Desde las faldas de la madre/ From Underneath … · Nellie Campobello addresses single motherhood in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo (379) Motherhood and mothering are at the

DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

1Desde las faldas de la madre/From Underneath Mother’s Skirt: Nellie Campobello (Re)Claims (Single) Motherhood and Mothers as Historians

Abstract: Motherhood has been a revered space for women for centuries. It has also been a prison, a place that keeps women in the home, tied to children and—if it is to be considered proper—to a husband. Children must be born to a mother and a father, inside the institution of marriage, to be labeled “legitimate” and to be given the privileges that come with a proper birth. Motherhood can be a privileged (if limited) domestic site or a source of scorn if it happens off the marriage bed. In Las manos de mamá (Mother’s Hands, 1937) Nellie Campobello revises the myths surrounding motherhood—the Virgin, la Malinche and la Llorona—to reclaim out-of-wedlock mothering as proper, and to construct the mother as a historian.

Melero, Pilar. Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. doi: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004.

P. Melero, Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity© Pilar Melero 2015

Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity

DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Cuando en el Norte una muchacha tiene la desgracia (a veces suele ser fortuna) de dar a luz sin haberse casado, su conducta no es atribuible a maldad sino a bondad, a sencillez, a entereza. Allí a una muchacha mala nadie la engaña; a las buenas, sí. Por eso, y a diferencia de lo que sucede en el Centro del país, a éstas las protege su familia.1

Nellie Campobello addresses single motherhood in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo (379)

Motherhood and mothering are at the heart of the definition of femininity in Mexico. Mythology of Mexican femininity centers on the figure of the mother: the good mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe and the terrible mothers, la Malinche and la Llorona. However, as central as motherhood is to Mexican culture, good mothering does not always mean good parenting—at least, not officially. Good, fit mothering has been traditionally linked to marriage, so much so, that single mothers have been typically considered unfit to mother, especially by la ciudad letrada dating back to colonial times. We have the precedent of Martín Cortés, the illegitimate son of la Malinche and Hernán Cortés, being sent to Spain to get an education away from the mother. The same can be said of Garcilaso de la Vega and other criollos born to indigenous (non-married) women in colonial times. Though nowhere is it writ-ten that the sons were taken from their single mothers because these women were considered unfit to mother them, it is clear in the myths of la Malinche and la Llorona, as well as in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, that “good” mothering means mothering that occurs within institutionalized parenting. Both la Malinche and la Llorona are demonized in Mexican culture, while the Virgin, blessed by the Church, is lauded as the good mother. In this chapter, I examine how Nellie Campobello questions long-held cultural belief systems on single motherhood. In the first part of this chapter, I center my analysis in Las manos de mamá (My Mother’s Hands, 1937) to propose that Nellie Campobello (re)claims single motherhood as valuable parenting, and, with it, recasts the Malinche and Llorona myths that portray single mothers as terrible mothers. I begin with a general introduction to why women mother; I examine mothering in Mexico and the myths of the Virgin of Guadalupe, la Malinche and la Llorona; and follow with an analysis of Campobello’s questioning of single motherhood as unfit parenting. The second part focuses on Cartucho. Relatos de la historia

Desde las faldas de la madre

DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

de la lucha en el norte de México (Cartucho. Stories about the History of the Struggle in Northern México, 1931). I examine how Campobello (re)constitutes motherhood to encompass historical subjectivity, rel-egating los letrados to the role of myth makers.

Motherhood reclaimed: why women mother

As we saw in the preceding chapter, mothering presents a culturally appropriate space for women subjects who are attempting to assert their subjectivity. Motherhood is a deeply rooted “feminine” cultural site that women are likely to reproduce, consciously and/or unconsciously, and that society is bound to accept as proper for women, especially in the early twentieth century in Mexico. In The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender, Nancy Chodorow proposes mothering as a central and constituting element in the social organiza-tion and production of gender.2 She argues that “mothering occurs through social structurally induced psychological processes” and that it is neither a product of biology nor of intentional training. Rather, she states that women’s mothering reproduces itself cyclically and that “women, as mothers, produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother” (7). More importantly, she argues that these capacities and needs are built into and grow out of the mother-daughter relationship itself and that:

[W]omen as mothers (and men as non-mothers) produce sons whose nurturant capacities and needs have been systematically curtailed and repressed. This prepares men for their less affective later family role, and for primary participation in the impersonal extrafamiliar world of work and public life. (7)

Chodorow also argues that the same systematic socialization of gender roles predisposes women for the interpersonal, affective relationships that may produce in daughters and sons a division of psychological capacities, which leads to the sexual and familial division of labor (7).

Chodorow’s arguments need to be reconsidered, as more women have abandoned the home and may no longer be the primary caretakers of the child.3 However, her thoughts are still helpful in our understanding of gender roles and how our becoming women or men and our accept-ance of those roles may depend more on the way we are socially (if unconsciously) constructed, than on our own individual choice to abide


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

by gender-specific roles. We may want to keep Chodorow’s comments in mind as we analyze what it means for Campobello to reject traditional models of motherhood, while embracing and even honoring mother-hood itself as a worthy role for women.

Mothering in Mexico: the good mother/ terrible mother archetypes

Aside from being an heiress to Western culture, Campobello also inhab-its (and is inhabited by) a culture with roots in Spain and Latin America in general and in Mexico in particular. As we saw in the Introduction to this book, femininity in Mexican culture is rooted in the cult to the mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin has been a national symbol of motherhood since colonial times, not only in Mexico City, where she is said to have appeared in 1531, but also in most of the country, as stated in the book Nacionalidad mexicana y la Virgen by Bernardo Bergoend:

[T]he national devotion to the guadalupana [the Virgin of Guadalupe] . . . was not limited to the capital of New Spain . . . There is no hyperbole in stating that all of its soil provided the same assurance, since in about a century, more or less, after [the Virgin appeared], the sacred monuments that told of the nationalism of this devotion were not few, and came from all directions. (101–102)4

The Virgin was the unifying national symbol in the Mexican War of Independence, as Miguel Hidalgo’s call to arms came wrapped in her image, turned into a flag, and in her name. He roused the masses to the cry of “Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe y muera el mal gobierno” (“Long live the Virgin of Guadalupe. Death to bad government!”) (Bergoend, 155). It is not surprising, then, that when the Mexican nation attempted to reformulate its identity, during and immediately after the Mexican Revolution, as Rivas Mercado noted in the 1920s, the model to emulate for women was that of the Virgin (324). Jean Franco explains that from the beginning of the Revolution, the need to recodify the position of women in society was recognized, and that this recodification had in its core the image of the Virgin Mother. She writes: “Women were especially crucial to the imagined community as mothers of the new men and as guardians of private life, which from Independence onward was increas-ingly seen as a shelter from political turmoil” (81).


