How Latina writers make sense of two worlds.

"Immigration has reinvented her and she is grateful ... she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention."

--Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban

There are places one can never leave even if one has never been there. There are places where one never finds a home, even if one has always lived there. In Cristina Garcia's novel, Dreaming in Cuban (Knopf, 1992), Pilar, the Cuban American granddaughter living in New York, says, "Although I have been living in Brooklyn all my life, it doesn't feel like home to me. I'm not sure where Cuba is, but I want to find out."

Garcia, Maria Amparo Escandon, Sandra Cisneros, Ana Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Demetria Martinez, and Esmeralda Santiago are U.S. women writers who find their roots in Mexican American, Mexican, Dominican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican traditions. All of them speak and write with an accent, whether they are writing in English or Spanish.

Although they are all very different, as different as their accents, they share a common pain and struggle. Lumping them together as "Latina writers" is thus both a disservice and a realization of a new people emerging in the United States--a new mestizaje (persons of mixed blood), a new people made of superimposed layers. Nothing is lost with each new layer.

Finding themselves between two cultures, some immigrants deal with their search for identity by shedding their "old skin"--just as earlier immigrants were (ill) advised to do--and by becoming "American." Others refuse to yield and become entrenched, somewhat petrified in their old identities and ways of being.

The words of people who move within different cultures are often a source of struggle, too. The languages learned with their mothers' milk might not be the ones they use most fluently. Something else has been imposed on them, again, as a struggle and as new possibilities for re-creation.

In the works of these Latina writers there is often a movement back and forth between Spanish and English. "It's amazing how much Spanish I have forgotten," says Esmeralda Santiago in When I Was Puerto Rican (Vintage, 1994). Ordinary business takes place regularly in English. But dreams, the language of lovemaking, the language of the heart, is Spanish--even for those who were born in the United States. Spanish is "that language crooned to babies," says Sandra Cisneros, "that language murmured by grandmothers, those words that smelled like your house, like flour tortillas, and the inside of your daddy's hat, like everyone talking in the kitchen at the same time."

In their novels most of these women writers journey back to their origins to find out the same thing: their true home and their true language. In doing this, they give us characters--particularly women--who assert their identity in an integration that is neither resignation to the reality around them nor an indiscriminate idealization of their cultures of origin. It is, rather, a syncretism free enough to be critical of all their different cultures--original and adopted.

As Cisneros says in "Bien Pretty," a story in Woman Hollering Creek (Random House, 1991), "In my dreams I am slapping the heroine to her senses, because I want them to be women who make things happen, not women who things happen to. Not loves that are tormentosos (stormy). Not men powerful and passionate versus women either volatile and evil, or sweet and resigned. But women. Real women. The ones I've loved all my life. Those women. The ones I've known everywhere except on TV, in books and magazines. Las girlfriends. Las comadres. Our mamas and tias. Passionate and powerful, tender and volatile, brave. Above all, fierce."

The gallery of these fierce women in the fiction of these writers is impressive: There is a poignant fierceness in Esperanza's innocent and faithful journey passing as a prostitute in order to save her daughter in Esperanza's Box of Saints (Scribner, 1999). Soft in Ana Castillo's So Far from God (Plume, 1994) shows endurance, compassion, resilience, and faithful care of her four daughters. Celia, Felicia, Lourdes, and Pilar in Dreaming in Cuban are fiery, passionate, and compassionate in their defense of their own political and religious beliefs. Maria in Demetria Martinez's Mother Tongue (Oneworld, 1994) is a picture of idealism and unconditional love.

All of them have their own identities, but--as Latinas--they can never exist outside their families, their communities, their cultures. They wouldn't be able to recognize themselves.

The women are, above all, women of faith. But it is a faith that comes, once again, in layers. Their Indian and African gods and beliefs often coexist rather peacefully with Catholicism, and, in the case of the immigrant women, even with New Age ideas. While Esperanza feels radically Catholic, her approach to the saints is very expressive of an unschooled popular religiosity. There is a disarming purity and innocence in her faith and her natural encounter with the transcendent in ordinary things, like the greasy door of her oven or the stained wall of her bathroom.

The women in So Far from God display all sorts of religious manifestations, from Catholicism to curanderismo (faith healers). Maria in Mother Tongue is quite representative of many young Latinas in the United States who rebel against the Catholic Church, seek forms of spirituality in New Age or Eastern mysticism, and finally return to a social justice-oriented Catholicism that is much more meaningful to them and allows them to retain their culture and fight for the causes of their people.

The women in Dreaming in Cuban or The Aguero Sisters of Cristina Garcia are seekers who might not accept any form of organized religion but still experience a seamless contact between their ordinary daily lives and the realm of the spiritual.

The mestizo self is multilayered. Ambiguity, whether it is manifested in religious beliefs, languages, or even political ideas coexisting in the same family, is seen as a way of life and strength, not as weakness. Mestizaje is not necessarily living at the border--although that could happen geographically also--without being able to decide on which side to fall. It is, rather, living in both worlds, being both and more.

Living in different worlds, or living in a totally New World--which is also an inheritance of the first American mestizaje of Indian, African, and Iberian bloods (the Iberian blood having itself been mixed many times over with Arab, Celtic, Greek, and Roman, among others)--gives a totally new perspective to the idea of death. For the Hispanic culture death is never final, because there is always another way of living. Separation is painful, but never hopeless. And this realization comes not only from religious belief but from real experience.

People who move between cultures don't have to leave anything. Space and time is of practically no importance. And the way to live with a community is not an orderly, determined, compartmentalized one, but wider, more encompassing, beyond borders. Geographical borders are an illusion; as a symbol of this, the borders and limitations of space and time are also illusions and lies. People live in many different ways, and seeing them or not is almost accidental.

La Loca of So Far from God and her sisters Esperanza and Caridad are wonderful expressions of life transcending all kinds of death. The separation of immigration and exile is also a type of death, but, as Celia of Dreaming in Cuban would say, "The sea now exists so we can call and wave from different sides."

All this is not indiscriminate acceptance or denial of reality. Life and anger and pain and resentment are very real for all the characters--indeed for all immigrants and people who have experienced the clash of cultures--but life is stronger than anything. For Hispanic immigrants in the United States, as well as for all Mexican Americans who were "crossed by the border" in Texas, New Mexico, and California, the experience of rejection and clash of cultures is not a new phenomenon. They were--and often are--foreigners in their own country, whose language, customs, and beliefs were feared and, therefore, derided.

Those who adapt, as the Mexican American girl in Cisneros' "Never Marry a Mexican," (in Women Hollering Creek) struggle with their own language. "Having had to put up with all the grief a Mexican family can put on a girl because she was from el otro lado, the other side, and my father had married down by marrying her. If he had married a white girl from el otro lado, that would've been different. That would've been marrying up, even if the white girl was poor. But what could be more ridiculous than a Mexican girl who couldn't even speak Spanish."

When women and men can rise up from oppression, refuse to believe the lies, and find the integration of their mixed blood, language, and belief--like the characters in these stories do--then the fierce mestizas that Cisneros, Escandon, Garcia, Alvarez, Martinez, Castillo, and Santiago have always known and loved don't need to make any efforts to go back to their country or to stay in their new one. They live in both, and it is, indeed, a New World.

By CARMEN AGUINACO, senior editor for Claretian Publications' Hispanic Ministry Resource Center.