WOMEN’S STUDIES

Inés Hernández-Ávila and Norma Elia Cantú, editors

Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art

978-1-4773-0796-0, Hardcover, 501 pp., 12 color photos, 38 b&w photos

University of Texas Press

February 2016

Reviewed by Natalia Treviño

The cover of Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art greets us with the human heart almost pierced by bladelike leaves. This image, Barraza’s Codex of Corazon Sagrado, features a sensuous maguey plant flanked by roses, kicking up toward an anatomically correct human heart, which floats between winglike clouds above the tapestry that forms the Texas landscape. Like the cover painting, this multi-genre collection of Tejana writers and artists sings of the liminal space that Tejana women inhabit in which the relationship between the land and the heart is both painful and sublime, thriving between two major Mexican feminine icons: Guadalupe, the sacred virgin Maria, and Malinche, traitor to Mexico, Cortez’s famous bride and secular “whore.”

This text houses a throng of unapologetic literary and political voices which form a complex and diverse love letter dedicated to author Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, a feminist cross-curricular scholar, artist, and writer who said of women from Tejas in her seminal work, Borderlands/La Frontera: “This is [their] home/this thin edge of/ barbwire”(13).  In response, editors Norma Cantú, Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University, and Inéz Hernández-Ávila, professor of Native studies at the University of California, Davis, who acknowledge that they did not include every notable Tejana author, offer not “a thin barbwire,” but a wide plain, a welcome home for the Tejana, where she can dance open-armed, her histories’ full skirts twirling.

Included are Texas poets laureate Rosemary Catacalos and Carmen Tafolla, who examine the powerful links between earth and the body. Catacalos meditates on the very dirt of Atascosa County, and Tafolla claims bold spiritual victory over cancer. Acclaimed poet and children’s author Pat Mora celebrates how women, like rivers, soften the cragged Texan landscape; American Book Award winner Evangelina Vigil and many other rock-star scholars in Chicano/a literature today relay the loving and sometimes brutalized experience of the Tejana-Mexicana. A wide range of new and well-established poet-activists join them, including Celéste Guzman Mendoza, who honors the hard-working and formerly abusive father: “Dirt-stained knees and elbows . . . / his work not complete till the last nail is pounded in” (80).  Poets ire’ne lara silva, Tammy Melody Gómez, Emmy Peréz, Anel Flores, Liliana Valenzuela, and Deborah Paredez take us into the Tejana’s inheritance: her loss of health, language, and land; her life facing homophobia; her love of a difficult father; her consumption by fierce mother-love.

Poet-activists such as Rosie Castro and Enedina Cásarez Vásquez echo harmoniously with Cantú’s, Hernández-Ávila’s, Hull’s, and Anzaldua’s illuminating and contextualizing essays. In one of the most fitting poems for this collection, Castro examines what is entre the sacred and secular: “If I am your Brown Mother/ full of stars / shouldn’t I / understand darkness?/ . . . .Or should I have already made / my assumption?” (204).

To boot, the book includes a beautifully curated selection of full-color reproductions of paintings and woodcuts that visually disturb and question the role of Tejana women. These reproductions add great heart to the body of this important, living, and essential text.

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