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Albeit traditionally negative, there are two other cardinal models of motherhood in Mexican culture: la Malinche and la Llorona. La Malinche is seen as the symbolic mother of Mexicans because of her role as the lover of Hernán Cortés and the mother of Martín Cortés. Martín Cortés is symbolically the first mestizo.5 La Malinche, thus, is cast as a cultural traitor, a terrible mother. She is “perhaps the most famous mythic figure associated with betrayal and treachery” (Herrera-Sobek, Chicano Border Culture and Folklore, 131). Although Octavio Paz has been credited with mythologizing her, la Malinche appears as a treacherous mother already in what is considered one of the first, if not the first, historic Mexican novels: Xiconténcatl, published in 1826 (Messinger-Cypess, 43). This fact is worth noting because it is in the 1820s, when Mexico gains its inde-pendence from Spain, that the country first becomes preoccupied with forging its own identity as a nation.

The other mother, la Llorona, mostly transmitted through oral tradi-tion, is a popular character in northern Mexico where Campobello grew up. She is also a variation of the terrible mother archetype. Upset at the betrayal of her lover, she drowns her children and is condemned to eternal wandering and wailing. Accounts of her malignancy were told in books written in the late 1800s and the early 1900s.6 The fact that the legend of la Llorona appears in written form already in the early 1900s is significant because it suggests that the story formed part of the imagi-nary of the young nation already at that point.

With such powerful mother figures dominating national discourse on femininity in Mexico, and with the model of the Virgin Mary served up by Christianity, it makes sense that women like Campobello center their writing on motherhood, even if and when contesting the very parameters of its fundamental cultural construction. Furthermore, as noted in the Introduction, motherhood is a role feminists embrace in Latin America and Spain in the early twentieth century. We may recall Gabriela Mistral’s “La madre. Obra maestra,” “a pure miracle” (“milagro puro”) where she notes that motherhood is worth even more than the work done to arrive at traditionally valued cultural masterpieces, such as the writing of the Illiad or the carving of the head of Jupiter (269). Mistral glorifies motherhood in its traditional form, even as she advocates for women’s rights such as access to education. Like her, Victoria Ocampo advocates on behalf of women arguing that “[i]t is [the] maternal feeling toward future women that ought to sustain us [women as we fight for the rights of women]” (25).7


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Embracing motherhood while advocating for women’s rights, as Ocampo, Mistral, Rivas Mercado, and, of course, Campobello do, consti-tutes what has been called feminism of difference or feminism with roots in Spain and Latin America. Unlike feminism with Anglo-American roots, which supported gender equality under the notion that men and women were equal and, therefore, should have equal rights, feminism with roots in Spain and Latin America sought equal rights for men and women, but embracing the idea of innate sexual difference. Alda Blanco explains that “[h]ighly disseminated by feminists at the beginning of the twentieth century, this theory articulated ‘woman’ and ‘man’ as natural categories determined by the biological sex of each human being” (26).8 This theorization of sexual difference accepted and even embraced tra-ditional constructs of femininity such as motherhood. At the same time, “it subverted the traditional paradigm by inverting the values assigned to the sexes” (26).9

Blanco’s explanation of the theorization of difference that subverts traditional paradigms of gender by inverting or rearticulating the values assigned to masculinity and femininity (values assigned to the sexes) is useful to our understanding of Campobello’s writing. Campobello positions herself and her mother within traditional discourse on wom-anhood, but then proceeds to subvert normative discourse precisely on womanhood and motherhood. Motherhood is a role that women like Campobello understand well and therefore can use as a point of depar-ture to discuss and/or contest the social construct known as “women.” More importantly, it is a role which culture in general understands and promotes as “feminine.” As has been argued before, and will be discussed in the following pages, motherhood allows Campobello to contest mod-els of femininity from a non-threatening cultural position.

Kemy Oyarzún has explored the idea that in her narrative Campobello launches a new relationship between the body of the text and the body of the mother as expressed in the first half of the twentieth century. By examining the “erasure of the mother” (“la ablación de la madre”) in texts written by men and by other women who Oyarzún argues have internalized matricide in literature, the critic writes:

Nellie Campobello speaks “from an alien locus.” There is no doubt that she is highly aware of her marginality. But her discourse is not merely contesta-tory, at least on that which has a relationship to literature of gender. Her writing not only refuses the patriarchal tendencies to [commit] matricide; rather, her apparently modest text (“those simple flowers” 21–29) affirms


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

the presence of a new subject in the writing of the Mexican nation. To give voice to the silenced, to rescue the productive from functions tradition-ally [“conceived”] as reproductive, to narrate from the entire body of the mother. (184)10

Writing “from an alien locus” often relegates women to the shadows. They are “characters uninvited to participate in the job of writing” (Guerra Cunningham, 137).11 Campobello, as a female writer, knows how the writ-ing space is not one she can call her own. In fact, she is cognizant of her marginality as a female writer, to the point that she makes a conscious decision to find a non-threatening vehicle for her stories. She decides to narrate in the voices of her childhood. “I looked for a way to enable myself to speak, but to do it I needed a voice, and I approached it. It was the only one that worked, the only one authorized. It was the voice of my childhood. To use its apparent inconsistency to expose what I knew ought to be said sincerely and directly . . .” (Las manos de mamá, 97).12

Campobello carefully selects the “inconsistent” voice of her child-hood to narrate her stories, which are different from those told by male writers of the Revolution. This voice, she contends, allows her to write without having to ask for permission (97). Appropriating the shadow of male discourse (such as the words of an inoffensive child) permits the marginalized writer to deconstruct masculine models in an apparently harmless fashion. As Guerra Cunningham explains, “in her position as a subordinate [subject], the female experience and its possible aesthetic modalizations, [woman] is forced to hide her dissident zones” (130).13

Because Campobello finds a suitable, acceptable emissary for her sto-ries in the child, she must find an equally acceptable subject position to have the child tell her story. What better place than under her mother’s skirt? Thus she writes her texts “desde las faldas de la madre,” “from underneath mother’s skirt,” a culturally adequate position for herself and, perhaps more importantly, one valued by her audience.

I am indebted to Oyerzún for her insights on how Campobello refuses to silence (erase) the mother. In fact, my argument departs from the recognition that the contestatory and revisionist nature of Campobello’s texts rests on her efforts to inscribe the voice of the mother and other women into the narratives of the Revolution. However, my study differs from Oyarzún’s in that I discuss Campobello’s attempt to give voice to the silenced, centering her discourse on the mythology of (Mexican) motherhood—as represented in the figures of la Virgen de Guadalupe, la Malinche, and la Llorona, and on the ideas of Graciela Lagarde y


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

de los Ríos about motherhood as one of the five cultural prison cells (cautiverios) in which women are kept in roles that separate them from themselves, from their personhood. Writing from motherhood, Campobello and the rest of the women whose works are examined in this book begin a process continued by Chicana writers years later, as Clara Román Odio successfully argues in Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions. Chicanas, Román Odio contends, “link the Virgin [of Guadalupe] to mothers and women of their community, as well as to pre-Columbian Aztec goddesses, to unleash counternarratives and icons against systems of domination that historically have repressed them” (2–3). Like Chicana artists in the late twentieth century and today, Campobello constructs her own counternarrative against a system that has traditionally repressed women. She does so by recasting single motherhood as proper parenting.

