#the mixquiahuala letters

[wastelandbarbie]

its the end of the semester

and I've been compiling all my course content because at like $3.8k a semester you best believe that i've saving that shit for future reference. and my lit prof who i love and get so shy around bc i have like an academic crush on her, was like "why didn't you read your creative writing pieces for the class, I wish you had because they're so good" and like hhhahhhhhh. I forgot how good I can be at writing and much I love written words. if i could upload my consciousness to a digital form and consume only text i think i would ascend into godhood. you couldnt tell me nothing. its because i can read so fast. i looked at my ao3 and saw that i had somehow blacked out and bookmarked like 50 works overnight (reading so fast does mean that I have to remember to be mindful and slow down sometimes). but yeah, apparently i'm really fine in all my classes. i am not going to fail. i might get a C-B in my linguistics if i don't dominate my exam and submit extra credit. maybe a B in my film class? my internship is credit/no credit. and my literature class I think I might get an A. in all honesty, that's very impressive for me. Like I was also working and had like two people in my life in my life die! One due to overdose, the other due to sickness/domestic violence/disability. I didn't know if I was going to break up with my partner or not (I've decided - no). I haven't seen or talked to my mom in like a month. All that to say that, that six years ago, I would bolted/not asked for help. I would have gotten on the 5 and not looked back. I still struggle a lot with consistency. It's why I have to always wear a watch and try to remember to keep up with records. Because otherwise, I won't remember it. I have to remember.

I also have to finish my research essay -> I'm doing something about the protagonist's roadtrip to Mexico and how that relates to something something queer identity/outsider/outlander status that follows queer-looking couples. it's ambiguous kinda teresa & alicia's relationship, sexually and racially. ppl noted that some editions (library copy, older) has the description on the back say they're both hispanic, even though we're all pretty sure alicia IS a white woman, right? no, she is. I have two letters for that, which is probably more than enough.

The genre is epistolary, a roadtrip to homeland. Need to start talking about how the author has contributed to this literature (1980s Latina/Chicana, sisters of the eighties), where we will be looking to the Lopez article, the literary history. Where does Ana Castillo lie in this pantheon? (would like to use source comparing Cisneros/Castillo form, but will have to choose one for this part, or). Need to talk about this specific entry's significance. Why are we studying this one, etc. etc. etc.

[courtesansjewelbox]

User katx_x in reddit wanted book suggestions to look like a Cool and Mysterious Girl Sitting in the Library and to make men fall in love with her. If you want to read the responses.

Of course some responses were like: just read what you want. Others were more like: this is what some guys are into but other guys have different tastes. While others are just: here’s a list of classics/here’s a list of everything Rory Gilmore has read.

Pretentious ask? Yes, but an interesting thought experiment nonetheless. I sometimes pick books because of the assumed cultural cache of having read them. (Very rarely though since I resist my own attempts by being distractible/easily bored/prejudiced against literary fiction/more likely to read trashy romances) That’s how I read Hemingway despite hating his work. That’s why I read Great Gatsby and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. What’s on my current tbr that’s like that? Probably Persuasion by Austen. What’s on yours?

On the other hand, some classics I want to read for entirely different reasons. I’m going to try and tackle Les Miserables so I can get into the fandom. 😂 I picked some queer classics because I’m interested in queer lit in general. I want to read Hopscotch because I read a book inspired by its form (Mixquiahuala Letters) and I’m curious what the multiple reading experiences will be like. I want to read Life of Pi so I can read Rajiv Surendra’s book about making the movie.

If you were to suggest a book for this ask, which one(s) would you pick?

[wrathofthestag]

1, 2, and 19 for the book asks :)

Thanks for the ask! :) 📚

1.book you’ve reread the most times? I answered this one here, but I thought of a few more: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Kitchen God’s Wife, and The Mixquiahuala Letters.

