ABSTRACT
Chicana artists employ La Malinche, La Virgen de Guadalupe, and La Llorona as key representations of femininity. Frequently portrayed on the binary androcentric spectrum of chaste and faithful womanhood on the one hand, and betraying and threatening femininity on the other, they are complex and hybrid figures informing modes of representation pertaining to Chicanas’ gender identity and notions of motherhood. These characteristics parallel established perceptions of Medea, whose feminine and maternal traits, too, have a long history of palimpsestic rewritings. While it is these figures’ very gender that is usually the focus of cultural and/or literary analyses, an aspect of their identity—the fact that all of them are also mothers—is subsumed in the sense that their motherhood completes and complements that which the current androcentric gender order suggests they are. In this chapter, I propose to read the motherhoods of the three Chicana icons as phenomena that are expropriated by ideals of androcentric, colonial, and transcendental hybridizing matrix. Further, I contrast competing interpretations of La Malinche, La Virgen, and La Llorona and accentuate their inherent hybrid and fluid qualities by reading their representations in relation to those of Medea.