Mothering away from the marriage bed: prison cell or room of one’s own?

That mothers produce mothers, as Chodorow argues, is very clear in Campobello’s narrative. As the child narrator comments: “If She [sic] wasn’t sleepy, I wasn’t sleepy. If She sang, I sang” (47).14 The daughter is a reproduction of the mother in both the figurative and the symbolic sense; in the role of the daughter who will shadow her mother and rep-licate her gestures, as the quote states; but in the case of Campobello, also as the daughter who will repeat (“sing”) the stories her mother told her to defend los hombres del norte. Both Cartucho and Las manos de mamá are populated with examples of women who reproduce mother-hood in its traditional role. For example, in “Los hombres de Urbina” (Cartucho), one of Campobello’s most conventional descriptions of women as mothers, the mother character takes her child by the hand and leads her to a place where she tells her the story of a man who died: “‘It was here,’ she said stopping by a blue rock. ‘Look,’ she told me, ‘A man died here. He was from our hometown’” (68).15 Clearly the mother is represented in the traditional role of guide to her children, and this role is reinforced further in the story when the narrator describes the place where the woman takes her child, and the person they plan to visit. Mother and daughter are on their way to the house of the child’s god-mother, la madrina. Writing about the godmother extends Campobello’s


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

text on motherhood, since la madrina is a second, symbolic mother in traditional Mexican culture.

In yet another example, the mother appears in her conventional garb as the one who protects her children. In the story “Her Skirt” (Las manos de mamá), she writes: “Her skirt was our refuge. It could be rain-ing, thundering, there could be lightening, hurricanes: we were there, in that gray door, protected by Her” (24).16 The mother’s skirt serves as a metaphorical extension of the mother’s womb, the domestic realm of traditional women. This is where the children seek refuge when they feel threatened. They go to their mother, who will nurture and protect them from the violence of nature (rain, thunder) and, in the context of Campobello’s stories, from the violence of the Revolution. As these examples show, Campobello’s female subject is not free from hegemonic constructions of femininity.

In Lagarde y de los Río’s examination of motherhood, which she couples with wifehood in the term “madresposa,” mothering is one of five identity prison cells in which women are kept captive. I argue that as they are kept from themselves, from el ser (“Being,” with a capital “B” as explained in the Introduction to Mythological Constructs of Mexican Femininity) they are also kept from el hacer (doing), especially when “doing” is defined as literary or other cultural production. This “not doing” keeps women from la ciudad letrada and the cultural capital that comes with being a citizen of it. The madresposa cautiverio denies woman the very notion of being, in that it is characterized by the mar-ginalized “ser-de-otros.” In this case, “ser,” which usually means “being,” turns into “belonging,” and “ser-de-otros” can be read as “belonging-to-others” (38), as explained in the Introduction.

Campobello’s conceptualization of motherhood could very much fit the definition of traditional motherhood as a non-being were it not for the fact that the mother in Campobello uses motherhood as action, denying the symbol its non-existence, its traditional inaction. She then expands the “doing” to other spaces negated to her, thus resignifying conventional figurations of female identity. She casts a claim on women’s sexuality, embedded in the culturally-sanctioned space of single motherhood, or motherhood outside of the marital home, redefining it as capable and worthy motherhood. Campobello accepts and even utilizes the “madre” part of the “madresposa” space, but divorces it from the spousal bed, legitimizing with it the concept of motherhood as a space for production, rather than mere reproduction. She positions herself within motherhood


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

to rewrite it in Las manos de mamá, recasting out-of-wedlock motherhood as an acceptable and even healthy space for women and their children. This is a direct take on the traditional vision of la Llorona, considered mad, unfit to mother, because she was a single mother. Traditional Mexican culture, as represented by the values of Central Mexico (la ciudad letrada, which is not always a regional zone, but rather a cultural one, the urban, educated center) stigmatizes women who mother outside of the institution of marriage. But Campobello, an illegitimate daughter herself, refuses the stigma,17 if I may repeat the quote that opens the chapter:

In northern Mexico, when a woman has the disgrace (sometimes fortune) of giving birth without having married, her behavior is not attributed to evil; rather, it is the result of her goodness, her simplicity, her integrity. There nobody fools a bad girl, only good girls [are fooled]. Therefore, and this is different than what happens in Central Mexico, these girls [out-of-wedlock mothers] are protected by their family. (Carballo, 379)

The intentionality in this quote is twofold. First, Campobello wishes to separate her vision of out-of-wedlock motherhood, the vision which she brings from northern Mexico, from that shared by the cultural values of la ciudad letrada. Out-of-wedlock mothers are protected in her culture, she tells Carballo. She also clarifies for him the geographical location to which she is referring, northern Mexico.

Therefore, and different from what happens in the Center of the Country [Mexico City], [single mothers] are protected by their families. Her brothers play the role of fathers for the child. I am talking about the women from the sierra: Guanaceví, Villa Ocampo, Santiago Papasquiaro, San Bernardo y Satevó, over there in Durango. (379)18

These statements provide Campobello with a cultural and geographical license to do what she sets out to accomplish in her text, that is, to rewrite motherhood outside the walls of la ciudad letrada, and away from the “Centro” of the country, the home of official discourse. By doing this, she repositions women outside the Malinche or Llorona myths (unwed, unfit mothers, or putas). She does the same in her literary text.

From the title of the short narrative, “Su falda” (“Her skirt”), Campobello presents the reader with a strong single mother character. The children seek refuge under mother’s skirt, not in the home, a symbol of patriarchal order. In the story, the house, like the day, is sad with its gray door. This is significant in that it places the strength in the mother, not in the institution of the madresposa, represented by the home.


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Subtly, Campobello constructs the image of the single mother, the “natural” mother, as she deconstructs traditional motherhood, the one represented by the establishment. And by adding that a single mother is protected by the extended family, she further resignifies the traditional space of it, in as much as it supports single motherhood. This definition of motherhood does not fit the model laid out by la ciudad letrada, a model she considers fake:

We were ignorant of city life, we did not know it, not even in books, for we were children who could not read. Our [world] was there: Mom, the sierra, the rivers . . . We could ignore the cities where people have the capacity to name every act; where there are displays full of lights, cakes, silk socks worn by children with withered lips and with moms wearing painted faces and tulle suits. (24–25)19

In the voice of the child narrator, Campobello juxtaposes the natural mother, surrounded by nature and written with a capital “M,” to the city mother, the symbolic mothers of la ciudad letrada, written in the plural (as [de]personified mothers) and with a lower-case “m.” This juxtaposition suggests that Campobello’s (single, free) mother is superior to the sanc-tioned (“painted,” “fake,” “anonymous”) motherhood model cherished within the walls of “the capital cities,” as she refers to them in her text. One day, the happy children are carried away by an anonymous “ellos” (“they”): “Who came? I do not know, it is impossible to remember. What time did they take us?” (26)20 The room where the children are placed is considered stylish by the anonymous ellos, by those within cultural hegemony. “That was, as elegant people would put it, a large [elegant] sit-ting room. Or rather, it was a long room with a wooden floor, smelly and old. There was a black room divider with herons etched in silver. This all sounds so elegant!” (26–27)21 But the children are uncomfortable in that setting, “Our tiny shirts, made with Mom’s chants, shrunk humbly before those imposing silver animals” (27).22

Not only is the “cultured” life death for the children, who become sad away from their mother and the natural world. It is also a condemna-tion of the patriarchal order. One line in the text gives the context that illustrates how “Su falda,” “Her skirt,” a traditional symbol, is turned upside down and becomes a defense of single motherhood. The children are taken because, the child narrator casually notes, “We no longer had a dad” (26).23 The State finds single motherhood a synonym of lacking motherhood and decides to seize the offspring. Yet it is not that simple.


