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Text and Performance Quarterly
ISSN: 1046-2937 (Print) 1479-5760 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpq20
Pro(re-)claiming Loss: A Performance Pilgrimage in
Search of Malintzin Tenépal
Bernadette Marie Calafell
To cite this article: Bernadette Marie Calafell (2005) Pro(re-)claiming Loss: A Performance
Pilgrimage in Search of Malintzin Tenépal, Text and Performance Quarterly, 25:1, 43-56, DOI:
10.1080/10462930500052327
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10462930500052327
Published online: 16 Aug 2006.
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Citing articles: 13 View citing articles
Pro(re-)claiming Loss: A Performance
Pilgrimage in Search of Malintzin
Tene
´pal
Bernadette Marie Calafell
This performance ethnography examines the author’s pilgrimage to Mexico City in search of
Malintzin Tene
´pal. The essay seeks to contribute to the Chicana feminist project of
reclaiming the narrative or voice of Malintzin Tene
´pal by means of autoethnographic
narrative, as opposed to more standard prose or poetic forms. By embodying Malintzin’s
story through her own, the author creates or reclaims her own voice and narrative through a
performative process of “working through” a loss or grief that is projected as both personal
and social.
Keywords: Malintzin Tene
´pal; Chicana Feminism; Memory; Loss; Pilgrimage
I do not re-write history. I tell the story for the first time. The story of holding one’s
self apart, to hold oneself together. (Moraga 202)
I am, however, caught in the time lag between the colonial and the postcolonial, in a
decolonial imaginary reinscribing the old with the new. (Perez 127)
Activism is an engagement with the hauntings of history, a dialogue between the
memories of the past and the imaginings of the future manifested through the acts of
our own present yearnings. It is an encounter with the ghosts that reside within and
inhabit the symbolic and geographic spaces that shape our worlds. (Rodrı
´guez 37)
ISSN 1046-2937 (print)/ISSN 1479-5760 (online) q2005 National Communication Association
DOI: 10.1080/10462930500052327
Bernadette Marie Calafell Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Communication and Rhetorical Studies and affiliate
faculty member in Latino-Latin American Studies at Syracuse University. This essay was derived from portions
of her dissertation “Towards a Latina/o Politics of Affect: Remembering Malintzin Tene
´pal” (University of
North Carolina, Chapel Hill; D. Soyini Madison, director). An earlier version of this essay was presented at the
2002 National Communication Association Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, and developed in Sarah
Amira De La Garza’s Advanced Field Methods course in Mexico City during the summer of 2002. In addition
to Michael Bowman, Miles Richardson, and the anonymous reviewers, the author thanks the following people
for feedback on previous versions of this essay: D. Soyini Madison, Della Pollock, Maria DeGuzman, J. Robert
Cox, Joanne Hershfield, Sarah Amira De La Garza, Richard C. Cante, Lisa Calvente, and Shane Moreman. This
essay was inspired by and dedicated to Joe R. Mun
˜oz. Correspondence to: Bernadette Marie Calafell,
Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Affiliate Faculty, Latino-Latin American Studies,
Syracuse University, 100 Sims Hall, Syracuse, New York 13244-1230, USA. Tel: 315 443 5138; Fax: 315 443
5141; Email: bcalafel@syr.edu
Text and Performance Quarterly
Vol. 25, No. 1, January 2005, pp. 43–56
Reflections on Preparations for a Journey
I prepare to return to a home that I do not know but that continues to define me.
Mexico City awaits me. Here I will come face to face with the women of my cultural
past. Marina, Guadalupe, Frida. Do they wait for me? Do they long for my return as I
long for the comfort I will find in the shadows and remnants of their lives? You lose
your home, you lose your culture, you lose your father—then what do you have?
Where do you go and what do you do? You must reinvent yourself, I suppose. Reinvent
yourself in the space you long ago decided to shut yourself off from. But when you are
empty what choice do you have?
Looking over the Lonely Planet’s guide to Mexico City I feel somewhat peculiar.
I note John Noble’s cautionary words that “Some indigenous peoples have learned to
mistrust outsiders after five centuries of exploitation. They don’t like being gawked at
by tourists and can be very sensitive about cameras: if in doubt about whether it’s OK
to take a photo, always ask first” (36– 37). How lucky I am to have John Noble to teach
me manners and reintroduce me to Mexico, though its history is written on my body.