2. top 5 books of all time? Oh, I can’t answer that.  That’s like asking me to pick a favorite song.  Impossible. :DDD Here are some of my favorites though:  1984, George Orwell; Crazy Cock, Henry Miller; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Hamlet, Will Shakespeare; Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris; Transformations by Anne Sexton; The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal; The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, The Kitchen God’s Wife by Amy Tan; The Mixquiahuala Letters by Ana Castillo; She’s Come Undone by Wally Lamb; Homo Faber by Max Frisch; The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks; The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje, and My Darling, My Hamburger by Paul Zindel.

19.  most disliked popular books? I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter. I know it’s supposed to be this iconic Chicana/Latinx book, and I should support fellow Mexican-American writers, but to me, it read like a goddamn telenovela, and I want to read stories about us (other Mexican-American women) that aren’t a fucking soap opera.  We have more going than that. Hard pass on that one.

[feralseraph]

My mother had only been close to female companions during her adolescence. My older sisters never maintained close relationships with women after marriage. When a woman entered the threshold of intimacy with a man, she left the companions of her sex without looking back. Her needs had to be sustained by him. If not, she was to keep her emptiness to herself.

Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters

[writtenbylois]

The Transfer of Power in Castillo’s Mixquiahuala Letters

Ana Castillo’s novel The Mixquiahuala Letters serves as a staple in Chicana feminist art, exemplifying the intersectional and multifaceted nature of the Chicana feminist movement. The novel is made up of letters written from one Chicana woman, the darker skinned Theresa, to her friend and travelling companion, the white passing Alicia, over the course of nearly twenty years. Much else can’t be said about the plot of the novel, for there are multiple ways of reading it, which Castillo highlights before the novel even begins in a note to the reader. Through Castillo’s choices regarding the epistolary form, perspective, and anti-essentialist undercurrent weaved into the novel, she presents Chicana feminism as a relational movement in which power is relinquished to the Chicana woman.

           The novel opens with an epigraph that is directly followed by Castillo’s letter to the reader, representative of the first transfer of power between not only Castillo and her reader, but white men to a presumed Chicana or woman of color. The quote, taken from Anais Nin’s Under a Glass Bell, reads “I stopped loving my father a long time ago. What remained was the slavery to a pattern” (Castillo, 6). This excerpt foreshadows the themes of sexism and complicated male-female relationships ingrained in the content of the novel, but also the way in which Castillo will push back against those ideas. While Castillo challenges heteronormative, sexist practices and norms by placing her protagonist, Theresa, in precarious situations throughout the novel, her strongest point of attack is found before we learn anything about the characters in her story—right after that epigraph. In a note to the reader and her earliest stroke of anti-essentialism, Castillo offers five ways of understanding The Mixquiahuala Letters based on different modes of thinking.  Castillo tells the reader that her book is not one to be read in “the usual sequence”(9) from first page to last with no ability to deviate from the strict linear way of processing a novel widely accepted and perpetuated by white male creators. The different modes of reading presented—for the Conformist, the Cynic, the Quixotic, and those who want to read each letter as a short story—take large chunks of the forty letters and rearrange them, creating drastically different interpretations of the book. Though it isn’t explicitly stated, there is one more way to read the book; from “Letter One” to “Letter Forty” in chronological order, with no regard to Castillo’s letter. While this act could indicate a reader’s objection to subscribing to a conformist or quixotic worldview, or view of themselves, the reader is taking control of how they ingest the book reflecting an implication of the Chicana feminist movement.

In being anti-essentialist, Castillo allows her reader to direct their own journey through her novel as feminists, specifically Chicana Feminists. Ana Castillo’s anti-essentialism comes in the form of rejecting the notion that any specific group of people, Chicanas in this instance, or things follow the same formula of living. The first way Castillo breaks a common convention of Chicana literature is using fiction rather than memoir or autobiography as a mode of expressing her ideas. By separating herself from the expected, Castillo has the ability to integrate ideas she deems valuable into her piece without having to be dishonest or rely solely on personal experience. None of the experiences of Theresa and Alicia can be devalued as bad luck or pure chance—they were purposefully included by a writer who was cognizant of everything she added to her novel. Castillo wanted us, the readers, to be aware of the intersectionality of Chicana feminism, the ways her protagonist exemplified that feminism, and they ways she fell into the cycle of patriarchal sexism into which she was born. One of the many beautiful aspects of The Mixquiahuala Letters is Theresa’s unreliable narration and the purpose it serves.

