ABSTRACT

Helena María Viramontes’s richly metaphorical fictional narratives about Mexican Americans in mid-to-late twentieth century Los Angeles and agricultural California can be usefully taught in a range of courses. I myself have taught her fiction in courses like Narrative and Narrative Theory (Under the Feet of Jesus, focusing on characterization, narrative perspective, and focalization); Contemporary American Literature (Under, focusing on representations of farmworker experience); Growing Up in America (Under and The Moths, focusing on twentieth-century Chicana girlhood experience); Writings by Women of Color (Moths, focusing on gender dynamics); and Chicana/o Literature (Moths and Their Dogs Came with Them, focusing on mid-twentieth-century Chicana/o experience of racial segregation and economic discrimination). Viramontes’s acute attention to interpersonal and social dynamics, her lyrical and allusive descriptions of people and places, and the immense generosity she shows toward her remarkably expansive range of character types make her one of the most important Latina writers to have emerged over the last 30 years. Currently a Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Cornell,

Viramontes is a much-loved and valued mentor to younger writers such as Manuel Muñoz, Alex Espinoza, and NoViolet Bulawayo. An activist at heart, Viramontes engages in fiction writing, academic organizing, and teaching as her primary forms of activism. She has co-coordinated several writers’ associations, participated in numerous social justice projects, and organized important conferences featuring the artistic production of Latina/o and Chicana/o artists. She is the coeditor, with Maria Herrera Sobek, of two anthologies that bring together art and scholarship. She is the recipient of a U.S. Ford Fellowship in Literature, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, a Sundance Institute Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicana/Latino Literature awarded by UCSB. Viramontes’s preoccupations as a writer and scholar were formed early. She was born

in East Los Angeles, California on February 26, 1954. Fifth to the youngest, she grew up as one of six sisters in a family of 11. A self-described “invisible child”—not the oldest, not the youngest, and not a boy-Viramontes spent her childhood as an unremarked witness to the chaotic goings-on of her vibrant, busy, crowded, and ultimately loving childhood home (“Beach Blanket Baja” 2008: np). Listening in from the other side of the door to “late night kitchen meetings where everyone talked and laughed in low voices, played cards, talked of loneliness, plans for the futures, [and] of loves lost or won” she was privy to the dreams, fears, and joys of those around her. “[C]apturing the moments and fleeing with them like a thief or a lover,” Viramontes began her “apprenticeship” as a writer “without even knowing it” (“Nopalitos: The Making of Fiction” 1990: 291). This

an 50s-something former housewife in “Snapshots,” to the troubled transgender character of Turtle in Dogs, to the profoundly responsible but oh-so-tired elderly Perfecto in Under, to the romantically yearning but tough young women in both Under and Dogs. Viramontes’s attention to the class and race dynamics that shaped the affective and

material lives of the people she grew up with is an important element of her fiction. With little education, her father labored as a hod carrier to support his large and growing family. Stressed with the responsibility and facing systemic racism at work, he “drank and was mean.” Because he was “[I]mpatient, screaming a lot of the time,” Viramontes and her siblings often found themselves “trembling in his presence” (“Nopalitos” 292). Viramontes’s mother, by contrast, was a homemaker, a woman of “total kindness” and “relentless energy” whose care and domestic inventiveness made her “the fiber that held [the] family together.” Viramontes writes: “If my mother showed me all that is good in being female, my father showed me all that is bad in being male” (“Nopalitos” 291). The patriarchal character of her family life, together with the circumstance of growing into womanhood during a time and place of intense political activism around systemic gender inequality (the Women’s Liberation movement); the substandard education accorded to Mexican Americans (the Garfield High School Blowouts), residential segregation (the construction in Los Angeles of freeways that decimated Mexican American neighborhoods), and the Vietnam War (the Chicano Moratorium), inspired Viramontes’s strong Chicana feminist outlook. The temporal-and oftentimes cultural-distance between Viramontes’s characters and