Am I a tourist seeking a “journey from an everyday situation to an extraordinary
location” (Edensor 105)? I have been a tourist before, la guera who could so easily pass.
I remember being so envious as I spoke to a friend in North Carolina whose parents are
Scottish-Irish and Mexican when she described her experience of crossing the border
and feeling at home. Her ability to blend in was an experience I was not privy to, yet
desired. Her journey, my futile desire for authenticity, it all came so simply for her.
I wanted that simplicity. I wanted that sense of purity.
I had been a tourist. The woman who had journeyed to Nogales right before coming
to North Carolina in search of souvenirs that would somehow “authenticate” her
identity in North Carolina—the Mexican blankets, the posters and all other things that
she proudly displayed in her room (Calafell). These items held memories; these
souvenirs symbolized her identity (J. Gonzalez; Love and Kohn). You’ve reduced
yourself to a picture you hang on the wall. You gaze at me looking for meaning and self-
worth, but I am not simply an object to be gazed upon, I am much more visceral. These
were things she had never really even owned at home in Phoenix, but somehow in
North Carolina they were essential. Performance artist Carmelita Tropicana once said
that she felt like a tourist returning to her home country of Cuba (Troyano).
I understand what she means as I ask, “Who am I, going to this place that hides traces
of identity?” Maybe I am something worse than a tourist. Am I a “wannabe”
anthropologist who is unenlightened and is looking for that exotic Other that is
myself? Will I go to Mexico as I did before looking for souvenirs to authenticate my
identity—souvenirs that are both foreign and essential to me? Is this simply an
uncritical nostalgia embodied in souvenirs?
Loss of culture. Loss of home. Loss of family. So many layered losses, and what do
you have but the condition of the exile. The exile is estranged from so much all at once.
The exile longs for authenticity. But what is that? In the poem, “Elena,” Pat Mora tells
the story of a Mexican woman who has immigrated to the United States. As her
children become Americanized she becomes more and more embarrassed by her lack
44 B. M. Calafell
of English skills. Now I am in a similar position as I enter Mexico City, much like
Rosario Morales writing of returning to Puerto Rico: “This is not home. I’ll always be
clumsy with the language, always resentful of the efforts to remake me, to do what my
parents couldn’t manage” (qtd. in Behar 150). Home, what does it mean when you
have lost everything and how ironic is it for me to claim a home that I have never
known except in the faint memories of distant relatives or our imagined realities of life
in the old country. Like Ruth Behar, who compares being in a diasporic situation to
experiencing loss or mourning, “I come to feel, deeply, the enormous sorrow of being
countryless, the enormous rage of being countryless. And I also experience the other
side of this: the enormous sorrow of having too much country, the enormous rage of
having nothing but patria” (142). The rage of having nothing but patria is all I have.
In her book, Remembering Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera
interviews Cuban American exiles about their experiences growing up displaced.
Herrera writes, “Their exile consciousness, therefore, can be attributed both to the
physical proximity of Miami to the Island, and to the fact that they were socialized in a
socioeconomic environment that reinforces a particularly strong sense of Cuban
cultural identity. As a result, quite a few pointed out that when they are in Miami, they
never have to think about their identities” (xxiii). Never having to think about my
identity when I am in Arizona, Aztla
´n, is such a luxury, but in this space of North
Carolina I must constantly face it, as I am deemed both authentic and inauthentic. My
Spanish skills and my white skin mark me as inauthentic to Mexican immigrants and
non-Latina/o Latin Americanists who have been deemed experts of “Latin” culture.
I am reminded of the words of a well meaning friend who commented, “Well I think
the way you speak Spanish is sort of representative of your identity. You know all the
symbols and the order but when you speak it, it doesn’t sound quite right :::. But it
doesn’t matter ‘cause you know all the symbols and the order, you just have a problem
articulating it.” You are an imposter. His statement, so telling of all my inadequacies
and insecurities, rang true in my flushed cheeks and embarrassed eyes. How would I
speak? How would I perform as I entered the space of Mexico City, the site of mestiza
birth? You come now looking for answers, but it’s not that easy. You must meet me
halfway.
