example, recorded interviews as raw material for accounts in which the dividing line between fiction and history is blurred. Testimonio, on the other hand, is seen as the unmediated record of testimonies of living history.26 From the 1960s onwards, female testimonial novels may have emerged in Latin America partly in response to Jorge Ibargüengoitia’s sardonic views of the possible ideas and causes behind the Revolution expressed in his Los relámpagos de agosto (1964).27 Marta Portal’s explanation of Ibargüengoitia’s interest in historical satire may also clarify the resurgence of the testimonial narrative: ‘La sátira histórica surge como rebelión y burla. Si la novela nace como oposición realidad subjectiva–mundo objetivo, aquí hay una intención (subjetiva)–caricaturesca que se opone al testimonio que de la Revolución ha significado la novela de la Revolución’.28 Some testimonial works, such as those written by Guatemalan Indian Rigoberta Menchú are known internationally because of their feminist interest. According to Amy K. Kaminsky (1991): Etymologically ‘women’s testimony’ is an oxymoron; the root of ‘testimony’ is ‘testes’, an anatomical requirement of all those whose witness might be accepted in a Roman court of law. Feminist psychology emphasizes that the invisibility and inaudibility of women in public life make women themselves believe that their words, lives, and experiences are less valuable and certainly less universal, than men’s.29

testimonio aims to modify Western notions of reality for the protagonist does not perceive himself/herself as an individual subject but as representative of the pueblo which contrasts with the Western notion of writing as individual creation. 26 Testimonial writing aims ‘to challenge “official”, bourgeois history, to fill voids in the record, to seek the other side of the coin, and generally to empower the voice of the underprivileged and repressed’. See Emil Volek, ‘Testimonial Writing’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy-Dearbourn, 1997), p. 784. For a perceptive discussion of Testimonio see Miguel Barnet, ‘La novela-testimonio. Socioliteratura’, in Testimonio y literatura, eds René Jara and Hernán Vidal (Minneapolis: Institute for the Study of Ideologies and Literature, 1986), pp. 280–302. This article became a kind of attestation for testimonio. 27 See Emil Volek, ‘Mexico: 20th-century Prose and Poetry’, in Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature, ed. Verity Smith (London: Fitzroy-Dearbourn, 1997), pp. 548–55 (p. 550). Also see Chapter Two, p. 37. 28 See Marta Portal, Proceso narrativo de la Revolución Mexicana (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1977), p. 233. 29 Amy K. Kaminsky, Reading the Body Politic: Feminist Criticism and Latin American Women Writers (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 48. Women’s voices have undoubtedly been repressed in the male public sphere but here Kaminsky’s etymological association of Latin testimonium with testis in the sense of ‘testicle’ is incorrect. In fact the etymology runs in the opposite direction (testis ⫽ ‘testicle’) and appears to be a special colloquial extension of the word’s basic sense of ‘witness’ (it is etymologically connected

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Although it is not exclusively a woman’s genre, it is undoubtedly an important literary medium for the empowerment of the subaltern woman and because it crosses class and racial boundaries.30 Testimonial narratives include texts written by Mexican female writers such as Elena Poniatowska, Ángeles Mastretta and Silvia Molina whose works offer a radical revisionist history of the Revolution from a feminist/feminine perspective. Like the feminist perspective, the sociopolitical dimension is of prime importance in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores. Mastretta always emphasizes the political purpose of her work. Both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores are characterized to a point by the polar opposites that Aníbal González sees as central to the construction of documentary narratives: truth versus falsehood, justice versus injustice, society versus the individual.31 These polar opposites are inextricably intertwined with the feminine. Mastretta’s socio-historical preoccupations in both Arráncame la vida and Mal de amores seem to go against the illusion-breaking thrust of postmodernism, particularly Arráncame la vida, which is a testimonial narrative (to be further explored on pp. 75–78 and 81–83), marked by its journalistic and documentary style.32 According to Mastretta her testimonial writing is an attempt to challenge the official version of history and to speak of lo no dicho, that is, the other side of history where the marginalized and silenced Other moves to centre stage. Although Ángeles Mastretta, like her female counterparts, embraces the satirical and frivolizes history in favour of the more banal and personal, she is not as mockingly irreverent towards the Revolution as is Ibargüengoitia. It must be added that it has not only been the female writers who have revived interest in the Mexican Revolution by resorting to the testimonial genre. In 1999, Carlos Fuentes published Los años con Laura Díaz which offers a feminist testimonial with Indo-European words for ‘three’). See Oxford Latin Dictionary, ed. P. G. W. Glare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 1932; and J. N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (London: Duckworth, 1982) p. 67. Furthermore Kaminsky’s suggestion that only men could testify in Roman courts is also incorrect: testis is a noun of common gender, and the Oxford Latin Dictionary gives a specific example of a female ‘testis’ in a judicial context (from Suetonius’s Life of Claudius). 30 See Jean Franco, ‘Going Public: Reinhabiting the Private’, in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, eds George Yúdice and others, Cultural Politics, 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 65–85 (p. 70–1). Jean Franco notes that it is vital, however, to emphazise that ‘the term testimonial embraces a corpus of texts that range from fragments embe