Mexican-American Literature: Pat Mora - Essay Example

PAT MORA Latina are redefining what America is and what American literature is since their literature has found its way to some of the mainstream publishers such as Norton, Knopf, and Random House. Although Pat Mora complains about what it is widely named as “Latin Boom,” saying “all you have to do is look at numbers” (Sullivan and Mermann-Jozwiak, 44), it is evident that American Latinas want their voices to be heard along with the mainstream literature. They appropriate their experiences to those audiences who can understand their struggle, identify with their experiences, or those who can find Latina writing as a source of knowledge about a culture. As Latina literature is flourishing in the United States, a new canon is about to be formed challenging what is known as mainstream literature and a creating a new literature, expanding the meaning of literature in America, and redefining and affirming the diversity of America itself. Lourdes Torres states that the diversity of American society as well as its literature is a “reinvention of nations, cultures, and languages that has revitalized American literature” (Torres, 49). Pat Mora, as one of the most celebrated Latina writers, have revitalized American literature as she moves back and forth between genres, mixes and fuses poetry and prose ranging from the fictional to the memoirs. As Torres states, “[Latina writers] challenge conventional literary forms from a multidimensional perspective as they rework the codes at their disposal” (Torres, 48). In her writings, Pat Mora uses a form and a style that reflects her position as individual and a woman, her ambivalence, and the plurality of her culture, rave and identity. From the critical perspective, the majority of Latina writers depict alienation and oppression of Mexican-American women in both the Latino community and mainstream American society. However, Pat Mora refuses to be politically militant. Because Mora writes for both adults and children, her world is more focused on how to educate the new generations about the Chicano people and about the world surrounding them. There is no outrage in her tone, though there is a need for a change. Pat Mora employs different themes to ensure that her voice could be accessible to all generations, children, and adults, activists and non-activists, men as well as women. For instance, in her introduction to Nepantla, Mora invites readers to her text as if she is inviting them to her own house; her house is literally a house of words. There is no difference since her real house reflects her words, and her words reflect back her house: “Welcome to my Word-house” (Mora, Nepantla, 3). With such a tone, Mora sounds more open to dialogue with others even with those who may disagree with her. After creating an appropriate atmosphere, the author assumes a conversation with her audience when she reveals that she writes from the middle of the United States. She introduces herself as a “child of the border,” in between two places, and on the border of each border of these two places, who has been influenced by those two countries, which have shaped her perception of reality (Mora, Nepantla, 6). Her source of knowledge is not only that border, but also those women who border her, namely her mother and daughter (Mora, Nepantla, 6). She admits that she is “very comfortable if people say Chicana, Latina, Mexican American…Hispanic I have more problems with” (Sullivan, Nancy and Mermann-Jozwiak, 44). However, in Nepantla Mora declares that the “Mexican American” hyphenated term is too moderate, while “Chicana” is too militant (Mora, Nepantla, 67). With such declaration, Mora is situating herself in the middle, as being herself moderate for she refuses to be either; she prefers to remain on the middle ground just like the geography of the borders. Perhaps the best way to explain mixed Mexican American identity of Pat Mora is through her poem “Legal Alien.” In it she clearly articulates the concept of alienation and displacement as suffered by all Mexican-Americans. The title itself draws the reader’s attention as one may wonder how one can be both legal and an alien simultaneously. Mora also begins and ends her poem with the prefix “bi”, thus focusing on the frustration felt by both Chicanos and Chicanas having to balance two sides of both worlds and yet not belonging to either: Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural, able to slip from ‘Hows life?’ to ‘Me stan volviendo loca,’ able to sit in a paneled office drafting memos in smooth English (Mora, Chants, 60). Although the Chicana in the poem is able to function in both worlds –“Bi-lingual, Bi-cultural, able to slip from ‘Hows life?’ to ‘Me ‘stan volviendo loca’” she is unacceptable to Anglos because she is “American but hyphenated [...] perhaps exotic [...] definitely different” (Mora, Chants, 60). She may have the right to live in the United States, but she does not look or sound like an American. On the other hand, she is also “viewed by Mexicans as alien, (their eyes say, ‘You may speak Spanish but you’re not like me’).” This Chicana is “an American to Mexicans / a Mexican to Americans / a handy token / sliding back and forth between the fringes of both worlds” (Mora, Chants, 60). Thus, by being denied total immersion into both cultural and societal circles, the poem’s character is alienated. Toward the end of the poem, Mora emphasizes not only the Chicana’s feeling of isolation but also her dual identity by playing on the word “by,” which sounds like “bi,” thus connoting the double feeling throughout the poem: “by smiling / by masking the discomfort / of being pre-judged / Bi-laterally” (Mora, Chants, 60). Overall, both Chicanos and Chicanas are “bi-lateral,” caught on the outskirts of two worlds that collide with each other. They have had to learn to shift back and forth between both in order to survive the dual colonialism and repression that displaced them in the first place. In her another poem, “Desert Women,” Pat Mora chooses cactus, a symbol of endurance and survival in a harsh climate, as a major metaphor to carry on a theme of women gathering strength through their connection to the earth. She begins the poem by stating that like cactus, desert women know how to survive the fierce heat and cold that burn and thicken their skin; and they have “learned to hoard, to sprout deep roots, to seem asleep[...] to hide pain and loss by silence,” (Mora, Borders 80) and to whisper their sad songs hidden safely behind their thorns. And then the poem ends abruptly with two short lines: “Don’t be deceived. When we bloom, we stun” (Mora, Borders, 80). Mora’s choice of words and abrupt ending convey the message that these women, who seem to be dormant like cactus, will no longer tolerate the injustices prevalent in their society. This subject is so acute it has been continuously emerging in the works of Kate Choplin, Toni Morrison and other women writers, which once again proves why Pat Mora represents American literary tradition. In “Bruja: Witch,” Mora plays upon the same theme of the witch seeking justice for those who have had evil enacted against them. A young wife pays the bruja three American dollars to bring her adulterous husband home. The bruja becomes one with the owl in order to perform her job: “I close my eyes, slow my heart, pull my life in, breathe it out into the owl’s warm feathers [...]. The owl and I are one [...]. I spy my victims. Through a dirty window I see two nude bodies trying to escape into each other” (Mora, Chants 22). Mora clearly presents the curandera or bruja as a complex, powerful symbol central to Chicana literature. Not only does this archetypal figure possess the positive qualities of the Virgin Mary, but, as Mora demonstrates the union with owl constitutes a woman’s awakening. In poem after poem, Mora’s message is clearly the same as that of man Chicana and African American female authors - to prevail against the tyranny of repressive patriarchal institutions, oppressed women must become themselves in the fullest way possible and form a united front of solidarity in order to transcend tradition and allow for gender equality. However, simultaneously developing her and other women’s feminist consciousness through writing, Pat Mora shows how one can embrace difference and rejoice in the plurality of the race, language, and culture. WORKS CITED Mora, Pat. Chants. Houston: Arte Publico Press, University of Houston, 1985. Mora, Pat. Borders. Houston: Arte Publico Press, University of Houston, 1986. Sullivan, Nancy and Mermann-Jozwiak, Elisabeth. Conversations with Mexican American Writers: Languages and Literatures in the Borderlands, University Press of Mississippi, 2009 Torres, Lourdes. “U.S. Latino/a Literature: Re-Creating America.” ANQuarterly 10.3 (1997): 47-51. Read More