Fast Forward: Embarking on a Pilgrimage
Travelers worldwide make pilgrimages to La Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
in Mexico City, the spot where La Virgen was said to have appeared to the villager Juan
Diego on Mount Tepeyac. On this spot is the original church built after the Virgin’s
appearance, as well as several other churches. Pilgrims come from far and wide to walk
or climb on their knees up the hill to the church. Others stand on the moving sidewalk
to catch glimpses of the image of the Virgin, which is said to be the original item that
appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak when he opened it for disbelievers. Though this was on
my list of places to visit in Mexico City, it was not my priority. Rather my desire was
with her—Malintzin.Your irreverence is so blatant. Your desire is blasphemous. Your
jealousy, desire for feeling, desire for passion, and need for reconciliation are all so
In Search of Malintzin Tene
´pal 45
transparent. Too bad they’re not for her. They are misplaced and I have become your space
of renewal. Accept your fate. Maybe it was because I felt so close to her because of my
own sense of loss. Maybe it was because I suddenly felt like a woman who was free,
taking things into her own hands for the first time. My marriage, just days prior, was
both liberating and constraining, as I no longer knew exactly who I was anymore. You
are a woman in the middle. Una mujer mala who has symbolically turned her back on her
family through the “sin” of self-indulgence, yet is always tempted by guilt and the desire
for affirmation. My journey was, as rhetorical scholar Carole Blair writes of those who
make journeys to memorial sites, a physical labor (46). It was a labor of love.
Reflections in a Dream
I am dreaming in bright colors of a Preconquest past that is somehow mine and yet not
mine. I am dreaming of her face. Her plain wide face, her full lips and her long dark hair
have come to me in visions time and time again yet now they are so blaringly clear that I
can no longer ignore them. A tear gently glides down the side of her cheek and my first
impulse is to lean over and kiss it, but instead I wipe it away with my tongue. Her tears
spoke so much as I tasted their bittersweetness on my tongue. I look into her eyes and for a
second there is silence. She lifts her hand to gently caress my face and pull me closer to her.
She pushes my hair behind my ear and whispers, “Mijita, where have you been? All this
time I have called your name and not once have you answered? I have longed for you to
come back to me.”
The voices whispering all along, were they hers? Were they mine or someone else’s?
The ghost of Malintzin Tene
´pal has been banging on my door again. Or could she be
disguising herself as our comadre, La Llorona the wailing woman, searching for her lost
children and culture? I am reminded of the words of Sarah Amira De La Garza who spoke
about the power of the shapeshifter and the power of Chicanas as translators. I guess we all
get used to wearing different masks at different times. Malinalli, Marina, Malintzin I long
to know you, but all I know are vague descriptions of you from a book written by a
Spaniard. Marina, I want to feel your flesh. I first fell in love with you in 1995. I remember
you. Do you remember me? Yes, good Mexican Catholic girl suddenly being reawakened
from a comfortable malaise being led astray into a world of sex, colonialism, and religious
critique. Transplanted from a life of certainties to a life of questions with no immediate
answers, out came an angry, feisty, ambiguous, Chicana who suddenly became the black
sheep of her family with all her radical views and “selfishness.” Yes, you and I go way back
but lately it seems like we have been so out of touch. Of course, there is the picture hanging
on the wall. Right above Lupe’s. Now isn’t that ironic! For once you are above her.
I admit Marina, I only came back to you out of necessity. It was not because I heard
your voice. I wanted to talk about colonialism and of course there you were. How can you
talk about colonialism and not talk about me? Of course not, though it sure seems like so
many other scholars have tended to overlook Mexicanas and Chicanas when they want to
talk about (post)colonialism as if our theories and experiences have no value. Perhaps
we have no cultural capital? I remember why I had fallen in love with you in the first
place. You represent so much to me. Imagine a woman not afraid of her sexuality.
46 B. M. Calafell
Imagine a woman who had the power to create a new people. Imagine the woman who
was my mother, who was my lover, who was everything to me. And now I return with the
question Cherrı
´e asked, “What kind of lover have you made me mother?” (Moraga).
I wonder, what did you do when Hernan, your lover (or was he your tool?) married you
off to one of his men because his “proper” Spanish wife was coming into YOUR world? Did
you laugh? Did you cry? Or did you make love to Juan Jarmillo in a vengeful passion to
spite Hernan so he would hear the cries and know exactly what he was missing? I ask you
Marina because I need you and I need to know. Did you long for his body even after he
left? Did you curse the day you met him? What did you do? You created the culture I have
lost and I need you to bring me back. Marina, what about your mother who sold you off so
that your brother might fare better? You know all about betrayal by love and loss:
Tracionado Por Amor. My lover, my mother, my sister I need you more than ever :::
Marina, I come to you now because, honestly, I see that you and I are in the same boat.
