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The Poetic Uses of Religion in The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Luis León
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Extract

It is surprising that so few historians of religions have ever tried to interpret a literary work from their own perspective.

—Mircea Eliade

There are no gospels that are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.

—Emile Durkheim

Was that what God expected, that ritual of more pain? She thought of Milagros. Add this to all her miseries? Milagros yearned for less pain… . Was the old woman in veils courting something more with her crawling on bloodied knees—a miracle—by displaying her endurance for greater misery?

—John Rechy

The past thirty years have been a watershed in Mexican American literature, witnessing the proliferation of texts with increasingly diverse themes. For the most part, this literary production has been motivated by the impulse to narrate the stories that typify Mexican cultural history in the United States.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 9 , Issue 2 , Summer 1999 , pp. 205 - 231
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 1999

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References

Notes

I wish to thank Davíd Carrasco, Richard D. Hecht, Jane Iwamura, and John Rechy for their valuable suggestions on earlier versions of this essay.

1. Eliade, Mircea, Cultural Fashions and History of Religions (Middletown, Conn.: Center for Advanced Studies, Wesleyan University, 1967), 3.Google Scholar

2. Durkheim, Emile, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (New York: Free Press, 1965), 476.Google Scholar

3. Rechy, John, The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gómez (New York: Arcade, 1991), 149.Google Scholar

4. The “canon” of Mexican American literature is too extensive to chronicle here. For an example of Chicana literature with religious themes, see Castillo, Ana, So Far from God (New York: Norton, 1993)Google Scholar, as well as her many other works; and Anzuldúa, Gloria, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1987).Google Scholar Although her work is too often overlooked in the study of religion, Anzuldúa is the first to have conceptualized the term “border lands” as it is now used. For an example of Mexican American literary criticism, see Calderón, Hector and Saldivar, Jose David, eds., Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5. I use the terms “Chicano” and “Chicana” interchangeably with Mexican American. I use the designations descriptively and broadly to refer to Mexicans living permanently in the United States. The terms “Latina” and “Latino” refer to all Latin Americans living in the United States, including Mexican Americans.

6. Davíd Carrasco, “A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimensions in Chicano Experience: Bless Me, Ultima as a Religious Text,” Aztlan 13 (1982): 192,195; the argument about refiguring the novel into a religious text is found on pages 195-221. Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima was published in Berkeley by Quinto Sol in 1972.

7. Rechy's first novel, City of Night (New York: Grove, 1963), has become a modern classic.

8. Gutierrez-Jones, Carl, “Desiring B/Orders,” Diacritics 25, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 106.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9. Gunn, Giles, The Interpretation of Otherness: Literature, Religion, and the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 75, 76.Google Scholar More recently, critical theory has brought the same concerns regarding choice and representation to bear on ethnographic and primary source historical texts as well. See, for example, Clifford, James, ed., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar

10. Gunn, , Interpretation of Otherness, 78, 81.Google Scholar

11. Carrasco, “A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimensions in Chicano Experience,” 198.

12. Gilbert Cadena, “Chicanos and the Catholic Church: Liberation Theology as a Form of Empowerment” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Riverside, 1988), passim.

13. For treatments of the role of Guadalupe in Mexican American Catholicism, see especially Elizondo, Virgil, Guadalupe: Mother of a New Creation (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1997)Google Scholar; Rodriguez, Jeanette, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment among Mexican American Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Castillo, Ana, ed., Goddess of the Americas: Writings on the Virgin of Guadalupe (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996).Google Scholar

14. See Cisneros, Sandra, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess,” in Goddess of the Americas, ed. Castillo, , 46–51 Google Scholar, quote on 50.

15. See especially Lafaye, Jacques, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531-1813, trans. Keen, Benjamin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).Google Scholar

16. For a highly idealized and romantic vision of this period, see Jackson, Helen Hunt, Ramona (1884; Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1893).Google Scholar

17. For a historical treatment of the treaty, see del Castillo, Richard Griswold, The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).Google Scholar

18. For histories of these events, see Camarillo, Albert, Chicanos in a Changing Society: From Mexican Pueblos to American Barrios in Santa Barbara and Southern California, 1848-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979)Google Scholar; and del Castillo, Richard Griswold, The Los Angeles Barrio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).Google Scholar

19. For general treatments, see especially Sandoval, Moises, On the Move: A History of the Hispanic Church in the United States (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1990)Google Scholar; Dolan, Jay and Hinojosa, Gilberto, eds., Mexican Americans and the Catholic Church, 1900-1965 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Mosqueda, Lawrence, Chicanos, Catholicism, and Political Ideology (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1986).Google Scholar For a regional history, see Matovina, Timothy M., Tejano Religion and Ethnicity: San Antonio, 1821-1860 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).Google Scholar

20. I have treated these processes at some length. See Luis León, “Religious Movement in the United States-Mexico Borderlands: Toward a Theory of Chicana/o Religious Poetics” (Ph. D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1997). See also Engh, Michael E., Frontier Faiths: Church, Temple, and Synagogue in Los Angeles, 1846-1848 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).Google Scholar

21. See Castillo, Ana, Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (New York: Plume, 1995)Google Scholar; and Cisneros, “Guadalupe the Sex Goddess.”

22. On the Malinche/Guadalupe couplet, see Paz, Octavio, “Sons of La Malinche,” in Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Kemp, Lysander and others (New York: Grove Press, 1985), 65–88.Google Scholar

23. Curanderismo comes from the Spanish “curar,” which means “to heal” or “to cure.” The term curanderismo is used to describe a wide variety of practices, from herbal home remedies to spiritual healings. Generally, it is a community-based Mexican healing System with antecedents in pre-Columbian Mexico; it blends Catholic Symbols and rituals with pre-Columbian practices and myths. Today, it is practiced in both Mexican and Chicano communities. For a discussion of curanderismo, see Trotter, Robert and Chavira, Juan Antonio, Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing, 2d ed. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).Google Scholar

24. Carrasco, “A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimensions in Chicano Experience,” 212, 207.

25. Ibid., 219.

26. John Rechy, “Outlaw Aesthetics: Interview with John Rechy,” interview by Debra Castillo, Diacritics 25, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 118-19.

27. If Henri Bergson is correct, memory impacts the body with equal force as does experience, for humans undergo both through the same sensory/biological processes. This renders the problem of memory even more difficult for those living as captives of their past. See Matter and Memory (New York: Zone Books, 1988).

28. I have reproduced this citation, as all others, the way it appears in the text—in either English, Spanish, or both.

29. For a discussion of “moral landscapes,” see Zukin, Sharon, Landscapes of Power: Front Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 253-76.Google Scholar

30. Rechy, “Outlaw Aesthetics,” 120.

31. Bourdieu, Pierre, In Other Words (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), 11 Google Scholar; de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xix.Google Scholar

32. Gutiérrez-Jones, “Desiring B/orders,” 111.

33. Cox, Harvey, Fire front Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-first Century (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 306.Google Scholar

34. See Scarry, Elaine, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

35. Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 99, 115, 116.Google Scholar

36. Buck-Morss, Susan, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1989), 337, 338.Google Scholar

37. Anaya, , Bless Me, Ultima, 179.Google Scholar

38. Castillo, , Massacre of the Dreamers, 152.Google Scholar

39. Bynum, Carloyn Walker, Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 1–20.Google Scholar