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

The elegant and cultured surroundings, personified by the folding screen with silver carvings, mean nothing to the rural children, who suffer because of the absence of their mother. More significantly, the lack of a father does not affect them, as the seemingly trivial mention of his absence confirms. They want their mother. “And Mom, where was She? We did not see her at all. We cried asking to see Her . . .” (27).24 Life is hollow for the little ones, who do not even remember simple, quotidian facts, such as whether they ate. “I do not believe they gave us wheat tortillas” (28),25 says the child narrator casually, marking the fact that the elegant house was not their home. At home, en el norte, they would have eaten whole wheat tortillas, a staple of the northern Mexican diet. Sadness ended with mother’s reappearance. “One day She returned” (28).26 The short phrase marks the intensity, the value of her person: you see her filling the otherwise empty space of the door and of her children’s lives. But it is her voice, her words that signal the strength of her character. She says, and the narrator is careful in stressing that she does so in a loud voice, “I’ve come to take my children” (28).27 The anonymous, faceless “ellos” again try to stop the mother. “‘No. No. No . . .’ said the crazed voices” (28),28 but she (She) is stronger than any of the voices: “Let’s go, children.”29 The “voices” try to stop her again. “You are not taking them!”30 Interestingly, the grammatical structure of the sentence reflects the power of the speaker. The verb is not a subtle request, “No [quiero que] te los lleves,”31 written in the subjunctive, but an indicative, “this is not happening”, “you are not taking them”: “No te los llevas.” One single letter (the “a”) signals the power structure in which this dialogue takes place. The state is not requesting the mother not to take her children. The state is denying that it is even happening. But there is no law that can stop the mother, for she had given them life (“nos había dado la vida,” 28).32 With this statement, the narrative voice places motherhood—single motherhood—above the power of the State, above the figure of the madresposa. No one can take away the children in Campobello’s narrative from the woman who gave them life, regardless of whether there is a father or not. At the end of the story, the mother is warned that someone very powerful (the State) wanted to remove her children. The mother’s response? “My children are mine, She said with her clean voice; nobody will take them away from me.”33 This line is noteworthy. First, the single mother is constructed as fit to care for her offspring, as being their rightful parent even without a father; and just as importantly, there is no shame, no moral judgment on single parenting. The woman has a “limpia voz,” a clean voice. Notice the


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

emphasis on the adjective, “clean,” as it appears before the noun. Usually in Spanish, adjectives come after it, unless they are emphasized. This is not the case of the immaculate mother. This mother is clean, free of sin, even though she is a single mother. There was a father—albeit an irrelevant one—as indicated by the narrator, a father who is no longer there: “Ya no teníamos papá.” “We no longer had a dad.” But the father had no place in the life of the children or of the mother. He is only of consequence for the State, who considers her unfit to parent outside of marriage.

The story could be passed as the simple veneration of motherhood were it not for the socio-cultural context in which it takes place, Mexican society and the figures of la Malinche and la Llorona. Both have been vili-fied specifically for the cultural sin of being unwed mothers. La Malinche has been cast aside as the traitor mother and la Llorona has been forced to cry her sins away alongside bodies of water. The children of both mythical figures were taken away, as mothers were considered unfit to mother for being single. La Maliche’s son, Martín, is sent to Spain to get a “proper” education away from his wicked mother and in the culture of the father. La Llorona’s children are “drowned,” as a way of condemning her for being single. Unlike la Malinche and la Llorona, the mother in “Su falda” keeps her children. She is a capable mother regardless of her marital status. Campobello clearly recodifies traditional views of out-of-wedlock motherhood. By taking motherhood outside of the home and placing it underneath the skirt of the mother where woman’s sexuality also resides, Campobello reclaims two spaces for women: single mother-hood and female sexuality. Not only is the space under the mother’s skirt proper and even a shrine to protect children, but the sexual act that led to motherhood happened outside the marital home. The mother admits that she was never married. She defies the madresposa cautiverio (the motherwife prison cell.) With this gesture, Campobello restores the fig-ures of la Llorona and la Malinche, no longer condemned for their con-dition as unwed mothers, and makes it unnecessary for the Virgin Mary to be either virginal or “married” to God, since the act of mothering has value outside institutional marriage. Campobello further liberates la Malinche and la Llorona from the puta cautiverio (the whore prison cell) and la Llorona from madness: as she can now keep her children and has no reason for maddening guilt. In a reversal of societal discourse, the voice of the woman is sane, as opposed to the “crazed” voices of society, the anonymous “ellos” who try, unsuccessfully, to seize her children.


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

The reconstruction of the Malinche/Llorona myth is even more appar-ent in the short story “Su Dios” (Las manos de mamá.) In the story, the main character, also a single mother, is about to be judged by a tribunal for her sin against the State: unwed motherhood. “Holding my daughter in my arms, I presented myself before my judges. I did not raise my eyes. They were accusing me. They were all arguing . . .” (32).34 The marginal position of the mother in the story is reflected in the action of keeping her eyes down as she faces her accusers. But she is not passive. She takes the initiative to face them (“Me presenté ante mis jueces,” “I presented myself before my judges”) as she strategizes to defend herself. She decides in favor of motherhood as her defense and takes her newborn daughter with her to the courthouse. Just as importantly, if we take the “tribunal” as a representation of those who cast the stone at la Llorona/la Malinche, or cultural constructs that place women who do not follow tradition in the puta cautiverio, we can then argue that with this image Campobello is undoing the Llorona/Malinche and Magdalena cautiverios.