We have both lost our voices. Yours has been missing for such a long time and, believe me,
lots of us have been trying to help you find it. For me it started in the fall of 2000 when I
left Aztla
´n. You remember that place, right? It continued seven months later when I lost
tata, my grandfather, my father, my guardian, my heart, my soul, my culture. With him
went my connection to Aztla
´n and any sense of self and cultural knowledge I had ever
known. So now here I am looking for a story, looking for my story and all I can see is you.
Chicana feminists like Adelaida del Castillo, Norma Alarco
´n, Lucha Corpi, and Carmen
Tafolla have all tried to reclaim your narrative from those machistas like Octavio Paz who
call you a whore when they compare you to Guadalupe. Listen, hija, I did not sell out my
people. Let me tell you, my sexuality is always in check; methinks he doth protest too
much. When they call you a whore and cast Guadalupe as a virgin they leave us no other
options because as Chicanas we are all stuck. I am not a virgin, I am not a whore. I am a
woman without a voice who perhaps really never had a voice to call her own. The story of
who I am is lost and now I need your help to find it. How can anyone understand the
complexity of your life and your decisions? They can’t: it all comes out very one-
dimensionally. You need to speak, your narrative needs to be heard. You need self-
definition right now just as much as I do. I am hoping in my journey towards you, I will
also find my voice and perhaps this pilgrimage, this performance in which I engage, can
add to a Chicana feminist project of bringing your narrative to life because it is so
embodied, because it is so performed. Thus, Marina, I ask you to let me work through my
pain, my loss, my own experiences of nothingness and reclaim or find my narrative with
you as I look for yours. Can this cultural pilgrimage not only give testimony to the
cultural, but also to the personal in ways that show how Chicanas are deeply affected by
the cultural narratives that dictate the proper roles of women and in a sense deprive us not
only of your voice, but also ours? Can you help me find my way back? If I perform and
honor your memory in a space that refuses to officially recognize it, can WE free ourselves?
In the City
I am looking for Malintzin but she is nowhere to be found. I see small glimpses of
her in the faces of people in the crowds in the city, in my mirror, and in a mural in
In Search of Malintzin Tene
´pal 47
the National Palace, but this is not enough. I need more than these pieces, much more. I
am exhausted, overwhelmed, and driven by my desire for reconciliation (Doxtader
“Reconciliation”). My furtive search, my desire, my anticipation are all manifesting
themselves in my desperate hunt for knowledge of her. Books have been read over and
over again. Poems have been devoured for clues, and now, in the sign of our times, the
Internet has been searched. If only I could find her then perhaps I could find myself.
Finally, there it is: the address and the space I have longed for - her home, our home. You
are close. So very close. Cuidado amor. Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldu
´a writes that as
Chicanas we are turtles, we carry our homes on our backs. When does his transitory
home become too heavy? Have I found what Sandra Cisneros gestures towards in The
House of Mango Street? Is this a real home or a space to call myown? A room of my own?
The house in Coyoaca
´n, built by Hernan Corte
´s is where he allegedly killed his wife
Catalina who had come from Cuba (Caistor; Krauss; Noble). The bright red house,
Casa Colorada, is a private residence located quietly across from a park a little further
down from a market (Krauss; Noble). Unlike the multiple official public spaces
bearing the name, words, or reminders of Hernan Corte
´s, this house was unmarked
and unassuming. I had once heard from a local that a statue of Marina, Corte
´s, and a
lion stood in the park across the street from the house, until it had to be destroyed
because its neighbors found it distasteful. Nothing gave away the house’s illustrious
history or clue of a former resident except perhaps in a cliche
´fashion the passionate
red of the house. Aren’t all of us Latinas associated with red? In an article from the New
York Times, the owner of the house, muralist Rina Lazo explains the private nature of
the house by stating, “For Mexico to make this house a museum, would be like the
people of Hiroshima creating a monument for the man who dropped the atomic
bomb. ::: We’re not malinchistas, but we want to conserve Mexican history”
(Krauss). Lazo’s words echoed the words of a storeowner in La Zona Rosa who
explained to me when my companion and I searched for items that depicted Malintzin
that she was important to Spanish history, not Mexican history. They say you are
buried in Spain while Hernan lies in this soil? Is it true? A few streets away from Casa
Colorada,Casa Azul, the home of Frida Kahlo is open to the public. A public
memorial, a private shame, Mexican history, the value of women, and public shame
are all played out within miles of one another in Coyoaca
´n as Malintzin exists in a
complex space of absence and presence. As Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci note,
monuments “instruct” their visitors about what should be valued in the future and the
past (350). The fact that Malintzin’s house remains unmarked and unendorsed again
attests to the way that Malintzin is devalued in the writing of history. Furthermore,
Blair notes that memorial sites by their very existence create communal spaces (48).