Castillo’s use of first person narration in the epistolary form gives the reader an opportunity to see the nuances of Chicana feminism through Theresa’s voice and experiences. Framing the novel in the form of letters establishes inherent intimacy between the narrator, Theresa, and the reader. As far as Theresa knows, Alicia alone has access to the letters, and Castillo uses that privacy to be blunt and vulnerable in her discourse. In “Letter Thirteen,” one of the angriest of the novel, the reader learns of Theresa’s conflicting feelings about Alicia and her multiple identities. The letter opens with the line “Alicia, why i hated white women and sometimes didn’t like you” (49) informing the reader of Theresa’s strong feelings, a divide between her and white women, and Alicia’s position as both an insider and outsider in relation to Theresa’s life as a woman of color. By having Theresa say that she “hated white women,” Castillo allows her protagonist to experience a full catalog of emotions. Theresa is given an opportunity to be angry, to be hateful, and to be imperfect in a way that women of color aren’t often afforded. She isn’t demonized for her feelings, and isn’t static or blind in her rage. Having Theresa express her frustration with the way white, and white-passing, women are valorized by men in the epistolary form gives her the freedom to jump around from idea to idea without censoring her stream of consciousness. The following sentence blames society for the hierarchy Theresa hates, which gives our narrator a full figured understanding of institutional and social factors that have established and continue to perpetuate the norms she suffers as a result of. The full sentence reads: “society had made them above all possessions    the most desired” (49) and not only highlights society rather than individuals as the source of Theresa’s issues, but the reference to white women as “possessions” acknowledges the suffering of the same group Theresa suffers more than.  

The language of “Letter Thirteen,” in all its anger and frustration, intimates a deep understanding of how gender and race work together and apart in systems of power and oppression. This is especially evident in the fourth sentence of the chapter, when Theresa writes that her “husband admitted feeling inferior to them.” This inclusion of the emotions men of color feel in relation to white women and women of color adds another level to exploration of oppression packed into the letter. Castillo illustrates white women in interracial relationships as “dough colored” (49) to shift Theresa’s thoughts and the reader’s attention from the actions and thoughts of men back to those of women, keeping with the feminist lens of the novel. Theresa goes on to discuss how white women fetishize men of color using words like “black pimps,” “savage,” and “bestial members” (49) to magnify the objectification white women can inflict. The duality of Theresa, Alicia, and their lovers—men of color, for the most part—is another important idea Castillo uses the epistolary form to write. Towards the end of “Letter Thirteen,” Castillo has Theresa write about the ways in which she is, or is seen as being, superior to Alicia. She writes, after expressing her frustration concerning the supposed superiority of white women, that Alicia is “not especially pretty and [bares] no resemblance to the ideal of any man [she] encountered” (50) as both a personal attack on Alicia and an acknowledgment of her own privilege. Theresa, the curvy, more beautiful of the two within the context of Mexican culture, implies that Alicia’s whiteness is the only praiseworthy thing about her, discounting their shared Chicana heritage. Despite the malicious intent of the comment, Theresa is taking control of the narrative and how we view Alicia.