Elizabeth Grosz’s analysis of female sexuality, characterized by its bodily fluids and seen traditionally as unclean, can help us to examine Campobello’s text. Grosz explains that “dirt” is that which is not in its proper place, that “which upsets or befuddles order” (192). As stated in the Introduction to this book, dirt, Grosz says, “signals a site of possible danger to social or individual systems . . .” (192). Female bodily fluids thus become a testimony of the fraudulence or impossibility of the “clean” and “proper” or of the orderly. Meanwhile, seminal fluids are seen in a different light, not as dirt, or secretions, or even as a liquid; they are not an expression of chaos. Rather, seminal fluids are seen in the context of creation. Writes Grosz,

Seminal fluid is understood primarily as what it makes, what it achieves, a causal agent and thus a thing, a solid: its fluidity, its potential seepage, the element in it that is uncontrollable, its spread, its formlessness, is per-petually displaced in discourse into its properties, its capacity to fertilize, to father, to produce an object. (199)

Grosz’s analysis of female sexuality in orthodox culture shines a light on Campobello’s construction of the mother as dissident. First, the woman is the one in possession of the child, of her own reproductive capacity to fertilize. The liquid—her liquid—has solidified. She is carrying the solid (the daughter) in her arms. Traditional gender roles have been reversed in other ways too. The chaos is not caused by the woman—the Llorona/


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Malinche figure in this short text—but by her accusers, as they argue with each other, “They were all arguing,”35 “Again the voices screamed against me,”36 “The law spoke,”37 “The voices continued to scream and scream” (32).38 At the end, the voices are not voices, “they were now uncontrollable roars” (32).39 The law has become chaos, animal sounds, roars, howls. The role of la Llorona has been symbolically inverted. She is not howling, and she has come to take her children, to rescue them from the State. The State is the unfit, mad parent, howling while the woman calmly constructs her own defense to face her accusers, even if fully cog-nizant of her subaltern status, as someone outside of la ciudad letrada: “I was barely recovering from all those strange words that the people from the city were saying” (32–33).40 La ciudad letrada, with its strange, alien words and laws, is hurting her, denying the Mother her right to parent. Yet, unlike her accusers (and contrary to the hegemonic belief system), she is the civilized one; she does not lose her temper. “‘They are my chil-dren,’ I said trying not to disturb the elegant mood of the room . . . ‘My children, [who came] from my flesh, from my eyes, from my soul, only mine,’ I said without raising my voice . . .” (32).41 “I turned my eyes on myself,”42 the character says, “I pointed to my torn shirt and told them, look, this serves as proof ” (32).43 The “law,” in turn, points to her ripped clothes and stresses that “that” is precisely her crime. She has participated in a sexual act. But the mother is also aware of tradition (man-made law) and she decides to use it to save herself. She knows that motherhood is what can protect her, but she also understands that she has to “cleanse” herself before her accusers. She tells her judges that “The rip is large, one can see the force that was used to tug at it” (32).44 This implies that she has been raped, and the law forgives her. While this can be seen as caving in to tradition—seeing the need to “cleanse” herself of the sexual transgression—the character is not doing it because she believes she has sinned. Claiming rape is a strategy. Further in the text, she stresses that she was not raped, that she has deceived her judges, but she is only lying to respond to another lie: tradition. “A lie was sinking me”45 (tradition says that women cannot mother as single mothers, that they shall not be sexual), “another [lie] saved me.”46 In what seems like a wink to the reader, who becomes the narrator’s accomplice, the character explains: “That is the way the law operates . . . Sometimes, it says that children born from our own flesh are not ours, but a rip at the right time undoes all eight hundred pages that affirm it” (33).47 The mother character does not claim purity. She assumes responsibility for her sexuality but decides


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

that she is capable of raising her children. She is not the passive, la Chingada, the “montón de huesos y sangre,” or “pile of bones and blood” that Paz claims la Malinche to be, unable to parent. By admitting to the reader that she was not raped, that she had children outside of marriage because she was a willing participant in (several) sexual acts (she has several children), the mother becomes a puta. She is not, however, “el ser de otros” (belonging to others, to the men who possess her body), because she is a willing sexual being. Even in her subaltern state, she has agency. She is a resourceful Being (ser) with the power to do (hacer). She will use every tool at her disposal, including the law and tradition, to build herself as the agent of her own life. But a willing sexual being is a free being, and thus she also escapes the puta cautiverio. There is no shame in her putería, in her “whoring.”

Campobello closes the story “Su Dios” with a final assertion: unwed motherhood is not an unfit state for a woman, nor is it a crime that requires taking away the children, as was done to la Malinche and la Llorona. Speaking to a general (representing the State), the character says: “My children’s father, I told him, my partner, went to war because he wanted to . . . he died fighting. We have lost him. No one is going to replace him for us. My children are mine and I ask you to let me keep them. You do not need to give them anything for the death of their father. Let me keep them” (33).48 Notice that she says “mi compañero,” “my partner,” never assuming the role of wife. She was in the relationship as a free woman, of her own free will, not because of any law or tradi-tion. This, again, liberates the character from the madresposa prison, and motherhood from the impossibility of happening away from the father. Through motherhood, Campobello rewrites the role of women as capable, mentally able and stable, single mothers.

Alda Blanco has noted that a possible strategy for reading the works of women whose texts seem to fall within such a paradox is not to eliminate that paradox or erase it. On the contrary, she writes, “Suggestive para-doxes . . . turn into expressions of meaning that allow the reader to face what were . . . for many . . . women writers, the most conflicting spaces for women who wrote in a cultural terrain dominated by man” (13).49

Campobello’s writing can certainly seem paradoxical. Literary critic Manuel Carballo notes, following an interview with the author, that in her narrative, “emotion defeats reason” (387).50 His statement seems at odds with an earlier comment where he calls Campobello’s writing “escritura revolucionaria,” although he attributes this quality to her technique,


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

rather than to her choice of content and treatment of it. He notes that Campobello’s text is revolutionary because the author “casts aside com-monplace technical models . . . [and] replaces them with other [models] more suited to her own temperament” (377).51 A trained male reader and critic, as Julio Cortázar’s “lector macho,” Carballo recognizes Campobello’s technical abilities as a writer, but fails to see that the treatment of the con-tent is also revolutionary: a recasting of existing Mexican femininities.

Carballo’s classification of Campobello’s writing, at once “revolucion-aria” but dominated by her “emotividad,” is worth noting in that it points to a paradox that a casual reading of Campobello’s texts might render difficult to assimilate. Indeed, Campobello’s construction of a world centered on the revolucionarios and on motherhood would appear to warrant its classification as traditional. The paradox lies precisely in the fact that though on the surface Campobello’s writings appear to fall within traditional parameters—especially when it comes to femininity and being centered on motherhood—her image of the mother is outside tradition.