Thus, conversely we must ask what does the lack of memorialization signify?
The Heart of the Matter: Mourning for Marina
A woman who was my lover, my mother, my sister.
Blood, sacrifice, life.
A woman who was my lover, my mother, my sister.
Seeing beyond your time, looking ahead while looking back.
A woman who was my lover, my mother, my sister.
48 B. M. Calafell
Looking for a face, but there is none.
What does it mean? All I see is a shoulder.
A shoulder of a man who hid your face.
Mixing blood,
opening yourself not as La Chingada,
but as the true creator you were.
A woman who was my lover, my mother, my sister.
A woman who has no tears, somehow they are all that I seem to have now.
Displaced, misplaced, misunderstood.
Tears fall from my eyes because of my lack of vision compared to all that you
could foresee.
A woman who was my lover, my mother, my sister.
Malinalli
(Mexico City, May 22, 2002, 5:30 p.m.)
In cultures that seem to value or idealize sacrifice (through images of the virgin)
and recognize the relevance of blood (in the multiple images of the bloody Christ and
through the narratives told of Aztec sacrifice), Malintzin’s place in national and cultural
memory is uncertain and contested because of her blood sacrifice, her blood mixing, and
her sexuality. Malintzin’s absence may be reflective of Stavans’ observation that, “Unlike
men, Hispanic women are indeed forced to open up. And they are made to pay for their
openness” (230). Herexistence asscapegoat foror representative of blood mixing may be
so abject because purity is such a valued concept held up by an unrealistic ideal: the Virgin
of Guadalupe. Psst :::Oh, mijita, do you remember how you were disciplined for that one?
Was it a patriarchal order or other symbolic oppressive structure coming down on you then,
just as it has for me over the countless years? Malintzin is forced to pay for her perceived
openness by existing in a state of limbo, superficially present in national narratives, yet
symbolically and literally facelessin the few visual renderings of this narrative throughout
the city, such as Diego Rivera’s El Arribo De Hernan Corte
´sin The National Palace. She has
no narrative, instead others write over her story with their narratives, seeking to fix
Malintzin in the virgin/whore dichotomy in national memory, only traversing it in the
imaginations and memory performances of everyday citizens such as Susana, a woman
with whom I spoke during my journey who told me of her great love of Malintzin.
Limo
´n has written about the relationships between desire, fantasy, and domination
in colonial encounters and their representation in popular or mass culture. One
prevalent trope is that of the white male and the Mexican girl who is often cast as the
self-sacrificing senorita. As observed by Keller, in film the senorita often sacrifices her
life for her white lover so that in the end he can be with a white woman. Considering
this ideal of sacrifice within the narrative of Malintzin, we might see her as serving as a
sacrificial lamb of sorts in this history of colonialism. Like the self-sacrificing senorita,
her narrative dies while that of her white lover continues. Pe
´rez’s argument about the
Oedipal Conquest Triangle or Complex in which the Indian mother, Malintzin, is
denigrated sheds light upon this situation:
Precisely because Paz and others like him cannot come to terms with the Indian
woman who, in their eyes, betrayed the race by embracing the white male colonizer.
In Search of Malintzin Tene
´pal 49
Yet contradictions proliferate. At some level he is compelled to embrace the
colonizer father, Malinche becomes the dreaded phallic mother who will devour
him, castrate him, usurp him of his own phallus/power. He must therefore ally with
the white colonizer father, but to do so is to ally in ambivalence. (107)
This situation, Pe
´rez argues, will continue to be played out over and over again as
Malintzin will continue to be despised as an abject object (107). Malintzin’s lack of
visibility in the city gives testimony to this argument as her name is whispered while
Hernan Corte
´s’ name and image are literally written across the city. Yes, even on the
wall of the museum of El Templo Mayor right next to the big cathedral his name is
written.
