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CHAPTER 1
What Would Edén Say? Reclaiming the Personal and Grounding Story in Chicana Feminist (Academic) Writing
Kandace Creel Falcón
Determined to find out more about Chicana feminism, I huffed and puffed as I walked up each set of stairs in the Watson Library stacks. A research project for one of my women's studies classes brought me to the library, a stately building defined by limestone and stairs, but I was digging for knowledge not assigned by my professors. Even though I was familiar with doing research in the library on the University of Kansas campus that housed the humanities and social sciences texts, my heart filled with a sense of awe, wonder, and pride every time I set foot in Watson. To think my tuition paid for the access to all these books and knowledge reminded me of the joys I felt researching in the Lomas-Tramway library as a young girl in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While a set of stairs also led up to my childhood library, it leveled out into a one-story maze of bookshelves easily navigated by patrons. The Watson Library contained five floors of books with stacks emanating from the center of the library connected by back-way, windowless, and cool climate-controlled staircases that made me feel more like a scholar in an Indiana Jones movie than a mere undergraduate in Lawrence, Kansas.
Libraries inspire a sense of belonging for me. They feel like home. Since childhood, shelves of books never judged my tastes; checking the catalogue for current library holdings and figuring out the inter-library loan systems unlocked gates I never knew were sealed. Discovering a favorite place in the library to read through the pile of books I found also brought its own rewards. The library became my sanctuary, a place where I could determine my destiny. Despite the recognition that I was often the only woman of color exploring bookshelves of texts, and the feeling that university spaces were not meant for a Mexican American like me, the Watson library felt safe.
It was in college when I learned libraries were politicized spaces, tasked with not only holding books, but also curating different ways of knowing for diverse readers. In my childhood library I don't recall coming across books by Mexican Americans, despite growing up in New Mexico. I tore through the typical (white) children's series, like Amelia Bedelia, The Berenstain Bears, and later The Baby-Sitters Club. Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me Ultima, and Sandra Cisneros' A House on Mango Street, books assigned to me in middle school, were exceptions, not the rule in my literary history. Stumbling upon Emma Pérez's The Decolonial Imaginary in the E184 call section of the 1 center stacks in the Watson Library changed me. Nearby, Carla Trujillo's edited anthology Living Chicana Theory lived on the shelf. Both books with rich, purple covers contained images of powerful Chicana iconography I never imagined, yet felt compelled to hold near. After admiring the covers and acknowledgments, I dug into these books' bibliographies and began searching out the other influences, stories, and voices that enabled these words on pages. Future visits to Watson encouraged a thorough search of the 4 and 41/2 center stacks where Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera sat next to the groundbreaking second wave feminist anthology by women of color This Bridge Called My Back, which resided near Norma Cantú's Canícula.
In the cave-like rooms in-between the library's floors that housed metal shelves crammed full of so many books, these Chicana feminist texts seemed like they were waiting just for me to find them. Upon searching them out, I devoured them with an urgency not yet felt upon other literary discoveries. As a Chicana with a brown mother and white father, Anzaldúa's ideas of mestiza consciousness, being in-between, and navigating borders helped me make sense of the experiences grounding my lived reality. By the time I came to Cherríe Moraga's Loving in the War Years, I emerged from her pages a Chicana. Moraga's mixed-race claiming of Chicanidad and the telling of her story of how she came to know her lesbian self inspired my confidence in claiming a queer identity too. These works not only helped me better understand myself, but they also pushed to challenge dominant assumptions that I felt deeply compelled to embrace.
Women of color writing freed me from previous assumptions I held about writing. Chicana feminists' lyrical writings fully embodied what my professors taught in my women's studies courses — that the personal is political. Except, more powerfully, Anzaldúa, Moraga and others center a Chicana experience of theorizing the personal so as to make political claims. Before reading women of color writing, my understanding of knowledge production focused on data, on evidence collected in a methodology sanctioned by a history of white academic legacies as the only true (correct) way to make valid scholarly claims. Women of color claims, informed by the realities of what it meant to be in the world through their experiences, further released my passion for knowledge with a new recognition of the value of seeing myself in the form of the messenger. Because these mujeres connected the self to the world around them, I learned the importance of exploring histories and present conditions entrenched not only in our individual selves, but also by the collective experiences of our people. Gathering the rich history of storytelling in the form of writing then is a Chicana feminist project filled with urgency and rooted in legacy. A race to correct the record of century-long inaccuracies, a need to interrupt the narratives of domination, became my call to action and invitation to engage this shared mission.