Inverting gender/genre: mother as historian, letrados as myth makers

A Mamá, que me regaló cuentos verdaderos en un país donde se fabrican ley-endas . . . To Mother, who gave me true stories in a country that manufactures legends . . .52

Nellie Campobello, Dedication to Cartucho

In her prologue to Mis libros, Nellie Campobello states that she wrote Cartucho to vindicate the memory of los hombres del norte (the revo-lutionaries from northern Mexico) because she believed that most of the writers who had written the so-called Novela de la Revolución (The Novel of the Revolution) had portrayed them unfairly:

[W]hen I wrote Cartucho I had not read any books on the Revolution, whether they told the truth or not. I believe there were very few, and I understand, from what was said about them, that they were plagued by legends [leyendas] and truculent compositions, representing the men of the Revolution in cruel and vulgar tones. Besides, without having seen them [the men of the Revolution] they [the writers] imagined [the revolutionar-ies] as lawless, Godless [men]. (Carballo, 385)53


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Like a faithful mother, Campobello sets out to honor “her sons,” the men who participated in the war, by humanizing them, portraying them as “los muchachos,” the boys or young men whose destiny happened to cross with the Revolution. In many of her stories, los muchachos appear engaged in daily activity common to young men, behaving in a sweet and caring manner. Campobello writes, for example, about “Cartucho,” a soldier who did not know how to sew a button but was always ready to wipe the nose of Gloriecita, the narrator’s (and Campobello’s) sister, and change her diaper (9). She tells the story of Elías Acosta, “tall, the color of cinnamon . . . beautiful . . . [a man who] knew how to cry” (11). She writes about Bartolo de Santiago, who had “a tight mouth, dull eyes, and wide hands” (17). She introduces us to los fusilados (revolutionaries executed by firing squad) among them Catarino Acosta, who dressed in black, “[with] el Tejano [his hat] tilted backward” (27). She gives the reader glimpses of the lives of Zafiro and Zequiel, “Two Mayo friends [of hers], Indians from San Pablo Balleza” (31). She writes about men in the battlefield, like Ismael Maynes and Martín López, who “arrived at Rosario and kept going” (151). Campobello clearly sets out to write about los hombres del norte in a loving manner, but she goes beyond defend-ing los muchachos and constructs a careful narrative by and about las muchachas (the girls) and about las mujeres del norte (the women from northern Mexico) who fought in the Revolution and/or lived through the brutality that came with it. She writes the stories of women like Nacha Ceniceros, who “broke colts and rode horses” (36);54 and about doña Chonita, “Elías Acosta’s mother and mother to many others” (149). In fact, despite Campobello’s claim that Cartucho is about los hombres del norte, the main characters in this narrative and in Las manos de mamá (1937) are a child narrator and her mother. They are the thread that links the stories of the men and women of the Revolution. In this chapter, I argue that Nellie Campobello, the writer, builds on firm cultural ground, motherhood, to construct women as historians of the Revolution rather than the minor, passive role of soldadera myth propagated by official and popular history.55

In Cartucho, Campobello claims the space of historian for her mother, by dedicating the book to “Her,” (Ella, written in capital letters.) She writes that her mother gave her “true stories” in a country where men, officially recognized as historians, “fabrican leyendas” (manufacture legend, myth, fairytales). By doing so, Campobello reverses gender/genre roles. She assigns the role of historian to women, relegating men


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

to the place of the untruth: myth makers. Placed at the beginning of the book, the comment points to its primacy; it states the intention behind the content and the intention in Cartucho is to construct “Mamá” (“Mom”) as a historical subject. From the moment Campobello writes Mamá (or “Ella,” “She”) in capital letters, she creates her as an authority, a proper noun, the proper subject, the real historian in a country “fond of manufacturing legend” that then it tries to pass as history. Who makes up that country? Who “manufactures” the “legends,” the false stories that Campobello wants to contest? Campobello provides us with the answer to these questions more than once, and in several formats, throughout her life. In an interview with literary critic Emmanuel Carballo (1960), she tells him that she wrote Cartucho “para vengar injurias,” (to avenge, to counter slander) stating that “[t]he novels written at the time, those that narrate war, are full of lies against the men of the Revolution, especially against Francisco Villa. In this book, I wrote what I witnessed about vil-lismo, not what someone told me” (385).56

It is not enough for Campobello to dismiss traditional historical accounts of the Revolution as mere myths. Through the eyewitness account, she sets out to deconstruct la ciudad letrada, the home of the letrados, the male intellectuals who control official history. She contends that she—and her mother—are the legitimate historians because they know the revolutionaries. Official writers, the letrados, she says, (with the exception of Martín Luis Guzmán) did not know the revolucionarios. The letrados, city men, many living in the center of la ciudad letrada, Mexico City, were geographically and culturally distant from northern Mexico. This meant that they wrote what others told them about los hombres del norte. More importantly, they wrote through a lens alien to the culture of the men they were writing about. This geographical and cultural distance, in Campobello’s eyes, made their accounts less reliable. Campobello, on the other hand, writes with the intention of narrat-ing what she saw growing up in Villaocampo, Durango, and in Parral, Chihuahua. Villaocampo is the town where Francisco Villa (then Doroteo Arango) lived as a young man; and many of the battles of the Revolution took place in Parral. Thus, following the tradition of other subaltern subjects, such as El Inca Garcilaso in colonial times, Campobello arms herself with the authenticity and authority of the eyewitness and writes an alternative history/narrative about the men and women of the Revolution, Cartucho and Las manos de mamá. She constructs herself and her mother as legitimate historians of la Revolución, questioning the


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

validity of established discourses circulating through and from la ciudad letrada. She tells Carballo: “In his novels, Mariano Azuela told pure lies. Like a bad actor, he overacted what he said about the Revolution, about the revolucionarios. He is a writer in black and white,” meaning, he lacks complexity (384).57 She dismisses José Vasconcelos, one of the most repu-table letrados directing the destiny of la ciudad letrada: “His testimony about the Revolution is weak: a mere relief ” (Carballo, 385).58 She does, however, express respect for the writings of Martín Luis Guzmán and calls him the best writer of the Revolution, adding that she liked El águila y la serpiente more than La sombra del caudillo. She says to Carballo, “Las memorias de Pancho Villa is based on the person and personality of the general: they are a collection of his real actions, the way he speaks. His work has, speaking in dance terms, dimension and projection” (385).59 It is in this comment that one sees how Campobello values the importance of knowing the culture of one’s historical subjects. She respects Guzmán’s writings about Villa because they not only narrate his “real actions,” but also his culture, seen here in the form of language, “the way he [Villa] speaks.” It should be noted that though Guzmán knew Villa, several of his works on the Revolution rely heavily on interviews and conversa-tions with Campobello.

Campobello clearly questions the legitimacy of official discourse about the Revolution. However, by using her mother’s voice as the nar-rator in her stories, one could argue that she stays within the hegemonic paradigm of femininity, in this case, motherhood. While this observa-tion is valid, it can also be said that Campobello uses motherhood, a traditionally privileged cultural space, as a springboard to question hegemonic expression. In a culture that denies women access to official discourse as subjects, Campobello must speak desde la oficialidad, from within customary spaces in order to have an opportunity to counter it. As Gayatry Spivak has argued, it is impossible for the subaltern to speak in her own voice, since even language is alien to her. Elizabeth Grosz recognizes a similar impossibility, but contends that to speak of women’s self-representation is possible by producing new discourses and knowledges, new models of art and new forms of representation practiced outside of the patriarchal frameworks. Grosz sees the need for women to construct subjectivity by providing displacements and criticisms of the patriarchal models of thought on sexuality and dif-ference. By constructing herself (the author) her mother, and the child voice of her female character as the true bearers of history—against


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

the “liars,” the letrados—Campobello provides displacements of male historical models. She ruptures the normative discourse of history by questioning hegemonic models of thought on “who” constitutes a legitimate historical voice and “why.” At the same time, she creates a gender gap through which she inserts the female voice as the genuine voice of history.