    The portrayal of Theresa as a complicated, multifaceted woman of contradictions is another function of Castillo’s anti-essentialism that gives power to the Chicana woman. Castillo proves that there isn’t a single way to tell the Chicana story in the same way that other activist artists do. One such artist is Suzan-Lori Parks, an African-American playwright and essayist who constantly pushes boundaries and challenges widely accepted ideas about how black people should be portrayed in art. In her essay “An Equation for Black People Onstage,” Parks discusses her thoughts on writing for black people and illustrating black experiences in a traditionally white space. Parks writes that “there is no single ‘Black Experience,’ there is no ‘Black Aesthetic’ and there is no one way to write or think or feel or dream or interpret or be interpreted” (Parks, 21) and this assertion holds true in both her plays and Castillo’s works about Chicana experiences. The Mixquiahuala Letters is a mostly English-language novel, living in a space created by white men whose successors would decide that the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway are classics, but those of Richard Wright and Sandra Cisneros are great pieces of “ethnic literature.” Castillo’s novel takes agency within a space it normally wouldn’t be invited to by rejecting the rigid tropes presented as markers of Chicana literature. She abandons autobiography for fiction, traditional novel structure for the epistolary, and focuses on dynamic characters rather than representative placeholders whose sole purpose is to explain their struggle to a white audience. Suzan-Lori Parks is a black woman writing for black people, Ana Castillo is a Chicana feminist writing for Chicana feminists, and they both skillfully use language and literature to convey nuances about their communities.

Ana Castillo stitches arguments about intersectionality and systems of oppression into Theresa’s angry “Letter Thirteen” before using a drastically softer tone in “Letter Fourteen” to add even more complexity to her characters and shed light on the love and sisterhood of Chicana feminism. Theresa begins “Letter Fourteen” by addressing Alicia, whom she had deliberately hurt in the previous letter, as “hermana,” (Castillo, 51) the Spanish word for sister, immediately expressing deep intimacy and tenderness. The fourteenth section of the novel is a love letter. Castillo never makes clear distinctions between platonic and romantic love in Theresa and Alicia’s relationship, which only adds to the control Theresa has over her narrative. She is not explaining herself to an “other” but to someone she loves and cares for, which is explicit when she writes “i wish i could have convinced you how beautiful you are” (51). In “Letter Fourteen,” Theresa apologizes for each of the insults she threw at Alicia in the other letter, instead choosing to empower her friend. To combat the comment she made about Alicia’s lack of beauty in the thirteenth letter, Theresa describes the construct that would deem her more desirable than Alicia as “antiquated values regarding feminine beauty” (51) and writing about Alicia’s body outside of the context of the male gaze. Theresa spends time describing Alicia’s beauty in physical terms—her hair, her legs, her fingers—but doesn’t objectify or sexualize her. Theresa does these things to relate to Alicia, who is a painter, in the way a visual artist would view the body with “angular lines,” “narrow ripples of [the] vertebrae,” and “graceful curves of the slender neck” (51). “Why don’t you see that?” Theresa asks, elevating Alicia’s view of herself as the most important perspective to consider. Chicana feminism, as expressed in “Letter Fourteen,” not only calls out oppression, but builds up those who suffer—and sometimes benefit, as white-passing women like Alicia do—form the systems of oppression in which they are immersed.

Another aspect of The Mixquiahuala Letters that works so well to express Chicana feminism is Theresa’s continued use of the lowercase “i” in reference to herself. The same societal constructs that say there is only one way to write novels and to portray woman of color also says that there is only one way to write a strong woman. Strong women often subscribe to characteristics of male dominance. Think of Katniss Everdeen’s blank stoicism in The Hunger Games and how her physical strength and lack of emotion is valorized, especially when she is compared to characters like Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby who are often characterized as weak for their femininity. Ana Castillo fights these traditional ideas about female strength by having her protagonist, the woman who controls all the readers have access to, use the lower, inferior “i” to tell her story. Maybe Theresa doesn’t see herself as strong. Maybe she does, but wants her letters to be more about Alicia and the other characters she describes than herself. Maybe the use of the “i” is a residual effect of growing up in a system that was created to demoralize and undervalue her. Maybe it’s a reminder of how she has overcome that system. Either way, Theresa’s “i” is powerful and important. Theresa isn’t presented as a strong Chicana woman, despite the fact that she is one.