Finding Chicana feminist authors in the Watson library stacks won me admittance into the University of Minnesota's Feminist Studies Doctoral Program. It was my archeological digging up of their words that informed my writing samples and personal statements when I applied for graduate school. It was my amplifying of their voices in concert with my urgent need to make sense of my own history that led me to the research projects and writing centering their expressions, identities, and stories. Emboldened by Chicanas reclaiming figures like La Virgen de Guadalupe as a Chicana lesbian role model, I began incorporating bold revisions and reimaginings of the intersections of my gender, sexual, and racialized identities in my writing. Along the way white scholars reminded me of how this project was not sanctioned implicitly and explicitly. I recognize it now by the way I had to make sense of these words on my own, without guidance, without classroom discussions, without the assumption that my professors would have read these works as undergraduate students. I remember how professors and grant reviewers constantly questioned my projects as a graduate student. "Is this research?" they would ask in the margins of my drafts. "The self and family are not valid sites of knowledge production, what is your intervention?" would come through in comments on my work. "There must be an archive somewhere, your job as a scholar is to find it." These demands from senior white scholars of what rigorous scholarship looks like clatter in my ears.
"Valid" academic writing and scholarship requires distance, a pretend, yet required, scenario in which the observer is supposed to be outside of that which is being observed. This is laughable. Who is behind the keyboard, the pen of your ethnographic observational notes in your field journal? Who is the name attached to your page? The assumed neutrality of whiteness translates into invisible Authorship. I do not mean the invisible authorship forced upon queer people of color where our written stories struggle to make it to page or press. I am naming the invisibility that the academy exalts, a disappearing of the raced/gendered/sexual self — operating in effort to falsely couch neutrality. White academia tries to insist the better scholarship is by those who can retain a neutral stance. (Queer) women of color writers know this neutrality is code for cis-male white privilege. I do not care for this project. I would rather my reader know this scholarship is rooted in an agenda of liberation. And women's studies as a discipline insists we push against the premise of objectivity/neutrality. Every effort challenging the establishment status quo of maintaining current power structures is the project of liberation for us all.
The PhD track is supposed to discipline you. During my time as a graduate student the process tried to beat me out of my writing. It started innocuously enough by erasing every first person utterance or inner thought. This happened in the name of "good" scholarship. I embraced the idea that through writing I should exhibit above average intelligence. So, when my professors started scratching out my "I" voice, I accepted it. I began replacing everyday words with exuberant ones I looked up in the thesaurus. Hours spent poring over difficult and indecipherable texts replicated complex (long) sentence structure in my formal writing. Soon, I could no longer recognize myself in my pages. I had been disciplined. Sometimes, in a rush to push writing out, I will revert to this distant, "objective" voice. Recognizing the strong pull of academese is not enough; I need backup.
If, like me, you are lucky, your Chicana feminist advisor will be your backup. She will give your writing back and pointedly say to you, "What is this? Where are you?" when you are missing from your stories. She will share with you that she stopped reading after the first paragraph. At first you will feel crushed, a bit spirit-broken, but later when you look again at what you gave her, you will come to agree with her assessment. You will look to her text, Chicana Without Apology as your muse. You will remember, you are not writing for white male academics, you are filling in gaps of knowledge, you are interrupting what has been done before. You will remember your true audience, your abuela who completed eight grades of formal schooling in Juarez, Mexico. You will remember your true audience, your mama who graduated from high school against the odds in Washington, Kansas. You will remember your true audience, your hermana who will soon graduate with a master's degree in technical writing with an emphasis in women's studies from Kansas State University. You will remember your true audience, your 4-year-old niece, and the young girl hungry for more, who is now searching for your book in the stacks of her community library.