Campobello’s reconstruction of historical subjectivity is not easily accessible to the reader. On the surface, Campobello, the author, has taken on the role of the mother, fiercely defending her children, just as the mother character does in her stories. Her writing seems to corrobo-rate Antonieta Rivas Mercado’s claim that Mexican women who take an active role during the Revolution do so from the space of the mothers defending their children as well as Jean Franco’s argument that women speak only on behalf of their men. But one must read beyond the sur-face. By positioning the mother as the bearer of historical facts and the letrados as unreliable voices, Campobello bluntly establishes not only the mother’s place as a historian, but also her own position as a narrator of “true stories” in a country plagued by official “leyendas.” That position undermines the role of the traditional mother, rearticulating it not only away from the home, but at the very center of la ciudad letrada.

Conclusion: within and outside gender ideology

Carmen Ramos Escandón warns against the danger of assuming that the simple mention of women in history means that they are included. She explains that the female presence in spaces traditionally not con-sidered masculine, such as the domestic space, may include women but that those spaces are not necessarily spaces for women. In this sense, one ought not to confuse the story of family, of daily life, or even of sexuality, with the history of women, since this would reduce females to the limiting space of family and to the condition of sexual objects. “The history of women must be a history that recovers the presence of women in different aspects: social and personal life, economic life, visual representation, linguistic [representation], and, above all [one which] emphasizes the social aspect of the relationship between the genders” (9).60 Yet, in portraying women in traditional roles, we see how Campobello indeed recovers part of the history of women. She does so by reformulating traditional models of motherhood that


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

projected women as archetypes of perfection (the Virgin) or aberra-tion (Eve, Malinche, Llorona). Campobello (re)articulates traditional mythology, legend, and the archetype of femininity, in essence recov-ering some of the stories and histories of women. She (re)examines the role of motherhood, contests its limited scope, and expands it. She uses traditional definitions of femininity, such as motherhood, precisely to provide alternative voices to the male monologue of the history of the Revolution and to challenge conventional views of motherhood and femininity. She rewrites the script for the single mother, freeing her from the puta, loca, and madresposa cautiverios, as well as from the Malinche/Llorona cultural curses. In fact, she rewrites the script for her Malinche/Llorona mother by (re)claiming unwed motherhood as proper, healthy motherhood. By positioning herself inside the affec-tive discursive space of motherhood, Campobello crafts an effective discursive space to question social constructs on what it means to be a woman, and a single mother. Similarly, she recognizes gender dif-ference but does not allow this difference to become a limitation and deny women’s contributions to the Revolution. She devises a narrative strategy that contests and complements the hegemonic discourse of the history of the upheaval. By writing about mothering and from the subject position of motherhood, Campobello revises traditional spaces occupied by women. Through these revisions, she (re)imagines woman as “Ella misma” (Herself). Woman is a mirror image of woman. Woman is the shadow of woman. She is not a myth. Woman is woman. This articulation of the female space rescues females from the looking glass that projects them as virgins, angels, or devils and that distorts or annuls their contributions to events that transformed the Mexican nation in the first part of the twentieth century. It is by questioning the image in the hegemonic mirror that Campobello attempts to cre-ate a dialogue about the history of the Revolution. It is through her questioning of traditional discourse that it becomes possible for her to say to the letrados “this book is bad, this picture is feeble” (Woolf, 36). It is through subtle questioning of the gender roles that Campobello is able to point out the non-representative nature of patriarchal his-torical accounts and recover the figure of the mother/historian, while (re)claiming single-motherhood as moral motherhood. She effectively turns the letrados’s monologue on motherhood, and on the Revolution, into a polyphonic discourse that recognizes women’s contributions to the cultural imaginary known as la mexicanidad.


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

Notes

“In northern Mexico, when a woman has the disgrace (sometimes fortune) 1 of giving birth without having married, her behavior is not attributed to evil; rather, it is the result of her goodness, her simplicity, her integrity. There (in northern Mexico) nobody fools a girl, only good girls (are fooled). Therefore, and this is different than what happens in Central Mexico, these girls (out-of-wedlock mothers) are protected by their family.”Chodorow defines “mothering” as an act by which women take primary 2 responsibility for infant care, spend more time with infants and children than men, and sustain primary ties with infants (3). She differentiates between “mothering” a child and “fathering” a child in that “mothering” has been defined and understood primarily as a nurturing function, and thus can be done by both men and women, while “fathering” is a biological function only available to men (11).Chorodow published her book on mothering in 1978.3 “[L]a devoción nacional guadalupana . . . no se concretaba a la sola Capital 4 de la Nueva España . . . Nada tiene de hiperbólico afirmar que todo su suelo daba la misma atestación, ya que un siglo, más o menos, después de las apariciones, no eran pocos los monumentos sagrados que pregonaban en todas direcciones el nacionalismo de esta devoción.”As mentioned in the introduction, there are other mestizo children (children 5 of Spanish and Indigenous backgrounds) before Martín Cortés, but, because he is the son of Hernán Cortés and La Malinche—the most famous couple in Colonial Mexico, and directly responsible for the conquest—he becomes the “first” symbolic mestizo.Tradiciones y leyendas mexicanas6 , Eds. Vicente Riva Palacio and Juan de Dios Peza, 1888; and Leyendas durangueñas, Everardo Gámiz, 1930.“Es [el] sentimiento de maternidad hacia la humanidad femenina futura la 7 que debe sostenernos [a las mujeres que luchamos por los derechos de las mujeres].”“Muy difundida por las feministas de principio de siglo [veinte], esta teoría 8 articulaba a la ‘mujer’ y al ‘hombre’ como categorías naturales determinadas por el sexo biológico de cada ser humano.”“subvertía el paradigma tradicional al invertir las conclusiones valorativas 9 adscritas a los dos sexos.”“Nellie Campobello habla ‘Desde un terreno ajeno.’ No hay duda que 10 está plenamente consciente de su marginalidad. Pero su discurso no es meramente contestatario, al menos en lo que guarda relación con la escritura generoglósica. Su práctica escriptural no sólo niega la tendencia patriarcal al matricidio; antes bien, su aparentemente modesto texto (‘estas flores sencillas’, 21–29) afirma la presencia de un nuevo sujeto en las letras de la