Although there is no marker or museum in her home, many are aware of its
presence. Try as they may to ignore her they cannot stop history because the absence of
the past “‘other’ meanings haunts the presence of the material now” (Kuftinec 83).
As Kuftinec asserts, “These absences, ‘empty’ spaces within the city, remain shadowed
by spectres of what-was-before and possible-futures-to-come, both engaging in the
politics of divisiveness within the city” (83). Mexican and Chicana/o identities cannot
be limited by discourse. As Phelan notes, “Identity cannot, then, reside in the name
you can say or the body you can see. ::: Identity is perceptible only through a relation
to an other” (13). Our history is inescapable, whether named or unnamed.
The Pilgrimage Revisited
Naively we had journeyed to Coyoaca
´n with the intent of seeing Frida Kahlo’s and
Malintzin’s houses in hopes that they would somehow illuminate our understandings
about the roles of Mexican women in past and present societies. Coyoaca
´n is where
Corte
´s and his men were said to have prepared for their attack on Tenochtitla
´n
(Caistor 124). After he had taken over the city, Corte
´s remained in Coyoaca
´n while his
new palace was being built on the site of Moctezuma’s palace. Taking the subway from
the Zocolo district, the historic district, to Coyoaca
´n, we first ventured to Frida Kahlo’s
house, Casa Azul. After visiting Kahlo’s house we began walking through the market in
search of 57 Hidalgo: the only tangible connection we had to Malintzin. Anticipation
was driving me crazy. My heart is racing. I am scared. What will I find? Can I handle this
right now? I am embarrassed by my desire and my need. I had been imaging this
moment since I arrived in Mexico City. I am waiting for you. A strange sense of
excitement and guilt rushed over me. My presence is an intrusion, but I cannot stop.
How many others have come into this space before me looking for a mythic Eve figure who
was neither virgin nor whore, but a real fleshed woman whose story is so cloudy yet so
familiar to me because of our perceived imperfections and shared losses? Religious and
cultural logic dictated that I should have been more excited about going to see the
shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, but this simply wasn’t the case. I’m sorry but you are
nothing like her, you are a daughter in my own image and personality. I was like a child
asking the inevitable question on a road trip, “Are we there yet?” Much like those
pilgrims I had seen venture towards the image of Guadalupe, an enormous sense of
desire, hope, and reverence reverberated throughout my body. Can she be my savior?
50 B. M. Calafell
Can she help me find my way back? Marina, I have lost my story, I have lost my voice, I
have lost my culture, can you help me recuperate them by my visit to this “blasphemous
sacred” site? Blair notes the affects that memorials have on the people who venture to
see them. She asserts that touching them “yields profound responses” (46). My
companions, somewhat taken aback by my reverence, remarked to me that perhaps I
should remember that Marina was a traitor, but it was too late: I was already seduced.
Self-knowledge and possibility are incredible sites of seduction; continue on, don’t let the
voices stop you. Don’t be disciplined again.
Walking towards Casa Colorada, I felt her presence immediately. Do you know I am
here? My blasphemy, her “sainthood” all played out. The black bars over each of the
windows seemed to be a metaphor for the containment of Malintzin’s story in national
narratives. To the left of the house was a sign letting the passerby know the house was
for sale. Who will bear the “burden” of ownership? Who will let her legacy live? At the
time when we shot our pictures I did not notice the sign because I was struck by the
unassuming nature of the house in a small hidden-away neighborhood a few blocks
away from the main market in the town. The ghosts of the past haunt as an eerie
feeling comes over those who come near it.
The huge wooden door had a large metal doorknocker that looked like a hand
coming out of the mouth of an ominous creature. Much like a representation of my
own feeling of being silenced or stunted, the hand was held back by the monster of
history, by the force of narratives, official narratives through which we have always
been defined. Now was the time for self-definition. I touch the walls and with each
caress my pleasure, my pain, my loss, all manifest themselves in welled up tears. Large
windows that form a balcony leave me wondering, did you look over the burning city?