Theresa’s just a woman speaking to her friend about their experiences, and Castillo uses the simplicity and intimacy of those interactions to illustrating an anti-essentialist Chicana story. In Suzan-Lori Parks’ “Equation for Black People,” she writes that essentialism is “a fucked-up trap to reduce us to only one way of being” (Parks, 22), the “us” in the essay being not only black people, but members of all marginalized groups. Parks continues to say that “we should endeavor to show the world and ourselves our beautiful and powerfully infinite variety” (22) which is the goal of Chicana feminism, at least in the way Ana Castillo expresses it. All of Castillo’s decisions, from choosing the epistolary form for her novel to giving her readers options in the way they read the novel, give power to the readers in the same way Chicana feminism relinquishes power to the Chicana woman.

[rank-sentimentalist]

For Your Consideration

@alice-quinn-at-oxford, some titles for your potential reading

Older

Herodotus, The Histories

Travels of Marco Polo

Journals of Captain Cook

Twain, Innocents Abroad

Stevenson, Treasure Island

(Anything Ponce de Leon?)

 Twentieth-ish

Isabella Bird

Jan Morris

Freya Stark, Valley of Assassins

Thomas Mann, Death in Venice

Lawrence Durrell, Alexandria Quartet

Norman Lewis, Naples ‘44

Bruce Chatwin, In Paragonia

Tony & Maureen Wheeler, Across Asia on the Cheap

Robert Byron, Road to Oxiana

Gerald Durrell, The Whispering Land

Bantock, any of the Griffin and Sabine books

Jelly-Shapiro, Island People

Marguerite Duras, The Lover

Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters

Cortasar, Hopscotch

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

Lawrence Osborne, Ballad of a Smaller Player and Bangkok Days

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and The Castle of Crossed Destinies

Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose

Suketu Mehta, Maximum City

Peter Mtthiessen, Snow Leopard (as opposite in climate)

 ‘Pop’ Travel and/or Film

Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

Strayed, Wild

Mayle, A Year in Provence

Garland, The Beach

Tailor of Panama

Constant Gardener

 Locally Topical?

Havana Noir

Robert Arellano, Havana Libre and Havana Lunar

Ian Fleming, Dr. No (whose villain was based on Fu Machu)

Grann Lost City of Z

 More Thriller

Roger Hobbs, Ghostman and Vanishing Games

Taylor Stevens, The Informationist, The Innocent (and more)

Helen Giltrow, The Distance

Olen Steinhauer, All the Old Knives

LeCarre, Night Manager

 Genre: SF/F Variations

Lara Elena Donnelly, Amberlough and more)

Malka Older, Infomacracy (and more)

James Hynes, Publish and Perish and The Lecturer’s Tale

Beth Bernobich, Time Roads

W.L. Goodwater, Breach

 Graphic Novels/ Comics

Greg Rucka, White Out and Queen and Country and Stumptown

Christopher Sebela, High Crimes

Anthony Johnston, The Coldest City (Atomic Blonde)

Disclaimers:  I’ve read some of it, but not all by any means.  No idea how well these fit your own interests or parameters.  Some educated guesses based on what I know.  I cannot offer TW information on any of these offhand.

[day-gazing]

2017 reads

Fiction

1. Angelou, Maya. Gather Together in My Name 2. Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings 3. Castillo, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters 4. Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees 5. Lessing, Doris. Buried Child 6. Lessing, Doris. The Grass is Singing 7. Pynchon, Thomas. Bleeding Edge 8. Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland 9. Yamada, Amy. Trash

Non-Fiction

1. Assange, Julian. Cypherpunks 2. Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity 3. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me 4. Easterling, Keller. Enduring Innocence 5. Graeber, David. Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology 6. Lerup, Lars. After the City 7. Pater, Ruben. The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Manual for Visual Communication 8. Poitras, Laura. Astro Noise 9. Pope, Albert. Ladders

[feralseraph]

The streets, dun colored, the way they are in New York in November and in cities infamous for alienation of the human heart.

Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters

[funksflo]

Letter Two

Our art is not a hankerchief to wring out with sobs of

my man done gone and left me over and again

like a warped Billie Holiday record. 

