Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alvarez.

Postmodern Cross-Culturalism and Politicization in U.S. Latina Literature: From Ana Castillo to Julia Alvarez. Fatima Mujcinovic. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. 200 pages. $63.95 cloth.

Critical texts on literature by Latinas, or women writers within the broad context of US Latino culture, have begun to comprise their own category, expanding contemporary discourse while creating a niche for new directions in literature by third-world feminists living in the US. This phenomenon focuses the work of contemporary novelists who restore the female gaze erased for centuries by respective hegemonies. The authors of such critical texts seem to be following bell hooks's (1994) statements in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations: "to remember is to empower," and "the Columbus legacy is clearly one that silences and eradicates the voices--the lives--of women of color. In part to repair the damage of this history, the way it has been taught to us, ... we must seize this moment of historical remembering to challenge patriarchy."

While hooks is not quoted in the text reviewed here, her observations echo in Mujcinovic's dense and well-presented book which evaluates the works of several contemporary Latinas from a variety of critical points, including objectification, political oppression, diaspora, exile, and displacement. Mujcinovic further considers survival and transformation in postmodern conditions, and the reconfiguration of subjectivities, based on hybrid and transnational notions. Principal theorists who inform Mujcinovic's study include Gloria Anzaldua, Chela Sandoval, and Donna Haraway. Her book is somewhat reminiscent of Ellen McCracken's New Latina Narrative: The Feminine Space of Postmodern Ethnicity (1999); McCracken also completed her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They discuss some of the same authors, but Mujcinovic's is a stronger assessment of the two-pronged struggle of the Latina against oppression within her US society and oppression within her culture. McCracken's historical framework provides a social representation of individuals of Latin American descent with discussion centered around a "feminine space." The function of the discursive strategies that she identifies is to subvert dominant discourses that threaten to erase, misinterpret, romanticize, exoticize, pluralize, tropicalize, and/or locate Latinas/os as the Other. McCracken uses concerns of the female gender in "new" (since the 1980s) Latina writing to expose various layers of what she calls a construction of heterogenous representation in postmodern ethnicity.

Mujcinovic, on the other hand, does not shy away from signaling direct declarations by Latina characters for a need to fight a double-pronged oppression: that of her mainstream society simultaneous with patriarchal oppression. Mujcinovic launches her discussion with Ana Castillo's The Mixquiahuala Letters, where she demonstrates that the author views cultural homogeneity as a "fallacy." She studies two authors' works in each chapter, but also mixes in the works of other chapters, stirring the pot, in a sense, by pulling commentary on the other authors into each context.

The book consists of a substantial introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion, with chapter one on maneuvering between two cultures, chapter two on diasporic identities, chapter three on exile and the interplay between two realities, and chapter four on the implications of geography and politics for identity. The conclusion rounds up new trends in Latina novels which demonstrate the marginalization of literature by US Latinas, its hybridity--ensuring its lack of classification--and its "politicization" for the immediate future.

In Mujcinovic's study, characters must resist social subjugation or exclusion while also resisting cultural hegemony and patriarchal systems (controlled by women as well as men), which include religious myths of female purity and the mores of Catholicism. For some novelists, an emancipated womanhood takes on greater importance than the recovery of traditional roots; for others, feminist alliances are grounded in solidarity with other Latinas who represent a variety of cultural backgrounds. Rosario Morales states that "this is not home," even after a decade of living again on the island. Aurora Levins Morales says she is "a child of the Americas, a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean," with Jewish heritage. Mujcinovic also adapts the commentary of women theorists of various cultures, including Chandra Mohanty's emphasis on a common context of struggle rather than color or racial identification.

Anzaldua's "mestiza identity" and Sandoval's "differential consciousness" provide a launching point for Mujcinovic in her approach of using "psychoanalytic concepts" to demonstrate Latina writers' articulations of selfhood in their various novels. She examines novels, and at times multiple works, by Castillo, Julia Alvarez, Cristina Garcia, Demetria Martinez, Graciela Limon, Helena Maria Viramontes, Rosario Morales, Aurora Levins Morales, and Judith Ortiz Corer, evaluating the way Dominican, Chicana, Puerto Rican, and Cuban identities are protrayed in the subject matter as well as the hybridity of the texts. Mujcinovic's analysis includes minor categories which have recently risen to take their place in the US Latino ethos. Her discussion delves further than McCracken's to include the Central American--El Salvadoran--exilic condition in works by Limon, Viramontes, and Martinez. As with Dominican American literature during the past decade, the Central American voice in US Latino literature is now a focus of recent anthologies. In chapter four, Mujcinovic discusses feminist liberation theology, a specific form of Latin American feminism which employs religious faith to confront and transform gender oppression in society and Catholic culture. Without stating this overtly, Mujcinovic shows an important distinction between US and third-world feminisms by demonstrating the emphasis on the female as it relates to the communal in the narratives of US Latinas.

Fatima Mujcinovic's book includes extensive footnotes presented at the end of the text, an eight-page bibliography, and a five-page index, of which the latter could be more substantial but is helpful for various theoretical terms and references to specific works. In all, this is an excellent first work by an assistant professor, and a significant contribution to the cutting-edge field of criticism on literature by US Latinas.

Elizabeth Coonrod Martinez

Sonoma State University