Did you weep over the changing landscape? Over a lost love? A weeping woman on a
balcony overlooking the destruction her lover made across the land of her birth? What
secrets did these walls hold? Moments of seduction, joy, and finally betrayal are all to be
found here in this moment of past, present, and future convergences. This house lies some
distance from the National Palace and the Templo Mayor in the Zocolo district where
Corte
´s set up shop after he had disempowered Moctezuma. Was this the distance that
Corte
´s purposely put between them? There has been so much distance between us, is it
because of the master narrative of your mestiza birth and the many “truths” you have
been told about me? Passion, self-knowledge, and the pain of history are all around us.
The force of history, the force of memory past, present, and future is inescapable as
I stand on this sacred site. Sacred is the site of mestiza birth. This site where Corte
´s was
said to have killed his wife is haunted by mysteries and unanswered questions.
Unanswered questions allow the visitor to reimagine, retell, and reperform. Perhaps it
is because this house remains unsanctioned that it is a place of renewal, allowing
visitors to write their own histories and stories. What would official narratives deny?
Standing near the house I merge my story into hers and our narratives become one. We
are not that different. We reflect on one another, change one another, and now as I
enter your space we are fused. I have come home to you another mujer mala. No more
mourning. The voice you lost was never your own. Those were not our words, they were
only scripts we had been force fed all along. In this space, I create my own embodied
In Search of Malintzin Tene
´pal 51
understanding of my legacy, of my culture. All along I had been mourning the loss of
my voice, culture, and story not realizing that in this process, in this space of
anticipation and finally in this space of reclamation and reconciliation through the
traversing of my past, present, and future I have created a space of new possibilities,
what Pollock terms a possible real. The possibility of remaking in the performance of
language and in this the embodiment of history can be liberatory and intoxicating as it
is the ultimate seduction.
The Space of Possibility: Past, Present, and Future
Cherrie Moraga writes about being in love with the unrequited or simply being in
love with the feeling of desire. Wanting to stay in that place of limbo yet not quite
limbo, that place of possibility, can give a sense of extreme pleasure. Anticipation
can be everything. Reversing things a bit, Michel Foucault argues that within
homosexuality the most pleasurable part of sex is the “recollection rather than the
anticipation of the act ::: the homosexual imagination is for the most part
concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it” (297). This
reminiscing or nostalgia creates a queer temporality that privileges memory because
homosexual acts are prefigured as other or outside of “master” narration. Leo
Bersani argues that displacement, in this case the displacement of the act, is
endemic to sexuality (221). Writing about the mobility of desire, Bersani argues
that sexual desire initiates “an agitated fantasmatic activity in which original (but,
from the start, unlocatable) objects of desire get lost in the images they generate”
(221). Alan Sinfield elaborates on the idea of a queer temporality or anticipation by
writing of a queer diaspora, “For coming out is not once-and-for-all ::: we never
quite arrive” (118). Similarly, this space of unfulfilled desire might seem somewhat
sadomasochistic or may rather exist as a byproduct of not just a queer desire, as
Halperin defines it—an identity at odds with the normal—but also the desire for
“original” experience (which has been denied) that may be a product of a
postcolonial or exile condition. So this space of what is unrequited exists as a space
of nostalgia. A space that longs for what never was and will never be. Longing for a
space that will never be, but enjoying the desire, “The exile is a person who having
lost a loved one, keeps searching for the face he loves in every new face and, forever
deceiving himself, think he has found it” (Arenas, qtd. in Herrera xxiv). Each of
these sources contributes to what I term a queer temporality. Others such as Bell
and Binnie, Sedgwick, and Altman raise questions about the possibility for a queer
diaspora or nationality, based upon shared experience or feeling, but I turn to
Foucault and other queer theorists not as a means to talk about sexuality, but
rather to talk about the feeling of being positioned at odds with the normal
narratives.
I cite Foucault because of the possibilities of where it can go theoretically, though I
realize the possibility that it could provoke much critique. For example, Leo Bersani
dismisses Foucault’s statement by saying it directs attention to “romances of memory
and the idealization of the presexual, the courting imagination” (220). My intention is
52 B. M. Calafell
not to use this framework as if to suggest that those who employ a queer temporality
have no history of their own, thus they must create history; rather I argue that
dominant discourses do in fact include them in narratives, but in ways that
marginalize them, do not privilege their experiences, or allow them to define those
experiences. Thus, they employ disidentificatory strategies such as memory and queer
temporality to challenge these constructions and power interests, offer counter
narratives, and create communities based upon these feelings of difference and excess.