my Stanford students means that they rarely have access to the range of interpretive schemas they need to appreciate Viramontes’s work. This places a burden on me to provide basic historical and sociocultural background. An advantage of Viramontes’s fiction is that it opens up to readings on several different levels. Even so, the more students know about the contexts from which Viramontes’s fiction emerged, the better their comprehension of her work can be. Consequently, I preface a discussion of her fiction with information about Mexican Americans as a racialized minority group within the United States, the Chicano Movement, and the development of Chicana and women of color feminism. I draw material from a range of sources; useful historical sources include Garcia, Sánchez, Ruiz, and Muñoz. The two anthologies Viramontes coedited with Herrera-Sobek help situate her work within Chicana feminism, as does Saldívar-Hull. To position her work within women of color feminism, I draw material from Anzaldúa and Moraga and Anzaldúa. In a class focusing on Chicano/a literature or the Chicano/a experience, I may charge my students with doing background research at the beginning of the quarter, allowing them to present their findings to their classmates in multimedia presentations. I ask them to address questions like: What was the socioeconomic situation of Mexican Americans in mid-twentieth-century Los Angeles? What effect did continuing immigration from Mexico have on the development of Mexican American culture? How does language figure into the picture? What and when was the Chicano Movement? What are the basic claims of Chicana feminism? In a class not focused solely on Chicano/a issues, I provide this basic information via lecture. The class in which I am teaching Viramontes’s fiction determines the questions I ask

of a given text. Some themes, though, are so ubiquitous that they emerge regardless of the approach I take. These include the inevitably deforming effects of racism and patriarchy; the deep humanity of the dispossessed, homeless, mentally ill, or undocumented

to resist most unlikely situation; and the existence of multiple perspectives on any given event. In Narrative and Narrative Theory, for example, I teach my students about narrative perspective and focalization in Under by asking them to pay attention to how Viramontes’s variable character-bound focalization emphasizes the partiality of each character’s perspective. Although the novel is narrated in the third person, the perspective shifts among the four main characters so that the world portrayed appears very different-often from one paragraph to the next. Although all the characters occupy the same physical fictional world, they experience and perceive it in ways that are consistent with their ages, genders, and social roles. So, when the members of Estrella’s family arrive together at the shack that will be their new home, they each look around and see different things. Where Perfecto sees utility, and Petra sees danger, Estrella, younger and less jaded than both, sees adventure and possibility: Perfecto looks at crates and sees an altar for Petra’s religious statues; Petra looks at her children’s bare feet and sees the threat of scorpions; Estrella looks at a row of eucalyptus trees and sees dancing girls fanning their feathers (Under 8-9; Moya 2002: 185-88). In Narrative and Narrative theory, or in Women of Color or Chicana/o Literature,

I might assign Dogs so that my students may consider the relationship between characterization and narrative form. Because characterization is one of Viramontes’s particular strengths as a writer, discussions and assignments that encourage students’ attention to it are especially fruitful. I begin with a short lesson from Woloch to introduce my students to the concepts of character-space and character-system. I want them to understand how Viramontes’s character-system represents a narrative innovation on the realist novel. In his book, Woloch (2003) shows that the omniscient, asymmetric character-systems of nineteenth-century realist novels create a “formal structure that can imaginatively comprehend the dynamics of alienated labor, and the class structure that underlies this labor” (27). Minor characters, insofar as they fulfill their narrative function in these novels, are necessarily flattened, distorted, and subordinated in the service of allowing the protagonist to grow, develop, and flourish as a “free human being” (29). By contrast, Dogs is a realist novel that, by presenting a character-system of all minor characters, refuses these minoritizing operations. The characters are minor in the sense that they represent marginalized persons (the immigrant, the homeless, the mentally ill, the economically marginalized), but also in the sense that there is no protagonist whose interior psychic development necessitates the flattening and distortion-or minoritization-of the other characters. To make the novel cohere in the absence of a clear protagonist, Viramontes weaves the diverse characters together in an intricate web of associations, relationships, and chance encounters. By creating a character-system that equitably represents the interiority of the kinds of characters that have historically been flattened, distorted, and relegated to the edges and margins of the novel form, Viramontes radically democratizes the character-space of the realist novel. In Writings by Women of Color or Chicana Feminist Theory, I encourage my students

to explore the way Viramontes represents the dysfunction of our sexist and racist society while also imagining other ways to be in the world. We engage in close readings that examine the interactions in her work of theme, plot, and metaphor. In “Moths,” for example, I point out how Viramontes’s symbolism involving the sun and the moon at the story’s climax evokes the Aztec legend of Coyolxauhqui. I show how she re-members (both in the sense of bringing to mind, and of putting back together) the moon

god of male dominance (Moya 2010). The story’s plot narrates a reconciliation between mother and daughter, even as its symbolism enacts that same operation. The semantic richness and literary artistry of Viramontes’s fiction make it appro-

priate for almost any literature course that one could imagine teaching. I have touched on only a few issues and methods. The essays in Gutiérrez y Muhs (2013) offer other productive suggestions.