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Article Excerpt
In Margarita Cota-Cardenas' Puppet: A Chicano Novella (1985), the protagonist Petra "Pat" Leyva is relentlessly plagued by what she perceives to be her inability to embody an authentic Chicana self. Pat's desire for authenticity belies her role as a single mother of two girls who holds down two jobs as an instructor of Chicano/a literature and Spanish at a community college and a part-time secretary at a construction company, for the Chicano/a identities that she embraces are extremely reductive. These identities depend upon a romanticized notion of marginalized communities, revolving around conceptions of the working-class laborer, feminist political activist, and selfless wife and mother at the core of a nuclear family. Moreover, Pat associates her feelings of betrayal of her community with some of the most iconic symbols of Chicano/a and Mexican culture, like Cesar Chavez, La Llorona, and La Malinche (also known as Marina or Malintzin). Pat's identification with La Malinche (93), the indigenous translator and lover of the Spanish conqueror Hernan Cortes, who is legendarily known as both the mother of the Mexican nation and as its quintessential betrayer, is particularly fraught; this identification leads her to assume the dichotomous role of female creator and destroyer as she struggles to find her place in her community of friends and family. As a result, Chicano/a identities are impossible to fulfill in the novel, and ultimately reinforce the production of impervious myths and icons of Mexican and Chicano/a identity.
Despite Pat's desire for an authentic and immutable Chicano identity, her anxiety also reveals resistance to such strict conceptions of identity. Perhaps the clearest example of the resistance and tension evident in Puppet is the way that the novel appears to promote fixed Chicano/a identities, yet bursts with multilingual tricks and slips that challenge the limits of identity at every turn. The novel deviates from the now dominant mode of hybrid identities and liminal, transnational spaces within much Latino/a and Chicano/a cultural production, evident in well-known texts such as Gloria Anzaldua's influential Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) or Guillermo Gomez-Pena's The New Worm Border (1996). Instead, through a radical interrogation of language and translation, Puppet provides a critical perspective on the ongoing struggle between fluid and essentialist Chicano/a identities. Throughout much of the novel, Pat persists in her desire for a fixed and authentic Chicano/a identity; yet Puppet constantly challenges the institutionalization of identity through this interrogation of language.
Cota-Cardenas' novel both rejects the institutionalization of rigid Chicano/a identities and demonstrates a desperate nostalgia for authenticity, fixedness, and monolingualism. While contradictory subjectivities and in-between spaces are explicitly rejected by most of the characters in the novel--especially by Pat herself--the language, form, and style of the novel explode strict boundaries at every turn, symbolically reflecting the transnational condition of Chicano/as in the United States. Instead of perceiving the contradictory representation of identity in Puppet as a marker of stagnation or hopelessness, we should interpret it as a matter of simultaneity and possibility, in which Chicano/as inhabit multiple languages and national identities even as they may occasionally be excluded by them. The secret is to interpret exclusion not as abjection, but as another element of the transformative potential of contradictory Chicano/a identities. Likewise, by emphasizing apparent flaws such as repetition, mispronunciation, misunderstanding, colloquialism, and language mixing, the linguistic games in Puppet privilege flexible identities by revealing each person's capacity to shift between the poles of inclusion and exclusion. This language play also rearticulates myths and icons frequently associated with Chicano/a identity. Such icons are generally invoked as symbols of collectivity and as markers of monolithic Chicano identity. Through the use of multilingual aesthetics, Cota-Cardenas deconstructs the dominant representation of iconic figures like Chavez in order to foreground the multiplicity of collective Chicano/a identities.
Fluid Languages
Puppet was originally published by Relampago, a small, self-established Chicano press (Rebolledo xiv). Because of its limited distribution, and certainly also because it had been written primarily in Spanish--a marginalized language in the United States--and also contains a hybrid mix of English and Spanish (Spanglish), the novel was out of print for many years. Puppet has been celebrated within Chicano/a literary circles as an underground classic, and it was republished in a bilingual edition by the University of New Mexico Press in 2000, suggesting that it is finally gaining prominence in the Chicano/a literary canon. Nevertheless, very little criticism has been published on the novel, and it is not well known in mainstream American or Latin American studies. (1) At the same time, Puppet clearly anticipates many contemporary debates surrounding Chicano/a identity formation in the United States, such as those on immigration and migration, language, citizenship, gender roles, various forms of nationalism, hybridity, transnationalism, and the role of Chicano/a communities.
While the novel contains many narratives, temporalities, and voices, the core narrative concerns a poor Chicano youth named Puppet who toils as a construction worker for the company where Pat is a secretary in Southwest City, a mostly Mexican and Chicano/a town somewhere in the southwestern US. As the narrative opens, we discover that Puppet has been unjustly shot and killed by the police. After receiving a phone call from her friend Memo informing her of Puppet's murder, Pat embarks upon a quest that shifts between reality and fantasy as she struggles to discover and record the truth of Puppet's life and death, and, in the process, to reconcile herself to her own frequently contradictory identities. Meanwhile, she is confronted by conflicting ideologies of class, language, and ethnicity. On one hand, Pat occupies a privileged position vis-a-vis police corruption, the official cover-up of Puppet's death, and the economic and social uncertainty of working-class Chicano/as and Mexicans from both sides of the border. On the other, she feels culturally and linguistically inadequate in the face of her Mexican and Chicano/a friends.
Nevertheless, Puppet is essentially a multilingual text, for Cota-Cardenas constantly switches between languages such as formal Spanish, Mexican, and Chicano/a Spanish slang, Spanglish, formal English, and broken English. While the bilingual edition of Puppet incorporates an English translation of the Spanish which remains interwoven throughout the text, both the version primarily written in Spanish and the English translation are and are not translations, since both are thoroughly multilingual. As I argue below, the simultaneous translation and refusal of translation in Puppet echoes Jacques Derrida's theory of the monolingualism of the other, which questions the idea of the natural "possession" of a given language and, by extension, of identity. Moreover, the novel's interrogation of language and translation reveals that the distinction between English as the national language of the United States and Spanish as a "foreign" language is plainly untenable.
Instead, Puppet demonstrates the primacy of Spanish and Spanglish as languages with a long-standing history in the US alongside English. In both versions of the novel, Cota-Cardenas produces texts which refuse the very notion of translation by rejecting the possibility of a monolingual text in either English or Spanish. She further contests monolingualism by playing with the structure of language itself, utilizing different fonts and typefaces, such as bold letters, capitals, italics, and indented type throughout the novel to emphasize emotion, memory, fantasy, and reality. At the same time, both versions of Puppet depend very much upon translation, since multilingual and monolingual readers will experience very different readings of Puppet. Multilingual readers of Spanish and English can experience the linguistic repetition and tricks in Puppet as a productive surplus of language, following literary scholar Doris Sommer's theorization of the advantages, rather than the deficiencies, of bilingual excess, which I examine below. It is significant, however, that the primary example of such linguistic "excess" is the impoverished, uneducated, and stuttering Puppet--a marginalized figure if there ever was one--not iconic figures such...
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