These personal narratives, Frederick Corey argues, disturb master narratives and
rewrite them through their performative elements (250). Personal narratives,
renegotiated memories may be born out of “a symptom of loss of grand narratives of a
culture” and may be programs for “recuperating loss” (Cox “Cultural Memory” 9).
Citing the work of Marcuse who believed in the “liberating power of remembrance,”
J. Robert Cox argues that memory “has the potential to subvert one-dimensional
consciousness and also to prefigure an alternative future” (“Memory” 3). The
argument from history “allows us, potentially, to transcend, or ‘go beyond’ the claims
of presentist argument. It recovers, re-collects, and reassembles what has been ‘left out’
of public debate” (12). The tensions or paradoxes lie in the question of “how to
become modern and to return to sources” and the “need to preserve the nucleus of a
culture—its temporal identity—on one hand, and the need to break with reified
interpretations of the past” (Cox “Cultural Memory” 4).
Taking Elin Diamond’s discussion of performativity a step further, Alberto
Sandoval-Sa
´nchez and Nancy Saporta Sternbach note that beyond the doing and the
thing done, performance points towards the future to give the audience a sense of
expectation; a future perfect, that which will have been done (97). I liken this future
perfect to D. Soyini Madison’s performance of possibilities, which speaks to the ability
of performed personal narrative to traverse margins and centers. Sandoval-Sanchez
and Sternbach write, “To recover that past is to activate ethnic memory, a memory
that, once recalled projects itself into a future performance of being, of selfhood. :::
performance is not only a ‘doing and a thing done,’ but also a ‘thing imagined,’ a ‘thing
to be done,’ a thing projected forward” (104). Thus, in the performance or
reembodiment of memory not only are present and past conditions affected, but in
this telling the future is opened. Idealistically, these openings would allow for altered
futures and possibilities, forays into materiality. Trauma to become susceptible to
critique through its telling, this performance, this pilgrimage enables a re-storied
history that is activated in each step I take. Others such as Davis have examined the
rhetoric of pilgrimage as a way to interrogate larger cultural histories, but the journey I
take is very personal and explicitly linked to Malintzin. Guided by a Four Seasons of
Ethnography perspective (M. Gonzalez), performance ethnography perspective
(Conquergood), and understanding art as meditation (De La Garza), I understand the
importance of using personal experience, body knowledge, and reflection to bear upon
my history and theorizations of it. Thus, I offer my own narrative, my own rewriting of
the space, and my own story of mourning to reperform possibilities for recuperating
colonial narratives, specifically, the narrative of Malintzin, in order to offer
possibilities for the future.
In Search of Malintzin Tene
´pal 53
Walking through the space of Mexico City our stories become active with
every step I take in search of her. Writing of the decolonial process, Frantz Fanon
argues,
The violence which has ruled over the ordering of the colonial world, which has
ceaselessly drummed the rhythm for destruction of native social forms and broken
up without reserve the systems of reference of the economy, the customs of dress and
external life, that same violence will be claimed and taken over by the native at the
moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the
forbidden quarters. (40)
In the same way, pilgrimage and the desire to reimagine history and national memory
are actions for those postcolonial subjects to embody history. Affect created through
performances of queer temporality calls preexisting subjects into spaces of
identification where lived experience is altered and potentialities are opened as
identity continues to be in the making. Taking a cue from Erik Doxtader, whose work
on South African Reconciliation argues for a middle voice that actualizes what it
explains, I identify performative process or pilgrimage as a means of honoring
identities in the making and alternative forms of advocacy (“Making Rhetorical
History”). Doxtader’s study acknowledges reconciliation as a rhetorical process or
procedure that is both action and object (“Making Rhetorical History”). In the same
way I propose the study of memory and pilgrimage as spaces of affective performance
that critique and actualize. The passivity and erasure Malintzin finds in the pages of
Mexican philosophy, murals, and history books are shattered through the pilgrimage I
make to her home to mourn not only for her, but for myself. Gloria Anzaldu
´a argues
that a Chicana identity is grounded in a history of resistance and adds that “Aztec
female rites of mourning were rites of defiance protesting the cultural changes which
disrupted the equality and balance between male and female, and protesting their
demotion to a lesser status, their denigration. Like la Llorona, the Indian woman’s only
means of protest was wailing” (21). Thus, I wail for myself, I wail for Malinalli, and I
wail for other Chicanas.
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