...

Ana Castillo in The Mixquiahuala Letters

[dartha135]

'What you perceive as 'liberal' is my independence to choose what i do, with whom, and when. Moreover, it also means that i may choose NOT to do it, with anyone, ever.'

The Mixquiahuala Letters, Ana Castillo

[day-gazing]

Might be the start of something new

Tuesday, September 19

….

Do you remember what Septembers used to feel like?

August falters, empty summer routines giving way bit by bit to the preparations of something new. A sense of untoward urgency, as if the unknown cosmos itself pushed you further and further from the calm of expected idleness. Whatever happened in the months of heat and humidity now firmly in the cycle of memories, the rush toward September pummels your still uneasy psyche with a too familiar weight of responsibility. School’s back in session; summer’s over.

….

Yesternight I found myself sleeping once again on a mind full of ideas without expression. If an idea finds itself alive in your mind, and no one is there to write it down or draw it out — does it really even exist?

I’m making a sure habit of snuffing out good ideas before they have a chance. Not good.

….

Sometime near-around 3:45 post-meridian, it’s just me, Kubal’s Ethiopia Aricha, Surface Book (what better companion could I have, really?), and a blank white space to fill on my WordPress site. I think this is a good look for me, really.

I figure the look is one of reflection and production. And I figure this look, once repeated often enough and with eventual vigor, will transfigure me, like He into rays of Light on the Mount, into an actually productive and reflective person.

One can always hope.

And so this post should also somehow serve as a breakthrough, glass-shattering, identity-confirming exercise in personal development; so, of course, I’m mashing keys to the beats of Taylor’s 1989….

….

Let’s take stock of my day so far:

10:40 AM     Woke up late today — which is typical for me, but later than “ideal.”

11:00 AM     Water on boil

11:10 AM     Bloom underway for the last of my Clubhouse Coffee “Fiesta Blend” Chiapas

11:33 AM     Good Morning America (originally aired 9/18/2017 — thanks, Hulu)

11:45: AM     Switch over to NPR One (Universal Windows App on Xbox One S – 2TB)

12:30 PM      Showered, coffee’d, dressed — let’s go!

1:00 PM     Bird Library (yes, still a varyingly depressing place, almost no matter where you decide to plop down your stuff)

1:12 PM     When you have to pack up your entire workspace at the library just to pee cause you don’t have any friends to watch your stuff….

1:30 PM     Oh yeah, and I packed a cute lunch — JIF Natural Creamy No Stir Peanut Butter & Smuckers Natural Strawberry Preserves sandwich on Wegman’s Whole Wheat Country bread with La Croix Pamplemousse sparkling water

3:30 PM     Kubal run! 😀

….

So about the only productive activity I’ve been able to maintain in my dailies is reading.

By which I mean reading books. Still a love, still a thing I can manage without much effort. Because of this, I’m deciding to double-down on this activity and take reading as the most serious character/career/productivity-building activity within my still pitifully-small arsenal of strategies to escape the living hell I’ve made for myself in Syracuse, New York 13210.

….

Forthcoming!

Castillo, Ana. The Mixquiahuala Letters (1986)

Kingsolver, Barbara. The Bean Trees (1988)

Tyldesley, Joyce. Hatchepsut (1996)

Yamada, Amy. Trash (1991)

[feralseraph]

4, 6, 11, 17 😃

Did you discover any new authors that you love this year?

Helen Knott. her memoir was amazing.

Was there anything you meant to read, but never got to?

i started The Mixquiahuala Letters but i haven’t finished yet. i got side tracked but i want to read it.

What was your favorite book that has been out for a while, but you just now read?

Besides Frankenstein, I’d say Another Brooklyn. That was a good book.

Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

Sing, Unburied, Sing was really good and i wasn’t sure if i would like it. also Cousin Philis by Elizabeth Gaskell, idk why i liked it so much lol literally nothing happens. The Bluest Eye also really hit.