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

nación mexicana. Hacer hablar a lo silenciado, rescatar lo productivo de la función tradicionalmente reproductora, narrar a partir del cuerpo entero de la madre.”“personajes no invitados a participar en el oficio de las letras.”11 “Busqué la forma de poder decir, pero para hacerlo necesitaba una voz, y fui 12 hacia ella. Era la única que podía dar el tono, la única autorizada. Era la voz de mi niñez. Usar de su aparente inconsistencia para exponer lo que supe era la necesidad de un decir sincero y directo.”“en su posición de término subordinado, la experiencia femenina y 13 sus posibles modalizaciones estéticas, está forzada a ocultar sus zonas disidentes.”“Si Ella no tenía sueño, yo no lo tenía; si cantaba, cantaba yo.” (Campobello 14 consistently capitalizes “Ella” and “Mamá,” throughout the text.)“‘Aquí fue—dijo ella deteniéndose en un lugar donde estaba una piedra 15 azul—. Mire—me dijo—, aquí en este lugar murió un hombre, era nuestro paisano’.”“La falda de ella era el refugio salvador. Podía llover, tronar, caer centellas, 16 soplar huracanes: nosotros estábamos allí, en aquella puerta gris protegidos por Ella.”In the prologue to 17 Cartucho. Relatos de la lucha en el norte de Mexico, Fernando Tola de Habich writes that Nellie Campobello was born in San Miguel de las Bocas (now, Villa Ocampo), on November 7, 1900, the natural daughter of Rafaela Luna and a non-declared father. (“nació en San Miguel de las Bocas [hoy, Villa Ocampo], el 7 de noviembre de 1900, siendo hija natural de Rafaela Luna y padre no declarado”) (xv). “Por eso, y a diferencia de lo que sucede en el Centro del país [she refers 18 to Mexico City and writes ‘Centro’ with a capital ‘c’], a estas las protege su familia. Sus hermanos son como padres de la criatura. Hablo de las muchachas de la sierra: Guanaceví, Villa Ocampo, Santiago Papasquiaro, San Bernardo y Satevó, allá en Durango.”“Ignorábamos la vida de las capitales, no la conocíamos, ni en los libros, 19 porque éramos niños que no podíamos leer. Allí teníamos lo nuestro: Mamá, la sierra, los ríos . . . Podíamos ignorar las capitales donde la gente tiene la capacidad para nombrar cada acto de la vida; donde hay aparadores llenos de luces, pasteles, calcetines de seda que llevan los niños de labios marchitos y mamás de caras pintadas y de trajes de tul . . .”“¿Vinieron quiénes? No sé, imposible recordarlo. ¿A qué hora nos llevaron?”20 “Aquello era, como dicen las personas elegantes, un salón. Más bien una sala 21 larga con piso de madera, mal oliente y vieja. Había un biombo negro con garzas bordadas en plata. ¡Qué elegante suena esto!”“Nuestras camisitas hechas con los cantos de Mamá se arrugaban de 22 humildad ante esos imponentes animales de plata.”


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

“Ya no teníamos papá.”23 “Y Mamá, ¿dónde estaba? No la vimos para nada. Llorábamos pidiendo verla . . .”24 “Yo creo que no nos dieron tortillas de trigo.”25 “Un día Ella apareció.”26 “Vengo a llevarme a mis hijos.”27 “. . . contestaron voces airadas.”28 “Vámonos hijos.”29 “No te los llevas.”30 “Do not take them.”31 “She had given us life.”32 “Mis hijos son míos—dijo su limpia voz—; nadie me los quitará.”33 “con mi hija en brazos, me presenté ante mis jueces. No levanté los ojos al 34 verlos. Me acusaban. Todos discutían.”“Todos discutían.”35 “Volvieron las voces a gritar en mi contra.”36 “Habló la ley.”37 “Siguieron las voces grita y grita.”38 “eran ahora rugidos implacables.”39 “Apenas me iba reponiendo de todas aquella palabras extrañas que decían las 40 gentes que venían de la ciudad.”“‘Son mis hijos’ dije sin querer lastimar el ambiente elegante de la sala . . . ‘Mis 41 hijos míos, de mi carne, de mis ojos, de mi alma, sólo míos’ repetí sin levantar la voz.”“Volví mis ojos a mí.”42 “mostré mi blusa rota y dije, ‘Vean aquí, ésta es la prueba’.”43 “la rotura es grande, se ve la fuerza con la que fue dado el tirón.”44 “Una mentira me hundía.”45 “otra mentira me salvaba.”46 “Así es la ley . . . A veces dice que los hijos nacidos de la propia carne no son 47 nuestros, pero una rotura hecha a tiempo desbarata las ochocientas hojas donde lo afirman.”“El padre de mis hijos—le dije—mi compañero, andaba por gusto 48 peleando . . . murió en eso. Lo hemos perdido, nadie nos lo repondrá. Mis hijos son míos y el gusto que le pido es que me los deje. No necesitan que les dé nada por cuenta de la muerte de su padre. Déjemelos.”“las sugerentes paradojas . . . se transforman en expresiones de significación 49 que le permiten al lector identificar y enfrentar lo que fueron . . . para muchas . . . escritoras, los espacios más conflictivos para la mujer que escribía en un terreno cultural tan dominado por el hombre.”“la emotividad vence a los razonamientos.”50 “desecha los esquemas técnicos de uso corriente . . . [y] los reemplaza con 51 otros más acordes a su propio temperamento.”


DOI: 10.1057/9781137502957.0004

“To Mom, who gave me true stories in a country where legend is 52 manufactured . . .”“[E]n la “época en que escribí 53 Cartucho yo no había leído ningún libro de la Revolución, ya estuvieran escritos con acierto o sin él. Creo que eran bien pocos, y entiendo, por lo que se contaba de boca en boca, que estaban plagados de leyendas o composiciones truculentas, representando a los hombres de la Revolución en acentos crueles, en ángulos vulgares. Además, sin haberlos visto, los imaginaban sin Dios y sin ley.”For a detailed examination of the short story “Nacha Ceniceros” as revision 54 of the role of women as soldiers in the Mexican Revolution, please see my article “Nacha Ceniceros: una reivindicación de la soldadera.” Revista Identidades. Estudia de las mujeres y el género, Norma Valle Ferrer, Ed. Cayey, Puerto Rico: Universidad de Puerto Rico en Cayey, 2008.In official and popular history, the soldadera is seen as the lover of the 55 male soldier rather than as a soldier in her own right, despite her clear participation in all facets of the Revolution. More on this subject in the second part of this chapter, as I revisit Campobello’s portrayal of Nacha Ceniceros, a woman soldier.“I wrote it [56 Cartucho] to counter slander. The novels written then, those that narrate war, were full of lies against the men of the Revolution, especially against Francisco Villa. Escribí en este libro lo que me consta del villismo, no lo que me han contado.”“Mariano Azuela contó en sus novelas puras mentiras. Como un mal actor, 57 se sobreactuó en lo que dijo sobre la Revolución, sobre los revolucionarios. Es un escritor en blanco y negro.”“Su testimonio sobre la Revolución es endeble: es sólo un desahogo.”58 “59 Las memorias de Pancho Villa están basadas en la persona y personalidad del general: recogen sus verdaderos actos, su manera de hablar. Su obra tiene, empleando términos de danza, dimensión y relieve.”“La historia de la mujer tendría que ser una historia que recuperara la 60 presencia de la mujer en diferentes aspectos: la vida social y personal, la vida económica, la representación visual, lingüística, y sobre todo que enfatizara el aspecto social de la relación entre los géneros.”

Documents

Desde las faldas de la madre/ From Underneath … · Nellie Campobello addresses single motherhood in an interview with Emmanuel Carballo (379) Motherhood and mothering are at the