Edén Torres, my Chicana feminist mentor, serves as the Chicana writer who most helped me bridge what I discovered long ago in the stacks. She continues to shape my writing practice even as she no longer reviews all of my work. I constantly use her as my gauge — what would Edén say about this? Where would she push me to reveal more of myself to get closer to the meat of my arguments? What story might I share to paint a better picture of the theory I wrestle and try to wrangle from thoughts to words on the page? She taught me many lessons, but the lesson I try to live most in my writing practice is that we each have an authentic voice and when we hone it, it cannot be detached from our self. When we are present and intentional about our audience, our writing sings most powerfully. My songs are only possible because of Edén's.
Basing my writing process in exposing and cultivating my authentic voice means that sometimes, most times, writing is a painful process. It is a task that requires me to lock myself away with only my thoughts. As an extrovert who thrives on being with others, writing can appear solitary at first glance. Moving the solitary to the communal takes a gentle shift in perspective and helps me feel less alone. With the successful honing of my writing craft, I bring my community into the process to counter the fears of being isolated. Feeling like the "only one" in academic institutional spaces haunts my reality when Xicanas make up such a small percentage of the professoriate. The demands of the academy constantly discipline. Women of color writers who masterfully blend story and theory bring me back into balance when the demands of academic writing conventions stifle my authentic voice.
Women of color and Chicana feminist writers lay their souls, traumas, and bodies bare for the reader. I am convinced that this practice in vulnerability is a political act of liberation. Anzaldúa reminds us of this in her famous essay, "Speaking in Tongues: A Letter to Third World Women Writers." In exploring why she is compelled to write she offers:
Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice. Because I must keep the spirit of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what others erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you.
(Anzaldúa, 2009, p. 30)
To write in this way is to be laid bare for all to consume. To write in this way is to build community. I envision my writing through story, like Anzaldúa's as an ofrenda, an offering, for you, my community. A gift rooted in a vulnerable sharing of me.
Resistance defines my writing experiences. External detractors wishing to deter my voice converge with internal thoughts trying to shame me into not writing. Perfectionist tendencies meet lifetimes of not seeing myself in others' words. Worries about what "counts" for publications creep up on the need to put myself into my writing to fulfill my compulsion to write. These tensions mark my journey in uncovering my authentic voice. When these pressures mount, I light a candle on my altar. The altar is my facilitator of offerings. To make an ofrenda at my altar grounds my intention. When I light a candle to honor the past and present, I embrace the flicker of shine from its wick. The candlelight reminds me to face the glow of light, imagine a spotlight and spill myself onto my screen, into my pages, whether keyboard or pen under my fingers. When a breeze taps the flickering light to illuminate my statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe, I imagine how she appears in all angles of illumination. These different perspectives of her back or side alit, harken back to my invisible readers, my supporters, my reminders of why I write in the dark, why I push through that which may be uncomfortable to share. Knowing even if it is only me who needs to read these words is enough to continue writing when it is most difficult. Rules of my craft matter less than unlocking the process of writing for me. Finding the conditions that best support laying myself bare for my reader took a while, but now, when I get lost, I light a candle and make an altar wherever I am.
Have you ever moved yourself to tears when you write? In a world where our tears may be construed as weakness, or used against us when we call out injustice, the act of crying while writing legitimizes my product and process. When my words move me to cry, I know I have left something behind that cannot be consumed without leaving a mark on the reader. I seek to move myself to cry when I write despite feeling uncomfortable or scared. To shift myself to cry confronts the borders within and the barriers I erect between others and myself. When I cry on my page, I know I am contributing to the archive of women of color writers who have brought me to tears through theirs. I am stretching that catalogue to embrace the young Chicanita who is searching for a glimpse of herself in the pages of a book or on the cover of a book in the tombs of a favorite library. I am honoring alternative ways for the foremothers, myself, and those not yet on this path. I learned this lesson when I revised the piece that Edén could not read. I lit a candle, scrapped the original, and opened myself to the vulnerable act of sharing myself with my page. I cried as I wrote, choking up even more when I read the new draft to myself out loud. When she gave it back to me, smiling and beaming, she said, "Now this is you."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "How Dare We! Write"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Sherry Quan Lee.
Excerpted by permission of Loving Healing Press, Inc..
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